I'm just a simple country professor but it seems to me that both sides of Letter Discourse have reached consensus that "free speech" & abstract procedural principles are red herrings here--boundaries of socially (rather than legally) acceptable opinion will ALWAYS be drawn…(1/6)
…and the real debate is just the substantive one re where those boundaries should fall. But having conceded that, both sides largely stick to arguments in the abstract! It's what trips TCW up w/ Chotiner--but it frankly can also come off as a dodge on the anti-Letter side. (2/6)
The key to the David Shor case is that, by the accounts I've seen, pressure to fire him came from clients & Civis colleagues who shared the *sincere* & earnest belief that his Wasow tweets were racist. This sincere view also led to his expulsion from a political listserve. (3/6 )
The specter of Twitter mobs and bad-faith power-plays is, in this case, itself a red herring. People really did strongly disagree about the appropriateness of Shor's Wasow comments! Anti-Letter folks now use his case as a "to be sure" concession, isolating it as an outlier. (4/6)
But I think it does in fact reflect a broader issue, one narrower and more specific than that purported by the likes of Sullivan or Weiss who aren't in-the-family progressives: In many progressive circles and orgs, new lines of acceptability and sanction are being asserted. (5/6)
And some of those lines are, arguably!, both stifling and substantively wrongheaded. Or maybe they aren't. In either case that's what left-of-center folks should actually be confronting and debating. (6/6)
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