Thread by @Katja_Thieme

Eric Kaufmann has graced us with another opinion piece. Before I tweet about it, please allow me to remind you of this other long, involved thread I wrote earlier this year when Kaufmann took a trollish survey he ran and spun it into wool for #Quillette readers' eyes. 1/

https://twitter.com/Katja_Thieme/status/1275876928398913536

This new piece, in *American Affairs*, is about Kaufmann's idea of "Liberal Fundamentalism." 3/

Kaufmann buys into the idea of the "The Great Awokening" as something that describes #BlackLivesMatter protests since Ferguson. Aside from borrowing that term, he suggests a collection of his own as well. They are a bit emotional. 4/

Basis for their definition seems to be Kaufmann holding his hands into some undisclosed discourse fire. Feeling the temperature. And reporting to us how his hands feel: "minorities are viewed warmly and majorities coolly," the "emotional volume has been steadily turned up." 5/

His hands seem to be somewhat limited to feeling "hot! hot! hot!" or "cold, brrrrr, so cold." I think a drugstore thermometer might have been a better research device. 6/

What a dream of a sentence: "The liberal identity has steadily diverged from liberal principles, and its blend of ideas is now best characterized as left-modernism, a blend of cultural egalitarianism and modernist individualism."

By which I mean, its seems dreamed up. 7/

If I may translate: "This X identity (created by me for unspecified others) has steadily diverged from X principles, and its blend of ideas is now best characterized as *something-I-mashed-up-ism*, a blend of cultural heck-take-another-ism and modernist why-not-one-more-ism." 8/

Can you feel some sand in your eyes?

Good.

With sand in your eyes you're perhaps not going to notice Kaufmann's quiet twist here. A twist in which he simply presupposes this whatever-it-is is a religion. If you weren't busy rubbing your eyes, you might ask for evidence. 9/

If you didn't think of it as a religion, you might not activate your memory of horror stories about religions past & present. If you didn't activate your memory of horror stories past & present, then what big bad feelings could Kaufmann arouse? He'd have none. 10/

Please note we're at the end of section 1, and I have no idea, really, who these "liberal identity" folks are. Where are they? What groups does Kaufmann mean?

I mentioned #BlackLivesMatter because he references Ferguson; that was interpretive precision on my part, not his. 11/

Hey, here's more sand-throwing.

Sorry, Eric, whose cognitive dissonance?

I take it you don't mean yours when you get so excited about the fact that the words liberal and illiberal are opposites but what if you use them to refer to the same undefined thing!? Genius! 12/

It's a bit entertaining to notice how, as Kaufmann reports on the temperature from his imprecise but extreme-feeling hands, he tries to make it sound a bit like social science by appending terms like "split-brain experiments," "cognitive dissonance," and "concept creep." 13/

The groups of left-modernists/wokes/liberal fundamentalists he so dislikes, they are "denouncing the Anglo-Protestant heritage of the country." It's the others who measure temperature with their hands! They show no nuance for the warm touch of the Anglo-American tradition. 👀14/

I admit, this phrase I find funny, actually: "the Marxist habit of shutting down debate with moralistic sound bites and purity tests." 15/

@threadreaderapp unroll