It Ain’t Me, Babe

Here are some snippets from Andrew Sullivan’s latest offering, responding to the question what has happened to him?

The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.

But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.

Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?

What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.

[…]

The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”).

A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing.

[…]

The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.

I see a strong analogy with a point I’ve made in the past. There are only two known strategies for allocating resources: a market system and a command system. A market system is not perfect; it does not result in outcomes that any of us would consider decent but its outcomes are far superior to those in command economies which are always catastrophic. Not only are they authoritarian and violent but they result in horrifically misplaced allocations of resources. It wasn’t missiles and tanks that brought the Soviet Union down; it was blue jeans from the West, it was Russia’s chronic inability to provide the good and lives its people wanted.

Consequently, we maintain a market system, tinkering around its edges on an ongoing basis to remedy its manifest injustices. It is a meticulous, exacting, unending process. Not “one and done”. A complete absence of state control is not good but as a general rule more state control is not an improvement.

Similarly, there are only two known orders for organizing societies: a liberal order and a totalitarian order. While the liberal order may be imperfect, not delivering the results you want as quickly as you want them, it is far superior to its opposite. A liberal order can tolerate those who oppose it; a totalitarian order cannot.