On the role of a liberal, reasonable columnist

Jonathan Chait's essay, "In Defense of Punching Left: The problem with ‘Solidarity'," appeared in the NY Intelligencer on May 10.

My perception is that perhaps he is describing not so much what it is to be a liberal as what it is to be a columnist.

We might say that to ask anyone to be an activist uncritically riding the wave of collective movement is to expect them to ride a car with no brakes. Chait says this self-awareness is true specifically of liberals, as if liberals were somehow different.

We might say that everyone wants to be reasonable. Chait implies that liberals are the only ones who really try.

To me, this seems to be a viewpoint on what it means to be a liberal, reasonable columnist. It isn't the only possible viewpoint.

For some, the work of a columnist might mean examining the world through principles of liberalism and reason and trying to understand people and things in liberal, reasonable ways.

For others, it might mean asserting: I'm the liberal, reasonable one, and everyone I'm critiquing isn't.

In my view, those are different endeavors.

I also hear them use words like complexity, objectivity, nuance, balance. How this works: The columnist says: Everything those people say is simplistic and biased. It lacks nuance, and the conversation is one-sided because they're the only ones who ever get to talk. Now it's time to listen to me — only me! And so they set themselves up as immune from critique.

This allows them to lack any expertise for what they're saying. Dr. Johnathan Flowers on Bluesky: "As Talia Mae Bettcher notes, this kind of arrogance is why people in philosophy try to opine about trans issues without ever talking to a trans philosopher or a trans person. We're taught to act as though no subject is free from our inquiry, even if our tools aren't up to the task of doing it." (May 15, 2024)

Another direction

Sometimes it's unproductive to think about our correctness as individuals and may be better to think about the correctness of entire movements over the long term.

Osita Nwanevu in The Guardian today:

"The student left is the most reliably correct constituency in America. Over the past 60 years, it has passed every great moral test American foreign policy has forced upon the public, including the Vietnam war, the question of relations with apartheid South Africa, and the Iraq war. Student activists were at the heart of the black civil rights movement from the very beginning. ... They have not always been right; even when right, their prescriptions for the problems they've identified and their means of directing attention to them have not always been prudent. But...it has made a habit of telling the American people, in tones that discomfit, what they need to hear before they are ready to hear it."

I wrote about the protests. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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— Osita Nwanevu (@ositanwanevu.bsky.social) May 13, 2024 at 11:50 AM

The 'indestructible exoneration' we give to supremacists by being 'fair' to them

"In fact, whenever you mention that Trump's "very fine people" defended the Nazis, you'll always get people—even proudly anti-Trump people, good liberals who want to be sure that no matter what we do in this struggle against facism, we always play fair—who rush in to take on the fascist framing uncritically, and let you know that well actually Trump was defending the non-Nazis that marched with the Nazis, not the Nazis themselves. It's a distinction we are meant to find meaningful; a sort of indestructible exoneration offered to supremacists and their allies."
A.R. Moxon, interviewed by Parker Molloy (Patreon), May 30, 2024