It was curious that he was a member of the board and former president of the National Book Critics Circle if he was such a disagreeable fellow. Yet, Carlin Romano, writer, philosopher, critic, was on the board and, accordingly, did what a board member is supposed to do.

One critics circle board member, Columbia University professor John McWhorter, an African American, agreed with him on the substance of the anti-racism pledge, but told the website Vulture that Romano’s way of expressing his dissent was a bit tone-deaf.  He “was not being a modern person in the way he responded” to the anti-racism pledge, McWhorter said, perhaps referring to Romano’s charge that some of the arguments of the anti-racism pledge were “absolute nonsense.”

How exacty does a “modern person” express himself?

The episode also signaled the repudiation of an honored and admired intellectual archetype – the curmudgeon. I’m not a close friend, but, as a book writer and former critic myself, I’ve encountered Romano over the years, and I’d describe him as something of a throwback to an earlier era, when a crusty, Socratic, erudite style carried with it a certain charm. But that’s one of the ways Romano seems no longer to fit in.

What brought about the explosion was a draft “Anti-Racism Pledge,” organized by poet Hope Wabuke and proposed to the board of critics for comment.

There were a number of comments on the draft, but Romano seems to have been alone among the board’s 24 members to object to phrases like “system of white supremacy” to characterize the whole publishing industry or to accept the notion of critics’ “culpability in the system of erasure of BIPOC voices.” In an email to other members that was supposed to be internal and confidential, he wrote, “Equating American book publishing with American police departments, as this claim suggests, is ridiculous.”  He supported Black Lives Matter, he said, but the draft statement was unfair to the “white publishers that have been working to elevate Black writers, and Black voices, for years.”

Wabuke was so outraged that she first put the confidantial comments on twitter for public outrage, and then resigned from the board, stating “it is not possible to change these organizations from within, and the backlash will be too dangerous for me to remain.” All because Romana had a quibble with the hyperbolic language of universal condemnation.

So some member of the board decided to seek Romano’s ejection, and a Zoom meeting was held about having a racist in their midst.

In other words, what Romano did was offer some criticism, which is what critics in an organization of critics are generally expected to do, and what he was being asked to do as the draft of the anti-racism pledge was circulated for members’ comment.  The fact that he was soon raked over the coals for “racism” led many people to bemoan an especially blatant incident of “culture cancelation.”

Even though the vote fell just short of the two-thirds majority needed to expel a person from the board, 62% of the voting members did favor ousting Romano, who, for the three months preceding the Zoom event, had been subject to a steady barrage of attacks – for “blatant racism” and “misogyny” – all because he dissented from a certain orthodoxy on the trinity of race, class, and gender.

Romano was a supporter of “Black Lives Matter,” for whatever that meant. His personality wasn’t the “modern” gushing empathy that precludes any reaction perceived as discouraging when the subject is racism, or encouraging when the subject was “structures” of white supremacy. But this wasn’t a battle over racism, but a skirmish over tweaking the condemnation of those who were dedicated to ending racism.

But the Romano incident also highlighted another, perhaps more far-reaching, aspect of the ongoing culture wars, namely how the “woke” left seems to be devouring old school liberals. While liberals and conservatives still battle on the largest political stage, the Critics Circle fight illustrates the arcane factional struggle within the left, in which the radical faction takes on comparatively easy targets like Romano because they are accessible and vulnerable in a way that actual racists and other non-insiders are not.

Richard Bernstein sees the underlying battle, the one within the left itself which has been brewing for a long time. The battle for hegemony over the left isn’t between racists and the woke, but between liberals for whom facts, reason and principles remain predominent and the social justice faithful for whom ideology and outcome is all that matters. You don’t challenge the orthodoxy unless you’re a racist. And the woke are not shy about expressing, and getting their fellow travelers to express, blind rage at anyone who fails to be an obedient and obsequious believers and supporter.

Carlin Romano wasn’t racist. What he also wasn’t was obsequious, happy to throw publishers under the bus who also weren’t racist. How dare he challenge an anti-racism pledge that was simplistic, grossly exagerated and wrong in attacking and blaming the very publishers trying to do everything possible to support the marginalized writers?

It’s not that Romano was a Nazi-adjacent, although you would think so from the way he was attacked. It’s that he was a liberal, put in the position of having to defend his “racist” ways of not being blindly supportive.

All of this might suggest Romano is more a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan than simply a dissenter to portions of the anti-racism pledge.  What he found to be “nonsense” wasn’t the pledge’s citing of surveys showing the dominance of whites in publishing; it was the suggestion that these whites are exemplars of “white supremacy,” when, in fact, American publishing has been a traditionally liberal institution, and over the decades, many editors have been in the forefront of efforts to find, publish, and promote black writers.

“It seemed to me,” he continued, explaining his reasons for his criticism of the anti-racism pledge, “that a few Board members drafting these claims remained too ignorant of real-world publishing history to get their generalizations right.”

They blamed it on his manner, too blund, too harsh, not enough soothing positive words wrapped around the most tepid disagreement possible, as is required of a modern person. But that was merely the excuse. Their real beef was that he was rational, a liberal, constrained by facts and bold enough to risk being led to the stake for his ritual burning to say so. Such heresy is worse than actual racism, because it could turn heards away from blind faith in the social justice ideology.

Had it been left to the people at the Zoom meeting, Romano would have been thrown out.

In the actual voting at the meeting, 72% of the 115 attending voted to remove him from the board. But Romano had collected proxy ballots from other members before the meeting and carried the day, by just a few percentage points. Romano will remain on the board for the duration of the current term, until 2022.

But his surviving the moment doesn’t change that he will always be a racist to the woke for having rationally disputes absurd and false generalizations. Like a curmudgeon. Like a liberal.