Since the rise of social justice as a religion, and accelerating after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, some folks have “awoken” more than others. My old pal, Radley Balko, is one them, having had an epiphany along the way. Once the Agitator, he surprisingly, yet not at all surprisingly, took his former roomies and colleagues at the libertarian magazine Reason to task. Radley, a long-time libertarian, had a beef.
So shortly after the 2016 election, I pointed out how odd it was that the Reason homepage was dominated by stories either mocking and ridiculing the left for being fearful of what was to come, or articles about how Trump might actually be good for libertarians. https://t.co/p12e5UjFXJ
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) November 10, 2020
On the one hand, there was no shortage of constant outrage and hysteria toward Trump, such that Reason’s not pulling a New York Times-level seven editorials a day about how Trump was literally Hitler was missing from the dialogue. On the other hand, assuming one accepted the premise that Trump was a vulgar, amoral, deceitful ignoramus, obsessing over his every burp and fart was neither new nor illuminating. “Trump said something stupid” could be an hourly headline.
At the same time, there was the other side of the horseshoe counterbalancing the fringe right that was a lot easier to love, and a lot harder to criticize. One side had the putative political power, while the other side had the social power of the mob. One did its damage. The other did its damage. Radley posed the question of why, in his view, Reason challenged both mobs rather than relished the opportunity to burn people at the stake.
Yet instead of embracing the momentum, forging alliances, and converting it into useful reform, many libertarians …
… belittled the activists pushing “defund” as impractical, radical, pie-in-the-sky. *We* are supposed to be radical, impractical, pie-in-the-sky! A big part of this is that many libertarians still see the left as a bigger threat than the right. I’m baffled by this given…
… the last four years, and what’s happening right now.
It’s a fair question, although Radley framed it as a strawman, which reflects where he’s gone as opposed to where Reason went. The problem with “defund the police” wasn’t that it was “impractical, radical, pie-in-the-sky,” but it was ignorant, simplistic and counterproductive. Calling it “radical” might be true, but then radical isn’t remotely the same as effective. It can also mean ridiculous.
The problem with “forging alliances” is that progressives demand ideological purity. Either you were an obsequious sycophant, also known as an “ally,” or you were all the -ists that compelled your destruction. There was no “alliance” to be forged with people who believe every heretic needs to be destroyed, and everyone not teetering on the left edge of social justice was evil. Not merely wrong, but actually evil.
But the big question was why libertarians see the “left as a bigger threat than the right.” This “baffles” Radley, but even though I’m not a libertarian, perhaps I can offer an answer. First, this question, too, is oddly framed. It’s not that the left is a “bigger threat,” but a different threat. This was a point I had made earlier to Conor Friedersdorf.
As someone best characterized as center left, I’m far more concerned with the potential harm of the left fringe than the right.
Maybe I’m expecting too much. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. But I fear social justice ideology is far more insidious than flagrant racists.
To many, this was tantamount to being a Nazi sympathizer, as sadly the nuance of “insidiousness” was lost on the unduly passionate and perpetually outraged. What attraction did Trump, white supremacists or flagrant racists have to anyone who wasn’t already on board with their views? They were what they were, obvious to all. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to entice the unwary. If you were inclined to the brutish, there they were. There wasn’t much more to it.
But social justice? It was the tool of the righteous, who usurped liberal goals like equality and twisted them to their malignant ends. It claimed to own empathy and compassion while destroying anyone who stood in its way. If you were against racism and sexism, it was an alluring option, provided you didn’t notice the fist inside the velvet glove.
It’s easy to see the big, dumb oaf standing in front of you, and know that you oppose him. It’s harder to recognize the people whispering sweet nothings in your ear from behind, ready to stick in the knife and gut you the moment you question their authoritarian demands for control.
It didn’t seem useful for Reason to parrot the daily grievances lining the bird cages of New York Times readers. There was nothing new to be said, and no lack of willing shriekers. Was it not their purpose, Radley’s purpose when he was merely the Agitator, to raise the insidious problems that the mob failed to recognize?
When this was a nation that adored its cops, couldn’t get enough Law & Order and voted for whomever called for the most Draconian punishments, Reason was challenging the mob. Radley was challenging the mob. Me too. We weren’t saying it because it was popular with huge groups of fans, but because it wasn’t. The slogan of “speaking truth to power” is slick, but over the past few years, power was split between the government, who had official power, and the mob, who learned to wield its torches and pitchforks with astounding and deadly efficacy.
So why did Reason appear, at least to Radley’s eyes, to be overly harsh on the left while not losing their minds over every instance of Trumpian insanity?
I’m glad Biden’s win means libertarians…
… will go back to being alarmists. But given the approach too many libertarians took during the Trump years, I suspect it’s going to be even more difficult to get people to listen.
Popularity is a dangerous drug. Maybe the libertarians want to be addicted to it, even if it means linking arms with the very authoritarians they abhor, if only to their left rather than their right. Beats me, because I’m no libertarian. But challenging the insidious mob is harder than challenging the obvious mob, especially when one basks in the mob’s adoration by embracing its ideology.
And I can’t really blame them.
That’s why the social justice mob is so insidious, luring those who once challenged the tyranny of the majority to its ranks, basking in the warm comfort of insipid adoration until he’s brought to his knees and silenced for heresy. But if the libertarians are what I believe them to be, there will still be a place for those who reject mob orthodoxy. They seem like a pretty tolerant bunch.
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There’s a truly perverse irony in an ideology that so fervently embraces “diversity” being so intolerant of diversity of opinion.
The ideology in question doesn’t “embrace” diversity, it “demands” it. But I agree its intolerance of diversity of opinion is at the very least ironic.
The word “diversity” is a rhetorical problem, much like “inclusion” or “tolerance” or any of the other warm and fuzzy words used to wrap up specific ends as if they were principled goals. Focusing on the “ironic” rhetoric misses the point that this isn’t about diversity at all, but about promoting a discrete litany of outcomes over alternative outcomes of equal merit.
It’s more Humpty Dumpty than irony.
I like diversity! We have some many, cool, vegan, ethnic, restaurants to choose from.
Have you never noticed that the people screaming “TOLERANCE” the loudest always seem the be the least tolerant of others? Look around and see.
I get the sense that you’re sad to have lost your comrade in arms from the days when Radley was focused on the issues rather than being the libertarian joke about the issues: World To End Tomorrow: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit. [Ed. Note: Link added because I can.]
Like you, many of us were huge fans of Radley, both as Agitator and his books like Warrior Cop. If you’re trying to remind him of what he once, an outsider, I fear he’s too far gone. It’s been sad to watch him (as well as some others) devolve into woke mob ass kissers. He will be missed.
I do miss my old pal and his brilliant focus on real problems and real solutions. But why would he care about one old lawyer when he can be a beloved part of a powerful movement?
I don’t fault Radley Balko for putting his priorities on things like racial injustice in law enforcement, police misconduct against protestors, or the treatment of illegal immigrants. For anyone who cares about civil liberties, these are important problems, worthy of attention, where a lot of work needs to be done.
At the same time, though, I know that libertarians skew white, male, educated, and affluent. They should rightly be concerned with all of the above, but these are mainly injustices affecting others. When academia proposes to remove due process protections from male students, that hits closer to home. When Democrats put out a platform that basically treats the 2nd Amendment as dead letter, it’s going to affect many of them directly, especially in light of rioting mobs who explicitly reject private property rights.
It’s a noble thing for Balko to concern himself with threats to the rights of others. It sure sounds more noble than other libertarians protecting their own rights first. But the latter isn’t wrong, nor should it be surprising.
And that’s what makes this so insidious, that small minds are incapable of distinguishing between the ends and the means. Are these good goals (with the caveat that insipid vagaries like “racial injustice” are the sorts of empty words best suited to the idiocracy), of course they are. Do you achieve them by mob destruction? That’s the difference.
Reason is generally all over police abuse stories. For example, Jacob Sullum was all over the Tuttle shooting in Houston even after the local media had dropped it.
To say that white male libertarians don’t care about abusive cops isn’t correct.
Balko’s issue with Reason wasn’t their coverage, it was that they disliked Trump insufficiently.
I suspect this is at the core of the problem, that there is an expectation that anyone anti-Trump must be so completely dedicated by being anti-Trump that it constantly attacks Trump, never questions Trump’s opponents and, god forbid, never, but never, suggests anything positive about Trump, such as the Trump-adjacent changes to Title IX.
In a way, it’s very much like Kendi’s anti-racist argument, that one is either dedicated to being an anti-racist or one is a racist. Any not on the left edge is part of the evil right, and there is no spectrum of views possible.
Or even, as you certainly know, simply pointing out that an extreme or incorrect criticism of Trump is extreme or incorrect. You’re immediately branded as a supporter or a fascist. God knows Trump leaves enough opportunities laying around for legit criticism, but you’ve got to support the most extreme stuff out there or you’re an enabler, now bound for the Truth Commission.
The wokes just don’t comprehend what this does to their credibility.
Trump has this uncanny ability to make people crazy to the point that they destroy their own credibility. He did it to the NYT and Wapo and CNN. He did it to Balko. He did it to another legal type that used to run a fantastic blog pre-Trump but now is a card carrying mob member.
I can’t stand him either and didn’t vote for him either time, but at least I kept my senses about me and didn’t let him change me, as did you. So it can be done.
What you’re describing doesn’t describe Radley. He hasn’t burned his credibility just because he’s moved to the left – a change I find unsurprising in any event, given that he married a progressive journalist and now works for a progressive paper. He would have burned his credibility had he become a hysteric, but he hasn’t.
And that he’s taken his former colleagues at Reason to task for what he sees as excessive love of Trump is far from “crazy” by the standards of the actual liberty movement. My experience interning for the big libertarian think tank in the early days of the Trump presidency was that people tended to be quite concerned about the existence of a “libertarianism-to-fringe-right pipeline” and supported in-movement corrective action to put a stop to that. I see Radley’s rhetoric as part of that effort.
The Trump era was a golden age for Libertarians and Anarchists, in the sense that the federal government was essentially paralyzed for four years. By contrast, the leftist ideology, during the Obama era, advanced a creeping, federal, pen-and-phone totalitarianism. It brought us the Title IX campus star chambers and the EEOC compelled pronouns. The leftist ideology is more dangerous to personal liberties because it is more organized than the ad hoc corruption of the right.
Nothing did more to coalesce (or congeal, as the case may be) the progressive left than Trump.
Radley was how I found you in the first place, so I guess you have another reason to be disappointed in him.
You’re like a little piece of the old Radley that won’t go away.
Come to think about it, it was also how I came across this blog for the first time.
It is hard to think. It is even harder to think well and rationally.
An ideology relives you of that burden. Not only does it relive you of thinking, it gives you a sense of moral superiority over others.
“I am a social justice warrior. I am so wonderful. Because I am so wonderful and morally superior to you who are not, I have the absolute right to tell you what to do, what to think, and how to live.”
Yeah, right. Repeat the same for a Marxist, just change “social justic3e warrior” to “socialist.”
You watch people do this and its like watching water go down the toilet bowl. Their options are enclosed in the width of the toilet bowl and the further down they go, the fewer options they have, until they hit that pipe going straight to the sewer.
I remember when you tweeted that, and that Carissa Hessick decided to jump on the woke bandwagon and claimed this made you some sort of Nazi sympathizer. I was surprised, but not shocked, that she so brazenly lied about what you said. I went to look for her tweets at you, but it appears that she deleted them.
Apparently, she has enough shame to delete her lies, but not enough to admit she’s just another disgraceful scold pandering for woke likes while pretending to be fair.
It was very disappointing, both her lying about it and to learn that she was so simplistic. Academics keep disappointing me, as I expect them to be either fairly smart or fairly honest. I clearly expect too much of them.