A Letter On Justice And Open Debate
[guest post by Dana]
I’m just going to leave this here. Missing the irony, but better late than never, I guess:
Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty…
–Dana
UPDATE BY PATTERICO: I think it’s a great letter — signed by a lot of people I admire — and along toddles a leftist to serve as a performative proof of the dangers the letter describes:
Matt Yglesias has been reported to his employer by a colleague for signing an open letter which argues that a climate of conformity, fear, and mutual surveillance has descended upon public intellectual life. pic.twitter.com/1ybwS68T7u
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) July 7, 2020
This is a threatening letter that insinuates that its author faces a hostile work environment — meaning it’s an implicit threat of litigation. In any event, this thin-skinned loser is definitely trying to harm Yglesias (someone for whom I have very little respect, but for whom signing this letter was an act of courage). If this delicate snowflake did not exist, the letter author(s) would have to create said snowflake.