Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places
Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places
The left shouldn't put its faith in government or Silicon Valley to help shutdown their enemies, but in the power of good ideas over bad ones.
“Our politics has been a bath in bullshit since forever.”
~ Thomas Frank, from his recent column in The Guardian.
It is an understandable impulse—after four years of Trump and his tenuous-at-best relationship with the truth, liberals are worried about how easily these damned lies spread, what fertile soil Twitter and Facebook are for the growth of Trumpism or other unsavory ideas.
And so, to many, it is our job—and the job of the tech giants—to clamp down. Free speech isn’t guaranteed on Twitter or Facebook or Google, and yet social media and Google is where most of our news comes from—including fake news.
In fact, due to the “reality crisis” America finds itself in, experts apparently think Biden should appoint a “reality czar.” Whatever the hell that is.
That last bit comes by way of Thomas Frank’s recent column on how liberals and Democrats have turned toward censorship (in its various forms and degrees) in the face of Trumpism. And “the folly of it all is beyond belief.”
It’s true: There are lefty types, like your diabolically humble narrator, who don’t particularly care for the scolding, authoritarian behavior we’ve seen take root over the past decade in woke media. We are dismayed by the increasing disdain for freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of dissent and worry that these types of tactics are harmful rather than helpful, and potentially dangerous.
Right-wing media has its fair share of problems, of course, but there’s no shortage of commentary on that. Critiquing the follies and excesses and bizarre 180 degree philosophical turns on the left is more useful than pointing out, once again, that Fox News is a den of vipers or that Sean Hannity is so full of shit you can spot it dribbling out his ears, lurking behind those empty, beady little eyes.
We know this already.
Writes Frank:
“The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an “extremism expert” shushing the world.”
He continues:
“Debunking” was how the literary left used to respond to America’s Niagara of nonsense. Criticism, analysis, mockery and protest: these were our weapons. We were rational-minded skeptics, and we had a grand old time deflating creationists, faith healers, puffed-up militarists and corporate liars of every description.
Censorship and blacklisting were, with important exceptions, the weapons of the puritanical right: those were their means of lashing out against rap music or suggestive plays or leftwingers who were gainfully employed.”
The right, Frank argues, is far from defeated after Trump’s much-too-narrow defeat, and liberals are eager to do whatever it takes to stop Trumpism before the next election. This includes attempts to de-platform as many Wrong Thinkers as possible. The problem here, aside from the ethical concerns, is that Democrats refuse to accept blame for their own failures, including the party’s inability to speak to working class America.
This is a party that has courted professional-managerial elites for decades, and now they have succeeded in winning them over, along with most of the wealthy areas where such people live. Liberals scold and supervise like an offended ruling class because to a certain extent that’s who they are. More and more, they represent the well-credentialed people who monitor us in the workplace, and more and more do they act like it.
What all this censorship talk really is, though, is a declaration of defeat – defeat before the Biden administration has really begun. To give up on free speech is to despair of reason itself. (Misinformation, we read in the New York Times, is impervious to critical thinking.) The people simply cannot be persuaded; something more forceful is in order; they must be guided by we, the enlightened; and the first step in such a program is to shut off America’s many burbling fountains of bad takes.
There are, of course, many reasons why it’s hard for Democrats and the left to put their full political vision into action. The nature of the electoral college and the make-up of the Senate, along with its pesky filibuster, certainly make it harder for Democrats to win and then govern with a mandate.
But perhaps there is another explanation: The left has forgotten that it is not a movement of rich celebrities, investment bankers and narrow-minded identity politics that sound crazy to the vast majority of the population. The left can’t abandon its commitment to labor simply because blue collar America isn’t woke enough. Perhaps the electoral college would be a less-insurmountable obstacle if Democrats appealed to more rural and blue collar voters, many of whom—especially in the Rust Belt—have drifted further and further to the right.
Which isn’t to say that white working class America is without its own problems, either. It’s just that many of those problems stem from the gutting of the working and middle classes and an economic outlook that for many is grim at best, and Democrats have failed to win the economic argument (or even make it). No wonder people who have lost status, economic security and faith in the future clamor to “Make America Great Again.”
Shutting down Parler might give you the warm fuzzies, but it won’t convince anyone to vote for Democrats. Journalists’ bizarre attempt to foil the Capitol riot suspects’ legal defense fundraising efforts by pressuring tech companies to thwart crowdsourcing campaigns will not magically stop Trumpism.
It might, however, help ensure that Americans despise journalists even more than they already do and continue pushing blue collar Americans into the arms of the right.
Singling out a religious baker with a lawsuit because he doesn’t want to bake a “transition celebration” cake for a transwoman (who just so happens to be an activist and a lawyer) will not convince working class, religious Americans that Democrats offer them a better economic outlook than the GOP. Shitting on someone’s religious freedom will not convince a largely Christian demographic that Fox News has mischaracterized the liberal bogeyman. Conservatives will happily play identity politics with you till everyone is blue in the face.
Please illustrate how this is a winning strategy?
Here’s Freddie in a really fantastic piece on the bizarre takeover of almost all non-rightwing media by the new woke dogma:
In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?
And the bizarre assumption of almost everyone in media seems to have been that they could adopt this brand of extreme niche politics, in mass, as an industry, and treat those politics as a crusade that trumps every other journalistic value, with no professional or economic consequences. They seem to have thought that Americans were just going to swallow it; they seem to have thought they could paint most of the country as vicious bigots and that their audiences would just come along for the ride. They haven’t.
This has been especially, glaringly true in the gaming sphere where the divide between game journalists and their audiences is stark.
It wasn’t until I first started covering games (almost a decade ago) that I even heard the term “Social Justice Warrior” and at first I took it as something right-wingers just called lefties. Then I realized that other lefties were also using the term. It was the early days of the woke takeover, and soon we’d find ourselves embroiled in GamerGate and the rise of a new movement on the right (though GamerGate didn’t start out that way, it was quickly latched onto by Milo et alia who then quickly latched on to Trump).
In the mainstream press, journalists may paint most of the country as “vicious bigots” but during GamerGate the gaming press crafted that template, penning article after article about the awfulness of their own readership. “Gamers are dead” we were told, as though some tiny cohort of game journalists could erase an entire identity with breathless proclamations alone.
Post after post after post after post claimed that this was the “end of gamers” or that “gamers are over” in a holier-than-thou chorus that surely wasn’t designed to rile people up and get clicks. Surely not. No, these noble paragons of truth were just concerned about all the harassment that these neckbeard incels were carrying out on Twitter.
Here’s Leigh Alexander leading the charge:
“Gamer” isn’t just a dated demographic label that most people increasingly prefer not to use. Gamers are over. That’s why they’re so mad.
These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers -- they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had.
There is what’s past and there is what’s now. There is the role you choose to play in what’s ahead.
She’s not wrong about one thing: They’re not her audience. Leigh Alexander is yesterday’s game journalist; today, these “obtuse shitslingers” are watching creators on YouTube.
That the game press largely helped create that anger and then gleefully fanned the flames after pouring gasoline over everything is beside the point. When I pointed out that there was useful historical context that could help us decode this consumer anger, it was seen as evidence that I was a part of the problem. Why bother with historical context when the answer is so simple: Half of all gamers are clearly just a “basket of deplorables.”
The narrative that formed around gamers and GamerGate was simple: it was nothing more than a harassment campaign against women. Even Law & Order jumped on the bandwagon. There was no desire to learn if that were actually true, no desire to dig into the root causes. Remember, once a narrative has taken shape it’s almost impossible to shake. (More on GamerGate in another post).
Has all of this led to better games journalism? Have we held the video game industry accountable for its many sins and excesses? Or has a huge portion of the audience simply migrated to YouTube where they find content creators who at least appear to care more about games than about talking down to gamers?
You might think it’s a good idea to try to get a video game banned because you find its subject matter problematic. In the end, all you’re doing is helping it go viral. People who never would have heard of Six Days In Fallujah will now buy it out of spite.
It might feel good to shut down conservative speakers at your university, but all you really do is give those speakers more attention, more notoriety, more ammunition and more followers. Another chapter in their next book. The only reason there’s a group called the Proud Boys right now is because protestors kept trying to shut down Gavin McInnes and he wanted some muscle to fight back against Antifa with. Turns out, this can escalate pretty quickly. Violence begets violence.
It might feel righteous to pressure social media companies into de-platforming your political opponents, but what happens when the wind changes? And do we really think that aligning ourselves with massive Silicon Valley corporations is a good strategy that won’t have any sort of blowback whatsoever?
Again, tell me how this is a winning strategy? I’d really like to know.
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You pose the question "tell me how this is a winning strategy?" as a challenge. So, here is my attempt.
Just to clarify, I have a lot of sympathy for the position that you, Greenwald, Frank, and others are arguing. I love the spirit of it, even. I have both conservative and progressive friends and I just want everyone to feel content that they have been treated fairly, whoever takes home the elections.
Whether or not a strategy is winning, depends on what metric is used to evaluate it. I don't think the metric being used by the shutdown-ers is "Democrats' ability to win elections". The problem that my leftie friends talk about (all the time) is the growth of the various strands of the alt-right. They are estimating/predicting that unless extraordinary tactics are used to hinder the ability of these movements to 1) coordinate their activities, and 2) persuade newcomers to join them, then these movements will grow to a significant extent. Shutting down Parler would be an example of 1), since this makes it difficult for the members to communicate among themselves. Banning alt-right leaders leaders from social media would be 2).
They also predict that if those movements grow too much, they will start being a constant problem that causes significant harm to society (I suppose the Capitol Riot would be one example - Donald Trump's many weird attempts to influence the election appear to be another).
If we think of the strategy as an attempt to "take one for the team" and take a hit in the polls in order to suppress a future (or contemporary?) problem, then it's a little bit easier to argue.
First, can banning extremist users make it more difficult for them to coordinate? I'd say it's reasonable to believe so, although with modern technology it's probably impossible to completely stop it. They can pay each other with bitcoins, or use any of the hundreds of strongly encrypted messengers/social media apps. But banning them on mainstream services still inconveniences them since it can make it more difficult for them to reach out to new people, and if any of them are less than decently tech-savvy it's goodbye for them.
Second, will it stop recruitment? It's difficult to say, but arguably yes since on the mainstream platforms they can benefit from exposure through the content recommendation algorithms used by Youtube et. al. An obvious counter-point would be to just adjust the algorithm to artificially punish them instead. This can even be done in secret, so avoids the negative PR of holding a censorship campaign, or a hypothetical Streisand effect.
This could be done more carefully and in more depth, but I'll stop here. I'll add that I agree that these politicians seem to be weirdly unaware of how bad it looks, and strangely unaware of how much of a trade-off the strategy really is: we are sacrificing our liberalism in order to (maybe) slow the growth of an illiberal, dangerous movement. This is not supposed to feel like a no-brainer; it's actually a dilemma!
Erik. I love your work. But have a fundamental disagreement with the way you are coming at this issue. I think you’d agree that every other statement from just about any right wing pol or media member is a lie. Perhaps you’d also agree that fascism is on the march in the USA. Fox News and right wing radio are enormously popular here so the idea that conservatives have no outlet just isn’t true. So here’s where you and I disagree. I think your conclusion is basically - fascist propaganda isn’t nearly the problem that the way the liberals are trying to deal with it is.
Deplatforming trump has worked out pretty damn well.