The end of the Social Justice Détente

After the wrenching fights over social justice from the ’60s through the early ’70s, American society made an implicit bargain I like to call The Social Justice Détente:

• no big new government policy moves to correct injustices
• no public expressions of overt bigotry

Advocates for social justice today tend to think of the emergence of The Détente as simply the bigots winning, but it did not seem that way at the time. Before The Détente, American public culture had allowed a measure of bigotry hard to imagine even if one is old enough to remember it. Changing that was not trivial.

Part of the logic of The Détente was that in the ’70s & ’80s, social justice advocates in our pop media engaged in a pervasive propaganda campaign to overcome bigotry. In an episode of Mork & Mindy, Young Robin Williams faced down the local chapter of the Klan! In an episode of The Partridge Family, Danny became an honorary Black Panther! Norman All In The Family Lear was the king of this sort of thing, but it was everywhere. When young social justice advocates grumble about white liberals’ earnest, maddening misunderstandings, half the time they are confronting ideas inherited from this propaganda campaign, which feels dangerously tepid & naïve to contemporary viewers but reflected a powerful challenge in its time, supported by sophisticated social justice advocates.

The broad left hoped that these egalitarian parables and a public sphere purged of overt bigotry would produce a new American generation free of the bigoted attitudes of the past. Arresting policy progress was a pause, not a surrender; the next generation would would pick up the baton and take the next steps toward a more just society.

Obviously that did not happen. American culture still has plenty of bigotry. The wave of political support for new policy comparable to the anti-racist (and anti-sexist) reforms of the Civil Rights Era did not come. To understand our current condition, we need to understand both those failings and the successes we did get.

Baseline common bigotry on the broad left today mortifies people attentive to social justice, but it is far less than the bigotry common even on the broad left prior to The Détente. Even the fact that we have a hard time remembering how bad bigtory used to be constitutes a major victory.

The broad right today is twistier.

The right started worse, and changed a lot less. But they are sincerely offended by a lot of things their great-grandparents would have said casually … which they think means they are not bigots at all.

Bigots never think they are bigots; they think their attitudes are just obvious common sense. So people on the right assume that most people on the left privately understand and agree with their attitudes. They imagine that we just differ from them in working harder to maintain the hypocritical performance of public norms which conflict with common sense. Surely in our most private circles we let ourselves admit the truth.

People on the right have learned not to express themselves “honestly” without subtly checking first whether everyone in earshot is “cool”. It is easy for folks on the left to underestimate the gulf between the attitudes people on the right have and routinely express in private versus what they say when measuring their words in our presence. When people on the right grumble about the “far left” exercising “totalitarian” control and “dominating” culture with “lies”, it is absurd, but they are sincerely describing what they experience.

Compounding that, the broad right feel that the broad left have violated the terms of The Détente. We didn’t accept The Détente as a satisfactory endpoint. We don’t admit that “real” racism & sexism have been obviously defeated. Indeed, we greedily demand more. The scope of what we permit in public keeps narrowing. And we have extended the power of the state to support the disgusting queers.

All this is of course a big part of why they find Trump refreshing and forthright. And they remain frustrated because even Trump does not get to say everything they say in private. I think it’s dangerously simpleminded to understand MAGA as just about bigotry, but it is a lot about bigotry.

Related

I was prompted to finally write this post because of a recent story about leaked chats among Young Republicans which I think even most people on the broad right would find repulsively bigoted and fascist. The bigots-among-the-bigots use the skills they learned in stepping carefully in mixed company to watch what they say even among ordinary folks on the broad right. Even more than regular people on the broad right, they find it cathartic to speak “plainly” among themselves, and yearn for a world in which they can be “honest”.

Vice President Vance dismissing concern over the leak by saying “I refuse to join the pearl clutching” demonstrates how MAGA as a manifestation of our ongoing massive social reälignment rejects both aspects of The Détente: they will roll back the social justice policies implemented in the ’60s & early ’70s and change our public culture to permit bigotry.

Liberal Currents
The Present Crisis and the End of the Long ’90s

A racial and sexual hypocrisy

The Long ’90s was also a cultural settlement. The cultural settlement was not embodied in any single law or policy, but rather shaped the basic assumptions of Americans about our country — and, most especially, who was a full citizen. Surprisingly, the consensus can be expressed quite simply. On the one hand, explicit racial or sexual discrimination would end. On the other, America would remain de facto a white man’s republic.

From the perspective of 1982, this seems like a good bargain for all concerned. The bruising unrest of the 60’s and 70’s — including the violent terrorism the New Left had degenerated into, including the violent terrorism of Jim Crow or COINTELPRO — all that would end. The insurgents — the feminists, the civil rights activists — would get a major improvement on the status quo. And the status quo — the white patriarchy — would in practice get to keep most of its privileges and power.

The compromise broke down with the election of Barack Obama. After forty years, the “insurgents” were no longer the children of Jim Crow and white-picket-fence patriarchy. They were the children of the Long ’90s, who had been promised the world. We told all America’s children — men, women, and otherwise, black and white and otherwise — that they could be anything they wanted to be. Unsurprisingly, they believed us.

Meanwhile, the old guard of the white man’s republic — men and women both, it turns out — were shocked and appalled at the possibility of a black man being president—of black people demanding an end to routine police brutality — of women demanding an end to routine sexual assault. Both MeToo and Black Lives Matter were shocks to the conservative psyche it has not yet recovered from.

The Trump II theory of the case is bizarre and conspiratorial. Trump II appears to believe that this sea change in American culture — the belief that America is not a white man’s republic, but a republic in which all men and women are endowed with certain inalienable rights — was a result of a cabal of Marxist professors and other elites, the “Cathedral,” which brainwashed the youth of America, and if they can simply find the Cathedral’s funding and cut it off, Americans will go back to loving the boot. They just need to kill the woke mind virus. The demand that Harvard accept a group of political commissars to ensure “viewpoint diversity” (aka affirmative action for rightwing incompetents) embodies this.

Romney bitterness

Over on Bluesky, a bunch of lefties piled on to a post expressing a common sentiment from the right.

The media smeared Mitt Romney as Hitler. Then Republicans thought, well we might as well run Hitler.

We have been hearing this for years, and lefties mostly respond by calling shenanigans on this as disingenuous. This classic cartoon from lefty satirist Matt Bors sums up the point:

That critique of the right claiming that the left drives them right has a lot of truth to it, but I think there is some extra dimension to folks on the right feeling raw about Romney in particular.

To many folks on the broad right who may not even be MAGAs, supporting Romney’s presidential bid reflected something paralleling what Clintonian triangulation represents to the broad left. “He is obviously sharp. He is fundamentally competent. He doesn’t say inflammatory stuff that freaks out the other side which some other potential candidates from our side might. We are tacking toward the center rather than toward what we want most, to be less vulnerable to criticism.” There was even the inversion of Dems’ grumble, “How can the Republicans object to the Affordable Care Act when it is essentially the same plan Romney implemented in Massachusetts?” He was not a candidate who excited them, he was a candidate they hoped would repel their opponents less, win over a few votes, and enable reaching across the aisle in Congress.

I’m not saying Romney was that person; he was more a creature of longstanding Republican movement conservatism than they remember. But a lot of Republicans sincerely understood him that way. Folks on the broad left should be familiar with how it feels to see that fail.

There’s also a thing that fascinates me about Mitt Romney’s screen presence. He looks like the actor one might cast in a movie which has just one scene in the Oval Office, and thus needs a guy who is obviously meant to be the president without anyone having to be told. It’s a characteristic which feels very comforting to Republicans in a way they would assume extends to Dems. They don’t understand that it opens the question of why they don’t feel the same comfort with Obama in the Oval, with its obvious ugly answer.

Dems of course did not attack Romney as Practically Hitler. But we did sharply criticize him (for very good reasons), which felt so unfair because they were Trying To Be So Nice in picking him.

Fine, then. They’ll pick a candidate who does excite them. Not because Trump is a fascist — obviously that is a “leftist” fantasy! But they get to enjoy the schadenfreude from the left frantic over that “fantasy”. Why not? Being nice by picking Romney got them nowhere.

“Cancel culture” and criticism

I keep bouncing off of my attempts to say something sophisticated about the challenges in constructively criticizing social justice advocacy culture. It’s a huge subject and I get lost in nuance.

95% of grumbling about social justice advocacy culture more generally is disingenuous reactionary bullshit from opponents of social justice. 95% is not 100%, because there are some legitimate criticisms which are not just attacks on the project of social justice itself. Roadblocks to engaging in worthy criticisms largely emerge as a response to conditions created by opponents of social justice, either directly or indirectly, but some of them are truly organic to social justice advocacy culture itself.

Today I fell into a rant about some of the essentials specifically about “cancel culture” on Bluesky, so it seemed worth capturing (and slightly refining) that here.

“Cancel culture” in particular

The Thing We Are Talking About When We Talk About “Cancel Culture” reflects this challenge. Because opponents of social justice often make absurd claims about “cancel culture”, advocates for social justice often claim there is no such thing. But there is a thing, it is a feature of social justice advocacy culture, and as the Bluesky thread which inspired this post observes:

in hindsight it makes sense to see cancel culture as a harbinger of the end of shame rather than an excess of it. “shame” presupposes stable social norms and a sense of what one did wrong and how it could have been avoided. not suddenly a thunderbolt from zeus thrown at random people

I have captured that thread below. This post started from me expanding on the point: the scary thing is capriciousness and lack of proportion. Memorable real examples include:

• A woman followed by a handful of friends on Twitter ironically takes the voice of a bigot to make a bad joke about AIDS in Africa, gets on a plane, and when she gets off she is infamous and unemployed. She deserved criticism, sure, but that was capricious and disproportionate.
• A couple of guys at a tech conference joke to each other about the technical term “dongle” and by the end of the day they are infamous and one of them is unemployed. They deserved criticism, maybe, but that was capricious and disproportionate.
• A trans woman writes a raw, personal story attempting to subvert a transphobic trope, the publisher faces so much criticism of it being “obviously” transphobic that they withdraw it, and the writer ends up so shaken by the pushback from her own community that she never attempts to get anything published again. A tragedy.

We all have said bad things that landed with people as even worse than they were, then found ourselves unable to set things right despite our sincere efforts. Dreading the possibility — however distant — that such an episode could seriously damage our careers or standing in community is natural and justified.

Moves people in social justice advocacy culture make to dismiss these concerns — like saying “‘cancel culture’ just means ‘consequences’” or “people should be more careful what they say” — implicitly endorse the capriciousness and disproportionate stakes.

The Thing We Are Talking About When We Talk About “Cancel Culture” is turbo-charged by online social media shitstorm dynamics but it is such a distinct phenomenon in social justice advocacy culture that Jo Freeman referred to it as “trashing” in a famous essay about feminist organizing in 1976.

Perversely, the more one actually cares about social justice, the more vulnerable one becomes to the thing we are talking about when we are talking about “cancel culture”. That bad actors often benefit from being “cancelled” is no comfort if one is neither cynical nor evil.

Again, most criticisms of “cancel culture” are disingenuous BS from bad actors trying to rationalize their desire to say bad things in public without consequence. But they are leveraging a real thing which presents substantive problems. Dismissing that real thing and those problems helps the bad actors and weakens the effectiveness of our advocacy.

Social justice advocacy is handicapped by advocacy culture resistance to criticism

These problems in talking about “cancel culture” exemplify a larger pattern. Preventing social justice loyalists from making good faith critiques of advocacy culture is not just bad on the liberal-values merits, it has been bad for achieving social justice. We can and should do better.

Ceding the ground of critiquing social justice advocacy culture to opponents of social justice makes those opponents look more credible than they are. “We are the only ones talking about this.”

It also undermines social justice advocates’ ability to develop our praxis. Every critique (including this post) has to waste a lot of energy underlining its support for the project of social justice rather than addressing its point. When we cannot sustain an internal dialogue about a problem, new critiques cannot build on past efforts or address those efforts’ limitations, re-starting from Square One, reïnventing the wheel. I find it particularly galling that social justice advocacy culture has let our opposition repeatedly coöpt our terms of art for self-reflection, including “identity politics”, “political correctness”, “social justice warrior”, and “woke”.

That social justice advocates all too often snap — either retreating from public advocacy or even joining the opposition — is bad for everyone. I submit that most people we push out from social justice advocacy culture were just flawed in an ordinary, human way, just trying to figure things out, just making honest mistakes. On principle, social justice advocacy culture should help people where they stumble, not attack them. Yet the Driving People Out thing in social justice advocacy is another pattern which pre-dates the era of the identity politics framework and social media. And yes, some of those folks were charlatans all along, but is rooting out charlatans as vigorously as possible worth the cost? The right don’t think so; they support their charlatans and it sure pays off for their cause. Plus I think many of us are too eager to read dissenters as having been Charlatans All Along; the psychological pressures of people facing a shitstorm of criticism will screw up even the most level-headed person. F’rinstance, I am fascinated by the tragedy of Warren Farrell. In the 1960s & ’70s he was a deeply committed feminist advocate. He turned the feminist analytical toolkit on what we now call toxic masculinity; I read his 1993 book The Myth Of Male Power, which has a fascinating mix of insight and bad ideas. Had feminist culture engaged with what he wanted to address rather than rejected him, our understanding of toxic masculinity would have gotten decades of head start. Instead, the pushback he got from feminist women drove him mad, and eventually he became a thoroughly evil MRA.

We need to do better. And we are rarely even ready to admit that we need to do better.

Aelkus on cancel culture

Not exactly my read, but illuminating, and it inspired the thread which became this post.

in hindsight it makes sense to see cancel culture as a harbinger of the end of shame rather than an excess of it. “shame” presupposes stable social norms and a sense of what one did wrong and how it could have been avoided. not suddenly a thunderbolt from zeus thrown at random people

because that was what CC was for the vast majority of people actually impacted by it.

at its peak, it really was essentially a free for all driven by platform dynamics and a ritualized system of aggression

Venkatesh Rao described a good part of here: The Internet of Beefs

there's a saying “not even wrong” to describe bad theories — they’re so bad that they’re impossible to be shown wrong. you might coin an analogue: “not even a mob with pitchforks.” all of the insanity of a crowd stoning someone to death, but none of the lasting social effects

i don’t think it makes sense to make an analytical separation, anyway, between “online harassment” and “cancel culture” as phenomena. they were both symptoms of the same underlying generating mechanisms in the 2010s

we do so largely because they are still ideologically loaded terms rather than neutral ways of describing “large masses of people concentrating negative energy on the internet towards a single target”

similarly, little of the discussions of “surveillance capitalism” in the 2010s acknowledged that social media was always built around peer to peer surveillance

the end result was fairly predictable. lots of random furries in discords got their social identities obliterated by other random furries in discords. however those with significant offline social status not only weathered the storm but became proficient at controlling platforms to use as tools of aggression. the quasi-feudal system Rao described in the post I linked died, and was replaced by what X represents today. A fully operational battle station controlled by a single nutty person

the fact that the system that produced this progression is now filled with nostalgia speaks to the enduring delusions its participants have about its true nature

The Ballads of Malcolm Reynolds

Over on Bluesky, Sean Kelly says:

Malcolm Reynolds starting off as an abusive prick who all the women love anyway because deep down, he’s a good person is such a case of Joss Whedon telling on himself.

Kelly is smart about this sort of thing. I see why he says this. As someone who watched — twice — all of Whedon’s perverse masterwork Dollhouse, I recognize him frequently revealing his misogyny, narcissism, and abusiveness in his storytelling. I see plenty of those problems in Firefly.

But on this point I see something else going on, because we know quite a bit about what Whedon wanted to do with Firefly and with Malcolm Reynolds. A few years back, I posted a quote from Whedon on this very subject:

Mal is somebody that I knew, as I created him, I would not get along with. I don’t think we have the same politics. But that’s sort of the point.

The series offers Mal to us as a noble scoundrel loved by all of the women aboard the Serenity, but not because Whedon wanted to tell that story, quite. Whedon created that under protest, as an adaptation to Fox’s insistence that the central character of the ensemble could not be the utter bastard he wanted to examine. Whedon filed down Mal’s rough edges — still an abusive prick, but less so — and made the whole ensemble less fractious, more loving. That paradoxically meant that the story did less work to justify the sympathy for Mal it asked for, creating a dissonance which made Kelly itch.

We can glimpse the different Malcolm Reynolds Whedon wanted to give us in the pilot which the studio rejected. The first sequence introduces Mal as a callously violent soldier smugly fighting for the Space Confederacy. In the second sequence, we see that losing the war broke something in him, turning him into an utter shit. He is insulting and disrespectful toward a sincere priest and a self-possessed prostitute! Had Whedon been able to figure out a way to justify including a dog in the scene, Mal would have kicked it.

In that pilot, yes, Kaylee does love Mal. Whedon has said that in writing the show “when Kaylee says it, we believe it” because she is a pure soul, wise enough to fall in love with the real hero of the Serenity crew before his heroism became apparent. But her love for Mal is the only thing in the pilot telling us that this asshole is worth caring about. Even Mal himself tells us otherwise.

In that pilot, River does not love Mal. Well, she doesn’t get to say much. In the second first episode, River says in one of her fugues of holy madness, “Mal. Bad … in the Latin.” The show uses River’s inhuman insight to tell us things, much as Whedon says it uses Kaylee, so that is stark. River comes to love Mal as the whole crew do, but along the way River — who is a scary murder-monster — often fears Mal.

In that pilot, Zoe does not love Mal. She is utterly loyal to him, and she trusts him. The show hints that she feels indebted to him for something he did in the war. But that is not love. In the Serenity film, Whedon tells us very clearly that Zoe only loves only one person in the ’verse, and it ain’t Mal. In the pilot it seems that Zoe does not even like him, though maybe she hopes to someday get back a better Mal she knew before the war broke him.

In that pilot, Inara does not love Mal, despite genre savvy telling us that Inara & Mal have romantic tension. What keeps them apart? Mal being terrible. Inara finds Mal attractive but dislikes him, for good reasons. (In this do see a different accidental confession from Whedon, resentment that women like Inara often feel attracted to men like Mal, an ugly note which shows up many times in his work.)

The changes in charactization after the pilot are significant but not jarring because Whedon and his team are crafty, largely just fast-forwarding to a state Whedon had meant to work hard to earn over a few seasons of storytelling.

He did a similar trick in wrapping as much as he could of several TV seasons’ worth of storylines in the feature film Serenity, including an abbreviation of Malcolm Reynolds’ arc. The series gave us Mal living by a code of honor which emphasized total dedication to his crew. In the film, he realizes that caring for a small circle of people is not good enough. He has to care about everyone. His moral obligation to the ’verse outweighs his own life and even the lives of the people dear to him.

Had Whedon gotten to make the Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds he originally imagined, I doubt that many people would love it the way they love the cozier Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds we got. I wish I could reach into a parallel timeline to watch the story we lost; it would have been a hell of a thing.