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 new 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.
People on the right assume that most people on the left privately understand and agree with their attitudes but are more committed to a hypocritical performance of public norms which conflict with common sense. So 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 a sincere description of how they experience it.
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.
All of which comes to mind 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.
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