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I think it’s safe to say that Freddie deBoer is considerably to my left. But even he finds much of contemporary social liberalism dispiriting and self-righteous:
It seems to me now that the public face of social liberalism has ceased to seem positive, joyful, human, and freeing. I now mostly associate that public face with danger, with an endless list of things that you can’t do or say or think, and with the constant threat of being called an existentially bad person if you say the wrong thing.
….I’m far from alone in feeling that it’s typically not worth it to engage, given the risks….If you are a young person who is still malleable and subject to having your mind changed, and you decide to engage with socially liberal politics online, what are you going to learn immediately? Everything that you like is problematic. Every musician you like is misogynist. Every movie you like is secretly racist. Every cherished public figure has some deeply disqualifying characteristics. All of your victories are the product of privilege. Everyone you know and love who does not yet speak with the specialized vocabulary of today’s social justice movement is a bad, bad person. That is no way to build a broader coalition, which we desperately need if we’re going to win.
….People have to be free to make mistakes, even ones that we find offensive. If we turn away from everyone that says or believes something dumb, we will find ourselves lecturing to an empty room. Surely there are ways to preserve righteous anger while being more circumspect about who is targeted by that anger. And I strongly believe that we can, and must, remind the world that social justice is about being happy, being equal, and being free.
Now, I suspect that this is a more acute problem on university campuses than in the rest of the world, so it hits deBoer and his students harder than it does many of the rest of us. But I think deBoer is right when he says that social media has largely sanded away the differences. If you make a mistake these days, you won’t just get a disapproving stare or maybe an email or two about it. You’ll get an endless stream of hate from Twitter and Facebook. And while it’s easy to point out that a few hundred angry tweets aren’t really all that many compared to the millions of people on Twitter, it can feel devastating if you’re on the business end of this kind of avalanche. You’re not thinking in terms of percentages or small fringes, you’re just reading what seems like a relentless flood of scorn and malice. And it can be overwhelming, especially if you’re not accustomed to it.
Some of this is simply the price of speaking in public. The problem is that in the past there were lots of different publics. Some were small, maybe no more than family or friends. Some were a bit larger: people you worked with, or went to school with. There were local publics, statewide publics, and national publics. The bigger the public you addressed, the more vitriol you could expect to get in return. The vitriol still wasn’t fun, but it was, in some sense, a trade made with your eyes open.
No longer. If you write a blog post or a tweet, and the wrong person just happens to highlight it, your public is suddenly gigantic whether you meant it to be or not. Then the avalanche comes. And, as deBoer says, the avalanche is dominated by the loudest, angriest, least tolerant fringes of the language and conduct police.
I suspect this wouldn’t be so bad if there were an equal and opposite reaction to the avalanche. If the hundreds of angry tweets were balanced by hundreds of more thoughtful tweets, it wouldn’t be so overwhelming. But what thoughtful person wants to get involved in this kind of thing? No one. That’s almost the definition of being thoughtful, after all. So the vitriol pours in, and it’s soul-crushing.
And with that, I’m sort of petering out. I feel like I should have a sharper point to make about all this, but I don’t really. I don’t know what the answer is, or even whether there is an answer. Maybe if I get a few hundred hate-tweets in response, I’ll think of something.
