With the values of a diverse liberal democracy under assault at home and abroad, it’s surprising that there is still the bandwidth to be outraged by seemingly self-evident statements like this: “The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.”
That line, from a now-infamous letter on justice and open debate, published in Harper’s Magazine and signed by 153 prominent journalists, authors and academics from across the political and demographic spectrum, provoked a firestorm of condemnation on social media. The accusations ranged from “bad timing” to the privilege of the signees that flowed from their prominence to the alleged transgressions of a few individuals against current woke wisdom to assign guilt by association to the whole group. As co-signatory and legendary leftist Noam Chomsky pointed out, “The nature and scale of the reaction reinforce the message of the letter.”
Less than two weeks after the Harper’s letter published online, New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss released a searing resignation letter, in which she detailed what she called an increasingly “illiberal environment” at the paper. That same day, New York Magazine announced it was parting ways with columnist Andrew Sullivan. Their departures were greeted with a chorus of good riddance, reinforcing a creeping intolerance to heterodox views in the allegedly liberal media.
These are not writers who have spilled ink defending President Donald Trump: both Weiss and Sullivan have repeatedly condemned the President as a threat to liberal democracy. But crucially they have also criticized the far-left identity politics they see rising in the wings. Weiss wrote extensively about anti-Semitism and Sullivan supported gay rights as an early advocate for marriage equality. But they have not let their identities predetermine all of their politics and they have been demonized because of these disagreements — not just by the usual hate parade of trolls, bots and strangers on Twitter, but from fellow journalists. According to Weiss’ resignation letter, some newsroom colleagues apparently took to office message boards like Slack as well as public social media platforms with smears and bullying calls for her dismissal. You don’t have to agree with everything Bari Weiss or Andrew Sullivan have ever said to defend their right to say it and rebut their arguments with reason rather than something close to contempt.
Their detractors were loud, their defenders decidedly less so — a typical feature of the social media distortion field. But in this, there is evidence of the core concern. In an era of social media, even some columnists who get paid to put forward thoughtful but provocative opinions are reluctant to wade into debates where they know social media mobs will attack. They already get plenty of hate from one side of the aisle. The anticipated backlash leads to hesitation, a degree of self-censorship and therefore a silencing of unpopular opinions — even modest degrees of dissent and intended humor — that they fear could be distorted and demonized.
We’ve seen variations on this theme before. When I was covering the unhinged right-wing reaction to the early years of the Obama administration for my book Wingnuts, I saw the center-right being mercilessly purged from the GOP in what was gleefully known as RINO-hunting (shorthand for those considered Republicans in Name Only). As I wrote at the time, “Hunting for heretics pretends to be a principled fight for ideological purity, but behind that mask is an uglier impulse, an attempt to intimidate and insist on conformity.”
Trump’s war on reality has skewed traditional political definitions, often making it difficult to find fact-based opinions to defend the President’s actions. But it also confuses attempts to ensure a degree of constructive political diversity in opinion sections — witness the tortured explanation for Sullivan’s departure from New York Magazine by its editor David Haskell: “I believe that there is a way to write from a conservative perspective about some of the most politically charged subjects of American life while still upholding our values … that we also have some writers who share our values but not always the politics of most of our staff is, to my mind, a credit to the organization and a benefit to the reader.” “But,” Haskell says, “publishing conservative commentary or critiques of liberalism and the left in 2020 is difficult to get right, and thoughtful, well-meaning people can come to different conclusions about it…”
Good people can, of course, disagree. But with a wary eye on his newsroom, Haskell also articulates an underlying problem — confusing criticism of the left with conservative opinion. It is entirely possible to call out the excesses of the far left without being a de facto conservative, let alone a Trump apologist. A commitment to liberal values can be shared by people writing from progressive to centrist to libertarian political perspectives. But personal attacks directed at differences of opinion are fundamentally at odds with liberalism, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as “a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties.”
John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Columbia University and a contributing editor at The Atlantic who also signed the Harper’s letter, told me, “The new idea is that battling power differentials must be the heart of thought and morality and anything that strays from a certain punitive orthodoxy must be condemned as heresy. When a clear and compassionate thinker like Bari Weiss is witch-hunted off the New York Times, you know we are living in ‘The Crucible.'”
In this over-heated and deeply polarized political environment, there is a danger of losing the core values of liberalism — a contest of ideas about the best ways to achieve liberty and equality but the virtues of kindness, forgiveness and redemption. As Abe Foxman, longtime leader of the Anti-Defamation League told the New York Times: “All my life I was lucky enough to fight prejudice and anti-Semitism,” he said. “If you don’t believe you can change people’s hearts and minds, why bother? If you are not going to try and change hearts and minds, why are you in this business at all?” This is a defense of the liberal value of persuasion — which is very different from crossing into contempt or cancellation.
We need to defend the values of a diverse liberal democracy because they are under attack at home and abroad. Demonizing principled disagreement does not advance liberal values — it fuels negative partisan narratives that Trump’s reelection depends on. It can distract from actual purveyors of hate, and a sitting President who advances policies that are often racist or homophobic as well as anti-immigrant. This is the far more urgent cause. Joe Biden’s success to date has been based in part on his stubborn refusal to mistake Twitter debates for real life conversations in America. But these fights are a sign of coming attractions, and evidence of just how much work lies ahead of us all as we try to reconcile and reunite the United States. It will require honoring all our interesting differences while also recognizing that we are all imperfect people, struggling to form a more perfect union, together.
