the thing is that we're losing

As is typical when I criticize social liberal efforts, I'm getting a lot of pushback in emails and comments when it comes to Rand Paul at Howard. Some of these are asserting that I have a regard for Paul that I have explicitly denied. But more take a form that I find far more pernicious, which is the chronic overestimation of social liberalism's current strength and success.

Here's three things that many social liberals seem to believe.

1. The United States has historically been and remains a deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic society, not merely in emotional terms but in systematic and material ways that impact on matters of economics, material security, and individual freedom. (They're right.)
2. Progress has occurred far too slowly, and in some ways appear to have stopped. (They're right.)
3. Social liberalism is proceeding more or less as it should. Critiques from either the left or the right are not motivated by good faith. Reform is unnecessary.

How can all of these things be true? Here, let's take the most communal activity in social liberalism today, the ritual mockery of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. It's like a secular sacrament. Everybody jeers and laughs, everybody emerges convinced of their superiority, nothing happens. Yes, it's true: a lot of Stewart's points are spot on. Yes, it's true: lots of conservative racial discourse is incredibly tone-deaf or out-and-out unhelpful. No, I don't think that most of Rand Paul's preferences would be good for black people or the country writ large. But those aren't the questions that matter. What is the theory of change, here? Jon Stewart has been mocking Republicans for over a decade. Do you think that this is somehow expanding the coalition? We have tried this. It is not working.

The overwhelming impression I get from social liberals is of annoyance at ever being asked to assess whether their efforts are working. Liberals complain about conservative epistemic closure constantly, but every time the Twitter outrage cycle gets going again-- pretty much a weekly occurrence, at this point-- I say to myself, this is epistemtic closure in its purest form. It's a small group of like-minded people who substantially agree on almost everything and who have systematically excluded contrary or critical opinion by immediately and vituperatively denouncing anyone who questions the dominant narrative. I asked whether the Onion-Quevenzhane Wallis controversy had created any genuinely positive effects, and everybody flipped the fuck out. It happens that it's easier to forbid that question than to answer it.

My earliest memories of really being aware of how deeply unequal our society was, outside of the limited confines of my own life and my own neighborhood, was when Jess Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign held a rally at my elementary school. It was the first time my 7 year old self really got how big the effort had to be. Well, go back in time and bring somebody from that Jesse Jackson rally to now, 25 years in the future. How could they possibly be anything but deeply saddened and disturbed that we haven't come any farther? Consider the recent research on the black-white wealth gap. Or pick any number of metrics that reflect on the actual, material conditions of black people in this country, related to economics, to education, to health care, to quality of life. On far too many, if they've advanced, they've advanced at a crawl. The Civil Rights Acts are coming up on their 50th birthdays. Do you feel good about where we are?

If you believe that we have a profound duty to end systematic inequality, and if you believe that we are not moving nearly fast enough in those efforts, then you cannot shield your own movement from reform. I can only honestly relay my impression of social liberalism as it exists now: a collection of people who have a very narrow view of this society and people within it, who are disproportionately collected in liberal enclaves, who consume certain types of media and have certain types of conversation, and who treat politics as a sorting mechanism for dividing the righteous from the wicked, rather than as a tool to make the latter into the former. Social liberalism as it currently exists strikes me as a movement more interested with being right than with doing right. You are free to disagree with that evaluation. But to look at the metrics of actual material success and conclude that the current movement does not need reform is to be a part of the problem.

In order to constitute a part of the solution, you've got to give up the tired stance of snarky superiority that often seems to be the sole idiom of social liberalism. You've got to stop mistaking scoring cheap points with cheap jokes for actually contributing to anything resembling progress. And you've got to force yourself to stop believing that your RSS reader is an accurate reflection of country-wide sentiment, or that everybody more or less believes as the people in your Brooklyn neighborhood do, and that solving these problems is merely a matter of righteously mocking some small, sad rump of racism that lives somewhere far away. If you want to make progress, you have to change, rather than constantly telling other people they have to change. But to do that, you've got to give up the jokey imperviousness that so many social liberals treat like a birthright.

If you're Chris Hayes, meanwhile, I think the message is simpler: late night cable television doesn't need any more programming based on the notion that problems go away when we laugh at them, as profitable a model as that can be. Those bases are covered.

Update: 


Drug war, nonviolent offenders, jails full of black and Hispanic people convicted of drug crimes, hardy har har