A Certain Idea of America, page 30
They take something from you when they take your name. And once they’ve taken that they will be taking more.
On the phone with the bank, regarding a recent transaction:
Bank worker: “Yes, Edith, how can we help you today?”
Me: “Ah. I am certain you are a very nice person and if I knew you I would quickly ask you to call me by my first name, but since we’re not old friends yet I would appreciate—”
Him (sullen, impatient, flat): “I’m-sorry-about-that-how-would-you-like-me-to-address-you?”
Me: “As your enemy. As the implacable foe of all you represent. Does that work?”
What the new world doesn’t understand is that when you address us as Miss, Mrs., Ms., or Mr., we usually say, “Feel free to use my first name.” Because we are democratic, egalitarian, and fear the guillotine. But we’re pleased when someone asks permission, and respond with the grateful effulgence of the losing side.
There is more to say but I must close.
I am not calling for a new refinement. That is beyond my capacity and your ability. It is possible you’re entrenched, as I said of the Vanderbilts, in a sort of Thermopylae of bad taste from which no earthly force can dislodge you.
Great nations have fallen over less.
I am merely suggesting a less selfish and vulgar way of being. Surely you can consider that.
If a political figure should come by whose slate consisted of “America, reclaim your manners,” he would “break through” and win in a landslide. Because everyone in this country suffers—literally suffers—from the erosion of the essential public courtesies that allow us to move forward in the world happily, and with some hope.
Thank you. I am grateful to have you as a reader.
THE SAN FRANCISCO REBELLION
February 17, 2022
It was a landslide. That’s the important fact of this week’s San Francisco school-board recall election: There was nothing mixed or ambivalent about the outcome. Three members were resoundingly ejected from their jobs: 79 percent voted to oust Alison Collins, 75 percent to fire Gabriela López, the board president, and 72 percent to remove Faauuga Moliga, the vice president.
This was a vote against progressive education officials in the heart of liberal San Francisco. It is a signal moment because of its head-chopping definitiveness, its clarity, its swiftness, and its unignorable statement by parents on what they must have and won’t accept. It was a battle in the Democratic Party’s civil war between liberals and the progressive left. And it marks a continuation of the parents’ rebellion that surfaced in November in Virginia’s upset gubernatorial election.
It is in the way of things that Democratic leaders in Congress won’t feel they have an excuse to crack down hard on the progressive wing of their party until the entire party loses big in the 2022 elections. But Democratic voters on the ground aren’t waiting for permission. They are taking a stick to wokeness whether the party’s leaders do or not.
You know most of what was at issue. During the height of the pandemic, when San Francisco’s schools were closed, parents were increasingly frustrated and newly angry. They saw that remote learning was an inadequate substitute for children being in the classroom. Many sensed that a year or two out of school would leave their children with an educational deficit that would not be repaired. The teachers unions balked at reopening and the Board of Education approached the problem with what seemed muted interest. Although they did a lot of word-saying featuring impenetrable jargon, as school boards do, they didn’t have a plan and the schools didn’t open.
While the board was failing to open the schools it was doing other things. It produced government by non sequitur. The board focused on issues of woke anti-racism and oppression. The problem wasn’t whether the kids were getting an education, it was whether the boarded-up schools had unfortunate names. They spent months researching the question and proposed renaming a third of the system’s 125 schools. Many were named for previously respectable people like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Francis Scott Key, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Their names were “inappropriate” because their lives and actions could be connected with charges of racism, sexism, and colonialism. From the San Francisco Chronicle: “The move shocked many principals and families, who questioned whether changing a name was a mid-pandemic priority when their children cannot physically attend the school in question.”
The public rose up—stop this stuff, get our kids back in school! The backlash intensified when it was revealed some of the board’s historical research was dependent on cutting and pasting from Wikipedia.
So it wasn’t only government by non sequitur, it was inept. The board backed off and said, essentially, that the matter needed more study.
The board soon moved on to another item on the progressive wish list. It homed in on academically elite public high schools that based admission on testing and grades. For people who can’t afford a $40,000-a-year private-school tuition, such schools are a godsend; they were designed long ago to offer demanding course study to students with limited money but demonstrable gifts.
The board decided too many Asian-American and white students were accepted in the schools. So they voted to scrap testing and replace it with a permanent lottery system for admission at Lowell High, one of only two campuses in the district to use merit-based admissions. (The decision was later overturned by lawsuits.)
Now parents exploded, very much including the Asian community. It got more heated when it was discovered Ms. Collins had an old tweet accusing Asian-Americans of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’ ” She seemed rather a creepy and bigoted person to have in a position of such authority.
Even aside from that, parents who were up nights helping their children with homework, seeing that schoolwork was done and discipline learned, felt their effort was being discounted and their children abandoned to abstract notions of equity. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Kids have to be taught to earn their way through effort. Lotteries don’t teach them that; lotteries teach them it’s all luck.
Now the recall process took off.
It did not help that just before the pandemic, in 2019, the board had famously turned to censorship. There was a big, colorful series of Depression-era frescoes in a local high school. They’d been there since the 1930s and were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal, a stylized depiction of the founding of America that included slaves and American Indians. The board decided it was racist, cruel, reductive; there was the implication it was right-wing art. In fact the frescoes were the work of a Russian immigrant to America, Victor Arnautoff, who was a communist and trying to bring attention to the cruelty present in some of America’s history. No matter, it was offensive, so the board decided to paint over the murals.
Art-sensitive San Francisco rose up: This is akin to book burning, you don’t lay waste to art. The board then decided it wouldn’t paint over the frescoes, merely conceal them behind barriers of some sort.
What was astonishing as you followed the story is what seemed the board members’ shock at parental pushback. They seemed so detached from the normal hopes of normal people. They seemed honestly unaware of them. It was as if they were operating in some abstract universe in which their decisions demonstrated their praiseworthy anti-racist bona fides. But voters came to see their actions as a kind of woke progressive vandalism that cleverly avoided their central responsibility: to open the schools.
School boards somehow always seem to think they are immune from pushback, that their pronouncements will never be opposed because they can barely be understood.
But people have a way of seeing. If, during a pandemic lockdown, board members speak often and thoughtfully of the increased likelihood of the abuse of neglected children, one will get a sense of their motivation and heart. If instead they dilate on political issues that deflect, one will get a different, darker view of their motivation and heart.
That’s why the three in San Francisco were fired.
What happened shows again that there is a real parents movement going on, and it is going to make a difference in our politics.
Democrats dismiss these issues as “culture-war distractions.” They are not; they are about life at its most real, concrete, and immediate. That easy dismissal reveals the party’s distance from the lives of its own constituents.
To think parents would sacrifice their children for your ideology, or an ideology coming from within your ranks that you refuse to stand up to, is political malpractice at a high level.
Joe Biden received 85 percent of the vote in San Francisco in 2020. Those board members just lost their seats by more than 70 percent. A cultural rebellion within the Democratic Party has begun.
THE KIDS ARE NOT ALL RIGHT
April 7, 2022
Journalists and people who think aloud for a living are often invited to gatherings where experts in various fields share what they know. These meetings often operate under Chatham House rules, in which you can write of the ideas presented but not directly quote speakers. At such a gathering this week I was especially struck by the talks on Big Tech, and since Congress is considering various regulatory bills I want to say what I gleaned.
First and most obviously, nobody understands the million current aspects of social-media sites. They raise questions ranging from the political (misinformation, disinformation, deliberate polarization, ideological bias) and the technological (hidden data harvesting) to the legal (antitrust law, First Amendment rights) and the moral and ethical (deliberately addicting users, the routine acquisition and selling of private information, pornography). It’s all so big and complex. Mark Zuckerberg, who invented the social-media world we live in, appears to have thrown in the towel and fled to the metaverse, where things will no doubt become even more complex and bizarre. But what he calls a visionary next step looks very much like an escape attempt.
The breakthrough event in public understanding of social-media problems was the congressional testimony, last fall, of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. She said Instagram, owned by Facebook parent Meta, was fully aware it was damaging the mental health of children and teenagers. She had proof, internal documents showing Instagram knew of studies demonstrating increased suicidal thoughts and eating disorders among young girls who used the site. Big Tech had failed at what Google, at the turn of this century, famously took as its motto: “Don’t be evil.” That wouldn’t seem the most demanding mission, yet they all failed.
One thing that was strange and unreal about her celebrated testimony is that it was a revelation of what everybody already knew. Professionals in the field knew, think-tank observers knew, Big Tech knew it had addictive properties, they were put there deliberately to be addictive. It was part of the business model. Attentive parents knew as they watched their kids scroll. Ms. Haugen spoke of what she called “little feedback loops” in which “likes and comments and reshares” trigger “hits of dopamine to your friends so they will create more content.” But now at least everyone else knows.
The difficulty at the heart of all Big Tech debate is how hard it is to get the facts, and how the facts keep changing. Transparency and disclosure are urgently required—how much information is being gathered about you each day, to whom is it sold, and for what purpose? The social-media sites don’t want to tell you, or tell each other. The nature of the beast is opaque and fluid. How do you audit an algorithm? It’s a moving river changing all the time. And the algorithms are proprietary. But constructive regulation must be based on clear information.
I asked a speaker if I was thinking correctly when I imagine algorithms: I see them as a series of waves, not necessarily in sequence, different in size, pushing my small skiff in this direction or that. No, she said, the algorithm isn’t the wave, it’s the water. It’s the thing on which you sail. To go to a site is to choose to cast off.
Another speaker: When we speak of the internet we speak of “privacy rights.” Companies are taking information they glean from your use of tech and without your permission selling it for purposes that aren’t fully clear. This violates your privacy, but there’s another way to look at it. Many of the devices you carry with you are pinging out exactly where you are. They know you got out of a car at Twenty-third and M. But your current location should belong to you. It is a private property issue when someone takes it from you. Because you belong to you. Making it an issue of property rights makes things clearer.
No one among the experts or participants had faith in Congress’s ability to understand adequately or to move in a knowing and constructive way to curb Big Tech. The previous hearings have shown how out of their depth they are. The heads of Big Tech had been hauled in a few years ago and were supposed to break out in a sweat under heavy grilling, but they were pressed on petty irrelevancies and sucked up to, along the lines of You started your business in a garage—only in America! Does Facebook charge for membership? No, Senator, we’re totally free! Why doesn’t my page load? The hearings were a signal moment—the stakes were high and the inventors of Big Tech walked out more arrogant than ever. Because now they knew their opposition, their supposed regulators—the people’s representatives!—were uninformed, almost determinedly so, and shallow. Big Tech had hired every lobbying shop in Washington, made generous contributions to organizations and candidates.
We’ll see what happens on Capitol Hill. It would probably be best for America’s worried parents to assume the cavalry isn’t coming and take matters into their hands.
A participant suggested an at least partial solution that doesn’t require technological sophistication and could be done with quick and huge public support.
Why can’t we put a strict age limit on using social-media sites: You have to be eighteen to join TikTok, YouTube, Instagram? Why not? You’re not allowed to drink at fourteen or drive at twelve; you can’t vote at fifteen. Isn’t there a public interest here?
Applying such control would empower parents who face “all the other kids are allowed” with an answer: “Because it’s against the law.”
When we know children are being harmed by something, why can’t the state help? In theory this might challenge economic libertarians who agree with what Milton Friedman said fifty years ago, that it is the duty of companies to maximize shareholder value. Instagram makes massive profit from ads and influencers aimed at teenagers. But a counter and rising school of conservative thought would answer: Too bad. Our greater responsibility is to see to it that an entire generation of young people not be made shallow and mentally ill through addictive social-media use.
The nature and experience of childhood has been changed by social media in some very bad ways. Why can’t we, as a nation, change this? We all have a share in this.
A participant here told a story of a friend, the mother of a large Virginia family who raised her kids closely and with limited use of social media. The mother took her children to shop for food. The woman at the checkout counter, who had been observing the family, asked the mother, “Do you homeschool your kids?” The mother wasn’t sure of the spirit of the question but said, “Yes, I do. Why do you ask?” The checkout woman said, “Because they have children’s eyes.” And not the thousand-yard stare of the young always scrolling on their phones.
There were many different views expressed at the meetings but on this all seemed to agree, and things became animated.
SAVE CAPITALISM!
February 14, 2019
Let’s think about the broader, less immediate meaning of our political era. This is how I read it and have read it for some time:
The Democratic Party is going hard left. There will be stops and starts but it’s the general trajectory and will be for the foreseeable future. Pew Research sees the party lurching to the left since 2009; Gallup says the percentage of Democrats calling themselves liberal has jumped twenty-three points since 2000. But you don’t need polls. More than seventy Democrats in the House, and a dozen in the Senate, have signed on to the Green New Deal, an extreme-to-the-point-of-absurdist plan that is yet serious: Its authors have staked out what they want in terms of environmental and economic policy, will try to win half or a quarter of it, and on victory will declare themselves to have been moderate all along. The next day they will continue to push for everything. The party’s presidential hopefuls propose to do away with private medical insurance and abolish ICE. Three years ago Hillary Clinton would have called this extreme; today it is her party’s emerging consensus.
The academy and our mass entertainment culture are entities of the left and will continue to push in that direction. Millennials, the biggest voting-age bloc in America, are to the left of the generations before them. Moderates are aging out. The progressives are young and will give their lives to politics: It’s all they’ve ever known. It is a mistake to dismiss their leaders as goofballs who’ll soon fall off the stage. They may or may not, but those who support and surround them are serious ideologues who mean to own the future.
None of this feels like a passing phase. It feels like the outline of a great political struggle that will be fought over the next ten years or more.
Two thoughts, in the broadest possible strokes, on how we got here:
The American establishment had to come to look very, very bad. Two long unwon wars destroyed the GOP’s reputation for sobriety in foreign affairs, and the 2008 crash cratered its reputation for economic probity. Both disasters gave those inclined to turn from the status quo inspiration and arguments. Culturally, 2008 was especially resonant: The government bailed out its buddies and threw no one in jail, and the capitalists failed to defend the system that made them rich. They dummied up, hunkered down, and waited for it to pass.
