What's Our Problem?, page 40
Over the six years I worked on this book, I’ve had what feels like 80,000 discussions with this person on the right. I’ve heard their arguments many times.
You’re cherry-picking the worst anecdotes. Every movement has its share of awful stories.*
What people call “cancel culture” is just the marketplace of ideas doing its thing.*
If free speech were really in peril, people like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Bill Maher wouldn’t be able to regularly criticize wokeness on their huge platforms.*
Progressive movements are always intense and often radical, but that’s how change happens—you’re making the “old man on the wrong side of history” mistake.*
You’ve been spending too much time on Twitter. Out in the real world, this stuff just isn’t that big of a deal.*
I understand the thinking behind all of these arguments, and part of why I wrote this book is that it’s not easy in a discussion to fully explain why I believe those arguments are so badly misguided. I hope I’ve been able to do so here.
I don’t know everything there is to know about this topic, and I undoubtedly have blind spots—but after spending a whole lot of time grappling with this story and studying it from every angle I could, I feel pretty confident in a basic overarching point:
SJF Is Bad for Almost Everyone
We’ve seen a lot of people hurt by SJF in these stories.
There are its direct targets: the people who have been smeared, publicly shamed, and punished.
There are the employees SJF is being forced upon, in mandatory trainings.
There are the millions of kids, from pre-school through college, who are being denied important lessons in favor of ideological training—taught, by grown-ups they’ve been told to trust, how to think like Zealots and bully like idea supremacists.
There are all those industries and institutions whose core functions have been impeded by SJF, like a disease spreading through the organs of a body—something that affects all of us.
But think about where SJF has done the most harm: academia, media, tech, publishing, healthcare, the arts, and left-wing politics. They’re all traditionally politically progressive. As I mentioned at the end of last chapter, Social Justice Fundamentalism evolved for decades within academia to become resistant to the particular immune defenses of the progressive environment. SJF’s use of straw men and smearing and trojan horses was, with time, precisely tailored to exploit progressive vulnerabilities. By the time the movement exploded out of college campuses into the world, SJF had perfected the art of taking over a progressive institution.
In a podcast episode about the infamous brutal executions carried out by the Catholic Church in the 1600s, Dan Carlin made a point that stuck with me: “The most horrible procedures were done on devout Christians by even more devout Christians.” It seems to be a similar story with SJF. This radical left movement has directed most of its bullying toward the less radical left. And progressive America has suffered terribly for it. In particular:
SJF Is Bad for Social Justice Causes
Productive social justice movements use a big toolkit, and SJF has deprived progressive America of many of its most important tools. Like:
Nuance
Earlier, I compared social movements to earthquakes. A certain cause gathers more and more momentum until eventually, the stubborn status quo gives way and society’s tectonic plates shift. A lot of change happens quickly, and chaos ensues. This is the movement’s “hammer phase,” which smashes old norms, old systems, and old laws. But this is only part of the job.
Imagine you’re trying to fill a glass to the very top with water. You can fill the first 80% of the glass quickly, but then you have to slow down and get cautious and precise—otherwise you’ll overfill the glass and make a mess.
Movements work the same way. The hammer phase is like filling the glass to that first 80%. To finish the job, movements need to put down the hammer and pick up the sandpaper. Major progress has been made, but edges still need to be sanded, new policies still need tweaking, and new cultural norms need to be pressure tested.
During the hammer phase of a progressive movement, it can be hard to tell the difference between the Upper Left and the Lower Left, as both are charging ahead fiercely. But when it’s time for the subtler “sandpaper phase,” the difference becomes crystal clear.
Golems don’t use sandpaper. They only know how to hammer. As the Upper Left tries to get nuanced, the Lower Left keeps charging full steam ahead breaking things. For a progressive movement to prevail, it has to succeed on two fronts: its struggle against conservative resistance, and its struggle against Lower Left excess.
And it’s here that America’s Upper Left has faltered in recent years. Instead of engaging in the full two-front battle, they only engaged with their conservative opponents, losing their nerve when it came to a major threat down on the Lower Left: Social Justice Fundamentalism.
In failing to stand up to SJF, the Upper Left has allowed SJF to take sandpaper out of its toolkit. When the high-rung world has attempted to engage in productive discussions around complicated topics like fairness, accountability, bias, discrimination, diversity, forgiveness, and affirmative action, SJF has smeared every argument other than its own doctrine as a right-wing attempt to uphold the status quo.
Optimism
Successful American movements have been fueled by optimism and hope. But there’s no place for positivity in SJF, which is rooted in the idea that liberal societies are hopelessly and irreparably oppressive. When it comes to the state of our politics, negative sentiment like grievance and outrage are shorthand for righteousness in SJF, while positive sentiments like optimism and gratitude are taken as a sign of false consciousness, callous privilege, or both. When positivity is shamed out of the conversation, the air ends up filled with gloom, resentment, and nihilism—not sentiments that energize people to fix problems.
Common-humanity rhetoric
Look at a successful progressive movement of the past and you’ll hear a lot of “common-humanity” rhetoric—the kind captured by civil rights activist Pauli Murray in her essay An American Credo:
I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods. When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.
This kind of language, which speaks directly to people’s Higher Minds, builds the broad coalitions that can create seismic change.
SJF speaks instead to people’s Primitive Minds using the “with us or against us” language of “common-enemy” rhetoric—while stigmatizing common-humanity rhetoric like “there is only one race, the human race” as bigotry. Common-enemy rhetoric creates division and limits the movement’s size and ability to make enduring change.
Credibility
To win people over, a movement has to maintain a reputation for integrity. But the unscientific, illiberal, hypocritical nature of SJF has hurt the credibility of today’s social justice movements.
When SJF activists argue that trans women swimmers, bikers, and weightlifters have no physical advantage over their ciswomen counterparts, in the face of clear scientific evidence about sex differences in things like bone density and muscle mass, it hurts high-rung LGBTQ movements. When Black Lives Matter’s stance remains that Jussie Smollett is telling the truth, in the face of overwhelming evidence that he is not, it makes it harder for the high-rung activists calling for police reform to be persuasive. As SJF concept creep has continually expanded the definitions of critically important terms like “racism,” “misogyny,” and “violence,” it has diminished the impact of those words and cheapened their meaning. When a movement continually cries wolf, it weakens our defenses against actual wolves.
Deprived of these critical tools, many social justice efforts have stalled. Worse, many have begun to move backward.
Counterproductive results
Social justice activism is aimed, above all, at improving the lives of marginalized people. But Social Justice Fundamentalism has been shown time and again to be counterproductive to that cause.
There’s research showing that diversity training makes companies less diverse and can reinforce stereotypes.165
Creating a distorted perception of how dangerous cops are diminishes trust in law enforcement and makes police encounters potentially more dangerous and less effective, and making people feel like the system is hopelessly rigged against them logically makes them more likely to engage in criminal activity and other antisocial behavior.166
SJF screams from the hilltops that standardized tests like the SAT are biased against women and people of color. While there’s little evidence that this is true, there is evidence that when people are led to believe a test is biased against them, it hurts their performance.
Sometimes SJF seems to mimic bigoted traditions that Liberal Social Justice activists have worked so hard to knock down. As we’ve discussed, SJF insists that virtues like niceness, punctuality, and evidence-based thinking are qualities of “whiteness”—which sounds a lot like the kinds of things white supremacists say.
The SJF narrative also reinforces rigid gender stereotypes. In an article called “As a Gay Child in a Christian Cult, I Was Taught to Hate Myself. Then I Joined the Church of Social Justice—and Nothing Changed,” Ben Appel writes:
Young boys and girls, not to mention impressionable adults, are being led to believe that if, say, a boy likes to wear skirts or put on makeup, he might really be a girl on the inside; or if a girl would rather play football than cheerlead, then perhaps she’s not a girl, but really a boy, or nonbinary. By means of this “progressive” ideology, we regress to a time in which the categories of “boy” and “girl” were defined in a narrow and reactionary manner.
This regressive SJF concept is now the messaging of most major medical institutions. The American Psychological Association, for example, defines “transgender” as “an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.” So if you were born a girl but you behave or express yourself in a way typically associated with boys (aka a tomboy), the APA definition seems to imply that this makes you less of a girl. The same messaging rang out in a video on Boston Children’s Hospital’s YouTube page, in which a doctor talks about signs your child might be transgender, including “playing with the ‘opposite gender’s’ toys.”*
When any movement—no matter how noble—falls into the hands of a low-rung tribe, it ends up in a backward place, usually hurting the people the original movement wants to help.
SJF Is an Affront to the Progressive Spirit
Beyond the most basic definition of "pushing for change," when I think of “progressivism,” a couple of defining characteristics come to mind:
1) Fighting for the little guy
Progressives—from the moderates to the radicals—are supposed to speak truth to power and advocate for the powerless, the downtrodden, the oppressed. Those categories are broad and fluid, so effective progressivism should be as well.
But SJF isn’t broad or fluid. Who’s the little guy and who’s the big guy is determined by one thing: the Intersectional Stack.
The road upward in modern America runs through college campuses,167 but children of America’s large white working class are dramatically underrepresented among college students.168 For universities so hell-bent on “diversity and inclusion,” this underrepresented group is invisible—because on the Intersectional Stack, they show up in the powerful, privileged category.
The same working class voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. When it came to white voters, the less educated the neighborhood, the more likely they were to vote for Trump.169 And the districts where Trump made gains over Romney were in notable economic despair. But SJF, with its single-axis lens, saw only one story: White people voted for Trump. The privileged part of the country voted for the racist, xenophobic candidate. Clean and simple. The fact that it was specifically the least privileged whites who voted for Trump didn’t register.
A 2019 paper found that “among social liberals, learning about White privilege reduces sympathy, increases blame, and decreases external attributions for White people struggling with poverty.”170 Being white is surely a source of privilege in today’s American society but learning about privilege only through the lens of intersectionality leaves would-be progressives with a blind spot toward America’s white working class that, on most other metrics, qualifies as one of the country’s “little guys.”
SJF’s one-dimensional lens also ends up neglecting the non-white poor. According to scholar Richard Kahlenberg, 71% of the Black and Hispanic students at Harvard come from wealthy backgrounds. It’s well-known that colleges privilege applicants whose parents are alumni—an overwhelmingly wealthy, white group—but it seems that the college admissions process favors the wealthy across all backgrounds. When “diversity” is only thought about from a one-dimensional perspective, the distinction between the wealthy and poor person of color goes unnoticed.
Homicide is the leading cause of death among young Black men in America,171 while growing up in a single-parent home is one of the best predictors of poverty.172 But violence and one-parent homes aren’t phenomena easily explained by SJF's notion of the Force, so they are left out of much of today’s progressive discussion.*
There’s also SJF’s attitude toward free speech. As Jonathan Rauch wrote in 2013, “History shows that, over time and probably today more than ever, the more open the intellectual environment, the better minorities will do. It is just about that simple.” Free speech is always most important to those not in power. Free speech is the only nonviolent tool for criticizing and challenging the status quo. It is the engine behind every social justice movement in American history, from the abolition of slavery to gay marriage. In any society, it is the little guy who relies most on free speech. But SJF takes the opposite stance, framing free speech as a tool of the powerful and something marginalized groups need protection from.
SJF leaves a lot of little guys in the dust. Maybe it comes down to disagreements about what constitutes a little guy or what helps the little guy. Or, less charitably—maybe SJF just isn’t really focused on the little guy.
Being part of the elite class does not in itself make one an elitist. Elitism is an attitude: one that looks down upon those who don’t have elite wealth or an elite education, who don’t have the right table manners or the right hobbies. Or…one that looks down upon those who don’t hold the elite’s political views or use the proper elite words and terms. Elitism is a social club with very specific codes and rules, and SJF sure seems like the current set of code words and code views to signify membership. Which is, of course, the very opposite of what progressivism is supposed to be about.
2) Open-minded
When I think of the best kind of progressivism, I think of the ultimate safe space. There should be nowhere easier to be yourself, to be weird, or to be different than a progressive environment. Progressivism, at its best, celebrates difference. There should be nowhere safer to ask dumb questions or make mistakes—because progressivism is compassionate and forgiving and super-duper humane. This is the kind of hyper-evolved environment young people growing up in a strict home with rigid, close-minded parents can’t wait to escape to.
Compare that with this passage from a queer activist named Yarrow Eady as he reflected on his days as an SJF hardliner:
Thinking this way quickly divides the world into an ingroup and an outgroup — believers and heathens, the righteous and the wrong-teous. … Members of the ingroup are held to the same stringent standards. Every minor heresy inches you further away from the group. People are reluctant to say that anything is too radical for fear of being seen as too un-radical. Conversely, showing your devotion to the cause earns you respect. Groupthink becomes the modus operandi. When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues. Internal disagreement was rare. The insular community served as an incubator of extreme, irrational views.173
He’s describing the opposite of a safe space—the exact kind of space a kid with strict, rigid parents wants to escape from.
From every angle, SJF is a complete and utter departure from open-minded progressivism. It is highly authoritarian, laying down rules about how to speak, how to think, how to teach, how to hire. It doles out severe penalties for minor infractions. It’s the opposite of diverse and inclusive, enforcing strict conformity. It’s vindictive and promotes medieval-style public shaming campaigns. It assumes the worst about people’s intentions.
Like elitism, rigidity is supposed to be what progressives make fun of conservatives for.
Most progressive Americans are not SJF adherents. But many of them have been scared into silence by SJF. The result is that SJF is writing a lot of the rules about what modern-day progressivism is and isn’t. In allowing SJF to do that, high-rung progressives have betrayed a lot of the people who have always relied on progressives to fight for them.
And finally—
SJF Is Bad for SJF Believers
Over recent decades, Americans began spending less time immersed within communities and more time being isolated and lonely.174 This broad trend may be especially pronounced in progressive America, which has also seen a sharp decrease in religion. According to Gallup surveys, in 2000, 71% of Democrats were church members. By 2020, that had dropped to 48%.175
