Conservative victim-playing: antebellum reasoning
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29 Aug 2019, 9:16 pm
I thought the Washington Post had a really good article out on how conservatives love to play victim, and talk about how they're the true dissidents and how the left is oppressing them; they note that it is very similar to the arguments made by southerners prior to the Civil War:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ ... civil-war/
(Here's the readable version if it's behind a paywall for you.)
https://outline.com/LKzt4S
Quote:
I grew up in a conservative family. The people I talk to most frequently, the people I call when I need help, are conservative. I’m not inclined to paint conservatives as thoughtless bigots. But a few years ago, listening to the voices and arguments of commentators like Shapiro, I began to feel a very specific deja vu I couldn’t initially identify. It felt as if the arguments I was reading were eerily familiar. I found myself Googling lines from articles, especially when I read the rhetoric of a group of people we could call the “reasonable right.”
These are figures who typically dislike President Trump but often say they’re being pushed rightward — sometimes away from what they claim is their natural leftward bent — by intolerance and extremism on the left. The reasonable right includes people like Shapiro and the radio commentator Dave Rubin; legal scholar Amy Wax and Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic who warns about identity politics; the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt; the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss and the American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, self-described feminists who decry excesses in the feminist movement; the novelist Bret Easton Ellis and the podcaster Sam Harris, who believe that important subjects have needlessly been excluded from political discussions. They present their concerns as, principally, freedom of speech and diversity of thought. Weiss has called them “renegade” ideological explorers who venture into “dangerous” territory despite the “outrage and derision” directed their way by haughty social gatekeepers.
So it felt frustrating: When I read Weiss, when I listened to Shapiro, when I watched Peterson or read the supposedly heterodox online magazine Quillette, what was I reminded of?
These are figures who typically dislike President Trump but often say they’re being pushed rightward — sometimes away from what they claim is their natural leftward bent — by intolerance and extremism on the left. The reasonable right includes people like Shapiro and the radio commentator Dave Rubin; legal scholar Amy Wax and Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic who warns about identity politics; the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt; the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss and the American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, self-described feminists who decry excesses in the feminist movement; the novelist Bret Easton Ellis and the podcaster Sam Harris, who believe that important subjects have needlessly been excluded from political discussions. They present their concerns as, principally, freedom of speech and diversity of thought. Weiss has called them “renegade” ideological explorers who venture into “dangerous” territory despite the “outrage and derision” directed their way by haughty social gatekeepers.
So it felt frustrating: When I read Weiss, when I listened to Shapiro, when I watched Peterson or read the supposedly heterodox online magazine Quillette, what was I reminded of?
But a key note is that many of these white southerners didn't explicitly defend slavery, instead they made appeals to the 1st amendment and "civility":
Quote:
If that sounds absurd — Shapiro and his compatriots aren’t defending slavery, after all — it may be because many Americans are unfamiliar with the South’s actual rhetoric. When I was a kid in public school, I learned the arguments of Sen. John C. Calhoun (D-S.C.), who called slavery a “positive good,” and Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice president, who declared that the South’s ideological “cornerstone” rested “upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man.”
But such clear statements were not the norm. Proslavery rhetoricians talked little of slavery itself. Instead, they anointed themselves the defenders of “reason,” free speech and “civility.” The prevalent line of argument in the antebellum South rested on the supposition that Southerners were simultaneously the keepers of an ancient faith and renegades — made martyrs by their dedication to facts, reason and civil discourse.
It might sound strange that America’s proslavery faction styled itself the guardian of freedom and minority rights. And yet it did. In a deep study of antebellum Southern rhetoric, Patricia Roberts-Miller, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin, characterizes the story that proslavery writers “wanted to tell” between the 1830s and 1860s as not one of “demanding more power, but of David resisting Goliath.”
They stressed the importance of logic, “facts,” “truth,” “science” and “nature” much more than Northern rhetoricians did. They chided their adversaries for being romantic idealists, ignoring the “experience of centuries.” Josiah Nott, a surgeon who laid out the purported science behind black inferiority, held that questions like slavery “should be left open to fair and honest investigation, and made to stand or fall according to the facts.” They claimed that they were the ones who truly had black people’s best interests at heart, thanks to their more realistic understanding of human biology. “No one would be willing to do more for the Negro race than I,” John Wilkes Booth wrote shortly before he assassinated Lincoln. He alleged that any pragmatist could see that freeing black people into a cold, cruel world would actually cause their “annihilation.” Slavery, another Southern thinker argued, was natural, because if whites could work the sweltering South Carolina rice fields, they would. The “constitutions” of black men, on the other hand, were “perfectly adapted.”
But such clear statements were not the norm. Proslavery rhetoricians talked little of slavery itself. Instead, they anointed themselves the defenders of “reason,” free speech and “civility.” The prevalent line of argument in the antebellum South rested on the supposition that Southerners were simultaneously the keepers of an ancient faith and renegades — made martyrs by their dedication to facts, reason and civil discourse.
It might sound strange that America’s proslavery faction styled itself the guardian of freedom and minority rights. And yet it did. In a deep study of antebellum Southern rhetoric, Patricia Roberts-Miller, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin, characterizes the story that proslavery writers “wanted to tell” between the 1830s and 1860s as not one of “demanding more power, but of David resisting Goliath.”
They stressed the importance of logic, “facts,” “truth,” “science” and “nature” much more than Northern rhetoricians did. They chided their adversaries for being romantic idealists, ignoring the “experience of centuries.” Josiah Nott, a surgeon who laid out the purported science behind black inferiority, held that questions like slavery “should be left open to fair and honest investigation, and made to stand or fall according to the facts.” They claimed that they were the ones who truly had black people’s best interests at heart, thanks to their more realistic understanding of human biology. “No one would be willing to do more for the Negro race than I,” John Wilkes Booth wrote shortly before he assassinated Lincoln. He alleged that any pragmatist could see that freeing black people into a cold, cruel world would actually cause their “annihilation.” Slavery, another Southern thinker argued, was natural, because if whites could work the sweltering South Carolina rice fields, they would. The “constitutions” of black men, on the other hand, were “perfectly adapted.”
They loved to paint themselves as the oppressed, even though what they were ultimately defending was oppression. In the antebellum years, by painting the abolitionists as the extremists they were able to maintain the institution of slavery for much longer than other Western countries, and by painting themselves as "just facing facts". The author calls this "antebellum reasoning", and points to examples in the present day of similar reasoning from Dave Rubin, Bart Weiss, Ben Shapiro, and Bret Easton Ellis, who paint the left as oppressors, despite the fact that the left has been out of power. She gives an example of Sam Harris letting a white supremacist named Charles Murray on his show multiple times, acting like Murray is an embattled maverick who is just trying to get the truth out and is the only one willing to speak against the "orthodoxy", while showing how absurd Harris's reasoning all is:
Quote:
Many reasonable-right figures find themselves defending the liberties of people to the right of them. Not because they agree with these people, they say, but on principle. Sam Harris, a popular podcast host, has released three lengthy shows about Charles Murray, a political scientist who is often booed at campus speeches and whose 2017 talk at Middlebury College ended when students injured his host. Murray argues that white people test higher than black people on “every known test of cognitive ability” and that these “differences in capacity” predict white people’s predominance. Harris repeatedly insists he has no vested interest in Murray’s ideas. His only interest in Murray, he claims, rests in his dedication to discussing science and airing controversial views.
But Harris’s claim is implausible. Hundreds of scientists produce controversial work in the fields of race, demographics and inequality. Only one, though, is the social scientist nationally notorious for suggesting for suggesting that white people are innately smarter than people of color. That Harris chooses to invite this one on his show suggests that he is not merely motivated by freedom of speech. It suggests that he is interested in what Murray has to say.
But Harris’s claim is implausible. Hundreds of scientists produce controversial work in the fields of race, demographics and inequality. Only one, though, is the social scientist nationally notorious for suggesting for suggesting that white people are innately smarter than people of color. That Harris chooses to invite this one on his show suggests that he is not merely motivated by freedom of speech. It suggests that he is interested in what Murray has to say.
This plea to victimization is effectively a veiled threat, like how viruses use immune cell shells to trick other cells in the body into letting them in:
Quote:
But today I see what Lincoln feared. Nearly daily, I read some new figure appealing to antebellum reasoning. Joining the reasonable right seems to render these figures desirable contributors to center-left media outlets. That’s because, psychologically, the claim to victimhood can function as a veiled threat. It tricks the listener into entering a world where the speaker is the needy one, fragile, requiring the listener to constantly adjust his behavior to cater to the imperiled person.
With this threat, the reasonable right has recruited the left into serving its purpose. Media outlets and college campuses now go to extraordinary lengths to prove their “balance” and tolerance, bending over backward to give platforms to right-wing writers and speakers who already have huge exposure.
With this threat, the reasonable right has recruited the left into serving its purpose. Media outlets and college campuses now go to extraordinary lengths to prove their “balance” and tolerance, bending over backward to give platforms to right-wing writers and speakers who already have huge exposure.
It's nothing new. It's a long-standing tradition of American politics:
Quote:
If somebody says liberals have become illiberal, you should consider whether it’s true. But you should also know that this assertion has a long history and that George Wallace and Barry Goldwater used it in their eras to powerful effect. People who make this claim aren’t “renegades.” They’re heirs to an extremely specific tradition in American political rhetoric, one that has become a dangerous inheritance.
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30 Aug 2019, 5:27 am
What I see with this column is somebody claiming that anybody who disagrees with nostalgic for a bigoted past because they are a bigot therefore anything they say no matter how reasonable they sound can be dismissed.
I am not familiar with all of the columnists mentioned but all of them are not southerners. Jorden Peterson is Canadian and Bari Weiss is from Pittsburg. Considering a white supremacist shot up the synagogue where she was bat-mitzvahed I doubt Weiss is nostalgic for white supremacist past.
It apparently never occurred to the author that some people just might prioritize free speech over safety or feel it encourages bigots to out themselves. It apparently never occurred to the author that “reasonable feminists” might feel that way because they disagree with the “extremist” feminists or feel the “extremists” hurt the cause of feminism. It apparently never occurred to the author that preferring reasonableness or order might be a personality trait not nostalgia.
That said I have to admit as a person who holds a bunch of views the author is writing about that I am nostalgic for the past. The past where liberals were the vanguard in arguing against stereotyping groups of people.
Truth? That’s What the Slaveholders Say!
Quote:
In an August 29 Washington Post op-ed, the journalist Eve Fairbanks goes after the arguments of a group she calls “reasonable conservatives.” By reasonable, she means unreasonable. And by conservatives, she means closet racists.
Neither Fairbanks nor the Post’s fact-checkers can be bothered even to verify that the objects of her smear are, you know, conservatives. For example, she gives us Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind. Haidt is a self-identified, and seemingly actual, centrist. Then there’s Sam Harris, the militant, and by no means conservative, atheist. But that doesn’t matter because Fairbanks is simply using the term “conservative” to apply to anyone with the gall to criticize left-wing intolerance. The individuals she names—from Haidt to Harris to Bari Weiss of the New York Times—have nothing in common apart from the opinion that freedoms of speech and thought should be defended against efforts to curtail them.
That’s the problem for Fairbanks, you see, because one of the arguments that Southern slaveholders made was that the North was infringing on their freedom of speech and thought. Advocates for slavery, she explains, “anointed themselves the defenders of ‘reason,’ ‘free speech’ and ‘civility.’” Get it? By her bizarre logic, while advocates of free speech and thought aren’t slaveholders, per se, they sure are slaveholderish.
There’s not much more to Fairbanks’s disgraceful argument than that, and in truth, it all goes the other way around. As Nadine Strossen has observed, the claim that certain speech should be suppressed because it inflicts “emotional injury” was made by slavery defender John C. Calhoun. Free speech advocates often point out that abolitionists like Frederick Douglass were on their side of the argument, whereas the proslavery crowd, where it could, made anti-slavery speech a crime.
Strossen is right. Once you adopt, in the hope of suppressing speech you consider unjust, the argument that emotional hurt can be grounds for suppressing speech, you’ve got nothing to say when the same argument is made to suppress speech you consider just.
Fairbanks, to be sure, says that she is “not inclined to paint conservatives as thoughtless bigots.” And who knows? Maybe she felt such a disinclination. But she overcame it.
In fairness to the Washington Post, it has been more than twenty-four hours since it had to correct an op-ed falsely claiming that J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, had lamented a decline in white births. Perhaps its editors regret the error. But what’s truly regrettable is the impulse to publish any and every article, no matter how wrong or foul, postulating that anyone who crosses the left is a racist.
Neither Fairbanks nor the Post’s fact-checkers can be bothered even to verify that the objects of her smear are, you know, conservatives. For example, she gives us Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind. Haidt is a self-identified, and seemingly actual, centrist. Then there’s Sam Harris, the militant, and by no means conservative, atheist. But that doesn’t matter because Fairbanks is simply using the term “conservative” to apply to anyone with the gall to criticize left-wing intolerance. The individuals she names—from Haidt to Harris to Bari Weiss of the New York Times—have nothing in common apart from the opinion that freedoms of speech and thought should be defended against efforts to curtail them.
That’s the problem for Fairbanks, you see, because one of the arguments that Southern slaveholders made was that the North was infringing on their freedom of speech and thought. Advocates for slavery, she explains, “anointed themselves the defenders of ‘reason,’ ‘free speech’ and ‘civility.’” Get it? By her bizarre logic, while advocates of free speech and thought aren’t slaveholders, per se, they sure are slaveholderish.
There’s not much more to Fairbanks’s disgraceful argument than that, and in truth, it all goes the other way around. As Nadine Strossen has observed, the claim that certain speech should be suppressed because it inflicts “emotional injury” was made by slavery defender John C. Calhoun. Free speech advocates often point out that abolitionists like Frederick Douglass were on their side of the argument, whereas the proslavery crowd, where it could, made anti-slavery speech a crime.
Strossen is right. Once you adopt, in the hope of suppressing speech you consider unjust, the argument that emotional hurt can be grounds for suppressing speech, you’ve got nothing to say when the same argument is made to suppress speech you consider just.
Fairbanks, to be sure, says that she is “not inclined to paint conservatives as thoughtless bigots.” And who knows? Maybe she felt such a disinclination. But she overcame it.
In fairness to the Washington Post, it has been more than twenty-four hours since it had to correct an op-ed falsely claiming that J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, had lamented a decline in white births. Perhaps its editors regret the error. But what’s truly regrettable is the impulse to publish any and every article, no matter how wrong or foul, postulating that anyone who crosses the left is a racist.
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Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 30 Aug 2019, 7:22 am, edited 2 times in total.
30 Aug 2019, 6:59 am
Broadly, conservatives advocate "individualism".
So, naturally, an individualistic worldview will likely see growing oppression.
Higher taxes, loss of freedoms, government growing (not shrinking), liberal advocates asking for more, more, and more,
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31 Aug 2019, 2:28 am
ASPartOfMe wrote:
What I see with this column is somebody claiming that anybody who disagrees with nostalgic for a bigoted past because they are a bigot therefore anything they say no matter how reasonable they sound can be dismissed.
I am not familiar with all of the columnists mentioned but all of them are not southerners. Jorden Peterson is Canadian and Bari Weiss is from Pittsburg. Considering a white supremacist shot up the synagogue where she was bat-mitzvahed I doubt Weiss is nostalgic for white supremacist past.
It apparently never occurred to the author that some people just might prioritize free speech over safety or feel it encourages bigots to out themselves. It apparently never occurred to the author that “reasonable feminists” might feel that way because they disagree with the “extremist” feminists or feel the “extremists” hurt the cause of feminism. It apparently never occurred to the author that preferring reasonableness or order might be a personality trait not nostalgia.
That said I have to admit as a person who holds a bunch of views the author is writing about that I am nostalgic for the past. The past where liberals were the vanguard in arguing against stereotyping groups of people.
Truth? That’s What the Slaveholders Say!
I am not familiar with all of the columnists mentioned but all of them are not southerners. Jorden Peterson is Canadian and Bari Weiss is from Pittsburg. Considering a white supremacist shot up the synagogue where she was bat-mitzvahed I doubt Weiss is nostalgic for white supremacist past.
It apparently never occurred to the author that some people just might prioritize free speech over safety or feel it encourages bigots to out themselves. It apparently never occurred to the author that “reasonable feminists” might feel that way because they disagree with the “extremist” feminists or feel the “extremists” hurt the cause of feminism. It apparently never occurred to the author that preferring reasonableness or order might be a personality trait not nostalgia.
That said I have to admit as a person who holds a bunch of views the author is writing about that I am nostalgic for the past. The past where liberals were the vanguard in arguing against stereotyping groups of people.
Truth? That’s What the Slaveholders Say!
Nostalgia? What are you talking about? The author doesn't mention it at all. Plus, the author wasn't talking about just southerners, simply a tradition started by them.
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31 Aug 2019, 3:39 am
LoveNotHate wrote:
Broadly, conservatives advocate "individualism".
So, naturally, an individualistic worldview will likely see growing oppression.
Higher taxes, loss of freedoms, government growing (not shrinking), liberal advocates asking for more, more, and more,
So, naturally, an individualistic worldview will likely see growing oppression.
Higher taxes, loss of freedoms, government growing (not shrinking), liberal advocates asking for more, more, and more,
Individualism when it comes to only to people of a specific heritage and color. What about all those Americans who have been traditionally locked out of the chance to be individuals where they can thrive without the odds stacked against them for just who they are?
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31 Aug 2019, 4:58 am
beneficii wrote:
ASPartOfMe wrote:
What I see with this column is somebody claiming that anybody who disagrees with nostalgic for a bigoted past because they are a bigot therefore anything they say no matter how reasonable they sound can be dismissed.
I am not familiar with all of the columnists mentioned but all of them are not southerners. Jorden Peterson is Canadian and Bari Weiss is from Pittsburg. Considering a white supremacist shot up the synagogue where she was bat-mitzvahed I doubt Weiss is nostalgic for white supremacist past.
It apparently never occurred to the author that some people just might prioritize free speech over safety or feel it encourages bigots to out themselves. It apparently never occurred to the author that “reasonable feminists” might feel that way because they disagree with the “extremist” feminists or feel the “extremists” hurt the cause of feminism. It apparently never occurred to the author that preferring reasonableness or order might be a personality trait not nostalgia.
That said I have to admit as a person who holds a bunch of views the author is writing about that I am nostalgic for the past. The past where liberals were the vanguard in arguing against stereotyping groups of people.
Truth? That’s What the Slaveholders Say!
I am not familiar with all of the columnists mentioned but all of them are not southerners. Jorden Peterson is Canadian and Bari Weiss is from Pittsburg. Considering a white supremacist shot up the synagogue where she was bat-mitzvahed I doubt Weiss is nostalgic for white supremacist past.
It apparently never occurred to the author that some people just might prioritize free speech over safety or feel it encourages bigots to out themselves. It apparently never occurred to the author that “reasonable feminists” might feel that way because they disagree with the “extremist” feminists or feel the “extremists” hurt the cause of feminism. It apparently never occurred to the author that preferring reasonableness or order might be a personality trait not nostalgia.
That said I have to admit as a person who holds a bunch of views the author is writing about that I am nostalgic for the past. The past where liberals were the vanguard in arguing against stereotyping groups of people.
Truth? That’s What the Slaveholders Say!
Nostalgia? What are you talking about? The author doesn't mention it at all. Plus, the author wasn't talking about just southerners, simply a tradition started by them.
You are right in a sense that none of the columnists she critiques are probably nostalgic for the Confederacy. She is the one who keeps on hearing "The Antebellum South" ie white supremacy in these columns when none probably exists. She is the one who is intimating "conservative" people who support freedom of speech and civility do it to hide their white supremacy.
Even if she is saying which I doubt that these columnists are unknowingly defending the confederacy she is letting those who use freedom of speech, civility, and reasonableness to promote racism define these views for her.
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31 Aug 2019, 6:06 am
ASPartOfMe wrote:
You are right in a sense that none of the columnists she critiques are probably nostalgic for the Confederacy. She is the one who keeps on hearing "The Antebellum South" ie white supremacy in these columns when none probably exists. She is the one who is intimating "conservative" people who support freedom of speech and civility do it to hide their white supremacy.
Even if she is saying which I doubt that these columnists are unknowingly defending the confederacy she is letting those who use freedom of speech, civility, and reasonableness to promote racism define these views for her.
Even if she is saying which I doubt that these columnists are unknowingly defending the confederacy she is letting those who use freedom of speech, civility, and reasonableness to promote racism define these views for her.
I don't think she's even saying that they're defending the confederacy. What she's talking about is not so much the what of what they're defending, but the how. It's the tactics they're using, not so much what they're defending.
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31 Aug 2019, 7:43 am
Interesting article.
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ASPartOfMe
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31 Aug 2019, 9:31 am
beneficii wrote:
ASPartOfMe wrote:
You are right in a sense that none of the columnists she critiques are probably nostalgic for the Confederacy. She is the one who keeps on hearing "The Antebellum South" ie white supremacy in these columns when none probably exists. She is the one who is intimating "conservative" people who support freedom of speech and civility do it to hide their white supremacy.
Even if she is saying which I doubt that these columnists are unknowingly defending the confederacy she is letting those who use freedom of speech, civility, and reasonableness to promote racism define these views for her.
Even if she is saying which I doubt that these columnists are unknowingly defending the confederacy she is letting those who use freedom of speech, civility, and reasonableness to promote racism define these views for her.
I don't think she's even saying that they're defending the confederacy. What she's talking about is not so much the what of what they're defending, but the how. It's the tactics they're using, not so much what they're defending.
She could say conservatives tend to hide behind freedom of speech to mask the draconian budget cuts in social services and welfare for the rich they favor. That would still be painting conservatives with a broad brush. Nope, she keeps on seeing lost cause mythology.
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01 Sep 2019, 1:27 am
I am an avid fan of certain sports. One of which is college basketball. After every game you can count on complaints from both sides about the refereeing. It is my observation that both fanbases remember the bad foul calls that went against their team but not the bad foul calls that went for their team. Frequently you can see an exchange that goes something like this.
"The refs screwed us so badly in this game."
"Are you kidding! The refs were clearly biased against our team!"
Look there are certain leftist elements that use the "right side of history" as a cudgel to shut down any right of center view point. There are far-left extremists that have used the threat of violence to shut down conservative speakers on campuses. The right is no better. Alt-right agitators have made peoples lives miserable with death threats and troll storms. I'm drawing a blank on what the moderate right equivalent of "the right side of history" would be, but I'm sure that is merely an oversight on my part.
One thing that bothered me in this article is this passage:
Quote:
A conservative I’m close to routinely emails me political commentaries of her own. She’s delighted when I post them on my Facebook page for discussion. But she insists that I conceal her name. When I ask why, she points to herself and says, “Marrano” — the word for the Jewish minority who were viciously persecuted under King Ferdinand II of Spain.
“But a Republican is the king!” I say, baffled.
She doesn’t want to hear it. She’ll just point to herself again and repeat, “Marrano.” It’s an identity that’s important to her.
“But a Republican is the king!” I say, baffled.
She doesn’t want to hear it. She’ll just point to herself again and repeat, “Marrano.” It’s an identity that’s important to her.
It's hard not to see the one to one parallel with the following faulty line of reasoning that was rolled out after Obama's election:
"How can there still be racism, a black man is president."
That belief was very very wrong. It's wrong to suggest conservatives don't face any persecution in liberal dominated circles because Trump is president. And if you're a NeverTrumper you can count on his fanbase calling you disloyal, RINO, etc. Ben Shapiro has received death threats from both far-right extremists and far-left extremists.
I think it's reasonable to speak out against attempts to shut down debate wherever they happen. Whether perpetrated by the right or the left.
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01 Sep 2019, 4:48 am
Interesting article. While of course it doesn't show that anyone concerned about free speech is secretly pro-slavery, it does show that some people who claim to be in favour of "free speech" are actually being disingenuous.
I'm always tickled when people like Peterson try to paint themselves as radical free-thinkers oppressed by people who can't face facts, when actually they're just religious conservatives lost in a secular world.
