Mobs and justice

Liberalism isn't just about what you can do, but also what you should do for others

“A growing illiberalism, fueled by social media, is trampling democratic discourse,” reads the homepage tagline on a new essay in the Atlantic, by Anne Appelbaum. “The result is a chilling atmosphere in which mob justice has replaced due process and forgiveness is impossible.”  The piece, you may be surprised to learn, is about the woke mobs which occasionally roam across Twitter and other platforms calling attention to people accused of (or adjacent to those accused of) intolerance toward various disadvantaged groups or, in other cases, sexual harassment or assault. 

It could have been about other kinds of illiberalism trampling democratic discourse, or indeed democracy. In fairness to the Atlantic, it has published its share of very good pieces laying out the threat posed by illiberalism on the right (including a number by Appelbaum, whose work I generally admire); indeed, the Atlantic is quite a bit better on the subject of nascent right-wing authoritarianism than some other esteemed publications which also get annoyed by the wokes. I nonetheless found it a frustrating essay, if also a useful one in the way that it illustrates the problems with popular arguments about the meaning of wokeness.

The piece is built around extensive conversations with the victims of the woke mob: people who for one reason or another found themselves on the wrong end of a social-media storm, and who as a consequence faced social isolation and, often, significant professional costs. The problem, Appelbaum says, is not that none of these people did things that were wrong; she allows that some engaged in behaviors of which she disapproves. The issue, rather, is that these people were afforded no due process, no real justice, and no opportunity for forgiveness and reconciliation. Appelbaum plays with a few different historical analogies in the piece, including a number drawn from totalitarian states (an area of expertise of hers), but the one which frames the essay is that of Hester Prynne, the central figure of The Scarlet Letter. The woke are The New Puritans, she writes, possessed of a powerful sense of self-righteousness, and whose determination to wipe out heresies threaten to turn America into a land of dismal conformism.

The essay stuck in my craw for a few reasons. One is an unfortunate lack of perspective. The fact that there is a much more virulent and imminent threat to a liberal America has been noted. The woke mob did not besiege the capital building in an attempt to lynch lawmakers and overturn an election, it isn’t threatening political violence day in and day out or working systematically to undermine American democracy, it doesn’t have the full support of the leaders of one of the nation’s two parties, and so on. That doesn’t mean that one can’t still complain about other sorts of intolerance, but perhaps it is possible to do so without using, say, the tagline quoted above, given that literal mobs are now a real and worrying feature of the American political landscape. 

More broadly, Appelbaum acknowledges in passing but does not take adequate account of the fact that woke overreach is not an isolated phenomenon but part of a much broader and on the whole welcome shift in the balance of social power. The victims to whom she speaks are for the most part very successful people—professors at prestigious universities, editors of prestigious journals, writers for prestigious newspapers—which does not mean that they deserve what they got but which does place all of this in an extremely important context. 

That context is: powerful gatekeepers in business and academia and the media wield enormous influence over the lives of people trying to make a career for themselves, and have for a very long time been at liberty, more or less, to abuse that power in egregious ways. They may not have abused that power in the name of some higher mission, but that scarcely mattered to the powerless people who experienced abuse, serious professional consequences and any number of other ills. It would certainly be unfortunate if someone whose name appeared on the “shitty media men” spreadsheet had not in fact engaged in any abusive behavior but did face extreme personal and professional hardship. But come on: this was a list, intended to be private, which circulated among women who were simply trying to have a career in media without being harassed or groped or worse, and who had good reason to think that there were few other good ways to protect themselves. 

This is a persistent problem with the piece. There were frustrating bits of the essay and good bits, but my jaw fell open when I read the closing paragraph:

Worse, if we drive all of the difficult people, the demanding people, and the eccentric people away from the creative professions where they used to thrive, we will become a flatter, duller, less interesting society, a place where manuscripts sit in drawers for fear of arbitrary judgments. The arts, the humanities, and the media will become stiff, predictable, and mediocre. Democratic principles like the rule of law, the right to self-defense, the right to a just trial—even the right to be forgiven—will wither. There will be nothing to do but sit back and wait for the Hawthornes of the future to expose us.

The right to self-defense? The right to a just trial? A miscarriage of justice is a miscarriage of justice, but wokeness as a hot national topic really exploded in the summer of 2020, because that’s when white people finally began to pay serious attention to the fact that cops were killing black people with impunity. Now, the fact that Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd doesn’t make it ok for some asshole to get a professional rival pushed out of his job by making a cynical accusation of racism. But the asshole is able to do that because suddenly there are at least some professional consequences to actually being a racist. And people in power actually being racist is, historically, a pretty significant cause of flatness and dullness and manuscripts in drawers. It would be great if these two things could be separated, and hopefully we will as a society get better at separating them. But to imply that there hasn’t until now been an oppressive, illiberal culture denying opportunities for expression or justice to “difficult” people, such that the net effect of the recent push for social justice is, thanks to its occasional excesses, a stultifying one seems to me to massively mischaracterize what’s been happening in America.

But what most frustrated me about the essay is a thing that’s frustrated me about so much of the conversation around this subject. It is an inability quite to get at what makes a liberal society liberal. Appelbaum writes:

I have been trying to understand these stories for a long time, both because I believe that the principle of due process underpins liberal democracy, and also because they remind me of other times and places. A decade ago, I wrote a book about the Sovietization of Central Europe in the 1940s, and found that much of the political conformism of the early Communist period was the result not of violence or direct state coercion, but rather of intense peer pressure...

What we see here is both a misguided confidence in institutions as the basis of liberalism—the faith in due process—and an acknowledgement that there is something outside of the machinery of the state that shapes the character of a society. Due process is great. We should treasure it as a fundamental principle of the legal system. But we should also recognize that due process is not something that can or should be a basis for all aspects of civic life, and understand that due process under the law can be perfectly consistent with unjust outcomes in the absence of something more. 

I’ve recently been reading Dierdre McCloskey’s newest book, and have appreciated the way in which she expresses some ideas I’ve been attempting to get at here in this newsletter. She writes of liberalism that it is a belief in the liberty and the dignity of the individual. It is a belief that good things happen in societies in which people enjoy a lot of freedom to live their lives in their own way, and in which the essential worth of all people is recognized. The liberty bit we all know and love and expound upon. The dignity bit we often forget, but it is the dignity bit that makes a liberal society something more than a riot of dickheads. The dignity bit demands that we, as free people, exercise self-restraint out of concern for the welfare of others. The dignity bit is what turns the potentially oppressive hand of the state or the ruthless hand of the market into something more just and tolerable. A society which respects this liberalism in full is an ethical society. Not a perfect society, but a better one than just about any other set of isms can accommodate.

A respect for these liberal principles is not self-enforcing, unfortunately, and so an important question is what we ought to do when these principles are transgressed. There are, of course, more and less liberal ways to try to defend and support a liberal ethics. People may disagree with me, but I think, given the alternatives, informal social celebration of liberal virtue and informal social sanction of illiberal vice is perhaps about the best that we can do. 

And so I think that in an important way, recent social-justice movements represent successful and laudable efforts to make American society more liberal. These have not been violently coercive movements (although there has of course been some left-wing violence and looting associated with public protests). They have not been movements which relied upon the power of the state to force change. They have not been movements which have relied upon the corruptingly persuasive power of piles of corporate money for their success (although there have been many corporate interests keen to associate their brands with the push for social justice). 

These movements have deployed discomfort as a tool to achieve change. But discomfort, Appelbaum says, is something we ought to be prepared to accept in our lives, and not ask to be shielded from. We may not feel that it is particularly liberal to marshal public opinion and use it to affirm certain virtues and condemn certain vices. But on some level we need to ask ourselves: given the reality of normalized extra-judicial police violence against black people, the reality of more or less universal low-grade discrimination against racial minorities, the reality of tacit acceptance of sexual harassment and assault by powerful men, has society really become less free as a consequence of this particular social development? Less affirming of the dignity of every individual? Is it easy to imagine successful mass social movements which did as much to change workplace culture and focus attention on injustice without creating quite so much discomfort among people in positions of power?

But Appelbaum is right that not everyone has been treated the way they ought to have been over the course of the past year. There have been injustices, and even if they aren’t of the same magnitude as police killings or the systematic abuse of women by powerful bosses, they represent a failure to live up to liberal ideals. And while the right is a threat to liberal democracy in America in a way that social-justice warriors simply aren’t, you can’t really affirm liberal values by betraying liberal values. 

This, though, is where I think America has gone wrong: by forgetting that shared values are the critical infrastructure of a liberal society. Effective liberal institutions are created and sustained by people acting according to shared values. Due process isn’t the source of liberty in a society; a society which holds in common a respect for the liberty and dignity of every individual creates and sustains institutions which operate according to the principle of due process. If the shared values which underpin a society erode, then everything really does become a brutal power contest.

And this is the direction we have been heading in America, because we’ve increasingly normalized the pursuit of one’s own narrow interest as the one value to rule them all. Get out there and make your money. Maximize shareholder value. Take whatever you can within the rules, then break the rules so that you can take more. 

The people in Appelbaum’s piece want society’s understanding, a certain generosity of spirit, and that’s a reasonable thing to want. But generally speaking, we don’t affirm the value of self-restraint on behalf of others in this country. We don’t value the dignity of every individual as well as the liberty. What capacity we had for that we seem to be losing. And so we have no cultural mechanism through which to encourage people to wear masks or get vaccines for the sake of others. We have no way, outside of the coercive power of the state, to encourage companies to pay their workers a decent wage, or get them to cut their emissions, or simply not design their massive automobiles in ways that make them more likely to kill pedestrians. The idea that the very clever and talented should worry less about their own scramble up the career ladder and more about expanding opportunity for everyone has no cultural legitimacy in this country. 

I think it’s really important to have that social capacity, and I worry terribly about the fact that we seem to be losing it, because it looks to me like a very difficult thing to reestablish once it’s gone. Building it back up again is the mother of all collective action problems; in a society in which power rules everything, it demands that people not exercise what power they have to the fullest. The people in Appelbaum’s piece are asking that figures on the left who are enjoying a taste of cultural power refrain from wielding it, even as angry, violent groups on the right set their mind toward shoving those groups back into a place of social subordination.

Is that a reasonable thing to ask? I mean no, objectively it isn’t. Maybe it will happen anyway; it has often fallen to women and black Americans and other oppressed groups to make extraordinary sacrifices in order to advance the cause of liberalism. But what really wouldn’t hurt would be for those individuals and groups which still wield enormous power in this country, however threatened they feel by woke mobs, to do their part to affirm the liberty, and the dignity, of every person. If you care about a liberal society, then don’t maximize your own self-interest. Make sacrifices for others. Tell greedy shareholders to fuck off. Use somebody’s preferred pronouns; it doesn’t cost you a thing. Listen generously when someone tries to teach you something you don’t want to hear: whether that’s the fact that structural racism in America is a real thing, or the fact that people who committed the unconscionable sin of owning other human beings also made positive contributions to American society. The world is messy, people are flawed, and we only make it better by working to build a society that treats everyone with dignity and generosity. 

Appelbaum used the example of the Puritans to frame her piece, but she might have drawn on other eras of American history. When the British sought to force their American colonists to pay taxes on imported goods, the colonies banded together to adopt a strategy of nonimportation. But importing goods was a lucrative business, and not every merchant wished to abide by the policy. In response, mobs of colonists threatened the merchants, destroyed their wares, and occasionally turned to tarring and feathering or worse. Those were illiberal acts, which no one can or should condone. At the same time they did, in their way, affirm certain liberal values and support a liberal cause. It’s not a thing to celebrate, exactly—although we do look back fondly on the dumping of tea into Boston harbor. But it illustrates how liberty has often advanced in this country: messily, pushed forward by flawed heroes, unfolding in imperfect ways and with plenty of holes left for future generations to fill.

I think that’s the right lens through which to view the fervor of wokeism in America, rather than Puritanism or Maoism. Condemn the excesses, affirm the values, and recognize that graver threats to liberalism lie elsewhere.

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