Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
The U.S. Capitol is seen behind razor wire, February 18, 2021.
I don’t know how many times I can say this, but here goes: Left-wing cancel culture is a real problem, especially in academia, and within progressive journalism and nonprofit organizations. The appropriately “woke” positions on race, gender, and lately, Israel, remain in constant motion and it can be a struggle just to keep up. A young person’s misjudgment can threaten an entire career. Even so, it is an ant compared to the elephant of the Republican campaign to shut down all critical discourse at the same time it destroys our democracy.
Elite media institutions, led, unarguably, by The New York Times, have been almost comically obsessed with the former threat, while failing to pay anything like sufficient attention to the threat posed by the latter. (This is to say nothing of the challenges facing the sorts of institutions of higher learning that its writers and editors did not attend, but most American students do.) We don’t know why this is so. It strikes me as likely, however, that it’s a product of decades of right-wing “working the refs”—which, Google reminds me, I testified about to a panel led by Bernie Sanders and John Conyers in May 2005. The Times is the most important “ref” in the entire global media. Now, with the egregiously inappropriate “bothsidesism” of this editorial, it can answer conservative and corporate critics of the paper’s alleged liberalism/wokeism by saying, “See, we bash liberals, too.”
Another likely motivation lies in the realm of the psychological. Leftists and liberals deemed to be insufficiently woke (like, sometimes, yours truly) find few things more annoying in life than attacks emanating from their political left. They believe these folks should “get real” and embrace whatever compromises that one has, over time, felt oneself compelled to embrace. “Woke” left charges often arrive accompanied by a combination of unearned moral superiority and smug condescension that would piss off the Dalai Lama. But the failure to distinguish between these genuine annoyances and Republicans’ anti-democratic campaign to replace American democracy with what looks more and more every day like a homegrown version of fascism is itself a danger to democracy. What’s more, it’s an excuse for right-wingers to keep up their focus on the perils of wokeism. All they have to say is “Even the liberal New York Times editorial page agrees …”
Fortunately, I need not go on, as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has already done a fine job of dismantling the Times’ “odd bit of partisan both-sidesing, conflating the left’s engagement in criticism with the right’s leveraging the law to control speech.” Want more? Dan Froomkin has it here, and so does Thomas Zimmer here, and Will Bunch here, Ken White here, and Sebastian Stockman here. Also, The Onion …
Finally, one supposes that it must be mere coincidence that the Times almost simultaneously agreed to stop restricting technology workers who oversee interns from expressing support for a union, settling a case brought by the NLRB.
Since Russia’s Ukraine invasion began, I’ve seen significant punditocracy attention paid to the writings of Hannah Arendt. The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan did so here, as did The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, here. I share their belief in her relevance, but as I argued over and over during the Trump presidency, Arendt’s warnings apply to the present-day U.S. as well. Below, I pull together some of the examples I employed in my 2020 book Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse, which, amusingly, Ms. Sullivan discovered after a two-year absence on her office desk, together with some really old fudge.
As Arendt observed, “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer … And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
In her 1967 essay “Truth and Politics,” Hannah Arendt described “a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth” as the means by which fascist dictators can undermine our ability to “take our bearings in the real world”—a necessary precondition for the replacement of a democratic system with a totalitarian one. This systematic use of lying as propaganda, as Arendt observed in 1951’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (on page 382 of the 1973 re-edition from Harvest Books) discourages people from even seeking truthfulness. “Under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
The embrace of Trump’s tactic of the bald-faced lie among contemporary Republicans is consistent with what Arendt argued [in Origins, p. 474 but see also Paul Mason, “Reading Arendt Is Not Enough”] to be the necessary conditions for the creation of “the ideal subject of a totalitarian state”; that is, the person “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
For more on Hannah Arendt’s thought and its relevance to America today, see Samantha Rose Hill’s fine short book on her thought and some of the terrific essays published over the decades in The New York Review of Books, especially those by Alan Ryan, Alfred Kazin, Seyla Benhabib, Amos Elon, Tony Judt, and of course Arendt herself (especially those linked above). For the threat of fascism posed by Trump, the Republican Party, and those media entities that demonstrate their fealty to both, see this interview with Jason Stanley, author of the fine book How Fascism Works, which also draws on Arendt’s arguments.
Gallup just released a new poll on the American public’s attitudes toward Israel and the Palestinians. What is most remarkable about the poll is the fact that while Americans—especially Democrats—have grown more sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, and more critical of Israel’s negotiating posture, their strong support for Israel itself remains remarkably stable since the poll began asking 21 years ago. A person who gets most of his or her news from Twitter or other social media would probably not be aware of this.
The people who should be paying the most attention, however, are BDS supporters. I’ve seen a number of pieces lamenting the fact that the world has snapped to attention regarding boycotts of the Russians, but continues to ignore—or in many cases, attempts to outlaw—the boycott of Israel (originally launched in 2004 and 2005). (Here is one from The Nation.) BDS supporters, however, are proving awfully reluctant to draw the obvious conclusion from the success of the former and the failure of the latter. It’s not that they need to try harder, it’s that they have an ineffective-to-the-point-of-counterproductive strategy. (I wrote a long essay on the failures of BDS for Democracy in 2018.) The fact is simply that Americans are eager to boycott the Russians but have no interest in boycotting Israel. It’s been 17 years, after all, and so far, no universities, no major national unions, no major U.S. corporations, no local governments, not even any food co-ops of which I’m aware have joined in. The possibility of an endorsement by the Middle East Studies Association does not exactly make up for all that.
Anyway, for people who genuinely care about the fate of those Palestinians living in exile, or under occupation in the West Bank (in part, thanks to the corruption of the Palestinian Authority), or in the “open-air prison” in Gaza (in significant measure, thanks to Hamas), or under intense legal discrimination inside Israel, what is needed, before there can be a transformation within either U.S. or, more importantly, Israeli policy, is a Palestinian perestroika, accompanied by a reassessment of its failed political strategy.
Finally, a mere 55 days after virtually every other important international news source did so, The New York Times has finally alerted its readers to the fact of Amnesty International’s report on “apartheid” in Israel. Here is a Twitter thread tracing the Times’ own explanation for this, and some of the implications of this decision.
Eric’s Trash TV Reviews
People often ask me, “Eric, what do you think about trash TV, and specifically which shows do you watch?”
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Tragically downhill since the brilliant pilot. Terrible fourth season; Susie is the most annoying character ever, but the last episode, heavy with Lenny Bruce, was surprisingly good.
- Billions: Has become embarrassing to have on.
- Emily in Paris: Like an endless colonoscopy.
- Pam & Tommy: Even worse, if possible.
- Inventing Anna: Weirdly excellent, perhaps the best trash TV since the now trash classic Gossip Girl (the original, obvi).
But then many of those same people say, “But Eric, what about really good non-trashy shows?” I respond:
- My Brilliant Friend
- Shtisel
- Call My Agent!
- Station Eleven
- Succession
- The Afterparty
- Archer
- The Morning Show
- Valley of Tears
- and (obvi) Curb Your Enthusiasm
“And what about OK shows if you just want to watch something?”
- Dickinson
- Losing Alice
- Somebody Somewhere
- Upload
- Normal People
- Single Drunk Female
- Srugim
“Any golden oldies?”
- Freaks and Geeks
- The Mindy Project
- The League
- Party Down
- The Thick of It
- and of course, The Office
