Inbox scrap 117

WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE?

AS I WRITE THIS in the summer of 2020, Alison Roman, a food writer for The New York Times, is on suspension. You might wonder just what a food writer could do to end up temporarily dismissed by her employer. Roman’s sin: In an interview, she passingly criticized two people for commercialism, model and food writer Chrissy Teigen and lifestyle coach Marie Kondo. Roman was Twitter-mobbed for having the nerve, as a white woman, to criticize two women of color.

Teigen is half white and half Thai. Kondo is a Japanese citizen. Neither of them are what we typically think of as people of color in the sense of historically conditioned and structurally preserved disadvantage. However, in 2020, the mere fact of a white person criticizing not just one but two (apparently the plurality tipped the scales) non-white persons justified being shamed on social media and disallowed from doing her work. Roman, as a white person, was supposedly punching down—i.e., “down” at two people very wealthy, very successful, and vastly better known than her. Her whiteness trumped all, we were told.

Roman, now typical of such cases, ate crow with an apologetic statement about how she had reflected and realized her error. Teigen even said that she did not think Roman deserved to be sanctioned. But no matter—a kind of fury, passed off as being “antiracist,” now has a supreme power in our public moral evaluations, and this required that Roman be pilloried in the town square. Her Wikipedia entry will forever include a notice that she was deemed a racist, billboard style, despite that most Americans likely see that she did nothing that remotely deserved such treatment, and despite that she would not have been treated that way as recently as a few years ago. She later left the Times permanently.

THE SAME YEAR, Leslie Neal-Boylan lasted only a few months as dean of nursing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The problem was that in the wake of statements nationwide after the murder by police officers of George Floyd, Dean Neal-Boylan had the audacity to pen this blinkered, bigoted screed to her colleagues and staff:

I am writing to express my concern and condemnation of the recent (and past) acts of violence against people of color. Recent events recall a tragic history of racism and bias that continue to thrive in this country. I despair for our future as a nation if we do not stand up against violence against anyone. BLACK LIVES MATTER, but also, EVERYONE’S LIFE MATTERS. No one should have to live in fear that they will be targeted for how they look or what they believe.

A certain crowd decided to read Neal-Boylan as chiming in with those who resist the slogan “Black Lives Matter” by answering that “All Lives Matter,” as if BLM is somehow claiming that black lives matter more. However, one could read Neal-Boylan as meaning this only via not reading well. She started out by lamenting “a tragic history of racism and bias,” and no, she didn’t mean that it existed only in the past and that black people need to get over it, because she also wrote that the racism and bias “continue to thrive in this country.”

However, because her composition included the three words “everyone’s life matters,” she was reported to her superiors and quickly out of a job without even being allowed to defend herself. Why was Leslie Neal-Boylan’s email deemed a missive from someone unfit to supervise people dedicated to healing and giving comfort? A child would wonder why—as would a time traveler from as recently as 2015. But Neal-Boylan’s detractors were deemed authoritative.

ALSO IN THE SAME YEAR, 2020, David Shor, a data analyst at a progressive consulting firm, lost his job. He had tweeted a study by a black Ivy League political science professor, Omar Wasow, showing that violent black protests during the long, hot summers of the late 1960s were more likely than nonviolent ones to make local voters vote Republican. Shor’s intent was not to praise this, but to disseminate the facts themselves as a glum announcement—one that had been covered eagerly by liberal media shortly before this.

Certain parties on Twitter, though, didn’t like a white man tweeting something that could be taken as criticizing black protest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The consulting firm took heed and expelled Shor.

Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that because racism is baked into the structure of society, whites’ “complicity” in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.

Under this paradigm, all deemed insufficiently aware of this sense of existing while white as eternal culpability require bitter condemnation and ostracization,

Third Wave Antiracism forces us to pretend that performance art is politics.

For example, the Third Wave Antiracist is deeply moved by a collection of tenets that, stated clearly and placed in simple oppositions, translate into nothing whatsoever:

When black people say you have insulted them, apologize with profound sincerity and guilt.

Don’t put black people in a position where you expect them to forgive you. They have dealt with too much to be expected to.

Silence about racism is violence.

Elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own.

You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people.

You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.

Support black people in creating their own spaces and stay out of them.

Seek to have black friends. If you don’t have any, you’re a racist. And if you claim any, they’d better be good friends—albeit occupying their private spaces that you aren’t allowed in.

Black people cannot be held accountable for everything every black person does.

All whites must acknowledge their personal complicitness in the perfidy of “whiteness” throughout history.

Or, as it is. Specifically, these tenets serve the purpose of expressing the central pole, the guiding watchcry, of Third Wave Antiracist religion. It is rarely stated explicitly, but decisively steers its adherents’ perspective on existence and morality. Third Wave Antiracism’s needlepoint homily par excellence would be the following:

Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.

It can seem an oddly particular perspective, this rigid focus on battling differentials in power. Power is rampantly abused and creates endless suffering, to be sure. An enlightened society must be always addressing this and trying to change it. However, given the millions of other things that constitute human life and endeavor, to impose that undoing power differentials must center all possible endeavor in what we call life is a radical proposition.

In any case, one of the main power differentials in our society is the one conditioned by racism. It is this Salem-style religious commitment to “battling” it that made the excommunications of Alison Roman, Leslie Neal-Boylan, and David Shor make sense to so many perfectly sane people.

Third Wave Antiracism’s claims and demands, from a distance, seem like an eccentric performance from people wishing they hadn’t missed the late 1960s, dismayed that so much of the basic work is done already. Seeking the same righteous fury and heartwarming sense of purpose and belonging, their exaggerations and even mendacities become inevitable, because actual circumstances simply do not justify the attitudes and strategies of 1967.

Third Wave Antiracists have a particular weapon in their arsenal that lends them outsized power, much more impactful than a cream pie.

Ironically, the weapon is so lethal because of the genuine and invaluable change that has occurred in our sociopolitical fabric over the past decades. That change is that to the modern American, being called a racist is all but equivalent to being called a pedophile. A lot of very important people fought to make it that way, and few of us would wish they had not. But the problem is that the Third Wave Antiracists now piggyback on it. A key part of their tool kit is that they call those who disagree with them racists, or the more potent term of art of our moment, “white supremacists.” That kind of charge has a way of sticking. To deny it is to confirm it, we are taught; once the charge is hurled, it’s like you’re caught in a giant squid’s tentacles. At least you can wash a cream pie off.

We need not suppose Third Wave Antiracists do this cynically to amass power. Take a look at, or listen to, that family member, neighbor, or co-worker you know who thinks this way and ask yourself whether they really give any indication of being a power seeker. The Third Wave Antiracist genuinely reviles racism, as do most of us. They also seek a great deal else in the name of this that seems hopelessly impractical, idealist, or just plain mean. But under our current conditions, the shakiness of their platform does not get in their way. This is because they can at any time shout out that you are a racist—and they do.

And to all but a very few, being called a racist is so intolerable today that one would rather tolerate some cognitive dissonance and fold up. This wouldn’t have worked as well in, say, 1967. In that America, many white people called racists by this kind of person, for better or for worse, would have just taken a sip of their cocktail and said, “I don’t think so at all.” Or even just “Fuck you!” Today—because of progress, ironically—things are different. Now most cringe hopelessly at the prospect of being outed as a bigot, and thus: In being ever ready to call you a racist in the public square, the Third Wave Antiracist outguns you on the basis of this one weapon alone. Even if their overall philosophy is hardly the scriptural perfection they insist it is, that one thing they can and will do in its defense leaves us quivering wrecks. And thus they win.

The people wielding this ideology and watching its influence spread ever more are under the genuine impression that they are forging progress, that reason and morality are in flower. However, society is changing not because of a burgeoning degree of consensus in moral sophistication. What is happening is much cruder. Society is changing not out of consensus, but out of fear—the fear of the child cowering under the threat of a smack from an angry parent, the serf cowering under the threat of a disfiguring smash from the knout. The statements of solidarity from seemingly every institutional entity, the social media selfies of people “doing the work” of reading White Fragility, anyone pretending to entertain notions that the hard sciences need to “open up” to “diverse” perspectives by pulling back from requiring close reasoning—all of this is a product of not enlightenment, but simple terror. We have become a nation of smart people attesting that they “get it” while peeing themselves.

Unbeautiful but real. Third Wave Antiracism exploits modern Americans’ fear of being thought racist to promulgate not just antiracism, but an obsessive, self-involved, totalitarian, and utterly unnecessary kind of cultural reprogramming. One could be excused for thinking this queer, glowering kabuki is a continuation of the Civil Rights efforts of yore, the only kind of new antiracism there could be. Its adherents, now situated in the most prestigious and influential institutions in the land, preach with such contemptuous indignation that on their good days they can seem awfully “correct.”

That if you are white you are to despise yourself as tainted permanently by “white privilege” in everything you do. That you must accept even claims of racism from black people that make no real sense, or, if you are black, must pretend that such claims are sacrosanct because the essence of your life is oppression. Whatever color you are, in the name of acknowledging “power,” you are to divide people into racial classes,

You, black or not, are not crazy to get that this glowering double-talk doesn’t wash. And your job is to learn to cover your ears against what feels like verbal jiujitsu from those whose sense of significance is founded in denying reason and teaching people who have already been through enough to build their identities around a studied sense of victimhood.

Of course, they say they are pursuing “social justice,” thus telling the rest of us that we are resisting social justice. Don’t get tripped up. They are using the term to refer to their very specific and questionable sense of what social justice is, and as such, to ask us whether we are “against social justice” qualifies as a dirty trick along the lines of being asked if you still beat your spouse.

Author and essayist Joseph Bottum has found the proper term, and I will adopt it here: We will term these people the Elect. They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom, granted them for any number of reasons—empathic leaning, life experience, maybe even intelligence. But they see themselves as having been chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something most do not. “The Elect” is also good in implying a certain smugness, which, sadly, is an accurate depiction. Then too, it challenges the people in question to consider whether they really think of themselves as superior in this way. Of course, most of them will resist the charge. But with it sitting in the air, in its irony, they may feel moved to resist the definition, which over time may condition at least some of them to temper the excesses of the philosophy—just as after the 1980s many started disidentifying from being “too PC.”

But most importantly, terming these people the Elect implies a certain air of the past, à la The Da Vinci Code. This is apt, in that the view they think of as, indeed, sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are. The medieval Catholic passionately defended persecuting Jews and Muslims for reasons we now understand were rooted in lesser facets of being human. We spontaneously “other” those antique inquisitors in our times, but right here and now we are faced with people who harbor the exact same brand of mission, just against different persons.

In 1500 it was about not being Christian. In 2020 it’s about not being sufficiently antiracist, with adherents supposing that this is a more intellectually and morally advanced cause than antipathy to someone for being Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim. They do not see that they, too, are persecuting people for not adhering to their religion.

Electism manifests itself in degrees, of course. There are especially abusive Elect ideologues. Some are comfortable ripping into people in person; others largely restrict the nastiness to social media. Still other Elect do not go in for being actively mean but are still comfortable with the imperatives, have founded their sociopolitical perspectives firmly upon them, and are hard-pressed to feel comfortable interacting socially with people in disagreement. They allow the openly abusive Elect to operate freely, seeing their conduct as a perhaps necessary unpleasantness in the goal of general enlightenment.

I do not wish to imply that the Elect are all of the especially abusive type; the vast majority are not. It is a frame of mind compatible with all variations of human temperament, not a fanaticism. Fundamentalists hope their Good News reaches the whole world someday, but they encompass all personality types, as do all Christians, Muslims, and Baha’is. Thus we must not imagine that the Elect is prototypically a picketing shouter. Just as plausibly, they are an easy-mannered sort with some kids and a quiet grin, who you would never imagine subscribing to something extremist, unempirical, and tribalist. They may well even play the ukulele while singing Odetta songs and sipping Knob Creek. Yet this selfsame person will, with no hesitation, sign a letter requesting the firing or public shaming of someone who has contravened the Elect’s doctrine.

We will hear that this is a book “against antiracism,” and thus racist (cue the fist bumps). But as most of us can see, there is a difference between being antiracist and being antiracist in a hostile way, where one is to pillory people for what, as recently as ten years ago, would have been thought of as petty torts or even as nothing at all, to espouse policies that hurt black people as long as supporting them makes you seem aware that racism exists, and to pretend that America never makes any real progress on racism and privately almost hope that it doesn’t, because it would deprive you of a sense of purpose. We must conceive of such people as adherents of a sect called the Elect.

What kind of people do these things? Religious fundamentalists.

Why do they get away with it? Because they scare us in calling us heretics in the public square.

Are we going to let them continue to? Not if we want to keep our intellectual, moral, and artistic culture from being strangled by what is not a sociopolitical program but a religion. The Elect are operating on the basis of a new religion emerging before us here in our own times.

THE NEW RELIGION

we have traditionally restricted the word religion to certain ideologies founded in creation myths, guided by ancient texts, and requiring that one subscribe to certain beliefs beyond the reach of empirical experience. This, however, is an accident, just as it is that we call tomatoes vegetables rather than fruits. If we rolled the tape again, the word religion could easily apply as well to more recently emerged ways of thinking within which there is no explicit requirement to subscribe to unempirical beliefs, even if the school of thought does reveal itself to entail such beliefs upon analysis. One of them is this extremist version of antiracism today.

Early Christians did not think of themselves as “a religion,” either. They thought of themselves as bearers of truth,

it will feel unwelcome to the Elect to be deemed a religion, because they do not bill themselves as such and often associate devout religiosity with backwardness.

It is inherent to a religion that, amid various other tenets and commitments, one is to accept certain suspensions of disbelief.

Certain questions are not to be asked or, if asked, only politely. The answer one gets, despite being somewhat half-cocked, is to be accepted. The Christian is allowed to ask why the Bible is so self-contradictory, or why God allows such terrible things to happen. But no one has had a smackdown answer for two millennia anyway, and what’s key is that you believe.

One internalizes an etiquette that it stops there. One is to classify the issues as “deep.” A way to fashion this as of a piece with rational thought is to assume that the relevant questions “always lead to more questions.”

in “the conversation” about race that we are so often told we need to have, the tacit idea is that black people will express their grievances and whites will agree. “Oh, no, no—you’re caricaturing,” the Elect object when we characterize their conversations that way, but they are unable to specify a single thing they might learn in said conversation, as opposed to what we heathen (see below) might. Rather, just as the Christian may be told that the main thing is to believe, the Elect are taught that the main thing is to not be racist, regardless of the implications of their beliefs for the people they are supposedly fighting for.

for the Elect, battling racism is to be questioned only in ways that reinforce the idea that the Elect are correct—even at the cost of basic sense. This is superstition.

This is all very Abrahamic, as religion goes. Muslim, Islam—the core of such words in Arabic is the consonants s-l-m, which constitute the concept of submission. One submits not only to a God. To suspend disbelief is a kind of submission. It is no accident that many of the white Elect spontaneously put their hands above their heads as an indication that they understand that they bear “white privilege.” Think of this type, asserting “Oh, I know I’m privileged!” while holding their hand up, palm out, like a Pentecostal. Maybe they think they are being a little “hip” and taking a page from black gestures—but then upon reflection they would surely condemn that as “cultural appropriation” of a kind they surely revile. They are so comfortable with that gesture in attesting to their privilege because of an overriding impulse: to indicate submission to a power up there looking down on them.

its audience was seeking proclamation, not information.

for his fans he has been not just a teacher but a preacher.

It probably wasn’t the kind of sermon that, for most of those people, blew their minds. They enjoyed it because it was a beautiful rendition of that which they knew before, and it gave them comfort.

On race, the Elect cherish certain top-rate thinkers for their gifts in phrasing, repeating, and crafting artful variations upon points considered crucial. These are their priests, their clergy. You need your preacher to keep telling the religion’s truth, and to tell it often, since the superstitious, nonempirical wing of the ideology is easy to drift away from as real life impinges ever upon you in daily existence.

The Elect, then, have magic, clergy, and also a conception of original sin. Under Elect creed, the sin is “white privilege.”

To anticipate a question, yes, I do believe that to be white in America is to automatically harbor certain unstated privileges in terms of one’s sense of belonging. Figures of authority are the same color as you. You are thought of as the default category. You are not subject to stereotypes. Although these days, you actually are subject to one—that of the menacing, anal “whiteness” monster the Elect tar you as—but we shall not quibble.

But the issue here is not whether I or anyone else thinks white privilege is real, but what we consider the proper response to it. The Elect are to ritually “acknowledge” that they possess white privilege, with an awareness that they can never be absolved of it.

if whites venture any statement on the topic other than that they harbor white privilege, it only proves that they are racists, too “fragile” to admit it. The circularity here—“You’re a racist, and if you say you aren’t, it just proves that you are”—is the logic of the sandbox.

Nominally, one acknowledges original sin as a preparation for admittance to living in the grace of Jesus after death. On the ground, however, a person often lives within a narrower concern—whether or not one is a good person here on this earth—for reasons connected to our everyday experiences and how we appear to others as we go through them. In the same way, this acknowledgment of white privilege is framed as a prelude to activism, but in practice, the acknowledgment itself is the main meal. Despite formal claims otherwise, in real life the Elect testify—yes, testify—to their white privilege as a self-standing, totemic act.

“Why don’t they allow people to have different opinions?”

You’re missing the point. The Elect can seem truly baffling—until we see that they are a religion. Specifically, an evangelical one.

To wit: Do we wonder why fundamentalist Christians do not see their beliefs as just one of many valid opinions? They see themselves as bearers of a Good News that, if all people would simply open up and see it, would create a perfect world. That most of the world does not fall in with them is something they learn to bear with toleration, with a hope that in the future things will turn their way. We see a certain coherence in Christians who view the rest of us as “heathen.” We may disagree, but we can easily imagine someone under the impression that their worldview—if it includes unreachable belief in things we never see or feel that they insist are real nevertheless—is truth, while ours is an error. Christianity (or one of the other Abrahamic religions) is something many of us grow up around, or at least know of, from an early age. It feels normal. Because it is.

To be Elect is to think in exactly the same way. Key to being Elect is a sense that there is always a flock of unconverted heathen. Many of the heathen are, for example, the whites “out there,”

The Elect wonder how those people “out there” can be reached. They are, from a Mormon perspective, behind doors as yet un–knocked upon.

The people in question are out as compared with what is thought of as in here—in here where we are blessed with the true wisdom, a womb of sorts, where we live bathed in the grace of … well, let’s just have it as in here where we “get it,” ritually atoning for our stain of white privilege.

It is easy to see smugness in this vision,

Elect scripture stipulates a judgment day: the great day when America “owns up to” or “comes to terms with” racism and finally fixes it. Apparently this will happen through the long-term effects of psychological self-mortification combined with the transformational political activism that whites will be moved to effect upon being morally shamed and verbally muzzled.

And notice that the Elect find such questions unwelcome, or even arrogant, as if they are asking how we dare question the divine. Even the language here is liturgical, referring only approximately to actual existence, and fully comprehensible only as poetry, spirit, or prophecy. So, to venture some additional arrogance: What would it mean for America to “come to terms” with racism? Precisely what configuration, event, or consensus would this coming to terms consist of? Who would determine that the terms had actually been come to? Why should we assume that the Elect would ever allow that the terms had been come to? They are, after all, obsessively condemnatory of any attempts to come to any today—they teach us that any sense we have that progress is happening is just another form of racism and “fragility,” and are professionally resistant to allowing that any real progress has happened.

On the ground, the Elect imperative is to insist how far we are from this great day, mired in a present within which nothing changes. Why? Because the fantasy of an America ever just a half inch past Plessy v. Ferguson creates an urgency that justifies extreme action. Catastrophizing the current moment is a hallmark of ideology;

have attracted and retained their followers by appealing to an idealized past, a fantastical future, and an indelibly polluted present.

To these people, actual progress on race is not something to celebrate but to talk around. This is because, with progress, the Elect lose their sense of purpose.

Note: What they are after is not money or power, but sheer purpose, in the basic sense of feeling like you matter and that your life has a meaningful agenda.

Note: makes you think about how frankl says the driving force of life isn’t a Will to power but a will to meaning. Perhaps that may be a better explanation for religion than Nietzsche

Yet this almost fantastical pessimism was predictably celebrated by the usual suspects as thrilling testimony. This kind of thing makes sense only as a willful refusal to allow that real change happens. Sociopolitical progress is irrelevant to the Elect’s take on race in America not because they are stubborn, not because they profit somehow from stirring people up, but because antiracism is their religious faith.

The Elect consider it imperative to not only critique those who disagree with their creed, but to seek their punishment and elimination to whatever degree real-life conditions can accommodate. There is an overriding sense that unbelievers must be not just spoken out against, but called out, isolated, and banned.

what the Elect call problematic is what a Christian means by blasphemous. The Elect do not ban people out of temper; they do it calmly, between sips of coffee as they surf Twitter, because they consider it a higher wisdom to burn witches.

Not literally, but the sentiment is the same. The Elect are members of a religion, of a kind within which the dissenter is not just someone in disagreement but is a kind of environmental pollution. They are not to be among us.

found his very presence unbearable:

any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space.

A sad amount of ink has been spilled over the idea that such people must stop being so delicate, that they are fragile creatures deformed by helicopter parenting. The truth is that this is not real fragility, but a pose. The Elect do not feel frightened, much less physically injured, by columns, tweets, syllabi, symbols, and verbal expressions. They are posing as injured in order to demonstrate the “violence” of the views with which they disagree and thus prove that those views are evil.

The religious fervor is absolutist, complete with a Manichaean sense of good versus evil.

whenever you hear the Elect deem someone “problematic,” to understand what they are saying and hold them accountable for it, substitute the word witch.

a dissenting view must be not just questioned but quashed, there being no possible good world that includes it.

Why can’t they allow other views? Remember, this is religion, not political science, and specifically a religion eerily akin to devout Christianity. To the Elect, racism is the equivalent of Satan. If I deign to walk by Satan with the idea that we can just let him be, I am missing the point. I am “wrong.”

the Elect take on race is founded on a religious requirement to decry racism rather than on seeking and measuring the results of efforts to make black people’s lives better. As such, under their perspective, my views qualify as errors. In not adhering to their tenets, I am committing the sin of countering their gospel, dismissing the mission that they see as rendering them and other people worthy as human beings. As such, I am a foe, someone who is “against” them—and thus, by extension, “against” black equality.

“he thought it was ok to send,” with its air of censure by a tribunal of prelates who decide what is permissible to say versus what isn’t.

sainthood increases with all other people as you move down the hierarchy of intersectional oppression.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, it became newly common to see white people actually adopting religious body language in fealty to black people, with black people often present and standing in attendance. In Bethesda, Maryland, white protesters against Floyd’s murder knelt on the pavement en masse, chanting allegiance to anti-white-privilege tenets incanted by what could only be deemed the pastor of the flock, all with hands actually up in the air. Social media recorded another episode in which white protesters actually bowed down to black people standing right in front of them as they received their antiracism testaments, many in tears. White protesters washed their fellow black protesters’ feet in Cary, North Carolina (yes, this actually happened!), while elsewhere, many black protesters sensed some performativity in white activists strolling around with painted whip scars on their bodies, to show their sympathy for the black condition.

a certain modern way of thinking as less progressive than peculiar, as something we must learn to step around and resist rather than let pass as a kind of higher wisdom. A cohesive and forward-looking society must treat this kind of thought like a virus, a regrettable though perhaps inevitable result of modern social history, which nevertheless must be ongoingly corralled. We should hope for its eventual disappearance, but if this is impossible—and it likely is—it must be kept on the margins of our existence, just as smallpox is.

it isn’t that they don’t want their power taken away: The Elect see themselves as speaking truth to power, not as occupying it. What they perceive as threatened is their reason for being, as engaged humans in this world. We cannot hate them for that, but our problem is the vast gulf between their sense of personal mission and the rest of ours, and the fact that their mission includes the tool of calling people racists in the public square.

they may seem unlike what we think of as “religious.” But don’t be fooled: Religion knows no culture. Nor do all religions entail the worship of a God (the Elect lack one), or even forgiveness (which the Elect do not seem to have exactly caught up with just yet). As Eric Hoffer put it, religions don’t need a God, but they need a devil, and the Elect have that down quite comfortably. Superstition, clergy, sinfulness, a proselytizing impulse, a revulsion against the impure—it’s all there.

WHAT ATTRACTS PEOPLE TO THIS RELIGION?

A religion soothes. It helps people make sense of things.

any claim of racism a black person makes must qualify automatically as valid because … they are black and speaking from “their experience.”

this makes no sense at all because any human’s take on something might be erroneous,

white person embraces it as a way of showing how thoroughly they understand that racism exists

its signature proponents have usually been people of color makes critiquing the “theory” especially forbidding to most. Those who deign to take on CRT beyond polite quibbles, if they do it where people will really hear it, are dismissed as racists or, if of color, just plain broken,

With whites, to be Elect is a natural outcome of the transformation of the left from what philosopher Richard Rorty termed in his Achieving Our Country a reformist left to a cultural left after the 1960s. This begins with a proposition that the American system is too rotten to merit reform, and that true justice will require our entire set of cultural values to change. As with literary deconstruction, this in itself is an interesting idea that deserves a “seat at the table.” However, an almost inevitable outgrowth of it is an inward turn in its adherents, wherein one’s commitment is driven more by how it feels to be someone with the message rather than the message alone.

As Rorty put it in that book, one comes to feel that self-expression is, in itself, a kind of persuasion, in that since you have the “proper” ideals, how you feel must, by itself, carry a certain moral and even logical authority. No human being can sit and review basic principles and their validity on a daily basis, and thus, after a while, this cultural leftist has come to suppose that his or her sentiments are a kind of political manifesto in themselves.

The result is what Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have called “folk politics,” under which a prime attraction, embodied partly in the idea that to vent is to reason, is that we can “reduce complexity down to a human scale.” Electism is presented as complex—i.e., in requiring the “work” we are told is necessary—but it is also, in being motivated by a simple quest to show that one is not a racist, rather easy. Easy is always attractive to all of us: Electism is a kind of politics hack.

Electism is one more in an endless succession of political philosophies offering this sense of coherence.

Of course, to be a proper Elect is to embrace a self-flagellational guilt for things you did not do. Yet even this, oddly, feels good. It is a brand of the “Western masochism” that philosopher Pascal Bruckner has taught us about. Pundit Douglas Murray nails it: “People imbibe because they like it,” he tartly puts it. “It lifts them up and exalts them. Rather than being people responsible for themselves and answerable to those they know, they become the self-appointed representatives of the living and dead, the bearers of a terrible history as well as the potential redeemers of mankind. From being a nobody one becomes a somebody.” Murray was referring to the left’s take on Islam, but the analysis applies just as well to today’s Elect take on black people.

Hence what Émile Durkheim called a “collective effervescence,”

Electism simply fills a hole left after the secular shift among thinking Americans especially after the 1960s. Under this analysis, it is human to need religious thought for a basic sense of succor, such that if institutional religion no longer grounds one’s thought, then some similarly themed ideology will come in to serve in its place.

I will leave it to philosophers and theologians to explore that possibility in depth. However, it is hard not to see prescience in predictions such as Sigmund Freud’s—which he meant in warning, not celebration:

If you wish to expel religion from our European civilization you can only do it through another system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity, and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defence.

these are aesthetic matters. Behind these big words and menacing phrases, as often as not, is logic as sloppy as anything you might hear from a spokesperson for Donald Trump. Firing Garrels did not “function”—as these people like to use that word—to “dismantle structures,” which stayed in place in the Tenderloin, a walk from the museum. Garrels’s firing “functioned,” as it were, to make his inquisitors feel noble, and look noble to one another. They were doing their duty as religious parishioners displaying their faith, not forging societal change.

Kids build forts because they like building forts. As often as not, after they’ve built one, they don’t really spend much time in it. People claiming that the “work” of white-privilege consciousness-raising is a prelude to political action are like kids pretending their forts are for protection. It feels good to say that all of this rhetoric and dismissal is necessary for changing “structures.” But the real reason they are engaging in this suspiciously lengthy prelude is that there is a joy almost all of us take in hostility. Most who aren’t up for wielding it themselves don’t mind watching it slung.

This is human nature. You love flinging it at others partly as a balm against the pain you exert when flinging it at yourself. The guilt of the civilized, ressentiment: This is not just me, but Nietzsche and Freud, the humanistic canon. Wait—to be enlightened we must reject that concept as just some dead white guys sounding off? Okay, let’s try this: Who doesn’t get off at least a bit on squaring off and yelling “No!”? Or “Asshole!”? Or … “Heretic!”?

If Elect philosophy were really about changing the world, its parishioners would be ever champing at the bit to get out and do the changing,

The Elect teach us that all of this book burning and catcalling, all of these neck swivels and pliés and twerks, are necessary before getting down to actual work, but they never tell us why. Maybe the idea is that even if all of this kabuki was not necessary to get us where we are now, for some reason we need it to get us anywhere beyond. But that’s just me trying to make some sense. Note that the Elect never present that justification, and let’s face it: It’d be flabby.

Really. Teach people, by firing Garrels, to never say “reverse racism”—okay; so then, when we are safe from that term and others, San Francisco folk will rise up in the thousands and force legislators to make it so that no one ever sleeps in a tent on the sidewalk? One can only ask What the fuck? And no, I have caricatured not a bit. What do the Elect really intend by getting people like Garrels fired? Just how is all of their fire and brimstone—implication intended—related to the fate of actual people suffering?

“Now breathe,” as Robin DiAngelo so graciously advises in her religious primer. But once we breathe, we are to fire Garrels for blaspheming—to no effect whatsoever upon a single person suffering. This is where we are.

Electism’s appeal also stems from the fact that, as much as its fans claim that the relevant issues are complex, it is actually founded on aspects of cognition that are rather elemental. Electism is, ultimately, easy.

Elect language deftly straddles the gap between reality and rhetoric here with the word function. “X functions to keep black people mired in …” they say, when X is an abstraction that has no intentions and thus cannot “keep” anyone in anything. But a Latinate term like function does two things: (1) It implies higher reasoning in being a formal word and (2) it keeps the exact nature of the supposed thing being “done” at a distance via the abstractness of the word, because real questions seem beside the point when there is justice to be done.

The Elect, then, despite their general level of education and advanced vocabulary, are engaging in intuition over questioning, quietly trashing the basic orientations of scientific inquiry in favor of going back to centering—to use one of their favorite terms—feelings, including the atavistic kind that clamor to see people not just critiqued but punished. Michael Lind is sadly accurate in his take on the Elect, who he sees as

reviving the preliberal, premodern religious approach to society, conceived of as a congregation of the virtuous and like-minded. Either you are a true believer or you are a heretic. There can be no compromise with wicked people, and the chief measure of wickedness is not action—[such as] engaging in overt discrimination on the basis of race—but expressing disapproved attitudes and refusing to use ritualized politically-correct language.

🔮 The Cosmos

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