America Goes Soviet
Izabella Tabarovsky writes at Tablet about collective demonization:
Collective demonizations of prominent cultural figures were an integral part of the Soviet culture of denunciation that pervaded every workplace and apartment building....Twitter has been used as a platform for exercises in unanimous condemnation for as long as it has existed. Countless careers and lives have been ruined as outraged mobs have descended on people whose social media gaffes or old teenage behavior were held up to public scorn and judged to be deplorable and unforgivable. But it wasn't until the past couple of weeks that the similarity of our current culture with the Soviet practice of collective hounding presented itself to me with such stark clarity. Perhaps it was the specific professions and the cultural institutions involved--and the specific acts of writers banding together to abuse and cancel their colleagues--that brought that sordid history back.
On June 3, The New York Times published an opinion piece that much of its progressive staff found offensive and dangerous. (The author, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, had called to send in the military to curb the violence and looting that accompanied the nationwide protests against the killing of George Floyd.) The targets of their unanimous condemnation, which was gleefully joined by the Twitter proletariat, which took pleasure in helping the once-august newspaper shred itself to pieces in public, were New York Times' opinion section editor James Bennet, who had ultimate authority for publishing the piece, though he hadn't supervised its editing, and op-ed staff editor and writer Bari Weiss (a former Tablet staffer).
Weiss had nothing to do with editing or publishing the piece. On June 4, however, she posted a Twitter thread characterizing the internal turmoil at the Times as a "civil war" between the "(mostly young) wokes" who "call themselves liberals and progressives" and the "(mostly 40+) liberals" who adhere to "the principles of civil libertarianism." She attributed the behavior of the "wokes" to their "safetyism" worldview, in which "the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech."
It was just one journalist's opinion, but to Weiss' colleagues her semi-unflattering description of the split felt like an intolerable attack against the collective. Although Weiss did not name anyone in either the "woke" or the older "liberal" camp, her younger colleagues felt collectively attacked and slandered. They lashed out. Pretty soon, Weiss was trending on Twitter.
As the mob's fury kicked into high gear, the language of collective outrage grew increasingly strident, even violent. Goldie Taylor, writer and editor-at-large at The Daily Beast, queried in a since-deleted tweet why Weiss "still got her teeth." With heads rolling at the Times--James Bennet resigned, and deputy editorial page editor James Dao was reassigned to the newsroom--one member of the staff asked for Weiss to be fired for having bad-mouthed "her younger newsroom colleagues" and insulted "all of our foreign correspondents who have actually reported from civil wars." (It was unclear how she did that, other than having used the phrase "civil war" as a metaphor.)
Mehdi Hasan, a columnist with the Intercept, opined to his 880,000 Twitter followers that it would be strange if Weiss retained her job now that Bennet had been removed. He suggested that her thread had "mocked" her nonwhite colleagues. (It did not.) In a follow-up tweet Hasan went further, suggesting that to defend Weiss would make one a bad anti-racist--a threat based on a deeply manipulated interpretation of Weiss' post, yet powerful enough to stop his followers from making the mistake.
All of us who came out of the Soviet system bear scars of the practice of unanimous condemnation, whether we ourselves had been targets or participants in it or not. It is partly why Soviet immigrants are often so averse to any expressions of collectivism: We have seen its ugliest expressions in our own lives and our friends' and families' lives.
...In a collectivist culture, one hoped-for result of group condemnations is control--both over the target of abuse and the broader society. When sufficiently broad levels of society realize that the price of nonconformity is being publicly humiliated, expelled from the community of "people of goodwill" (another Soviet cliché) and cut off from sources of income, the powers that be need to work less hard to enforce the rules.
But while the policy in the USSR was by and large set by the authorities, it would be too simplistic to imagine that those below had no choices, and didn't often join in these rituals gladly, whether to obtain some real or imagined benefit for themselves, or to salve internal psychic wounds, or to take pleasure in the exercise of cruelty toward a person who had been declared to be a legitimate target of the collective.
...From my vantage point, this cultural moment in these United States feels incredibly precarious. The practice of collective condemnation feels like an assertion of a culture that ultimately tramples on the individual and creates an oppressive society. Whether that society looks like Soviet Russia, or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Castro's Cuba, or today's China, or something uniquely 21st-century American, the failure of institutions and individuals to stand up to mob rule is no longer an option we can afford.
It's gone nuts.
Ironically I think unapologetic conservatives are safer from the left than the left is.
NicoleK at June 19, 2020 4:16 AM
unapologetic conservatives are safer from the left
They tend to be well armed.
I R A Darth Aggie at June 19, 2020 7:24 AM
How do the finances of this work? Doesn't the NYT have to cater to its actual paying audience (old, mostly white, traditional liberals)?
It's paper subscribers are certainly old and millennials are not the kind of people to pay for a subscription. The NYT is pleasing the people who don't give it money and pissing off the people who do.
Curtis at June 19, 2020 9:23 AM
It's more than that, though, IRA. There's this purity test. And if you fail... that's it. You can grovel all you like but unless you quit any influential position you have you will be hounded like mad.
NicoleK at June 19, 2020 10:44 AM
The fault here lies entirely with corporations and universities that bow down to mob behavior. All they have to do is nothing when twitter blows up--who cares what a mob thinks? Ignore them like you do a toddler having a tantrum. If your child has a fit because you won't let them drive or have a gun, do you give in? Our leaders are the biggest chickens ever. Cowards. These twitter mobs only have the power we give them. No more.
In the NYT case, is it not news when a senator has something to say? Is not the editor in chief in charge?
If you give in to the mob they quickly learn that they have real power to destroy. It doesn't matter to them that they know nothing. Statues of abolitionists were attacked last week. Mobs don't care.
cc at June 19, 2020 10:47 AM
Virginia governor Ralph "Blackface or Klansman" Northam (D) borrowed a song from REO Speedwagon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTBv4kAdk_w
https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1273481964255756289
Just don't comment. Say nothing. Go about one's business. Sooner or later the howling mob will grow bored and wander away to find a new victim.
Or you can tell 'em to kiss your grits then bark at the hole.
I R A Darth Aggie at June 19, 2020 12:08 PM
More toddler:
https://twitter.com/counterchekist/status/1271986003935399942
I R A Darth Aggie at June 19, 2020 12:11 PM
> It's more than that, though,
> IRA. There's this purity test.
> And if you fail... that's it.
I think what Ira's saying is that he ain't takin' no fuckin' purity test.
Everybody snickers about American gun ownership, even the suppressed citizens of nations where the local mayor would know if you had ANYTHING empowering tucked away in a basement or under a mattress.
But the workings of the Second Amendment in the rhetorical and literal levels are deeply intertwined… You don't harvest admirable American cussedness until people have the sleep-at-night resources in their homes to tell busybodies to fuck right off.
Crid at June 19, 2020 12:18 PM
Probably should have said corporeal instead of literal level.
Y'know, the bleedy part. People's bodies, families, property, etc. As compared to the words-y part.
Crid at June 19, 2020 12:23 PM
Damn! That coulda been one of the great comments.
Ah well, we'll add the correction for the monthly newsletter.
Crid at June 19, 2020 12:24 PM
“Everybody snickers about American gun ownership, even the suppressed citizens of nations where the local mayor would know if you had ANYTHING empowering tucked away in a basement or under a mattress.”
Hah . Germany essentially banned private Handgun gun ownership years ago, by putting more and more restrictions on it. Must be a member of a club, most store you gun at the club, Yada yada.
Long story short, I have some acquaintances in the gun business who run a shop in Texas. Ethnic Germans, immigrants. Every year for years they would exploit a loophole in the German gun laws that allowed you to sell your unregistered undeclared handgun if it was going to be immediately exported out of Germany.
Advertising discreetly in the various newspapers they would come back with a whole shit pot full of Sig, Sauer Hammerlis, Walter, etc, which they would take to the United States and sell for a hefty profit.
Isab at June 19, 2020 5:22 PM
Ahem. Demonization has been directed and abetted by public policy starting in the 1960s.
Everything you see today in race relations is the result of this carefully-prepared and nurtured hoax, and if you attempt to behave in ways other than your self-appointed moral superiors authorize, you will be... hurt.
Don't point this out, because penalties accrue to the honest.
Radwaste at June 19, 2020 6:12 PM
Yeah but what I'm saying is IRA isn't being asked to take the purity test... it's internal within the left. They already know the conservatives failed so they don't care, they don'tgo after them as hard.
I have just been seeing so many people grovel and apologize for microaggressions lately, and the mob doesn't relent. So from a personal perspective there's no point.
I ended up leaving several alum and other social groups because I couldn't stand the way people were being treated.
NicoleK at June 19, 2020 10:42 PM
> They already know the
> conservatives failed so they
> don't care, they don'tgo after
> them as hard.
Dunno about that… People want fights they can win, or at least they want counterparts who won't effectively respond. Ever notice how Christians are the believers most often maligned by atheists, even as Muslim atrocities are unaddressed?
Here's a joke from a few years ago.
Crid at June 20, 2020 1:02 PM
The younger the employee, the lower the salary.
KateC at June 21, 2020 7:04 AM
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