This NYT column is a sandwich. It starts and ends with a denunciation of conservatives for continued support for Donald Trump and continued “flight 93” thinking. But in the middle are these two paragraphs:
Over the last decade or so, as illiberalism, cancel culture and all the rest have arisen within the universities and elite institutions on the left, dozens of publications and organizations have sprung up. They have drawn a sharp line between progressives who believe in liberal free speech norms, and those who don’t.
There are new and transformed magazines and movements like American Purpose, Persuasion, Counterweight, Arc Digital, Tablet and Liberties that point out the excesses of the social justice movement and distinguish between those who think speech is a mutual exploration to seek truth and those who think speech is a structure of domination to perpetuate systems of privilege.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Given an NYT audience, if you want them to pay attention to those paragraphs, wouldn’t you have to hide them in the sandwich?
He wants his liberal readers to read him and feel like he’s on their side. So any denunciation of wokeness has to be surrounded by denouncements of the “bad guys”. If Brooks started out with the points from the middle, most of his readers would just stop reading after the first paragraph.
The “flight 93” slur won’t age well. In time January 6 will become best known as the USA “Tianmen Square moment ” with the Martyr to Democracy Ashli Babbitt, callously murdered by a nameless government thug becoming as revered and honored as the tank guy.
The occupation of the capitol was a pro-democracy exercise in patriotic citizenship and had nothing to do with Trump. The pro-democracy forces were pushed to the limit by an unfair and opaque election in which hack partisan judges randomly illegally changed election rules to favor one party, Zuckerberg financed states elections and his goons ran amok unsupervised in vote counting areas, voter registration rolls were in total disarray and countless ballots mailed out to incorrect addresses, minimal effort undertaken to prevent fraud, and countless other instances of procedural wrongs that made the election opaque and questionable. The anti-democracy forces seeking to white wash this shameful moment in history will forever be remembered with scorn and contempt.
I’ve been saying Ashli Babbitt was killed by the Secret Police. Like those who protected HR Clinton from indictment over her illegal email crimes.
The elite won’t accept the pro-democracy exercise, and since my sister was there, she explains she was against election fraud. It will more likely be recorded by supporters as a pro-Trump, anti-fraud protest.
Oh my.
I think Brooks thinks he “needs” to put the truth in a sandwich with lies for bread, in order for the NYT readers to eat it. Tho maybe he also believes the lies are true.
Ross Douthat also seems required to skirt many truths.
If “liberals” are unable to win the fight for Free Speech, there will come some better fighter than Trump who does fight, to win, in Free Speech. A fighter who is less liberal than Trump.
Jonathan Turley is a Dem Party supporting lawyer very very strongly in favor of Free Speech, up to the limits against incitement to violence as SCOTUS decisions have been made. He’s doing great work, on many cases.
https://jonathanturley.org/
Plus, he’s on my FI team!
Brooks writes from a position of fear.
I have been very happy with Liberties Journal. It is a broad assortment of topics dancing around the concepts of liberalism and culture. Heady stuff. Also well designed as an object. The issues are more like nice books than periodicals.
The next sentence after the two paragraphs is, “This is exactly the line-drawing that now confronts the right, which faces a more radical threat.”
The direct interpretation of Brooks is that he is calling on (classical) liberals on both the Left and Right to draw a sharp (or bright) line between themselves and illiberals “on their own side”: “[Left liberals] have drawn a sharp line between progressives who believe in liberal free speech norms, and those who don’t….Republicans and conservatives who believe in the liberal project need to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side.” These statements are quite transparent and direct, so I don’t see a Straussian subtext.
Ideally, liberals wouldn’t view illiberals as “on their own side”. That’s the meaning of the il- prefix.