To The Barricades, O Liberals!
It's not just the nationalist right, but the absolutist Left, that threatens our world
Enough! It’s time for liberal institutions to say “enough” to the Jacobins who are bent on destroying them. By “liberal institutions” I mean the universities, newspapers, museums, foundations, writers organizations and the like that function as the ecological niche for the absolutists of the Left who are now, bizarrely, braying for their downfall. It may have appeared, until recently, that the path of self-preservation lay with appeasement; it is now obvious that these institutions are being forced to choose between defending their core values or accepting their own demise.
The chief subject of this newsletter has been practical ways to blunt threats to democracy from the right–because that’s where the worst threats are coming from. But a healthy liberal democracy requires not only political and economic institutions, but cultural ones, whose role is to promote the pursuit of knowledge, of truth, of beauty, and shelter them from the forces of politics and the marketplace. Because our culture is largely liberal, so, too, are those institutions; and it is their values that today’s radical activists seem to most deeply despise.
This struggle did not begin October 7. In recent years a parade of museum directors and curators have been fired, or forced to retire, after committing some offense against identity politics deemed evidence of “white supremacy.” The American Civil Liberties Union has been riven by demands among younger attorneys that it stop defending forms of speech they regard as unjust. Conservative speakers invited to university campuses have been regularly hooted down, at times with the acquiescence of administrators.
The war in Gaza, however, has furnished activists with a cause they regard as so unarguable, and so paramount, that the very act of abiding by institutional constraints comes to be seen as complicity with evil. Of course the most dramatic demonstrations of non-compliance have occurred on campus, where students have occupied public space and accepted arrest rather than disperse. I might be protesting too if I were in college; yet students outraged by Israel’s reckless indifference to Palestinian life and suffering have focused their fury not only on Israel and President Biden but on university administrations that have, rightly, avoided taking a side on an issue that profoundly divides students, faculty and board members.
For me, however, the last straw has come with the assault upon the writers organization PEN, of which I am a member and where I serve as an active volunteer. Like the ACLU, PEN is dedicated to the principle of free speech, defending writers imprisoned abroad and highlighting threats to free speech at home, for example the banning of books in school and public libraries. And like the ACLU, many of its members now regard that value-neutral commitment as a form of moral cowardice. In early February, 600 writers–a number that later grew to 1300–released an open letter demanding that PEN explicitly condemn Israel, “a Zionist colonial state funded by the U.S. government.” One month later, another group, including such prominent figures as Naomi Klein, Lorrie Moore, Elizabeth Alexander and Hisham Matar, released a letter stating that they would not attend the PEN World Voices festival in May. And then, several weeks ago, many of the writers longlisted for PEN’s prestigious awards stated that they had withdrawn their works from consideration. Both the festival and the awards ceremony have now been canceled.
Throughout this period, PEN has done the kinds of things it always does amidst violent conflict, calling for a ceasefire, helping individual Palestinian writers, criticizing Israeli crackdowns on the press. It has not, however, explicitly condemned Israel, much less called it a Zionist colonial state. That is not PEN’s role, as the organization explained in a letter of its own. That letter did not mollify the activists, who responded in mid-April. “Neutrality,” they declared, “is a betrayal of justice.” Moreover, they wrote, “among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.”
How can we explain that astonishing assertion? The signatories are not college students, or young curators, or junior civil liberties lawyers. Some of them are profoundly gifted writers of fiction, not to mention full-grown adults. Yet in their self-righteous fury they cannot see that many “writers of conscience”--and indeed people of conscience–who believe that Israel has committed terrible violations of human rights do not think that those violations amount to genocide. They cannot see that it is precisely PEN’s unwillingness to reconstitute itself as a social justice organization that allows it to carry out its sacred mission of protecting writers the world over. Many of them have called for the resignation of PEN’s president and executive director. The fact that the organization might be destroyed if they got their way is of no matter. They are, after all, writers of conscience.
Liberal democracy depends for its survival on respect for principles like the rule of law, free speech, and the peaceful transfer of power. They are “neutral” in the sense of applying equally to all parties and points of view. That is why today’s right-wing populists, who believe that truth resides with them alone, treat those principles, and the institutions that enshrine them, with contempt. Now it seems that liberalism, with its elaborate system of restraints and its deference to process, has become increasingly intolerable to the left as well. Perhaps illiberalism is by its very nature contagious: how can one side remain rule-abiding while the other is not?
Yet today’s radicals aren’t targeting the right so much as the “near enemy” of universities, museums, foundations. And those institutions are rendered almost defenseless by their internalization of many of the principles of their most implacable critics. Universities fall all over themselves to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. museums highlight the anti-colonial subtext of canonical painters. PEN has always struck me as achingly sensitive to the identity fixation of young writers. But this very receptivity encourages the Jacobins to think of these institutions not as what they are but as instruments for the achievement of their social justice aims. And then they’re outraged when PEN insists on being PEN, or The New York Times on being The New York Times.
There are signs that these institutions have woken up to their predicament. Stanford Law School’s dean rebuked both the students who hounded a conservative speaker off the stage and the administrator who appeared to abet them; the Times recently ordered an investigation of reporters who may have leaked information out of opposition to the paper’s Gaza coverage; PEN has refused to stand down from its principled defense of its core values. None of these institutions want to alienate some of their most talented and impassioned constituents. What would PEN be without the likes of Lorrie Moore? Yet we may have to find out. If the purists want to found a purist writers organization, or museum, or university of their own, we should bid them godspeed.
"[...] They like to understand. They like to play devil's advocate./ My father plays soccer. It's so hot in Gaza./ No place for a child's braid. Under/ that hospital elevator. When this is over./ When this is over there is no over but quiet./ Coworkers will congratulate me on the ceasefire/ and I will stretch my teeth into a country. [...] Tell me,/ what op-ed will grant the dead their dying?/ What editor? What red-line? What pocket?/ What earth. What shake. What silence." From the poem "Naturalized" by Hala Alyan. I have no principle to tolerate genocide by. Sorry, Jim.