Imagine Christian nationalists didn’t just exist but were aggressively demanding that you affirm their doctrines and practices. Imagining being told that you had to obey the rules of their ideology. Imagine, moreover, that they had the state at their backs to make sure that you did. You would be disciplined and even terminated from employment for refusing to so do. Imagine a DEI program set up along the lines of Christian nationalist thinking. When you complain, they’d tell you that is merely a matter of being kind to Christian nationalists. What’s so hard about that? Respecting Christian nationalists takes nothing from you. What are you, a bigot?
I could have used Islam as my example. Imagine being punished at your work place for failing to obey sharia and its rules against blasphemy. I could have used Scientology, as well. Imagine being required to believe in the existence of thetans and to refrain from criticizing dianetics and the practice of auditing. There are a myriad of other ideologies that make useful examples, but I trust you get the point: A free society depends on individuals being able to believe what they will and others not being compelled to share in those beliefs. I cannot be free if I cannot choose my beliefs. The institutions of a free society must not compel belief any more than they forbid it. Censoring and compelling belief are the signs of a totalitarian society.
What many woke progressives don’t seem to understand, in addition to failing to understand why it’s wrong to compel others to obey the rules of their ideology (a thickness that results from their position in the structure of authority), is that they are, by conditioning people to accept the beliefs of others through the use of coercive tactics, making a whip for their own backs. Put another way, when—and I argue that it is a matter of when not if if this keeps up—another authoritarian ideology replaces the current one as the hegemonic system in American society, progressives are sure to squeal when their speech is censored and compelled.
This is what’s so frustrating about the very long moment of the present time. When right wing activists stand on public grounds or enter public buildings or speak at city council and school board meetings, they are condemned for their presence and speech and the police quickly mobilize to remove them from the premises. The media sparks and spreads panic about their presence and warns of the end of democracy if their presence is tolerated. Right wing voices aren’t allowed to demand election integrity; their actions are portrayed as efforts to undermine free elections. There are many other examples. Whatever the subject, the right wing activist cannot convey his point on his own terms because he doesn’t control the media frame. Progressives do. He is a priori bad and wrong and therefore his speech illegitimate.
When left wing activists do all the same things that the right activist does, indeed, much worse things, they are celebrated as standing up for the democratic values of a free society. Their violent protests are described “mostly peaceful.” Their occupation of public spaces and buildings is portrayed as an exercise of free speech, not as an insurrection. The double standard signals the character of hegemonic power. Progressives have captured our institutions—the academy, the culture, the government, the mass media, the university. People ask how we can know this. The conditions confirm it. Because they are the hegemonic power, progressives are able to frame their politics as normality and cast those who dissent as a dangerous mob.
We don’t need to flip all that by putting the right wing parallel in power. We need to instead push progressivism out of our institutions and establish the principle that our institutions are for everybody and should govern themselves in the neutral fashion that a free and open society demands.
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In a recent conversation, I was accused of articulating heterodox ideas. But my ideas are heterodox only in relation to the orthodoxy of the university, captured by progressive ideology. In the light of the population at large, the same ideas become orthodox. It may be heterodox in the academy to deny that men can be women, but, if we take everybody’s beliefs into account, that assertion is exposed as campus orthodoxy. Most people don’t believe men can be women. Part of the reason they don’t is because they intuitively know that can’t be true. In the absence of a corrupting ideology, their experience with the actual world tells them that. Anybody who had spent any time on a farm knows this is true. The other part of this is that they look at the crackpot ideas of the left and call bullshit because their own bullshit beliefs inoculate them against other bullshit beliefs. We might mock this, but not all bullshit is of the same quality.
People in the academy, many of whom came straight out of high school to pursue their undergraduate college and advanced degrees, live in a bubble where they come to believe that what are bullshit ideas constitute the orthodoxy. This happens to people when they exist in a cloistered environment. This is especially true in the humanities and social sciences. It probably didn’t escape readers that, in the natural and physical sciences, the crackpot “theories” of CRT and queer theory are much less pronounced. Some of these ideas aren’t even tolerated. It’s in the humanities, where imaginations run wild, and in the social sciences, disciplines that risk corruption by ideology because their finding are less sure than their hard science counterparts, that we see smart people believing stupid things.
The desire of trans activists to compel others to affirm their imagined identities is the same desire of progressive academics to demand ideological conformity in the humanities and the social sciences. They only way the junk beliefs can appear to have any truth value is if everyone suspends their disbelief and for whatever reason upholds the validity the doctrine. It’s the same logic of affirmation that trans identifying people depend on to ease their self-doubts.
I’m old school. I’m a scientific materialist. I don’t accept crackpot ideas. And I never will.
freedom and reason 