I thank Russell Greene for his rich, critical review of my recent book The Third Awokening (“Equal Rights, not Equity,” August 6).
Russell and I agree that woke cultural socialism, with its exclusive focus on achieving equal outcomes and psychological harm protection for minorities, reduces human flourishing in society. But a response pointing to where we agree is hardly going to interest readers as much as focusing on the fringes of the Venn Diagram where we see things differently!
Greene’s article advances a number of important criticisms. The first concerns my use of John Stuart Mill’s ideas to defend free expression. Greene correctly notes that Mill smuggled several positive liberal conceits into his political theory, notably the idea of natural equality between men and women. I would add that he believed that breaking the cake of custom and challenging tradition was a more noble way to live than conservative communitarianism; he even held that peripheral nationalities like the Bretons in France should bury their narrow provincialism and assimilate to dominant imperial groups like the French and English. So I share Russell’s misgivings about the positive liberalism that animated Mill and dragged him away from a purely procedural conception of liberty.
Russell also cautions that Mill’s “harm principle” is the source of our ills. Here I am more willing to defend Mill’s justifiable limit on freedom. The notion that I have the freedom to swing my fist up to the point it hits your nose is a reasonable one. But the idea that I can say something up to the point it offends you is not. Thus when it comes to harm, I support limiting freedom when it causes significant physical (including economic) harm, but not when restricting liberty to prevent merely psychological harm. The latter is simply too subject to motivated reasoning and self-deception to justify limits on free expression.
Indeed, woke cultural socialism engages in what I term, appropriating critical theory’s own lexicon, “the social construction of harm.” For instance, I point out in the book that British Sikhs who voted to remain in the European Union are three times more likely than their co-ethnics who voted “Leave” to say they experienced race hate after the 2016 EU referendum. In the United States, black Americans who vote Democrat are twice as likely to say they experienced racism under Donald Trump than under Barack Obama, whereas black Trump voters reported a consistent level across both periods. In the mid-2010s, black people on social media were substantially more likely to report racist microaggressions than those who were not on it.
Greene also observes that I support a moderate level of redistribution, and thus he classifies me as a “left-liberal.” My approach to cultural redistribution, however, is to broaden recruitment efforts and pipelines, but maintain a single standard of merit and equal treatment. I am not sure, however, the difference between us is as wide as it appears. I would accept some concession to race and gender “representation” in bodies such as Congress, but only if this is justified on the basis of grubby pragmatism (“we need a midwestern white man as VP”) rather than our current cultural socialist moralism which reads any deviance from mirror representation as discrimination.
Greene correctly decouples pre-2016 Republicanism from Hayekian classical liberalism such as Milton Friedman advocated. I had overlooked Friedman’s objections to the Civil Rights Act, and thus thank Greene for drawing my attention to this. Others on the right who claimed inspiration from Hayek, however, endorsed neoconservatism and acted as the left’s rule-takers on cultural questions like affirmative action while offering only weak resistance to political correctness and the progressive curriculum. Whilst I appreciate classical liberals’ robust defense of merit and equal treatment in the face of affirmative action and other aspects of DEI, many castigate the efforts of Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and others to restrict critical race and gender ideology in schools.
Democracy and elected government are more transparent and achieve results that a solely market- and choice-based approach cannot.
David French and other “Never-Trumpers” are the most obvious examples of this tendency. But so too are anti-woke voices such as Greg Lukianoff at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) or Yascha Mounk at Johns Hopkins University, both of whom I greatly respect. Their books focus exclusively on moral exhortation and expanding educational choice, shrinking from endorsing government-led restrictions on curriculum content or prescriptive bans on CRT and DEI in government.
My survey work shows, however, that the worldview of young Americans is strongly shaped by what they learn in school, and private or parochial schooling is as saturated with critical race and gender ideology as the public system. I worry that two in three young Americans believe America is a racist country and just 15 percent of university students think a speaker who believes transgenderism is a mental disorder should be permitted to speak on campus. This “youthquake” is a cultural emergency that requires an overhaul of education, including banning politicized teaching and enforcing a balanced approach to history that doesn’t gloss over non-Western or Indigenous slavery, colonialism, and genocide. School choice is good, but will have little impact on this indoctrination machine.
Many libertarians are also silent in the face of the assault on traditional American identity represented by CRT-inspired statue-toppling, “sensitivity readers,” and history rewriting. They seem quite comfortable with the idea of a cultural oligopoly in which an interlocking network of tech firms, payment processors, and accreditors enforce a progressive ethos of DEI and ESG on customers, clients, and employees. Firms and professional bodies that draft highly political speech codes or force mandatory diversity training on employees chill their speech and violate their freedom of conscience. They represent the most important threat to liberty that contemporary American citizens currently experience. This explains why nearly half of employed Americans fear for their job or reputation for what they express in person or online. When it comes to the freedom of institutions or citizens, I prioritize the latter. Yes, government can restrict freedom, but devolved technocratic agencies and large private firms—both of which fly under the radar—pose a bigger threat.
Greene asks why, if voters care about indoctrination enough to vote for DeSantis, they would not care enough to choose the right school. The answer is that the content of education is opaque because teaching takes place behind closed doors. Only a very informed parent with time, stamina, money, and realistic non-progressive options can find out what is really going on and make an informed choice.
By contrast, political campaigns occur under the bright lights of the media with opposing politicians working hard to inform the public. This is why democracy and elected government are more transparent and achieve results that a solely market- and choice-based approach cannot. Just look at universities, where students and parents are free to choose from an almost entirely progressive menu. Though a handful of conservative schools exist, they lack the status and endowments of established R1 universities. Barriers to creating new institutions—especially influential elite ones—are extremely high. Education is riven with market imperfections.
In the final analysis, I am, contra Greene, an originalist, but hold that there will always be a degree of constitutional interpretation. Given this reality, I would prefer to see this minimal degree of interpretation reflect the views of the majority rather than the progressive minority. This means the silent majority must become more organized, using the one institution it controls—elected government—to proactively reform compromised institutions. The future of the republic depends on it.
