Whose Society Is It Anyway?

And: Egypt Stealing Orthodox Monastery?; Never Trust Anyone Under Thirty

Podcaster Dave Rubin at the Danube Institute last night

Last night I was part of a group of guests that appeared on Dave Rubin’s show, taped at the Danube Institute in Budapest. One of the guests was my pal Peter Boghossian, the Red Baron of the Culture War. Peter is a liberal and an atheist who, along with James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, humiliated the academy in the brilliant “Grievance Studies Hoax.” This, from the Wikipedia entry on the affair, explains it:

Through their series of hoax articles, James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose intended to expose issues in what they term as "grievance studies", a subcategory of academic areas where the three believe "a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed [...] and put social grievances ahead of objective truth". The trio referred to several academic fields—postcolonial theory, gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, intersectional feminism, and fat studies—as "grievance studies" because, according to Pluckrose, such areas begin "from the assumption of a grievance" and then bend "the available theories to confirm it".Pluckrose argued that all of these fields derive their underlying theoretical perspectives from the postmodern philosophy that developed in the late 1960s. …

Pluckrose suggested that fields such as postcolonial theory and queer theory could be called "applied postmodernism" in that they sprung up largely in the late 1980s as a means of pushing the gains of the civil rights movement, gay rights movement, and liberal feminism from the arena of legislative change and into the territory of reshaping discourse. She argued that these fields adapted postmodernism to suit their activist agendas. …

Pluckrose described herself and her collaborators as being "left-wing liberal skeptics". She stated that a core reason for why they wanted to carry out the project was to convince other "leftist academics" that there was a problem with "corrupted scholarship" in academic fields that were "based on identity politics and postmodernism." She argued that in rejecting modernism, much postmodernist-derived scholarship was also rejecting science, reason, and liberal democracy, and thus undermining many important progressive gains…

The Grievance Studies hoax was featured in a highly entertaining documentary (watchable on YouTube) by Mike Nayna.

Anyway, on the show last night, which you will all be able to watch soon, Peter talked about his outrageous experiences as a philosophy professor at Portland State University (though he did not name the university, that’s where he taught until he was forced out). He described an internal culture of woke totalitarianism that beggars belief — and did so answering Rubin’s question about why he, as a leftist, loves Hungary. (Answer: because even though Hungarians he encounters might not share his politics or his atheism, Hungary, despite the propaganda in the western media against it, is a place where people are able and eager to discuss and debate issues openly.) There was a French TV documentary crew present. They had interviewed me earlier in the day in my apartment, focusing mostly on my concept of “soft totalitarianism.” As Peter spoke, I texted the French journalist, saying that what Peter is talking about is a classic example of soft totalitarianism: when people in a free, democratic society choose to impose totalitarian standards, with no involvement from the state. Nobody sent Peter Boghossian to jail for asking hard questions, but he, like so many dissenting academics, was still compelled to be silent at that university, for the sake of protecting his job. There’s no way to keep Peter Boghossian quiet in the face of absurdity, so he eventually left the university.

Peter’s interview last night on the Rubin show went on to the point where he said he does not think that the Trump administration’s attack on elite universities goes far enough. His point is that these institutions are so corrupted by soft totalitarianism that the only way to root out this poisonous ideology is through brutal methods. Mind you, all Trump is doing is pressuring them by removing, or threatening to remove, federal funding. An important issue at stake here is this: in a democratic society, do certain people and institutions have a moral and legal right to compel taxpayers to fund their work against their (the taxpayers’) will.

I do not believe they do, and frankly, can hardly believe that this is an issue. To be clear, the question of whether or not it is wise for the Trump administration to undertake this campaign is separate from the question of whether or not it has the right to do so. In a correctly functioning democracy, the people, through their elected representatives, certainly have the right to decide how to spend their own money. No person or institution has a right to that money. What the administration’s campaign against Harvard and other universities exposes is the heretofore uncontested assumption by these institutions that they do possess that right. The illiberal, undemocratic arrogance of these people, who think it is scandalous to be held to account for the taxpayer dollars they receive, is in full view.

It’s also on view with NPR’s new First Amendment-based lawsuit against the administration for removing federal funding from public broadcasting. Writing in The Free Press, Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld says NPR has no case. Excerpts:

NPR seems to have forgotten some free speech basics. As the District of Columbia District Court—the court where NPR filed suit on Tuesday—stated just a few weeks ago, “the government does not abridge the right to free speech by choosing not to subsidize it.”

More:

NPR, in its complaint, says the government can’t defund public radio or television for being politically biased. That’s “an egregious form of content discrimination,” forbidden by the First Amendment.

NPR is right that taking action against a news organization because of its biased political news coverage is what First Amendment jurisprudence calls a “content-based” distinction, and it would usually be flat-out unconstitutional. But again, some free speech basics: When the government is subsidizing speech, the normal rule against content-based discrimination doesn’t apply.

“It is well established,” as the Supreme Court held in 2007, “that the government can make content-based distinctions when it subsidizes speech.”

No broadcaster has a right to taxpayer funding. The government is not constitutionally obliged to subsidize any activity it doesn’t want to fund, even if that activity is constitutionally protected. To quote the Supreme Court again: The “refusal to fund protected activity, without more, cannot be equated with the imposition of a ‘penalty’ on that activity,” which is why the typical “recourse” for a party that “objects to a condition on the receipt of federal funding” is “to decline the funds.”

Rubenfeld’s point is that while there are instances in which the federal government could be fairly accused of unconstitutional “viewpoint discrimination,” this is not one of them.

As I’ve written in this space recently, the United States is now engaged in an unprecedented reckoning with its ruling class over the terms of the relationship between the people and its institutions. Given the jaw-droppingly illiberal way that Portland State, a public university, runs that institution, it is shocking to me that Oregon taxpayers continue to subsidize that woke madrassa. But that is their choice, in our liberal democratic society. If the voters of that state, through their elected representatives, choose to continue funding that nightmare school, I might not like it, but whether or not I like it is beside the point. I’m not an Oregon taxpayer; it is not my money.

As Peter pointed out last night, this entire society-wide furor is but one example of how, when forced to choose between liberalism and democracy, the elites will choose liberalism every time, no matter the particular facts in question. True, we do not live in a direct democracy, but a constitutional one. The fact that a majority on any given issue wishes for X policy to be enacted does not automatically grant them that right. If a majority wishes to take the vote away from (say) black people, it cannot do that under the terms of the US Constitution. But it is also that case that if the state were subsidizing Black Lives Matter, and decided to withdraw funding, that is not a case of unconstitutional racial discrimination.

The US has for decades allowed universities to get away with active discrimination against whites and Asians, for no other reason than that they are white and Asian. The Trump administration is determined to stop it. We are now hearing that Trump is devastating scientific research at universities by imposing a cap on paying for “indirect costs” of federally-funded scientific research. Take a look at this detailed Heather Mac Donald analysis of what that actually means. She says that the administration botched the rollout of the new policy, but explains why it makes sense for the government to do this. Once again, this initiative reveals how universities had become accustomed to thinking that they are entitled to government largesse without accountability for how they spend it.

As you readers know, I’ve been talking to British people in recent weeks about the sense of rage and powerlessness that ordinary British people feel in the face of their elected governments continuing to impose laws and policies around migration that fly directly in the face of the expressed will of the people. In other words, many Britons have come to believe that their elected representatives are governing in defiance of their wishes — and are concluding that for whatever reason, their elites will not change. Matt Goodwin was telling me the other day about how, in the wake of the top UK court ruling recently that biological facts, not ideology, determine the sex of a person, some British institutions have insisted that they will continue to abide by the gender-ideology standard. This would be illegal — but will any British authorities hold those lawbreakers accountable?

What I’m hearing anecdotally from Britons is that the loss of faith of the British people in their institutions is accelerating. The point to keep in mind here is that the ruling class whose responsibility it is to govern democratically — not just lawmakers in particular, but all institutional elites — is actively destroying faith in the country’s democratic institutions. For example, as Goodwin has pointed out, amid a severe crisis in the cost of housing, the UK government pays landlords to house illegal migrants, and to prefer them over native Britons (of all races):

The British state, the ruling class, are now using the British people’s own money —taxpayers’ money—to offer far more favourable contracts to private landlords who rent their properties to asylum-seekers and illegal migrants instead of renting them to the British people who need them.

That’s right.

Backed by the British state, private companies such as Serco are now proudly boasting about offering landlords far more favourable five-year deals to encourage them to house 30,000 asylum-seekers and illegal migrants, at the expense of the hardworking, tax-paying British people.

Unlike the normal housing market, under these deals landlords are being offered leases with no risk of arrears or non-payment, funding for property repairs and council tax bills, and no fees for letting companies and property managers.

In other words, they are being offered big incentives to house the illegal migrants who are breaking our laws while those migrants, too, are being offered even more incentives to enter Britain in the first place —the prospect of their own home.

The British are tolerant and peaceable to a fault. But this cannot go on forever. When you read about things like this, and talk to British people about how hard and expensive it is to find basic housing, you begin to understand why David Betz says the country is moving perilously close to civil war.

Back in the US, the thing to keep in mind is that whatever the wisdom of specific policy fixes the Trump administration is proposing, and whatever its competence in imposing them, the core question is this: Whose society is it anyway?