How Did the Harper's Letter Help Get Us To This Moment?

It did not

Photo by John Jennings on Unsplash

Yesterday, David Klion posted,

The article, however, shows nothing of the sort. Let’s look at what it does do.

After explaining that the Harper’s letter was a plea from public intellectuals to defend the free exchange of information and ideas, Klion writes,

In hindsight, the letter signaled a major shift in intellectual discourse: Less than a decade into the “Great Awokening” that signatory Matthew Yglesias identified as having begun around 2014, a swath of mostly liberal writers were declaring en masse that wokeness had already gone too far.

This sounds as though, to Klion, this objection was too soon and that liberal defenders of free speech should have waited at least a decade before deciding that they should defend free speech against the “woke.” He offers no justification for this. He does not argue, for example, that it had not gone too far which would seem called for here if he is going to argue that saying so had negative consequences. This was the summer of 2020, when I set up my organisation, Counterweight, to support the hundreds of people ranging from academics and students to teachers, social workers, psychologists, engineers, technicians, emergency services personnel who were at risk of losing their jobs for saying things like “I don’t believe all white people are racist” and “I don’t believe in gender identity.” It would have been useful had Klion described what ‘too far’ would look like and when it would have been acceptable to defend people’s livelihoods.

Nor does Klion explain the significance of ‘less than a decade’ . Does he perhaps think that if nobody on the liberal left had objected to the denial of freedom of belief and speech coming from the left for a few more years, the problem would have died down on its own or revealed itself not to be a problem and actually beneficial in some way? He does not say.

Klion then goes on to say that the election of Joe Biden a few months after this ushered in an '“elite culture” that was less friendly to “woke speech policing” and gives seemingly as evidence of this, the growth of alternative art and writing spheres and the existence of some Democrats openly opposing identity politics and radical stances like “Defund the Police”. This is not, of course, evidence of any such thing. The growth of alternative spaces for free expression is an indication of people being unable to exercise that in mainstream ones and the existence of left-wingers opposing identity politics and radical movements among them is an indication of there being a problem with identity politics and radical movements among them. (Here is much better evidence that wokeness has been in decline since 2021, but it is certainly not gone). Bizarrely, Klion refers to his own examples as a ‘backlash’ - a term generally used for a hostile opposing reaction to a phenomenon, not people making other arrangements to be able to speak or leftists appealing to other leftists to stop being divisive and radical. One wonders if there was any acceptable way at all for liberals to address the problem of illiberalism on the left.

Klion then ‘flash forwards’ to the Trump administration’s anti-woke backlash and its denial of free speech in universities. This is necessary because absolutely no direct line can be made between people ‘backlashing’ by continuing to speak in other places and trying to convince more of the left to be more liberal and other people banning mention of DEI in universities and arresting students for constitutionally protected speech. He appears to believe that repeating the word ‘backlash’ in both contexts and then “flashing forwards” makes an adequate substitute for any argument for causation. It does not.

Instead, Klion attempts to make another tenuous link between the defence of free speech in the Harper’s letter and the Trump administration’s censoriousness by saying that one of the inspirations for the letter was the forced resignation of The New York Times editor, James Bennet, for having published a piece by Republican senator, Tom Cotton, calling for the military to restore order in cases of rioting and looting amid the Black Lives Matter protests. It seems that same Tom Cotton tweeted in support of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil for taking part in pro-Palestine protests. It is entirely unclear how this link works, however. Klion does not make any argument for a convincing counterfactual in which not writing the Harper’s letter or not forcing Bennet to resign or Bennet not having published Cotton’s argument would have resulted in Cotton now supporting the free expression of pro-Palestine students on green cards.

The only substance to be found in this article is in Klion’s justified criticism that only a quarter of the signatories of the Harper’s letter have criticised censorious developments from the Trump administration. This, and the highly disappointing silence on the subject of the illiberal right more broadly from so many other people who had made such good arguments for freedom of belief and speech is indeed a cause for dismay and it can be demonstrated and argued to indicate a lack of principled consistency strongly and usefully. The title of Klion’s piece suggests that this is the case he will make but it is, unfortunately, restricted to a few sentences while the article is overwhelmingly dedicated to vague implications that defending freedom of speech somehow leads to right-wing authoritarianism and that those of us who did that should now be ashamed.

Klion does not make any argument at all for how liberals defending the free exchange of ideas can possibly lead to people electing Donald Trump and his administration demonstrating very little tolerance for the free exchange of ideas. We are left to guess at what links he could possibly see and therefore make ourselves vulnerable to accusations of uncharitable mindreading. Is it that he believes nobody would have noticed all the cancellations on the left and been alienated from the left enough to enable the election of Trump if liberals had not drawn attention to them by defending free speech? This hardly seems plausible.

I have, of course, argued that if liberals on the left had opposed the authoritarian woke more strongly, this could have defeated it and thus prevented the anti-woke backlash we now see. I cannot know that this would have been the case but I can make a strong argument for it citing many, many political strategists, commentators and polls on both left and right making the case that wokeness played a significant part in alienating voters from the left and this also seems quite evident in online discourse. I would have been interested to see a coherent argument that it was actually defenders of free speech who played a pivotal role here.

Does Klion perhaps believe that wokeness was not actually a significant problem but a right-wing boogeyman that people were frightened into thinking was a real thing and that liberal defenders of free speech, particularly on the left fed into by indicating that they also thought it was? This seems more plausible, especially given as he describes the wokeness problem as being comprised of “irritating undergraduate and entry-level scolds of the 2010s.” This would be an error, of course. It included an 8 billion dollar a year training industry that employers imposed on workers in all manner of fields with threats of disciplinary action for non-compliance. I have now worked with a few thousand of them directly. However, an argument could still potentially be made that critics of wokeness were inflating the extent of the problem and that could be engaged with. Alas, no such argument was made.

What does Klion mean when he says those signatories of the Harper’s letter who have also criticised Trump’s denial of free speech “should examine their role in helping to build a broad elite consensus that has functioned mainly to legitimize Trump’s actions.” He has not provided any evidence of this role and how it worked. Is this related to his erroneous belief that the ‘woke’ comprise of undergraduates and entry level workers rather than having significant roles in universities, schools, media and knowledge-production industries more generally? If so, he may find sociologist, Musa al-Gharbi’s book, We Have Never Been Woke useful for disabusing him of this notion.

Is it possible that the vagueness and incoherence of this piece stems from the same kind of tribal irrationalism being demonstrated by many of the ‘woke’ right now online and in my comments, despite having been published in a long-established and reputable magazine? I am hearing repeatedly from the least rational elements of the woke that the anti-woke backlash is entirely the fault of liberal leftists for criticising wokeness. “Are you happy now?” is their attitude. “You spent all that time criticising the woke left and now Trump is in power and there’s a massive anti-woke backlash. Aren’t you ashamed?” They too fail to offer any reasoned argument for why they think the anti-woke backlash was caused by the liberal leftists and class-focused leftists rather than the woke leftists. I have not yet seen anybody who had voted left last time but voted right this time say that the problem was too much respect for freedom of belief and speech and prioritisation of the working class.

The diehard wokeists simply feel that the problem was that they just didn’t push their own ideology hard enough and that if they had and the rest of us had helped, we could have forced it through with sheer fervour somehow. If we had only maintained solidarity with them and helped them push Critical Social Justice theories on workers and cancel anybody who disagreed with them or, at least, not suggested that this was both illiberal and likely to cause the most almighty illiberal anti-woke backlash, everything would be fine now. The general public would absolutely not have been alienated from the left, increasing numbers of the working class and people of racial minority would not have transferred their vote to Donald Trump and the left would be in power in the United States and everything would be going swimmingly.

This is, as the young people say, ‘cope’ and if it does not stop, the left is at risk of never being elected again, no matter how awful the right gets. This gives the illiberal right a sense of security to get pretty awful. Most importantly, we, on the left, need to offer something better and be properly left. We cannot hope to win elections because the right has managed to get even more illiberal and irrational and screw up our countries even more than people think we could.

We need to offer something worth having. This is a time for liberal American conservatives who value their constitution and their founding principles as the Land of the Free and liberal conservatives everywhere to lean into their combination of those two noble traditions and push back at the illiberal populist right. Liberal leftists should support them. Meanwhile, we need to strengthen our own combination of liberalism and focus on issues of socio-economic class and marginalise the woke so that when the next elections come round, we can offer people, not the lesser of two evils, but something they’d actually want to vote for.

It is time for the woke to take some responsibility for having caused the anti-woke backlash and alienated the very voter base the left should be able to count on. I would turn Mr. Klion’s request back on anybody who still believes that critics of wokeness rather than wokeness itself were the problem, “Will you examine your role in helping to legitimize Trump’s actions?”