Trouble on the left
Stories of political discontent.
Encounters with radical violence
One speaker declared us chicken-shits if we didn’t support the SLA.
EARLY ONE MORNING in November 1973 I was eating homemade granola in the kitchen of a north Oakland home that I shared with four roommates. The house was owned by a publishing collective where I worked for a small stipend. I had graduated from a conservative Baptist college in the midwest just months earlier and was thrilled to be surrounded by more simpatico people and exposed to everything from feminism to French-press coffee.
That morning, a clearly distraught roommate came into the kitchen. “They killed my boss,” she said. Pam worked in the district office of Oakland public schools. The night before, a group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army—a name soon on the lips of everyone in the Bay Area—shot Marcus Foster to death in the district parking lot with a sawed-off shotgun loaded with cyanide-laced bullets. Foster was the first black superintendent in Oakland, executed for proposing that students be issued identity badges.
The following spring, in 1974, our publishing collective was invited to set up a booth at a fair sponsored by leftist groups. The event was held at a park named after the suffragette leader, Frances Willard, that the sponsors had re-dubbed Ho Chi Minh Park, after the Vietnamese Communist leader. The featured speaker was Wilbur “Popeye” Jackson, who had been key to negotiations with the SLA after they kidnapped heiress Patti Hearst from her Berkeley apartment. Popeye was president of the United Prisoners Union, which was inspired by George Jackson, a Black Panther Party member and leftwing folk hero. George Jackson was shot to death in the San Quentin yard during an escape attempt in which two hostages and three guards were also killed. A year earlier, his seventeen-year-old brother Jonathan had died while kidnapping a judge at the Marin County courthouse in an attempt to free his older brother. The judge and two others were also killed. Jonathan’s guns were owned by Angela Davis, who was nonetheless acquitted of involvement in the incident. Davis is now a professor at UC Santa Cruz and a prominent proponent of abolishing prisons and defunding the police.1
At the fair, Popeye Jackson singled out white radicals and declared that we were all “chicken-shits” if we did not support the SLA. Whoa. After the elation of finding new friends in the Bay Area, I’d suddenly landed in a nightmare. As a teenager, I’d been inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr. and his nonviolent Civil Rights Movement. I opposed the Vietnam War because it involved the senseless killing of Vietnamese civilians and American soldiers. When I was a senior in high school, I was horrified by the killing of protesting students at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi. Now I was being directed to support murderers of a black school superintendent.
Even those who might have followed Popeye’s advice never got the chance. After their dramatic rise, the SLA fell quickly. In May, six members were killed in an LA shootout with police in which 9,000 rounds of ammunition were fired. I watched it unfold on live television. A year later, Popeye himself was murdered. He was sitting in a car in the Mission District with Sally Voye, a young Berkeley grad volunteering in a prison reading program, when someone unknown walked up and shot them to death.
The same summer, the Weatherman (née Weather Underground) issued a manifesto entitled Prairie Fire that outlined a program for anti-imperialist revolution. Unbeknownst to me, former members of our collective had arranged for the pamphlet to be collated in our office at night. The Weather Underground, founded by Bill Ayers, Bernandin Dohrn, and others, had taken militant positions within the Students for a Democratic Society that led to its downfall in 1969. By blowing up buildings and other acts of violence they drained popular support for the antiwar movement, which had been founded by pacifists, veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, and free speech advocates. Dohrn later became an associate professor of law at Northwestern University and Ayers, her husband, a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
FORTUNATELY I SOON found a new group of friends who shared my democratic values2 and within the year had decamped to Chicago, where I was a founding staff member of In These Times. Editor and historian James Weinstein moved the paper to Chicago to help cement its orientation toward a working-class politics and away from the sectarian cultural upheavals that were prominent in the Bay Area left. During our first few years in Chicago, the Bay Area was repeatedly rocked by violence. The Black Panther’s bookkeeper was found floating in the bay. Liberal mayor Mayor George Moscone and gay Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated. Faye Stender, lawyer to Huey Newton and George Jackson, was shot multiple times in her home by a paroled member of the Black Guerrilla Family, which had been founded by Jackson. Severely crippled, she later committed suicide. Jim Jones, whose People’s Temple had been praised by left politicians for its community outreach and commitment to racial equality, relocated his San Francisco church to Guyana, where he ordered the killing of a congressman and perpetrated a murder/suicide of over 900 of his followers.
These memories flooded back when I recently saw university students and leftists heralding terrorist murderers and rapists as liberators.3 Perhaps I should not have been surprised. Militant leftists of my generation cheered the violence perpetrated by Mao’s cultural revolution, Che Guevara, and Daniel Ortega, among others. Several wound up in university classrooms instructing new generations of radicals.4 We should count ourselves fortunate that their students seem more interested in assassination by brutal tweets rather than by guns. —December 2023
1 Davis’s mentor at UC San Diego was Herbert Marcuse, a communist philosopher from the Marxist Frankfurt School, a progenitor of Critical Race Theory and related ideologies. Scholars in this tradition attack Enlightenment values that undergird America’s founding ideals of individual liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty, often declaring them white supremacist and patriarchal.
2 One of those was John Judis, with whom I helped found the East Bay Voice in 1975. John has a new book with Ruy Tuxiera, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? and writes for the Liberal Patriot, which I recommend.
3 This is not to justify the massacre in Gaza. To get a sense of the scope of the catastrophe, I recommend this interview with the head of the mission for Doctors Without Borders, and this discussion with the former heads of Mossad and Shin Bet, who are critical of the current Israeli government.
4 For excellent histories of the intellectual roots of Critical Theory among the professoriate, I recommend Yascha Mounk’s book, The Identity Trap, and philosopher Susan Nieman’s Left Is Not Woke. Mounk edits the excellent Substack Persuasion.
Slaying my inner pig
Some comrades delighted in catching us saying the wrong thing or liking the wrong movie.
DURING MY FIRST summer in California, I divided my time between looking for a job and listening to the Watergate hearings on television. The hearings were riveting, the job search dispiriting. The economy was in poor shape and my recent degree in philosophy and psychology from a Baptist college in Missouri impressed no one. I did manage to get an interview for a job as a counselor in a summer camp. Fifteen minutes in, the interviewer, a guy with long hair in shorts and sandals, said, “I’m not going to hire you. Do you want to know why?” I nodded. “You’re not in touch with your feelings.” I left feeling insulted and worried he might be right.
The following year, in 1974, I joined a “Radical Therapy” men’s group. Twice a week, a dozen of us sat cross-legged on a weathered carpet in a weathered but lovely Berkeley brown-shingle home off Telegraph Avenue behind the Co-op (now a Whole Foods store). The sessions ran at least an hour and must have been cheap. My new job with a publishing collective paid twenty-five dollars a week.
We revered our counselor, though he strived to convey that he was not the leader, just one among equals. The sessions were guided by a philosophy based on the pop-psych notion that our “inner child” could be revealed and transcended through therapy. Radical Therapy’s innovation was to focus instead on our “inner pig”—the poisonous concoction of capitalist, paternalist, and racist ideas taught by society that live inside us. Whatever mental issues we might have, such as depression or anxiety, would presumably diminish or vanish once we slaughtered our inner pigs.
I eagerly attended these sessions for six months. I’d never been in therapy before and found talking about feelings, any feelings, new and thrilling. But when I began to think of my “inner pig” as a thing physically lodged in my chest, a demon to exorcise, a red light went off in my head. Treating neurosis as an actual thing—a reification—was exactly what I’d earlier concluded was wrong with psychiatric practices and institutions. I cheered Jack Nichols in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Alan Bates in King of Hearts, films that satirized the psychiatric world view. The inner pig also sounded suspiciously like the Baptist’s Satan.
Garnering attention and status in the group was achieved by confessing your sins of oppression and telling compelling stories of your own suffering. Being gay got you points. My shining moment came unexpectedly when I mentioned spending part of my boyhood living in a basement. That garnered underclass status points, which counted in those days. I’d never thought of the basement as that bad. It was the lower level of a structure that my parents were gradually turning into a split-level home. It had windows and doors and was surrounded by a forest where I spent much of my time. But I took the points.
MY GIRLFRIEND at the time also educated me in patriarchy’s evils. Ours was a mismatch. She was ten years older, and over time it became clear that what I most desired—she was beautiful, I was twenty-two—was not a shared relationship goal. She subscribed to a radical feminist journal called Quest, where I once read an article proposing a utopia with no men and female reproduction handled by laboratories.
Though left-wing movements were run on fuming by the mid-70s, my fellow radicals convinced themselves that revolution was around the corner. There was no shortage of theories on how to start an American prairie fire, debated in endless meetings of numerous sects. A favorite fantasy was that the Claremont Hotel, with its steam baths and tennis courts, would become the East Bay’s revolutionary headquarters. But having grown up on the prairie, I felt pretty sure the kids from my high school weren’t grabbing their pitchforks.
Mainstream feminism was on the rise, even on the prairie, and I celebrated it then and now. The Women’s Conference in Houston in 1977 was a watershed moment. My mother attended and later started a women’s shelter in Kansas. Among other things, I credit the women’s movement with enabling us to honestly discuss important things about her life for the first time. But among Berkeley’s radical feminists, more extreme positions—no men at all!—often garnered more attention and their advocates greater status.
In my men’s group, there were always one or two on the lookout for “mistakes”—saying the wrong thing, eating the wrong food, liking the wrong movie—and keen to correct us. A forerunner of political correctness and cancellation, its tweety evil twin, Radical Therapy’s path to social change began with personal purification. It was a finishing school that I flunked because ultimately I gave up on slaying my inner pig. I decided it wasn’t really a thing. —March 2024
Rustin roulette
He opposed black separatists, black power advocates, black nationalists, and Black Panthers.
“BLACK, QUAKER, homosexual, pacifist, a labor organizer, a tactician, and a dandy.” Gerald Early’s review of a 2004 biography of Bayard Rustin conveys the complexities of the man who organized the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in which his friend, Martin Luther King, Jr., called on Americans to share a new dream. The march to the March is the main subject of the new biopic, Rustin, produced by the Obamas. Colman Domingo is brilliant in the title role, convincingly conveying Ruskin’s energetic charisma.
Raised as a Quaker by his Pennsylvania grandparents, Rustin was a lifelong socialist in the Norman Thomas tradition and, despite brief membership in the Young Communist League in the late 1930s, a dedicated anti-communist. He was a war resister and peace activist who worked successfully with his mentor, labor leader A. Philip Randolph, to integrate the military. And though enemies derided him as a homosexual, and even friends worried that discovery of his sexuality would discredit the movement, he did not hide it and urged other gays to come out of the closet.
As a black, gay activist, Rustin would seem a perfect fit with today’s intersectional left, and the Obama film does little to dispel that impression. His main tormentors within the movement are Roy Wilkins, the moderate leader of the NAACP, played by Chris Rock, and the self-dealing Harlem congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, played by Jeffrey Wright. They want him expelled for his homosexuality. Rustin is rarely shown with white people except for a lover, Tom. In reality he was an integrationist who advocated and organized broad multiracial coalitions for economic justice. Some of his closest allies and friends were religious leaders, especially rabbis, and labor unionists, even as he fought to integrate the trade unions.1 United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther was a key partner in organizing the 1963 march.
Rustin’s insistence on building multiracial coalitions alienated former friends in the Civil Rights Movement when he opposed affirmative action, which he warned was a Nixonian scheme to split the civil rights and labor movements. He opposed black separatists, black power advocates, black nationalists, and Black Panthers.2 Rustin viewed black militants as fundamentally pessimistic about the radical change he sought. “They conclude that the only viable strategy is shock; above all, the hypocrisy of white liberals must be exposed,” he wrote. “These spokesmen are often described as the radicals of the movement, but they are really its moralists. They seek to change white hearts—by traumatizing them.”
OPPOSED TO VIOLENCE on principle, Rustin also saw it as a political dead end. Inspired by Gandhi, he traveled to India to learn about nonviolent civil resistance. and returned to school Martin Luther King, Jr. in its principles and methods. (In the film Rustin convinces King to dispose of a gun he kept in the house.) Together, they organized one of the largest and most consequential nonviolent protests in the nation’s history, leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, followed by the Voting Rights Act the next year. At that juncture, Rustin penned a controversial 1965 essay in Commentary arguing that the movement must turn from protest to politics.
Rustin wrote that integrating lunch counters and buses was low-hanging fruit compared to the radical social and economic reforms required for full equality. In Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964, he saw the potential for a realignment. Fueled by the energy of the Civil Rights Movement, he envisioned an emerging voting majority of “Negroes, trade unionists, liberals, and religious groups”—the same coalition that marched on Washington in 1963. Holding them together would be a massive program to improve education and provide better jobs.
Over his lifetime as a social activist and reformer, Rustin was beaten, jailed, arrested under California’s sodomy laws, sentenced to work on a chain gang, and vilified by Strom Thurmond on the floor of the Senate. Yet as Early argues in his review:
Suggesting that Rustin was a martyr is to misunderstand the richness and complexity of his life, and of the experience of being black and homosexual. Seeing his life as one of a double victimization is patronizing. His life and work are expressive affirmations, not sacrificial symbols. Rustin himself never voiced a view of himself as either a martyr or a victim. Instead, there is something about Rustin that suggests a soldier of fortune in the army of social reform, flamboyant, theatrical, egotistical, and deeply sincere.
Neither martyr nor victim, but hero, as the new film persuasively portrays. Rustin is Obama’s second major effort to cement Rustin’s legacy. The first was awarding him the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2013. He presented the posthumous award to his longtime partner, Walter Naegle.3 —December 2023
1 For more on Rustin’s views on coalition building, I recommend Richard Kahlenberg’s commentary on the film, What Bayard Rustin Could Teach Democrats Today.
2 Discussing the Rustin film in Quillette, Joshua Muravchik contrasts the legacies of Rustin and Malcom X, who is the subject of a new opera opening in New York, in Black Progress and Black Rage.
3 Naegle has been active in commemorating his late partner’s life and values as executive director of the Bayard Rustin Fund and through service on the board of the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice.
Hamas and the Left
Cheering terrorists who have little regard for Palestinian lives and none for Israelis.
I’VE BEEN BOTH perplexed and distressed by the outpouring of support for Hamas by purportedly leftwing organizations. I’m also disturbed by the broader antisemitism that’s emerged. This is not just support for the Palestinians—I think most people of conscience cannot help but feel concerned and upset over the lives lost in Gaza—but we’ve seen active cheering for a group of terrorists who have avowed little regard for Palestinian lives and none for Israelis. Their goal is to wipe out Israel and to build a caliphate under sharia law in the tradition of the Taliban and Iran, their sponsors. How can a supposedly leftwing organization support rape, murder, and kidnapping by such a group? It reminds me of the worship of violence— as long as it was launched under the veneer of “anti-imperialism”—that I observed among New Left groups in the 1970s.
I’m particularly perplexed because so many of the people I’ve worked with in liberal and leftwing circles over the years were Jewish. Have they been marginalized? And I am shocked by the more general hatred against Jews that’s emerged. Perhaps I shouldn’t be. The FBI stats on hate crimes report that last year, long before the current outpouring, anti-Jewish crimes were second only to anti-black ones.
I’ve read several good articles on the subject. Peter Juul calls it the indecent Left. NYU professor Susie Linfield writes in The Return of Progressive Atrocity about the long history of the Left overlooking, rationalizing, or actively cheering terrorism and autocratic violence.
The Western Left’s response to October 7th will, I believe, be viewed as a moment of moral corruption on a par with the defense of Stalin’s purges, Czechoslovakia’s antisemitic show trials of 1952, the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and Poland’s antisemitic expulsions of 1968, along with the denial of the Khmer Rouge genocide (see under: Chomsky, Noam) and the adulation of China’s vicious Cultural Revolution.
Conservative NY Times columnist Bret Stephens cited Linfield’s article while arguing that the Left’s anti-Israel stance actually dooms any hope for a Palestinian state. My friend John Judis, with Ruy Tuxeira, write in their book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? that the ideology underlying this response is also dooming Democrats. In Liberal Patriot, Tuxeira goes further, saying it’s time to throw the intersectional Left under the bus. He believes this is a “golden opportunity” for Democrats to disavow them. I’m not so sure how golden. Most liberals would be appalled to hear some of the comments at the Oakland City Council, including the accusation that the IDF staged the massacres in Israel. Shades of Holocaust denial. Yet the council voted against condemning the Hamas atrocities. I’ve also had liberal—not hard Left—friends describe Israel’s actions as a genocide while rationalizing away what happened at the Nir Oz Kibbutz and Sukkot music festival. What accounts for such a moral failure? Perhaps Jay Caspian Kang is correct when he argues in the New Yorker that we must see the dead children—in Nir Oz and elsewhere. —December 2023
We’re all Slow Horses now
“Smugness which hoped to inherit the earth, but would have no clue what to do with it.”
HELEN LEWIS IS A British writer on the staff of the Atlantic who, while a liberal and feminist, seems unafraid to say contrarian things that get her mobbed on X. I’m impressed with her and now look for her byline. A recent story delves into the television series, Slow Horses, which is based on novels by Mick Herron about a group of disgraced spies exiled by MI5 to a depressing outpost north of London called Slough House (hence Slow Horses). Season 3 landed recently and I’ve been watching it each week while rewatching the first two seasons. I love it. And Gary Oldman plays one of his best roles ever as the gross but clever leader of the misfit spies.
Lewis noted that “Herron’s spy-novel series is now 13 years old, the same age as Britain’s floundering Conservative government” (subsequently defeated by Labor). She claimed that the series serves as an all-too-apt metaphor for a failing Britain:
There is no justice in the world of Slough House: Bad people prosper and the good die young. (Even worse, the mediocre and cowardly—that is, the most relatable characters—also die young.) A recurrent theme of the series is the privatization of government, a process that Herron presents as arrogant predators streamlining an organization so it is briefly more efficient—read: profitable for them—before it collapses into dust. Herron is not reflexively liberal, however. Of Britain’s only left-wing broadsheet newspaper, he writes: “Martin Kreutzmer liked to read The Guardian, because it kept him in touch with that strain of self-lacerating smugness which hoped to inherit the earth, but would have no clue what to do with it.”
I had to laugh at that last bit, and indeed one of the many virtues of the show is its humor. Lewis, however, is quite serious about the danger of the left’s ineptness. A pre-election issue of the magazine wass entitled “If Trump Wins” and Lewis was unsparing in her view that “The Left Can’t Afford to Go Mad.” She argued that it needs to “seek converts rather than hunting heretics”—a clever turn of phrase, but I remained skeptical it would happen. So was political analyst Ruy Tuxiera, who argued that the Democrats had a better chance of beating Trump if they threw the intersectional left under the bus. As Lewis notes, in the past several years internal strife from heretic-hunting staff members has deflected organizations from the Sierra Club to Planned Parenthood to the ACLU from their core missions:
Trump created an enormous reservoir of political energy, but that energy was too often misdirected. Many liberals turned inward, taking comfort in self-help and purification rituals. They might have to share a country with people who would vote for the Orange Man, but they could purge their Facebook feeds, friendship circles, and perhaps even workplaces of conservatives, contrarians, and the insufficiently progressive. Feeling under intense threat, they wanted everyone to pick a side on issues such as taking the Founding Fathers’ names off school buildings and giving puberty blockers to minors—and they insisted that ambivalence was not an option. (Nor was sitting out a debate, because “silence is violence.”) Any deviation from the progressive consensus was seen as a moral failing rather than a political difference. The cataclysms of 2020—the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd—might have snapped the left out of its reverie. Instead, the resisters buried their heads deeper in the sand.
Another clue that this tendency, while weakened, remains strong in arenas where progressives have control—media, arts and culture organizations, universities—is their response to Hamas. As I wrote in my last post, the cheering of terrorism is a sign of both moral failure as well as a certain disconnect from the reality of Islamic radicalism. Of course, not all or perhaps even most progressives did so. But many did, which Lewis writes about in “The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test.” I’m keeping an eye on this writer. —December 2023
P.S. SPEAKING OF HAMAS, I recommend my friend John Judis’s article in The New Republic, which offers a sober account of the history of Zionism and its discontents. Much of the article is based in research for his 2014 book, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
Joan’s arc
Time and again we’ve have shown the capacity for spreading rumors and false beliefs.
HELEN BARR, mother of Roseanne Barr, called me at my San Francisco office one day in 1993. Mother Jones, where I worked as a creative director and editor, had recently run a story by Ethan Watters that challenged the Recovered Memory Movement (RCM). Helen hoped we could help exonerate her and her husband Jerry from the highly publicized charges of incest and physical abuse made against them by Roseanne. Helen’s voice was plaintive and pleading, tinged with fear. She was at a loss for how to contest the accusations of her famous daughter and how to handle the shame of them.
Today, it’s hard to remember the grip that RCM held on the national psyche. Well-regarded psychiatrists and their followers claimed we repress traumatic memories that can be vividly “recovered” using suggestive therapeutic techniques such as hypnosis—techniques now known to distort memory. RCM was reinforced by bestselling books, popular television hosts such as Oprah Winfrey, and in the media. It was also profitable. As many as a fifth of American licensed therapists supported RCM practices.
Theories of recovered memories were adapted from Sigmund Freud, whose descriptions of the mind—the id, ego, superego, Oedipus complex—remain ingrained in popular parlance. His conceptions also penetrated academic literary criticism and other disciplines, and still have adherents. But where the later Freud thought neuroses emerged from repressed sexual fantasies, RCM posited that repression consisted of buried memories of actual trauma, particularly sexual abuse.
There is no neurological or experimental support for either the Freudian or RCM versions. Theories of repression “would have us believe that the mind can take the memory of events and hold them in pristine form in the subconscious for years,” said Elizabeth Loftus, a Distinguished Professor at UC Irvine. “There is no laboratory evidence that this is possible.”
RCM also blurred the distinction between recovered memory patients and the many actual victims of sexual abuse who might benefit from therapeutic or legal interventions. “The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry,” wrote Professor Richard McNally, an expert on trauma and memory at Harvard. As he has shown, rather than forgetting or repressing their traumas, people suffering from PTSD are more often haunted by them.
A RECENT FILM, Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, prompted my memories of the RCM craze. It is a disturbing film. The joyful singer and activist with an infectious smile and Zen resolve in the face of angry mobs and police batons is revealed as plagued by anxiety and depression. Happy photographs and film clips from her childhood and many years as a popular singer are jarringly juxtaposed to pages from personal journals that reflect her inner turmoil.
Baez first entered psychotherapy as a teenager. The voice of an unnamed therapist, recorded during sessions with her, is liberally spread through the film. His affected tone and pop-psych mantras made me cringe. Through therapy, Baez became convinced that she and Mimi Farina, her younger sister, had been sexually abused by their father. She seems to acknowledge that the accusations are hazy, unprovable, denied by other family members, and subject to the vagaries of memory. Yet she considers these “recovered memories” responsible for her lifelong struggles with mental illness. Regarding the film’s depressive tone, a friend who has worked closely with Baez says, “it’s certainly not the feeling you get being with her.”
Baez also suggests that she has multiple personalities— “dissociative identity disorder” in professional lingo—a psychiatric fad popularized by the movie Sybil. “Dissociative” is the connective tissue to RCM. Both ideas revolve around hidden memories and identities revealed in therapy, but unverifiable by independent or reproducible experimental methods. Although critics praised the film as an “intimate” and “honest” account of the much-loved singer, it was arguably an unembarrassed chronicle of psychiatric abuse.
Ethan Watter’s article in Mother Jones, later expanded into a book with Berkeley social psychologist Richard Ofshe, was one of the first to challenge RCM, and it drew angry letters. He and Loftus and other critics of RCM were condemned for re-victimizing victims and even of enabling pedophiles. Since most patients were women, some feminists called it another case of not believing women.
Thirty years later, Ethan’s review of the rise and fall of RCM in the New York Times Magazine, “The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement,” still drew acidic comments from a few true believers, but a greater number praised the article. Some drew parallels to contemporary trends, including the dramatic spike in teenage girls reporting gender dysphoria. Studies suggesting that social contagion helps explain the rise have been denounced by activists.
Time and again, though, human beings have shown their capacity for spreading rumors and false beliefs as easily as they spread the flu in winter. A distant great aunt of mine, a 56-year-old widow named Mary Parker, was hung in Massachusetts in 1692, one of the last victims of the witch trials. She failed the “touching test”—when she was instructed to touch her hysterical young accusers, they calmed down. Centuries later, Salem’s witch trials were the setting for the cautionary tale told in The Crucible, a play Arthur Miller wrote amidst the fanaticism of the McCarthy era. Today, social media speeds the spread of all manner of social illnesses.
Intelligence does not inoculate us—smart people have spawned many of history’s worst calamities. Science, too, is subject to waves of enthusiasm for wrong-headed and destructive ideas, such as eugenics. The difference is that the scientific community is expected to hold itself to standards of proof that enable debate and require evidence. Rational skepticism and verifiability are two of the stronger safeguards we have against our attraction to totalizing explanations involving hidden forces.
Rosanne Barr later recanted some of her accusations against her parents. But when her mother called that day, all I could really do was to listen sympathetically. The leaders of RCM saw themselves as moral crusaders on behalf of vulnerable victims. From that perch, they became indifferent not only to contrary evidence, but also to the many victims—the broken families, the anguished patients, the falsely accused, the socially ostracized— that they wronged. —March 2024
What happened?
The troubles that sunk the Democrats was anticipated decades ago.
I PROMISED a short guide to some of the better analyses of the national election, but just in the last week, there have been so many beyond my poor power to add or detract. The substack Liberal Patriot (a fair description of my political leanings), has an early guide to interpreting Harris’s loss that covers the basics well. Ruy Tuxiera, a founder and regular contributor to Liberal Patriot, wrote a book with my friend, John Judis, entitled Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, that I’ve previously recommended. I also recommend reading a survey by American Compass that suggests why the so-called “diploma divide” is potent on core values, such as the meaning of the American Dream.
Thirty years ago, I commissioned two pieces for Mother Jones that I’m pleased to say did a good job of predicting liberals’ current predicament. In “Restoring Public Trust,” Daniel Yankelovich wrote, in the wake of the Gingrich takeover of Congress in 1994, that the new GOP would likely over-reach and fail to consolidate a new political realignment. He then suggested a program that could be written today for liberals to regain moral authority. Tuxiera and Judis echoed this theme in a recent op-ed in the New York Times, arguing that Trump’s coalition is unstable and unlikely to cohere if he over-reaches on unpopular stands. The appointments thus far suggest he will. Most people do not want RFK in charge of vaccines.
In 1997 in “The End of the Rainbow,” Michael Lind argued that liberal reliance on a grand coalition of people of color would unravel, as it noticeably did in the past few elections. He presciently wrote:
The strategy of rainbow liberalism has rested on two assumptions. The first is that conservatism would not appeal to nonwhite Americans. The second is that the very policies that promote the rainbow strategy — affirmative action and high immigration — would not produce tensions among the multiracial rainbow’s constituent bands. If these assumptions are wrong, then rainbow liberalism is digging its own grave.
They are, and it is.
Lind similarly argued, in the wake of the recent election, that "It’s time for the government to abolish “race”.
Tuxiera had been warning for months that the Democratic Party was bleeding Black and (especially) Latino voters. A 2022 Atlantic article brought that home to me through interviews with Democratic Latino activists in the Arizona and Texas—places that Trump subsequently won. How to regain these voters? I’ll give Judis the last word:
Democrats need to focus on what many of the voters who deserted them want: a growing economy that provides decent job; safe streets; and a safety net that removes Americans’ anxiety about access to healthcare, childcare, and a good education for their children. But voters will ignore even these earnest efforts if Democrats don’t sever their identification with cultural radicalism.
—November 2024