It’s simple! Stop complaining, already!
This article was published in The Polis on Medium.com on Jan. 20, 2024
Douglas Murray, a gay white British man, wrote a book about how, in his view, people who had been historically stepped on and brutalized for centuries have within the last 50 years been accepted and accommodated by society. And yet they are still carping and demanding more.
And what’s worse, in wanting more they are generalizing from the admitted ugly bigotry of white supremacists to white people as a whole. They’re accusing white people of wielding “white privilege” to perpetuate second class status for others. Murray feels that being nice to these formerly put-upon and marginalized individuals has turned them into shrill, habitual complainers. They are overreaching, he feels, and in their overreach they are themselves becoming bigots and racists.
Murray published his book, The Madness of Crowds, in 2019 and presumably spent the previous two years or so in writing it, and the year previous to that in formulating the idea and setting the framing. So let’s assume that his world view was centered on 2016, the year that Trump was elected and Britain left the European Union. It was heady times for conservative politics as it was buoyed up by electoral successes. The prevailing winds appeared to validate their belief that progressives had become radicalized and had seriously overreached. Now they had a “mandate” from the electorate to restore sensibility and decorum to society.
The villains that Murray set himself to tar and feather included gays, feminists, minorities, and transexuals. He devoted a chapter to each group, but throughout the book took special aim at the “intersectional” and “critical theory” ideas promoted by university sociology and ethnic studies departments. The “anti-woke” hysteria was still enough in its infancy that Murray gives it only nodding notice. It shows up in an afterword to the book he added in mid 2020.
Murray’s book became a best-seller and was blurbed approvingly by a whole array of conservatives. It had warm appeal for the audience he had written it for, as it strongly and wittily confirmed their bias that the left had overplayed their hand. Correction was needed and the population as a whole was asking for it. They, the conservatives, would deliver.
In fact it wasn’t the whole population demanding change. In Great Britain, whole segments of the country, including Scotland, voted no on Brexit. In the United States Hillary Clinton got three million more votes than Trump, but her win lost out to the anachronism and conservative bias of the Electoral College.
But maybe it’s inevitable that as conservative politics gained traction and won elections that it would itself overreach. In fact this is what happened and is still happening.
Since Murray’s book came out, we have had the affront to women’s rights to control their own bodies with the Dobb’s decision rescinding a right to abortion nationally. We’ve had increased threats and violence against Gay Pride events and increasing incidents of gay bashing and Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law. We’ve had the thin-skinned anti-woke movement in red states denying the reality of racial prejudice, accompanied by distortions of the historical record on slavery and Jim Crow laws. We’ve had laws promulgated in red states to keep trans females out of women’s gyms and locker rooms and to deny them gender affirming health care.
In sum, the claims of conservatives that the “radical left” has overreached has led to the actual result of conservatives overreaching and clawing back rights that marginalized groups have accumulated in the last 50 years. There wasn’t an awful lot of time before the balance swung from a societal kumbaya toward the rights of women and minorities back again to the disfavor and nastiness directed at them in the past.
So the question then is: Did the left actually overreach or did it not reach far enough? And what does the left do now to reclaim the gains that are lost and under threat?
Given the assault on women’s and minorities’ rights in the last ten years, the answer to the first question has to be that the left did not go far enough, at least in so far as not having convinced the population at large of its “agenda.” It might have been an impossible task anyway, given how many different constituencies are represented on the left and how polarized the world is. And, besides, conservatives certainly do have many more billionaires than the left to fund their own agenda.
But as to the second question. The left has more people and voters, enough, as we saw in the 2020 election, that the margin of progressive over conservative ballots cast increased to seven million votes (winner Biden over loser Trump). In 2024 the overreach of conservatives in the past four years should increase that number even more and should be enough to counter the reactionary effect of the Electoral College. It’s the turnout at the polls that will make this happen.
But conservatives will not be silent, of course. Of 8,000 or so reviews of Murray’s book on Amazon and 14,000 or so on Good Read, more than 80% are essentially in agreement with its premises and conclusions. And those who responded with some text generally did so articulately. Collectively these reviewers comprise a group of well educated conservative folks with some fewer numbers identifying as center-left leaning. And though I didn’t read all reviews, the sample I did read were predominantly men. Most of these reviews recommended that everyone read the book, especially college age people, presumably to cure the so-called “distortions and left propaganda” that assail them in today’s leftist universities.
By comparison Ta-Nehisi Coates book, Between the World and Me, published in 2015, received more than 39,000 reviews on Amazon and 135,000 ratings on Goodreads, about 75% positive. Coates is a Black man with an engaging personal story and an eloquence that frequently gets him compared with James Baldwin. Not any sort of weak comparison. As with Murray’s book the praise was piled high with many of the reviews as articulate and considered as those Murray’s book received.
Coates’s book hit bookstands right as Murray was researching his own book and it and Coates became punching bags.
It’s interesting to look at Murray’s specific criticisms of Coates’s book. They focus on Coates’s admissions about his burdened attitudes toward America and its institutions and to certain individuals. In one instance, Murray references Coates asserting of another journalist that the journalist was not capable of “seeing me or, frankly, a lot of you, as fully realized human beings.” The comment was in reference to a piece the journalist has written which supposedly demeaned a Black boy. I didn’t research the details.
In the context of the whole of Coates’s book, his comment, as dismissive as it might seem, was grounded in his conviction that fighting for racial justice was the only thing he could do. He had no expectation the fighting would lead to any solution. Murray took umbrage and wrote that it “was a terrible statement by Coates and says a lot about what he has been allowed to get away with throughout his career.” In other words, Murray claimed that Coates was taking advantage of some sort of Black privilege to express himself as he did.
In this point and in many other anecdotes he includes of marginalized people acting “badly,” Murray proves to himself (and to many of his admiring readers) that the problem is reverse racism. This judgment he declares without context, let alone empathy, for statements, anger, protest, aggression, and violence by his set-upon targets. He implies that they are acting capriciously and self-servingly.
That absence of context makes what could have been a better balanced book, instead come across as a screed, one, admittedly, that a lot of people appreciated. The Guardian critically reviewed the book on this point and concluded that, “Anger is ultimately a mystery to Murray, seeming to emanate spontaneously from his political and ideological foes.”
In other words, Murray implies that his targets are simply spouting off for no good reason. And concluding from that judgment that his readers would be justified in ignoring their complaining. Likewise, his advice to his targets might hypothetically be, “Just get over it!”
I don’t know whether there is a single strategy to run end around the misstatements, omissions, and hyperbole of conservative writers telling only their half of the story. If there is anything a writer, such as myself, can do, it would be to try and clarify and explicate. Not so much to throw mud on the opposition, but to generate some empathy for those who conservatives unfairly put in their crosshairs. But I’m also convinced, like Coates, that it won’t change the minds of people who believe that marginalized people should stay marginalized.
(A clap for Robert Ahrens on Medium, someone whose thinking on how to inspire progressive voters suggested a similar strategy. Apologies if I didn’t get it right.)