"Critical race theory" and ... Immanuel Kant (?!?)

An eye-rolling editing FAIL at the Washington Post has begotten something rare: an interesting and substantial thread about Immanuel Kant.

The impetus for this was an op-ed by professional Republican hack Marc Thiessen on the Republicans' favorite bogeyman this season, The danger of critical race theory 11/11/2021. He writes:

Critical race theory, [Allen] Guelzo says, is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. It was a response to — and rejection of — the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded. Kant believed that “reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives” and so he set about “developing a theory of being critical of reason,” Guelzo says.

Yes, folks, Immanuel Kant, author of What Is Enlightenment?, an essay often taken as a kind of general program for ; the Enlightenment, was an enemy of the Enlightenment.

Zack Beauchamp flagged how silly it was:

I just can't get over this. It's a thing the Washington Post actually published — a thing that is so completely and indefensibly wrong that anyone who has taken a single intro to philosophy course could explain why https://t.co/v5OteD8X5F pic.twitter.com/JBfX6Pb3PD

— Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp) November 12, 2021

David Neiwert followed up with this comment:

I’m sure @marcthiessen won’t bother acquainting himself with the history of philosophy, but Kant was mostly critiquing the Rationalist school of epistemology. The Empiricists, a competing school, are usually credited (particularly Locke and Hume) with influencing the Founders. pic.twitter.com/zxGd0zw3O9

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) November 13, 2021

Philosophy professor John Holbo then stepped in to recount this bit of philosophical background:

The Pantheism controversy, in German ideas & letters, starts when the philosopher Jacobi tells the philosopher Mendelssohn the playwright Lessing confessed to him to having been a closet Spinozist. 3/ pic.twitter.com/bfNCJJfjXf

— John Holbo (@jholbo1) November 13, 2021

Check out Holbo's whole thread.

The anti-"Critical Race Theory" narrative is a conspiracy theory. An especially sleazy one if you take the time to dig into the "hghbrow" version of the backstory as articulated by unsavory characters like James Lindsay and Christopher Rufo.

Conspiracy theories present a common dilemma in political contests. The Republican media network has clearly educated its viewers and followers that "critical race theory" is a tribal slogan for Their Side. So a Republican politician just needs to say, "I will ban critical race theory from the schools," and its a clear signal to their side.

But if Democratic candidates try to answer it by going into some detail explaining what a sleazy and dishonest conspiracy theory it is, it risks adding credibility to it in a "where there's smoke there's fire" sense. But it shouldn't be the kind of challenge the Democrats too often assume it to be when confronting a hot Republicans "culture war" slogan.

Gene Lyons has an idea how they can go about it, i.e., by approaching it as the promotion of a moral panic (Trump's Mob: Gullible, Conspiracy-Minded, And Willfully Ignorant Of History National Memo 10/13/2021):

Because [Tucker Carlson's target audience is] gullible and prone to apocalyptic thinking — "the rapture" was all the rage in evangelical circles not long ago — one result has been a succession of what can ... only be described as "moral panics" over largely imaginary threats such as "Sharia Law," "Cancel Culture," and "Critical Race Theory." Since 2010, for example, several states have found it necessary to ban Islamic religious courts from exercising legal authority.

As if.

Susceptibility to conspiracy theories has to do with what is known as "anti-intellectualism." Historian Richard Hofstadter did a well-known book on the topic, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963). But the phenomenon has hardly gone away in the ensuring six decades since it was published.

But it's also the case that conservatives are also eager to give even crackpot theories some kind of intellectual heft. Hofstadter noted that there are "lowbrow" versions of far right conspiracy theories as well as "highbrow" ones. He also suggested that a "middlebrow" category could be helpful, but that term doesn't seem to have caught on generally. (Though I use it myself.) In his most famous essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Harper's Nov 1964)

A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

A tremendous amount of additional research has been done on this topic since then, so Hofstadter's 1964 essay is scarcely the last word on the topic. But it's still a useful read.

There are many conservative think-tanks and assorted journals that crank out their own "middlebrow" and "highbrow" versions of these theories. The Claremont Institute and a faction associated with it called the West Coast Straussians is one such institution among many. Their perspective was very influential on the "1776 Project" which provides what passes for what the anti-CRT propagandists would like to see taught in American schools.

The Lost Cause narrative retrospectively justifying the Confederate revolt to preserve slavery that also became an ideology for the overthrown of Southern state democracies established during Reconstruction is a huge example of such a false, crackpot theory that not only served as a useful ideology for bad ends but screwed up the teaching of history in the US for generations.

So journalists, political analysts, and scholars do have to pay some attention to the backstories in such ideological theories, even if election campaigns are not the right place to attempt elaborate and nuanced discussions of them.

While we're on the topic of current paranoid conspiracy theories, I've noticed lately some tendency on the "highbrow" right to treat the term "narrative" as a pejorative. In that view, viewpoints of the Mean Libruls are "narratives," i.e., false and deceptive, while their own stories around something like the alleged Critical Race Theory conspiracy are simple statement of truth. There is an analogy here to some Christian fundamentalists - I've heard Pat Robertson do this - that their version of Christianity is not only the True Religion, but it's actually the only actual "religion" because all the other ways of thinking that call themselves religion are false, evil, Satanic, etc.

I recommend against putting a lot of effort into trying to uncover some chain of reasoning behind that. It's more the psychology of Us Againt Them.