"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.

Boris Johnson and the road to "illiberal democracy"

There's a difference between revolution and revolutionary methods. Sociologists and political scientists can come up with more-or-less well-delineated definitions to clearly distinguish them. For most people, the distinction is about as vague as it is irrelevant.

Britannica Online provides a useful general definition of the concept as it evolved since antiquity (Revolution, 2019), including references to these modern theories of revolution:

The 16th-century Italian writer Niccolò Machiavelli recognized the importance of creating a state that could endure the threat of revolution; but, at the same time, his detailed analysis of power led to a new belief in the necessity of changes in the structure of government on certain occasions. This new acceptance of change placed Machiavelli at the forefront of modern revolutionary thought, even though he never used the word revolution in his texts, and he was primarily concerned with the creation of a truly stable state.

The 17th-century English writer John Milton was an early believer in revolution’s inherent ability to help a society realize its potential. He also saw revolution as the right of society to defend itself against abusive tyrants, creating a new order that reflected the needs of the people. To Milton, revolution was the means of accomplishing freedom. Later, in the 18th century, the French, Haitian, and American revolutions were attempts to secure freedom from oppressive leadership. Modern revolutions have frequently incorporated utopian ideals as a basis for change. [my emphasis]

The Britannica editors also give credit to Immanuel Kant, who "believed that revolution was a 'natural' step in the realization of a higher ethical foundation for society," noting that the Kantian "idea helped serve as a basis for the American and French revolutions." Although in the former, more people got it directly from Thomas Paine rather than from Kant.

They even give credit to Hegel as "a crucial catalyst in the formation of 20th-century revolutionary thought" who "saw revolutions as the fulfillment of human destiny, and he saw revolutionary leaders as those necessary to instigate and implement reforms." A new biography of Hegel by Klaus Vieweg that emphasizes Hegel's republican thought rooted in the French Revolution, as suggested by its subtitle, Hegel: Der Philosoph der Freiheit [Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom] (2919). Hegel, like Thomas Jefferson, was deeply engaged with the political ideals of the French Revolution and supportive of them, while of course keeping a critical view of its actual outcomes. Paine himself was an elected deputy to the French Revolutionary National Convention, though his service was interrupted for a year when he was imprisoned for his criticism of the Terror.

In the United States for the last 40 years, Republicans have tended to be more comfortable than Democrats with using "revolution" to describe their goals, e.g., the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution. Although Bernie Sanders' use of "political revolution" currently has Republicans, corporate Democrats, and poor babbling Chris Matthews reverting to a more classical conservative view of at least feigning horror over the very notion.

But in our current, much-discussed trend in the world of rising authoritarianism, including in the US, Europe, Latin America, and India, some governments and parties are using and advocating methods that the Founding Father of modern reactionary thought, Edmund Burke, might have regarded as French Jacobin approaches.

The authoritarian, "illiberal democracy" that Viktor Orbán established after winning the Hungarian Presidency in 2010, he moved rapidly to build the current version of government in Hungary, using extreme gerrymandering, wide-ranging control of the press with help from allied oligarchs, politicized institutions of justice, without resorting to tactics like jailing or murdering journalists. Elections are still nominally free and competitive and people aren't arrested for political reasons. But the system is sufficiently rigged that Orbán's party can retain control without winning a majority in elections.

Peter Oborne has a thought-provoking take on Britain's Trumpish Prime Minister which is a reminder that there are various potential models for those seeking to get rid of democracy (Boris Johnson as a revolutionary figure, Boris Johnson is leading a revolution, and this time it's coming from the right Middle East Eye 02/08/2020:

Most of us were taught in college to think that revolutionary movements come from the left. It seemed to make sense: Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, Mao. It may be time to reconsider. Johnson is leading a revolution, and this time it's coming from the right.

He's either forgotten, does not know, or most likely does not care that the Conservative Party came into existence in the wake of the French Revolution as a defender of great institutions - monarchy, parliament, rule of law, the church - against abstraction, ideology and political violence.

This means that Johnson repudiates the doctrines of every Conservative leader from the Duke of Wellington onwards. Johnson's hostility to institutions is so striking that I don't believe he can be viewed as a Conservative in the way the term has been understood over the last two centuries.

The party he leads has detached from its moorings, while Johnson himself should be understood as part of a group of populist leaders that includes Donald Trump, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and most relevantly Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. [my emphasis]

He cites various examples of Johnson's authoritarian bent, including trying to politicize the courts, attacked and restricted journalists Trump-style, and a five-week shutdown of Parliament last fall that the British Supreme Court ruled illegal.

Oborne also calls attention to the often-mentioned charismatic leader in building an authoritarian political order. He cites an article by New Statesman international editor Jeremy Cliffe (Central Europe’s authoritarians show where an unleashed Boris Johnson could lead Britain 12/18/2019) on authoritarianism in the Visegrad nations - Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Cliff sees Boris Johnson as having just followed an "electoral narrative of 'people versus politicians' requiring rescue by a muscular father-of-the-nation type" that "is straight out of the Visegrad playbook."

But I try to be cautious about the notion a single charismatic leader as a ncessary element of authoritarian rule. All movements, including democratic ones, need leadership. Conventional wisdom often equates populism with authoritarianism and rightwing politics. I take a more restrictive view of populism as a way of doing politics that pose an antagonism between "the elite" and "the people." There are left and democratic versions of populism. And charismatic leadership does not equate to authoritarian or antidemocratic political goals.

But the institutional moves toward dismantling democracy and the rule of law need to be taken very seriously. And in the United States, the Democrats need to take "revolutionary" actions by the Republicans as the sign of asymmetric polarization that need to be countered within the rule of law. But they need to give up the fantasy that they can be countered with covering and "bipartisan" platitudes.