Identity Synthesis and the Challenge of Illiberalism
What are the real stakes surrounding the university presidents’ testimony?
In the previous edition of Decency and Sense, an essay I titled FIREd Up, I addressed the testimony that three university presidents – Liz Magill of Penn, Claudine Gay of Harvard, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT – gave at a December 5 hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. I focused then on two published responses to the testimony. This follow-up essay draws on other material – including conversations with personal friends – to explore the following theme:
Why is the conversation about differing moral and other assessments of the presidents' testimony important? What are the stakes of that specific topic and how it relates to larger issues?
First, a bit of throat-clearing. In FIREd Up I made the following statement:
I am highly sympathetic to the critique of cancel culture and the abuses of identity politics on college campuses (and elsewhere). It is a topic on which I have commented in other venues and I see that I am remiss in not having engaged with it in Decency and Sense.
By “other venues,” I principally mean, in addition to my own page, Facebook groups such as Wise Uncertainty, The BRIDGE Project and Decent and Sensible Dialogue (which I created). I particularly value the work of Yascha Mounk, which I have shared many times over the years. In September, for instance, in multiple venues I shared his New York Times essay about his book The Identity Trap as well as a podcast interview with Charlie Sykes on the topic.
And now a bit more throat-clearing. The November 1 edition of Decency and Sense was an essay (which I shared in multiple Facebook venues) that I titled “Stand Up for Decency and Sense in Israel/Palestine.” Below is an excerpt:
The other day a friend of mine invoked part of the name of this newsletter in a Facebook post. My friend wrote:
If you have at any point expressed a belief that the October 7 massacre was an act of resistance then I question your decency.
I agree with my friend. And I believe my friend would agree with a comment that I made in a discussion group on the morning of October 9. While the Hamas attack of just two days prior was still fresh and Israel had not yet mounted a significant response, I offered the following observation:
In the United States, there never seems to be an appropriate time to reflect upon the suffering of the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government and the settler movement.
It seems shameful to mention this in the context of the vile barbarism that Hamas has perpetrated and is perpetrating. HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT SORT OF THING NOW!
And yet, one struggles to identify a time when such an observation is EVER acceptable to what is likely the plurality of American opinion.
To make this sort of observation is NOT to justify the vile barbarism in any way.
I propose, though, that those who are so quick to condemn such an observation in this context reflect whether they personally EVER in ANY context opened their hearts to such an observation.
There is never a bad time for earnest reflection.
This in my own estimation – a bit self-congratulatory to be sure – is simple decency and sense.
I lay this down as predicate for examination of Mounk’s October 16 essay, “The Deep Roots of the Left’s Deafening Silence on Hamas.” Below is a passage from early in the essay:
On October 7th, the world witnessed the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Hundreds of attendees at a music festival were murdered in cold blood. Families hiding in their homes were burned alive. Jewish mothers and fathers were, in an eerie echo of the 1940s, imploring their children to stay quiet lest their would-be murderers should detect their whereabouts. Nearly two hundred people remain in the clutches of a terrorist organization that announced its genocidal intentions in its founding charter.
[...]
[M]any schools and universities, nonprofit organizations and corporations that have over the past years gotten into the business of condemning and commemorating all kinds of tragedies, both small and large, fell uncharacteristically silent.
Some of the most famous universities in the world—including Princeton, Yale and Stanford—only released statements after they came under intense pressure on social media. At Harvard University, it took pressure from alumni and an outraged thread on X by Larry Summers, a former president of the institution, to prompt his successor into belated action.
Worse still were the people and organizations who actively celebrated the pogroms. Multiple chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America, which continues to count Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among its ranks, encouraged their followers to attend rallies that glorified Hamas’ terror as a righteous form of resistance. As its San Francisco chapter wrote on X, the “weekend’s events” should be seen as part and parcel of Palestinians’ “right to resist.” The Chicago chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement even glorified the terrorists who murdered scores of people at a rave in southern Israel, pairing a now-deleted image of a paraglider with the caption: “I stand with Palestine.”
Meanwhile, academics from leading universities were busy defending these terrorist attacks as a form of anti-colonial struggle. “Postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial are not just words you heard in your EDI workshop,” a professor in the school of social work at McMaster University, in Canada, wrote on X. “Settlers are not civilians,” a Yale professor who has written for mainstream outlets including The Washington Post and The New York Times, maintained.
All of this raises a simple question: How could such a notable portion of the left side with terrorists who openly announce their genocidal intentions? Why have key institutions proven so reluctant to denounce one of the worst terrorist attacks in living memory? What, to them, renders the victims of these attacks so much less worthy of solidarity than those of the many other atrocities they have full-throatedly condemned?
Here Mounk speaks to a double-standard, and next he explores explanations for it:
In the past days, people have offered many possible explanations for this selective silence. Some focus on outright antisemitism. Others emphasize that an understandable concern over the immoral actions that Israeli governments have taken in the past have blinded many activists to the suffering of innocent Israeli civilians. Others still point out that institutional leaders want to avoid eliciting angry reactions from activists, preferring to stay silent on a sensitive issue out of simple fear for their jobs.
Each of these explanations contains a grain of truth. Some people in the world really are consumed by one of the world’s most ancient hatreds. Others are indeed hyper-focused on everything that Israel has done wrong, a stance that is easier to understand in the case of Palestinians whose ancestors have been displaced than it is in the case of leftist activists who have for many decades found the missteps of the one state that happens to be Jewish worthy of much greater condemnation than similar, or greater, missteps perpetrated by any other. Finally, it is indeed true that many university presidents, nonprofit leaders and corporate CEOs have, among the institutional meltdowns of the past years, come to believe that they must avoid controversy at all costs if they are to keep drawing their generous paychecks.
But the double-standard that has in the past days become so obvious on parts of the left also has a more profound source, one that is ideological rather than practical or atavistic. Over the past decades, a new set of ideas about the role that identity does— and should—play in the world have transformed the very nature of what it means to be on the left, displacing an older set of universalist aspirations in the process.
This novel ideology, which I call the “identity synthesis,” insists that we must see the whole world through the prism of identity categories like race. It maintains that the key to understanding any political conflict is to conceive of it in terms of the power relations between different identity groups. It analyzes the nature of those power relations through a simplistic schema that, based on the North American experience, pits so-called whites against so-called “people of color.” Finally, it imposes that schema—in a fashion that might, in the academic jargon of the day, ironically be called “neo-colonial”—on complex conflicts in faraway lands.
Mounk persuades me. I agree with him. Rather than go through this long essay in its entirety, I encourage people to read it through on their own. Perhaps readers of this, my own essay, would comment on points with which they agree and/or disagree.
Among the friends with whom I discussed the presidents’ testimony were some who referenced another essay which I consider similarly: I agree with much of it and I encourage others to read it on their own and also discuss it. I speak of James Bennet’s “When the New York Times lost its way,” which The Economist published this past December 14. Here is a very brief synopsis. James Bennet had been the opinion page editor of the New York Times. His tenure came to an end shortly after his June 2020 approval of the publication of a controversial essay in which U.S. Senator Tom Cotton proposed the deployment of U.S. troops in response to riots that erupted following the murder of George Floyd the previous month.
Bennet’s long essay provides abundant detail on the series of events and shifting stances on the part of Bennet’s superiors at the Times (in particular, the publisher, A.J. Sulzberger). I urge a full reading of it. I will suffice for now to provide an excerpt that speaks urgently to the question that I posed at the beginning of this essay: What are the stakes of [the topic of differing assessments of the university presidents’ testimony] and how it relates to larger issues?
Whether or not American democracy endures, a central question historians are sure to ask about this era is why America came to elect Donald Trump, promoting him from a symptom of the country’s institutional, political and social degradation to its agent-in-chief. There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.
I hope those historians will also be able to tell the story of how journalism found its footing again – how editors, reporters and readers, too, came to recognise that journalism needed to change to fulfil its potential in restoring the health of American politics. As Trump’s nomination and possible re-election loom, that work could not be more urgent.
I think Sulzberger shares this analysis. In interviews and his own writings, including an essay earlier this year for the Columbia Journalism Review, he has defended “independent journalism”, or, as I understand him, fair-minded, truth-seeking journalism that aspires to be open and objective. It’s good to hear the publisher speak up in defence of such values, some of which have fallen out of fashion not just with journalists at the Times and other mainstream publications but at some of the most prestigious schools of journalism. Until that miserable Saturday morning I thought I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him in a struggle to revive them. I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.
But Sulzberger seems to underestimate the struggle he is in, that all journalism and indeed America itself is in. In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias. I have no doubt Sulzberger believes in them. Years ago he demonstrated them himself as a reporter, covering the American Midwest as a real place full of three-dimensional people, and it would be nice if they were enough to deal with the challenge of this era, too. But, on their own, these qualities have no chance against the Times’s new, more dangerous problem, which is in crucial respects the opposite of the old one.
The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.
Let me be clear: I DO NOT mean to both-sides the crisis our country faces. I DO NOT mean to suggest that illiberalism on the left is responsible for illiberalism on the right.
I mean simply this: if we as a society are to successfully defend against the critical danger that illiberalism on the right poses, it is essential that as many as possible strive mightily to prioritize fair- and independent-mindedness. Such a posture: (a) uplifts the tenor of civic and political life, which in and of itself is vital public good, and (b) elevates standing to draw contrast with and potentially draw people away from those whose bad faith and demagoguery present a clear and present danger to the republic.
Which brings me back to the university presidents’ testimony. The four or so minutes of interrogation that Rep. Elise Stefanik perpetrated toward the end of the hearing was, to my mind, a display of bad faith and demagoguery. The direct question that Stefanik posed to each of the three presidents was (with some minor variance in the exact wording) this:
“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your university’s] code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment?”
Stefanik did not ask, “Should calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your university’s] code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment?” The question was “Does,” not “Should.” The university presidents were at pains to answer the question clearly. Jamie Kirchick of the free speech-promoting organization FIRE explained in the essay that I quoted in FIREd Up why the answer that the presidents gave is the correct one. I quote him again (more briefly this time):
Universities have a vital role to play in fostering a culture of free and open debate, and the presidents were right to draw a distinction between speech and conduct. Threats directed at individual students are inconsistent with a university’s goal of fostering a productive educational environment, not to mention against the law. Students can and should face disciplinary action and even expulsion for certain behavior: acts of violence, true threats (defined by the Supreme Court as “serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals”) and discriminatory harassment (which the court delineates as behavior “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit”). Students can and should also be punished for disrupting classes, occupying buildings or employing the so-called heckler’s veto, whereby they prevent a speaker from being heard.
But students should not be punished for speech protected by the First Amendment — even something as odious as a call for genocide.
It is absolutely fair to argue that the universities over which the three presidents preside have not consistently upheld the standard that they enunciated at the hearing and which Kirchick applauded in his essay. As Kirchick noted, FIRE’s most recent annual ranking of universities for the degree to which they honor free speech put Harvard dead last and Penn next to last. (MIT ranked 136 out of 248.) But as Kirchick also wrote in that essay, “[T]wo wrongs don’t make a right. If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry, the solution is not to expand the university’s power to punish expression.”
This wrong is exactly what Rep. Stefanik propounded so demagogically and in such bad faith when she browbeat the university presidents. In response to their espousal of the ideal that Kirchick laid out in his essay – “the presidents were right to draw a distinction between speech and conduct” – and their insistence that understanding the context is vital to a proper determination whether policies on bullying and harassment have been violated, she concluded:
It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes. And this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board.
During the hearing, it was Rep. Stefanik – no less than the university presidents – who displayed herself to be a hypocrite operating under a double-standard.
It will be interesting to see under which standard these three universities will operate going forward. Were they again to engage in the kind of censoriousness that is consistent with the identity synthesis that Mounk described, it would be appropriate at that point to speak of hypocrisy and a double-standard. Along with Mounk and Bennet, I believe it is urgent that they do not.
What is your view?