The Other McCain

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‘The Idioms of Non-Argument’

Posted on | October 18, 2018 | 1 Comment

Harvard-educated totalitarian Moira Weigel.

Longtime readers know I’ve never been a fan of Conor Friedersdorf, who made himself obnoxious by his pro-Obama “conservatism” circa 2008. Friedersdorf’s basic problem is excessive sincerity — he was guilty of “insufficient cynicism,” as I said, and seemed to be engaged in a campaign to obtain the Most Serious Intellectual Award. While he’s still never cracked a joke during the entirety of his journalism career, Friedersdorf has in recent months turned his critical focus on the Left and its increasingly totalitarian tendencies. For example, left-wing extremist Moira Weigel wrote a “review” of the new book by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which was not actually a review, but rather a partisan propaganda attack on the authors. Although neither Haidt nor Lukianoff identifies as a conservative, their book has been endorsed by many conservative critics of the campus Thought Police regime in academia. This has made them demonized Enemies of the People in the eyes of far-left ideologues like Ms. Weigel, a Harvard-educated feminist with a Ph.D.

Friedersdorf notes that Ms. Weigel’s “review” is an exercise in bad-faith rhetoric, full of guilt-by-association smears like this:

Hints of elective affinities between elite liberalism and the “alt-right” have been evident for a while now. The famous essay that Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos wrote in 2016, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” cites Haidt approvingly. At one point Lukianoff and Haidt rehearse a narrative about Herbert Marcuse that has been a staple of white nationalist conspiracy theories about “cultural Marxism” for decades.
Nassim Taleb, whose book Antifragile Haidt and Lukianoff credit with one of their core beliefs and cite repeatedly as inspiration, is a fixture of the far right “manosphere” that gathers on Reddit/pol and returnofkings.com.
The commonality raises questions about the proximity of their enthusiasm for CBT [cognitive behavior therapy] to the vogue for “Stoic” self-help in the Red Pill community, founded on the principle that it is men, rather than women, who are oppressed by society.

Notice how Ms. Weigel puts scare-quotes around “cultural Marxism,” as if no such thing could possibly exist although, as a matter of fact, it is quite easy to trace a direct line from the identity politics of today’s intolerant Left back to the so-called “New Left” of the 1960s, and thus to Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci and, ultimately, to György Lukács and Bela Kun. Ms. Weigel deliberately (and falsely) associates the term with “white nationalist conspiracy theories” as if David Horowitz or Roger Kimball could be lumped in with a bunch of crackpot tinfoil-hat Jew-haters. But even the so-called “alt-right” writers Ms. Weigel names in this passage — Allum Bokhari, Milo Yiannopoulo anid Nassim Taleb — don’t fit within the description of promoters of “white nationalist conspiracy theories.” Friedersdorf points out that Ms. Weigel indulges in such tendentious mischaracterizations as this: “Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, [Lukianoff and Haidt] therefore insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads” (emphasis added).

This is a variation on “kafkatrapping.” The first (and unstated) premise of Ms. Weigel’s syllogism is that everyone who is not a white male lives a life defined by “discrimination and domination”; all females and non-whites are victims of oppression, categorically. Because Lukianoff and Haidt are white males, the second premise of Ms. Weigel’s syllogism is that they have the “luxury” of living in a world entirely unlike the world within which the oppressed victims live. Ergo, the conclusion of Ms. Weigel’s syllogism: Nothing that Lukianoff and Haidt say has any validity; everything said by white males is false.

Of course, the moment you point out what Ms. Weigel is doing — i.e., dehumanizing entire categories of people, in quite the same way Stalin dehumanized the kulaks — she will deny the accusation, and assert that your objections to her insulting rhetoric are proof that you are a racist, sexist homophobe who wants to kill 6 million Jews. To criticize or disagree with a leftist is to become literally Hitler.

Any intelligent student of history sees the irony: Treating anyone suspected of pro-Trump sentiments as if they were crypto-Nazis, and thus a menace to democratic pluralism, Ms. Weigel adopts a totalitarian mentality that endorses suppressing the civil liberties of those who do not share her rabid anti-Trump mania. Her dishonest smears of Lukianoff and Haidt function as a justification for silencing them.

The other irony is that Moira Weigel is enormously privileged. The daughter of a Harvard-educated lawyer who made his fortune on Wall Street, she attended Harvard herself and married the scion of a political dynasty, her Harvard-educated husband being the son of two Carter administration officials. The perversity of this born-rich girl claiming to know that less-privileged people enjoy “the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination” simply because they are white males is the sort of insult that we grubby proles are expected not to notice.

 

“Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining” — do not insult my intelligence by pretending you don’t know you’re screwing me over.

Well, I started off intending to praise Conor Friedsdorf for his article and went off on a wild tangent, but nobody would ever nominate me for the Most Serious Intellectual Award, so I don’t bother trying to compete. Guess I’m just another white guy in the basket of deplorables . . .

(Hat-tip: Robert Shibley at Instapundit.)



 

 

Category: Intellectuals, Journalism

Comments

One Response to “‘The Idioms of Non-Argument’”

  1. News of the Week (October 21st, 2018) | The Political Hat
    October 21st, 2018 @ 6:40 pm

    […] “The Idioms of Non-Argument” Longtime readers know I’ve never been a fan of Conor Friedersdorf, who made himself obnoxious by his pro-Obama “conservatism” circa 2008. Friedersdorf’s basic problem is excessive sincerity – he was guilty of “insufficient cynicism,” as I said, and seemed to be engaged in a campaign to obtain the Most Serious Intellectual Award. While he’s still never cracked a joke during the entirety of his journalism career, Friedersdorf has in recent months turned his critical focus on the Left and its increasingly totalitarian tendencies. […]