A Rebuttal to “Modern ‘Liberals’, Moral Panic and the Culture Mob”

I shall start by saying it’s been a long, long while since there was any noise out of this blog. This isn’t because I became any less politically active, I’m a card-carrying democratic socialist these days, to lay my biases on the table. This year has been extraordinary. Between the coronavirus, the birth of a new civil rights movement, and Joe Robinette Biden promising to be the next FDR, one almost forgets this is the same year wag Coleen Rooney called out Rebekah Vardy like it was high noon in Tombstone.

In the midst of the BLM movement moving overseas from the US to UK, we have been forced as a nation to examine the colonial legacy and systematic racial biases at play in our institutions. There have been widespread protests and the hauling down of statues; there have been widespread counterprotests which I will characterise as either status quo fetishism or an excuse to be openly anti-black. One such “counterprotest”, was Jake Hepple hiring a plane to fly a race-baiting banner over the Etihad Stadium of a sunny Monday afternoon.

Hepple subsequently lost his job and so did his girlfriend: he insists the backlash has been “a total overreaction” and “blown of out of propotion”. He insists also that he is not a racist. If you play the stupid game of grand racist gestures, then you will be a called a racist, and you will lose your job. Now, why am I saying all this? Because of course, Jake Hepple has defenders in those that see him as another victim of the “culture wars”.

I read an article that advanced many of the same tropes I have seen advanced by people insistent we are in culture war, that they must win or the left shall wipe all liberty from the earth. This is the article in question. It is such a neat exemplar of anti-left fearmongering, reliant on implied terror, that I felt compelled to rebut the entire article. (I would like to make clear I hold no personal animus towards the author of that article, I just think the article is too lazily satisfied with itself to be allowed to stand formally uncontested.) Here follows my rebuttal:

1. Who are the culture mob? I see this said all the time and I never see it defined. It is variously characterised as a mass of Marxists, communists, post-modernists, SJWs, etc, etc. The term is meaningless.

2. “And what for? An insensitive, stupid banner which was flown over a football match donning the phrase ‘White Lives Matter’.”
   • As has been covered, the banner buys into the white supremacist intentional misreading of “Black Lives Matter” to be “only black lives matter”. That kind of thinking has never been the stated aim of the BLM movement, it is a mischaracterisation peddled by people who either: a) want to not be bothered confronting racism, b) insist the problem of anti-black racial bias is not as bad as it seems, c) are useless devil’s advocates, or d) are racists.
   • “insenstive, stupid” – the banner is racist. Say it is racist, acknowledge that it comes from a place of extraordinary emotional fragility about being asked to confront systemic racism.

3. “It begs repeating; he was investigated by our police force for speaking his mind.”
   • This is not new. Socrates drank hemlock because he refused to stop speaking his mind. This framing of 21st century progressives as bringing to bear a new censorious world order could have merit, if progressives were the people actually in control of the organs of state.

4. “Consider your most socially unacceptable political opinions. Perhaps you have admiration for Enoch Powell, believe Blair was justified to invade Iraq or maybe you’re literally a communist.”
   • These are not comparable beliefs and the implied conclusions are unsupported. This belies the author’s political gamesmanship at the expense of journalism or analytical integrity. One can admire Enoch Powell without loving the “rivers of blood” speech. One can be a communist and not want to reinstate Stalin’s mass killings. The emphasis on ‘literally’ lets us know how socially unacceptable the author finds communism.
   • This is a reference to Ash Sarkar’s famous words on Good Morning Britain, “I’m literally a communist”, but it sets the tone for the Red Scare alluded to throughout.

5. “The point is there’s a plethora of more controversial opinions and views than saying “white lives matter”, even in the current climate. For starters, it’s true.”
   • This is an understatement, relying on a reader not being familiar with the stated goals of BLM. This whole passage only works if the author subscribes to the false representation of “black lives matter” as a phrase, already covered. No BLM chapter has issued a statement to the effect of white lives not mattering. 

6. “Modern ‘liberals’ have no understanding of this and would sooner throw all Brexit voters in the Gulag”
   • Statement doesn’t make sense because the author never defined their terms and uses quote marks over liberals. What sense of the word liberal is being used? Is the implication that they are not really liberals? Say so. Use another word, for instance “progressive”. This confusion of terms grows worse.
   • As a consequence, there are liberals who did vote for Brexit who reasonably do not wish to send themselves to the Gulag. There are even leftists that voted for Brexit. The statement is a generalisation while trying to make light of a generalization.

7. “challenge all beliefs on a fair ground and, as a society, winkle them out and put in practice the best ones through the democratic sphere”
   • Not all beliefs are the same, the author knows this. They have chosen examples that can be defended more easily with the argument of ‘freedom of speech’s only consequence should be speech’ – an ideological desire not represented even in the practice of Supreme Court cases around the First Amendment. One could ask that the author defend Nazism, ISIS, or the Rev. Jim Jones; if the belief in free speech is so immutable, ALL opinions must be defended. Without exception, without favour, so that we can ‘winkle’ out the best. Perhaps after some centuries of white supremacy we can agree the practice is not the best? Or perhaps we require more debate.
   • Libel and slander laws exist, even in America, because not even the country most obsessed with personal liberties to the exclusion of altruism will let you say whatever you like.

8. “our law enforcers went into another gear of derangement all together and couldn’t help but swoon before the crowd to demonstrate their virtuous nature”
   • Why was it deranged for police officers to kneel? What is the derangement being implied? Deciding to show solidarity against systemic racism, to state ‘not us, not today, not ever’, does not seem particularly partisan.
   • The officers kneeling did not by doing so endorse the entirety of the platform of BLM – which is a socialist movement, but the author avoids saying for reasons that are not clear if they want their police non-partisan.

9. “Of course, kneeling is a lot easier than actually catching or deterring the vandals who pull down our statues or injure our coppers.”
   • This sentence breezes by, leaving unexamined value judgements about the character of protesters and the purpose of statues. This sentence also elides all the people that have been out in the past few months protesting as the same people. This is not true and the exact kind of “both sides” rhetoric that anaesthetises and shields us from the deeply troubling intentions of the far-right. BLM protesters tore down statues. Far-right counter-protesters decided to have well-documented brawls with police.

10. “is worrying at best, a potentially terrifying sign of what’s come at worst.”
    • This feels like a further allusion to the horrors of repressive leftist regimes without saying so. This is such a nebulous warning, summoning up the smell of the Great Terror. What is to come for us here in Britain at the hands of the woke mob? This is baseless scaremongering.

11.  “his relatively vanilla opinion”
    • The author has fully decontextualized the statement, to be merely one of many reasonable, boring opinions. Instead of a man hiring a plane, commissioning a banner, and having the public behold his works: of a big banner childishly, selfishly asserting “I matter!” in the midst of racial unrest and demands for justice. It is a racist belittling, not so different from if he’d had a big banner saying ‘don’t be uppity!’.
    • If his banner had said ‘goy lives matter’ during the height of a cultural moment for Jewish people, would there be thinkpieces lamenting his treatment? Very likely, but we would just consider those people racists. 

12. “The bullying had successfully generated the moral panic it always intended to create. The threat to the cultural gatekeepers was swiftly eradicated.”
    • Hepple’s employer fired him for racism. The insistence that he should be allowed to keep his job yields these consequences: his black coworkers will know he did this, will know he did so to mock a movement advocating for them, perhaps customers would get to know, and then major stakeholders, and so on and so forth. The position for his employer becomes untenable. To insist he keep his job is to insist that the lived experiences and feelings of his black coworkers are meaningless.
    • Who are the cultural gatekeepers? How have they been saved? Was the threat that a man could be virulently, mockingly racist in public without any consequence whatsoever? 

13. “the West as a whole as we descend into the ‘end game’ of the era of identity politics.”
    • What is the end game? Say it. The author keeps relying on frightening allusions to what the woke mob ultimately wants, but there’s no example given of what ‘the world liberals want’ is. 

14. “Oxford Feminist Society’s ethnic diversity representative (a title translated into English as militant bullshitter)”
    • The author reveals here their attitude towards equality and diversity work by caricaturing it as bullshit. There was no need to say this, it adds nothing and only amuses those who already believe the judgement being made.

15. “Some of whom I’m sure were admirers but also some who would love a chance to passionately criticise her, and her party’s, record on the Windrush scandal.”
    • One of the few mentions of the fruits of systemic racism is used to lament the fact that Amber Rudd was not allowed to speak. This is an article being written in a particular moment in response to that particular moment, but mentions very little of the impetus behind the moment.

16. “Long-Bailey adamantly protests she did not endorse all of the article in question. I’m afraid it doesn’t matter, Rebecca.”
    • The author here makes my earlier point for me. They extend the charity towards Long-Bailey that they deny to ‘literal communists’ or admirers of Enoch Powell.

17. “The Labour Party’s woke PR machine chugs on, squashing all before it. Even its own.”
    • After the immense anti-semitism scandal that consumed Jeremy Corbyn’s time as leader, Starmer must work to avoid this perception of Labour. It’s diligent politics with hands bound with the IHRA definition of antisemitism Labour was forced to adopt, in the midst of an ongoing investigation by the EHRC. This was not about “wokeness”. This was pragmatics.

18. “The Americans have always had superiority to most European nations on the matter of liberty due to the conception of the Constitution.”
    • This sentence again employs a value judgement that the negative liberty enshrined here is ‘superior’ to the other constitutional conceptions.
    • The Constitution also states explicitly the sub-human view of black people taken by its writers. It feels parlous to so boldly endorse the American Constitution as a loadstone for liberty, in an article where one defends a man for his racism, while not discussing the racial realities of the document.

19. “An impenetrable law of some description must be brought in ensuring, to the greatest degree possible, the only consequence of speech, harmful or not, is more speech.”
    • The author cites the American Constitution as a model for an “impenetrable law” regarding free speech. It also subscribes to a textualist reading of statute and the Constitution, wherein there can be no change of laws to move with society. This is comparable to a literalist reading of the Bible.
    • Effective civic laws are written to be malleable and interpretable, capable of change: the author wants the Code of Hammurabi when it comes to free speech. A speech for a speech.
    • The problem is this: the consequences of an actor’s free speech may not simply be speech. The counter-logical argument deployed time and time again that speech has no power over action, that the speaker bears no responsibility for the actions of those that hear, appears within this desire. This bears no relation to reality and is a dangerous precedent to set. I have covered why those targeted by these speeches would feel endangered and what it would say about the society that allowed them to be targeted in the name of liberty.

20. “Secondly, we must all ensure we keep on saying what we want. We can’t give in to the illiberal wave which has swept up the media, our corporations and, nearly, our culture.”
    • The author has said what they liked. No one is stopping the author saying what they like. The author asked that the only consequence for speech be speech. The author is confusing criticism with censorship or derangement.
    • The implication that to be so angry at injustice makes one have mental illness is deeply crude and ableist. I have seen the use of the word derangement used to belittle those that criticise Trump or Brexit, and I am sure it will come to be used for those that criticise Johnson.

21. “Whilst I don’t know her (thankfully), it is a legitimate position to despise Katie Hopkins and also believe she should have a platform on Twitter to spout her rubbish.”
    • The position is legitimate but the high-handed tone of the entire piece makes it clear that the author believes anyone who won’t do this, refuses to do this even, is ‘deranged’ in some sense.
    • ‘Her rubbish’ covers countless incitements to violence and despicable, racist, dehumanising attacks on non-white people. This tiresome appeal to Voltaire does not change the fact that if you owned a forum, where people came to share ideas and feelings, if some person only comes to actively spread hate – what are they adding to the discussion you wanted to hold? Have they in fact derailed the situation on purpose to draw attention to themselves? Should you perhaps tell them to not come back?
    • The author conflates private companies banning people with state censorship. Social media platforms are woefully unregulated and hold an outsize power in the world, however, they do not in fact make laws or control our lawmakers.

22. “Unfortunately for them, the culture mob will continue picking victims off one at a time until there is no one left willing to speak out unless something very tangible is done.”
    • Who are the culture mob?
    • No one is being stopped from speaking out, the number of articles and podcasts and videos and tweets from persons complaining that “the left establishment” will silence this or that alone should put paid to that notion.

23. “Surely at some stage there must only be one person left deemed woke enough, and then no one. Please could the final bigot turn off the lights before they leave? Thanks very much.”
    • The employment of the victim mode throughout culminates here. After alluding to Martin Niemoller’s ‘First they came’ by saying “no one left willing to speak out”, the author frames themselves and those that agree with them as engaged in some great struggle. A struggle for the heart of Western culture. A war they insist is blazing because of the left’s thirst for bullying and that the militant woke mob, if unchecked, will one day come Stasi-style to take them in the night. However, 20th Century history showed that often authoritarians come to power because conservatives and liberals shield them through their intellectualising of crises into verbal games that they might win. At other times, these sensible centrists that want only debate welcome authoritarians because of their disdain of the left. And other times, bastions of liberty will install authoritarians because of their ‘deranged’ attitude towards the left.

Update: This critique was amended to name the correct philosopher and to explicitly reference Ash Sarkar, in the interest of fairness.