A few left-wingers are still defending liberal values such as freedom to disagree.
A few left-wingers are still defending liberal values such as freedom to disagree.
T he adjective liberal is near, or perhaps past, the end of its run as a useful term for left-of-center thinking. So widespread is the impulse on the Left to shut down speech deemed disagreeable, that illiberalism is now among its defining features: Vehement opposition to freedom of expression, of worship, of pluralism, of tolerance, of due process, and the presumption of innocence are now rallying cries all over the progressive map. Is it progressive, though, to turn back the clock to pre-Enlightenment thinking? Progressives de nos jours seem inordinately attached to retrogression. We need a term for illiberal reactionaries of the Left.
Credit where it’s due, then: A handful of left-of-center writers and talkers whose policy preferences rarely overlap with mine are doing important work in defending liberal values to the Left. Bill Maher, Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald, and Andrew Sullivan are pushing back against their own side with impressive dedication. (I realize Sullivan describes himself as a conservative, but he’s considerably to the left of anyone to whom I would apply that label.) All of these people have been repaid with heaps of scorn and obloquy by members of their own intellectual tribe, but as far as I can tell, being rebranded as outcasts is proving to be invigorating for all of them.
One of the Left’s most ardent defenders of liberalism has turned out to be Matt Taibbi, the longtime Rolling Stone correspondent who, like several of the others I mentioned, seems to have discovered a new level of irreverent candor by writing on Substack, which has quickly become a leading platform for the dwindling remnant of left-of-center writers who still back liberalism. “Due Process Is Good, He Said Controversially” is the amusing title of one of his essays. Taibbi lately has written one knockout piece after another lambasting the leading mainstream-media outlets for becoming an echo chamber for hysterical, tendentious, and flat-out false claims about various figures on the right. While they are loading up the American mind with their partisan takes, they conspire to roadblock ideas with which they disagree. The liberal tradition of saying “may the best argument win” has been abandoned in favor of pushing the party line in an increasingly undisguised way.
Taibbi has noticed how left-wing thinkers tend to become utterly unglued when they find themselves in disagreement with those who (like Taibbi) largely share their ideological priors and social goals, which means they can’t deploy such weak rhetorical gambits as ignoring the substance of an argument by declaring it has been made in bad faith. And so they respond with playground name-calling or imputing guilt by association.
In a post entitled “Congratulations, Elitists: Liberals and Conservatives Do Have Common Interests Now,” Taibbi writes, “For years now, this has been the go-to conversation-ender for prestige media pundits and Twitter trolls alike, directed at any progressive critic of the political mainstream: You’re a Republican! A MAGA-sympathizer! Or (lately), an ‘insurrectionist’!” Taibbi goes on, “The traditional liberal approach to the search for truth, which stresses skepticism and free-flowing debate, is giving way to a reactionary movement. . . . It’s anti-democratic, un-American, and naturally unites the residents of even the most extreme opposite ends of our national political spectrum.”
He specifically cites Yahoo correspondent Michael Isikoff, who, like many other reporters, credulously cited the Steele dossier before questioning its veracity. When called on this by New York Times reporter Barry Meier, who debunked the dossier, Isikoff chided Meier by saying he’d been “pretty much ignored by other media” except for right-of-center outlets, and suggested Meier should therefore feel “queasy” about his work. Taibbi calls this a catch-22: “Isikoff’s implication is a journalist can’t make an impact if the only outlet picking up his or her work is The Federalist, but ‘reputable’ outlets won’t touch news (and sometimes will even call for its suppression) if it questions prevailing notions of Conventional Wisdom.”
Being labeled as supporting the views of Donald Trump makes a reporter radioactive to his colleagues, “so most media people will go far out of their way to avoid even accidentally incurring it,” Taibbi says. This in turn requires burying information, downplaying it, poisoning the wells (by, for instance, labeling inconvenient information a “conspiracy theory”), or rolling out the fact-checkers to assert that this or that claim has been “debunked.” That’s how the lab-leak hypothesis about the origins of COVID-19 was ridiculed and declared out-of-bounds by reporters who should have been investigating it. The “Democracy Dies in Darkness” gang wind up bolstering the narrative of the authoritarian leadership of China about the biggest story of the century if that’s what it takes to oppose Trump.
“Information that is true but doesn’t cut the right way politically is now routinely either non-reported or actively misreported,” Taibbi writes, and then he really hits home with these words:
The original propaganda line was that “half” of Trump supporters were deplorable racists, then it was all of them, and then, four years in, the whole country and all its traditions were deemed deplorable.
Now, when the statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt came down, there was a new target, separate and apart from Trump. The whole history of American liberalism was indicted as well, denounced as an ineffectual trick of the oppressor, accomplishing nothing but giving legitimacy to racial despotism.
The American liberalism I knew growing up was inclusive, humble, and democratic. It valued the free exchange of ideas among other things because a central part of the liberal’s identity was skepticism and doubt, most of all about your own correctitude. Truth was not a fixed thing that someone owned, it was at best a fleeting consensus, and in our country everyone, down to the last kook, at least theoretically got a say. We celebrated the fact that in criminal courts, we literally voted to decide the truth of things.
The overarching problem with the truth wars these days is that it is subordinate to the political wars. Greenwald, in an interview with Reason, discussed why he left The Intercept, a media outlet he co-founded: “I felt as though we had gotten off course for a few years now by becoming more and more linked with the Democratic Party,” he said. The Intercept was supposed to be fearlessly principled and independent, equally prepared to rain hellfire on the Obama or Bush administration. Gradually, it turned into an adjunct public-relations outfit for the DNC, like most other media organizations. “Particularly in the age of Trump,” Greenwald said, “we had become not so much a journalistic outlet but more an activist outlet, designed not to report the truth no matter who it aggrandizes or angers but serving the interests of the Democratic Party.”
In a February post, Taibbi noted with dismay the rising censorial nature of the Democratic Party, its media cheerleaders, and the social-media platforms who increasingly act to silence its opponents: “All of these stories share the same theme: small, unelected groups of private executives making sweeping decisions about speech, cheered on by Democratic Party politicians. If it proceeds to its logical conclusion, it poses a much more serious problem for society than even Fox News at its worst.”
This came in response to the news that two Democratic lawmakers, Representatives Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, both of California, were responding to the urging of CNN’s media reporter Oliver Darcy and other members of the politician-activist-media troika that cable systems should de-platform Darcy’s employer’s competitors, such as Fox News Channel, for the supposed crime of “misinformation.” As Taibbi points out, that tiresome term is today little more than a partisan tool for labeling your opponents as illegitimate. We live in an age when left authoritarians such as Darcy are in the ascendant. It’s essential that liberals on the left fight back against their worst instincts.