The Authoritarian Moment

by Ben Shapiro

  In fact, that sort of labeling—the attempt to turn all political opposition into evidence of personal malevolence, the mainstreaming of anti-conventionalism, combined with top-down censorship and incentivization of revolutionary aggression—is the reason for the backlash against down-ballot Democrats.

  Our culture wars aren’t about anything so mundane as marriage, policing, or even abortion. Our culture wars are about a simple question: Can we agree that freedom of speech is more important than freedom from offense? Can we hire, work with, and break bread with people who may differ on the nature of the good life, but agree on the individual freedoms that come along with being an American?

  If the answer is no, you’re probably a leftist. If the answer is yes, you’re part of the silent majority.

  And perhaps you’re only silent because you don’t know that you’re in the majority.

  Why don’t you know that?

  Because for three generations, there’s been an ongoing, successful attempt to wrest institutional control from the apolitical, and to weaponize those institutions on behalf of the authoritarian Left. Most Americans tend to think individually, both philosophically and strategically: they spend their time attempting to convince friends and family of their viewpoints, rather than infiltrating institutions and using the power of those institutions for mass marketing. Leftists have no such qualms. Most Americans, trusting in the free market and free speech, insist that people be left free to make choices they don’t like, and oppose the exercise of institutional power; leftists militarize powerful forces in a variety of fields to achieve their political ends.

  The authoritarian Left has successfully pursued a three-step strategy to effectuate their takeover of the major institutions in our society. The first step: winning the emotional argument. The second step: renormalizing the institutions. The third step: locking all the doors.

  CONVINCING AMERICANS TO SHUT UP

  The Left has spent decades gradually suppressing most Americans—and encouraging conservatives to suppress themselves. The process began with an appeal to politeness; that appeal became a demand for silence; then the demand for silence became an order to comply, repeat, and believe.

  This was a heavy lift, and it didn’t happen overnight. The Left began with a simple recognition that both conservative and liberal philosophies have soft underbellies. For conservatives, the soft underbelly is a militant insistence on cordiality. Conservatives were, until Donald Trump, deeply concerned with personal values in their politicians—but they were insistent on them in daily life. One of those virtues was peacefulness, affability, treating thy neighbor as thyself. As philosopher Russell Kirk suggested, conservatives believe in peace and stability, in human imperfectability and in community.4 If we believe in peace and stability, that requires tolerance; if we believe human beings are imperfectible, we shouldn’t be too quick to judge; if we believe in the value of community, we must be willing to forgive small slights. These are nuanced ideas, but all too often conservatives boil them down to being proper. And by being proper, conservatives all too often mean being inoffensive.

  But being inoffensive is a bastardization of the call to decency. Conservatism doesn’t merely believe in anodyne cordiality—a cordiality that looks the other way at cruelty, or requires silence in the face of sin. Conservatism promotes certain values that come into conflict with leftist values. Conservatism relies on moral judgment, too. Conservatism believes that friendship relies on willingness to steer those we love away from sin: as the Bible states, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your fellow, but you shall not bear a sin on his account.”5

  Nonetheless, leftism identified in conservatives a fundamental willingness to go along to get along—to see cordiality as virtue itself. And it wasn’t difficult for leftists to transmute some conservatives’ desire to be cordial into a political principle: anything considered offensive ought to be barred. This principle—we can call it the Cordiality Principle—manifested in ways directly contrary to the conservative ability to speak freely. Conservatism believes in standards of right and wrong, of good and bad. Distinguishing between good and bad requires the exercise of judgment. The Left suggested that judgment was itself wrong, uncivilized, vulgar. Judgment was, of course, judgmental. And this was bad. To be judgmental was to offend someone, and thus to violate the Cordiality Principle.

  “Equality” and “inclusion” and “diversity” and “multiculturalism” became the bywords of the day. As conservative philosopher Roger Scruton writes, “In place of the old beliefs of a civilization based on godliness, judgment and historical loyalty, young people are given the new beliefs of a society based on equality and inclusion, and are told that the judgment of other lifestyles is a crime. . . . The ‘non-judgmental’ attitude towards other cultures goes hand-in-hand with a fierce denunciation of the culture that might have been one’s own.”6

  This Cordiality Principle gained serious traction in arenas ranging from arguments over religion to pornography to abortion to same-sex marriage. Many conservatives became uncomfortable standing up for their own principles in polite company, or in moral terms—better not to be perceived as Not Very Nice.

  The soft underbelly of liberalism to the Cordiality Principle was obvious. For liberals, compassion isn’t merely a principle: it is an ersatz religion. Where conservatives define virtue in accordance with religious precepts or natural law, liberals define virtue as empathy. Liberals see themselves as compassionate, at root; they see themselves through the lens of kindness. And it simply isn’t “nice” to quarrel with others, no matter how demanding. Niceness lies at the core of everything; better to bite one’s tongue than to start a fight, which might be seen as intolerant.

  The Cordiality Principle was just the beginning. The second step came when leftists began to contend that judgmentalism wasn’t merely a violation of the Cordiality Principle, it was an actual harm. The argument shifted from “Just Be Nice” to “Silence Is Required.”

  Now, traditionally, offense has not been considered a serious harm. J. S. Mill famously posited the so-called harm principle—the notion that activity that actually harms someone ought to be condemned, or even legally barred. But Mill himself rejected the conflation of harm and offense—just because someone found something offensive, Mill argued, didn’t mean that it ought to be regulated or socially banned.

  The distinction between harm and offense, however, can be murky. Philosopher Joel Feinberg points out that few of us believe that people should publicly have sex with one another; that’s a crime against our sense of cordiality. Offensiveness, he says, can in fact be a harm. To that end, Feinberg posited a balancing test: on one hand, society would balance the “seriousness of an offense”; on the other hand, society would balance “reasonableness of the offending conduct.” If offensive conduct did not seriously offend anyone, for example, and was personally important to the offender, the conduct would be allowed. If, however, the offense is “profound,” the balance could shift, and shift precipitously.7

  The authoritarian Left has artificially shifted Feinberg’s balance. Every offense to particularly “vulnerable groups”—meaning groups defined as vulnerable by the Left in a kaleidoscopically changing hierarchy of victimhood—represents the possibility of profound offense. Those who engage in such offense must be silenced.

  Thus, the Left has posited that even minor offense amounts to profound damage—hence the language of “microaggressions,” which posit by their very nature that verbiage is an act of violence. Microaggressions range from the utterly anodyne (“Where are you from?” is apparently a brutal act, since it presupposes that the subject of the question is of foreign extraction) to the extraordinarily counterproductive (references to “meritocracy” are deeply wounding, since they presuppose that free systems reward hard work, thus condemning the unsuccessful by implication).

  Microaggressions require no intent—intent is not an element of the crime, since we may not be awa
re, thanks to our “implicit bias,” of our own bigotry. They do not even require actual evidence of harm. Subjective perception of offense is quite enough. The culture of microaggression is about magnifying claims of harm in order to gain leverage. That leverage can grow to astonishing proportions: woke staffers got a reporter for The New York Times fired for using the n-word to explain why and when using the n-word was wrong. Times executive editor Dean Baquet even repeated the authoritarian Left’s favorite mantra: “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” Regardless of intent.8 If you can be racist without intent, silence becomes the only protection for most Americans. After all, as Berkeley leftists chanted when I spoke there in 2017, “Speech is violence.”

  But now the Left has gone even further. Now, silence is violence. This idiotic, self-contradictory slogan has been picked up by a myriad of politicians and thoughtleaders. The idea is that if you remain silent in the face of an evil—an evil defined by the Left, naturally—then you are complicit in that evil. It’s no longer enough to oppose racism, for example; you must carry around a copy of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, announce your white privilege for the world to hear, and prepare for your inevitable atonement. If you don’t, you will be deemed an enemy.

  Now, don’t mistake the slogan “silence is violence” as a call for open speech. Far from it! “Silence is violence” means that you must remain silent, but only after “doing the work”—learning why your point of view is utterly irrelevant, ceding all ground to woke leftists, and becoming a crusader on behalf of their point of view. If you refuse, you will be targeted. Abject apologies will be demanded. The only way to escape the social media brute squads is to become a member, baying in unison.

  THE RENORMALIZATION OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS

  All of this might remain a fringe phenomenon relegated to the wilds of Twitter and college campuses, but for a simple fact: the culture of authoritarian leftism has now hijacked nearly all of Americans’ major institutions and cultural touchstones.

  Universities, once bastions of free thought, are now philosophical one-party systems dedicated to the promulgation of authoritarian leftism. Corporations, petrified of legal liability—or at least hoping to avoid accusations of insensitivity or bigotry—have caved to this culture. They have enforced a culture of silence in which tens of millions of employees fear speaking their minds for fear of retaliation. Social media have banned people who refuse to abide by social justice dictates, and social mobs, egged on by eager activists in the media, mobilize daily to target the un-woke. Culturally apolitical spaces ranging from sports to entertainment have been mobilized on behalf of the Left, weaponized in pursuit of the cultural revolution.

  How did this happen? How did colleges, supposedly protectors of open inquiry and free speech, turn into the bleeding edge of censorship and ideological compulsion? How did the media, supposedly committed to the business of facts and First Amendment freedoms, fall prey to the iron grip of the woke? How did corporations, oriented toward apolitical profit making, turn away from the vast majority of their audience and toward pleasing a vocal but small minority?

  The answer lies in a process that author Nassim Nicholas Taleb labels “renormalization.” This process allows a motivated minority to cow a larger, largely uninterested majority into going along to get along. Taleb gives a simple example: a family of four, including one daughter who eats only organic. Mom now has a choice: she can cook two meals, one for the non-organic family members and one for her daughter; or she can cook one meal with only organic ingredients. She decided to cook only one meal. This is renormalization of the family unit, which has converted from majority non-organic to universally organic. Now, says Taleb, have the family attend a barbecue attended by three other families. The host has to make the same choice mom did—and the host chooses to cook organic for everyone. This process of renormalization—the new normal—continues until broader and broader numbers have been moved by one intransigent person.

  The process applies in politics as in life. “You think that because some extreme right- or left-wing party has, say, the support of ten percent of the population,” Taleb writes, “their candidate will get ten percent of the votes. No: these baseline voters should be classified as ‘inflexible’ and will always vote for their faction. But some of the flexible voters can also vote for that extreme faction. . . . These people are the ones to watch out for, as they may swell the number of votes for the extreme party.”9

  It’s not enough, though, to have a lone stubborn person. You need a tipping point—a certain number of people within a whole in order to create a renormalization cascade. While each minor demand made of the broad majority might seem reasonable, or at least low-cost, over a long enough period of time, people fight back. It’s one thing to hold one block party with organic ingredients. It’s another to demand, day after day, that everybody in the neighborhood turn in their hamburgers for organic tofu. At a certain point, a long train of minor demands amounts to a major imposition. Even the American Founding Fathers were willing to tolerate a “long train of usurpations and abuses” for a while. Only after it dawned on them that those demands pursued “invariably the same Object, evinc[ing] a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism,” did they declare independence.

  The process of renormalization can only go so far unless a tipping point is reached. That tipping point, however, does not require a majority. Not even close. If all the intransigent actors get together, a core can be formed, which triggers the tipping point. Physicist Serge Galam has posited that in some cases, only about 20 percent of a population is needed to support an extreme view in order to cause radical renormalization. One way of creating such an intransigent minority coalition: the activation of what Galam has called “frozen prejudices,” at the risk of appearing intolerant or immoderate to a broad majority, while still maintaining a solid core base.10 In other words, start with a motivated core group; don’t worry about who you alienate; appeal to the prejudices of vulnerable groups, who are then forced to choose between the core group and its most ardent enemies. Make the choice binary.

  This is, in a nutshell, the strategy for the authoritarian Left. By putting together an intersectional coalition of supposedly dispossessed groups motivated by a common enemy—the system itself—they can move mountains. They can build a coalition of people who look the other way at revolutionary aggression, who endorse top-down censorship, who believe deeply in anti-conventionalism. And when the ascendant authoritarian leftist coalition uses its momentum against those who populate the highest levels of institutional power, offering job preservation or temporary absolution in return for surrender, institutions generally surrender. And then those institutions cram down these authoritarian leftist values. That’s how you get Coca-Cola, a company with over 80,000 employees, training its workforce to be “less white” in fully racist fashion, noting that to be “less white” means to be “less arrogant, less certain, less defensive, less ignorant, and more humble”—and claiming that this discriminatory content was designed to enhance “inclusion.”11

  SHUTTING THE OVERTON WINDOW

  Within institutions, the authoritarian Left’s incremental demands have been taken up, one by one: from diversity training to affirmative action hiring, from charitable donations to internal purges. But for the generalized impact of institutional takeover to be felt requires one final step: the renormalization of our societal politics in favor of censorship.

  Those who work within hijacked institutions remain a small fraction of the general population—but they can renormalize the society more broadly if they can convert liberals into leftists. American politics is, broadly speaking, divided into three significant groups: conservatives, leftists, and liberals. Liberals may share redistributionist goals with leftists, but can be distinguished from leftists with a simple test: asking whether those who disagree ought to be silenced. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, used to be liberal—it stood up for the right of Nazis to mar
ch through Skokie, Illinois. Now, however, the ACLU is fully leftist—in 2018, the ACLU promulgated an internal memo explaining, “Our defense of speech may have a greater or lesser harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed . . . we should make every effort to consider the consequences of our actions. . . .”12

  The bulk of mainstream Democrats—and the vast majority of Americans—don’t stand in favor of top-down censorship. But increasingly, the Democratic Party leadership has shifted from liberal to leftist. This means threatening action against social media companies for allowing dissemination of nonliberal material, or seeking regulation targeting corporations who do not mirror the liberal agenda.

  Renormalization takes place by inches. Instead of simply calling for outright bans on broad swaths of speech, leftists have insisted that the Overton Window—the window of acceptable discourse, in which rational discussion can take place—ought to be gradually closed to anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. This means savaging conservatives as racists and penalizing liberals who deign to converse with conservatives.

  This means that liberals are left with a choice of their own: they can either choose to form a coalition with leftists, with whom they agree on most policy goals, but with whom they disagree on fundamental freedom principles; or they can form a coalition with conservatives, with whom they disagree on policy goals, but with whom they agree on fundamental freedom principles.

  That choice is, so far, up in the air.

  On the one hand, there are liberals who still stand for free speech—or at least appear to do so. In June 2020, 153 liberals ranging from J. K. Rowling to Noam Chomsky signed a letter decrying the rise of “the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.” These prominent thinkers explained, “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. . . . .The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.”13 This was a heartening development. But not one Trump supporter appeared on the letter. Which meant that the question remained an open one: did these liberals mainly seek to avoid the radical Left’s censorious purges themselves, or did they truly hope to open up the Overton Window beyond themselves?