On Liberalism, Trans Rights, and Questions of Identity

Here is a recent Sightings article in which I think about the roots of liberal divisions over trans rights in the Enlightenment principle of state neutrality in religious affairs. The debate over trans rights is a very personal one, and it’s not one where I can or want to judge others’ experience from the standpoint of my own. I do confess to a naive surprise at the anger that trans inclusion causes to people who consider themselves very tolerant and sympathetic. However, I hope I can contribute by showing that “classical” liberal traditions give much less basis for contemporary progressives’ ideals than they seem to think. Prospects for more work on the ambiguities of “inclusion” remain to be seen. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

Dude Ain't Wrong But

Confucius says that in the course of serving their parents, children ought to be able to remonstrate (jian 諫) with them. Remonstration is a complicated idea that’s not at home in the modern world. The realm of acceptable speech was narrower in official imperial China, and as a result, its ideas of contrariety were subtler.

I’m not that interested in how to respect particular hierarchies while giving advice, but I am concerned that in the near-total freedom of speech on the Internet, we have forgotten how to distinguish and perform a kind of critical talking back that comes not from a place of scolding or denunciation but sharing deeply in a common purpose.

What I want now is to think about a piece of writing I agree with in substance and first sympathetically question its utility in advancing goals I share and then ask about how and why the author has put his work into making theoretical points and criticisms instead of something more positive and practical. In other words I’m worried about how a smart guy on the left is getting shunted into talking like an academic like so so many others. Among people on the left, especially those of us who say we hate the culture wars but can’t seem to talk about anything except the culture wars, there’s a lot to think about the essay I’ve read.

The piece in question is Dustin Guastella’s recent criticism of what he calls “anti-social socialism.”

He argues that “From loneliness to sexlessness, from drug abuse to murder, many on the Left find themselves excusing or ignoring the steady rise of collective antisocial behavior.” The reason these people are so indifferent is worse than them simply not caring. They rather think that their own maximally-permissive and individualistic lifestyles are the right way to live, and they think this way because whatever they say, their fundamental attitudes toward themselves and others are rooted in bourgeois socialization and elite education, two things that define what “the left” is in increasingly exclusive terms.

Guastella’s is a long piece, and I don’t disagree with any particular point he makes, not substantively. I have an Internet “team,” and my team says that any politics that challenges the establishment consensus with an alternative that promotes the needs of the vast majority requires a mass basis that transcends the real and fabricated divisions of a diverse society. My team says that where the left is dominated by subcultural in-grouping and avant-garde individualism that undermine the mass basis before we’ve even got it, we’re screwed.

Not only do I agree with what Guastella is saying, I think Guastella, as a Marxist trade-union leader, is exactly the person to say it, and it’s for that reason that no matter what I do, I will never raise my soft hand for any job that’s remotely confusable with political leadership.

So what’s the problem here? The problem comes with how Guastella makes what is largely an unobjectionable theoretical point. Guastella criticizes cultural vanguard positions: the total rejection of the nuclear family, and total toleration of alcoholism and drug addiction, positions he identifies with particular academics Sophie Lewis and Carl Hart respectively.

I don’t know whether he’s accurately representing their work or not, but if they’re arguing anything like what he says they’re doing, they’re not helping the left in any way, and are clearly manifestations of what’s hurting it.

Yet we should wonder whether Hart or Lewis was ever trying to help us, or anybody, a point we’ll revisit below, and the problem here is that Guastella is dodging some difficult questions.

On the issue of family life, I agree with Guastella that “Stagnant wages, insecurity in the job market, rising housing costs, and other structural factors have combined to cripple family life in advanced (and not-so-advanced) economies.“ I have experienced this personally, and it hurts me and my loved ones. I also agree that ““progressive” pessimism is helping to accelerate the family crisis” through things like climate catastrophizing and a tendency to label all forms of conflict, inevitable in family and romantic life, as “abuse.” 

Yet, in addition to the fact that climate change and domestic violence are very, very real problems, it doesn’t get us very far to say “the left loves families” and just try to abolish poverty. We ought to and we should.

But that’s just a discursive start. How can we actually make the world a more family-friendly place? However, it’s awkward for liberals to notice that the Western European social democracies we look up to for so much have low birth rates too, just like it’s hard for conservatives to note that Eastern European countries with pro-natal and anti-immigrant regimes have even lower birthrates. As for the rich countries in East Asia no team talks about, because they are both wealthy and secular and patriarchal and unwelcoming to immigrants... their birthrates are the lowest.

It seems like no one is articulating a vision people want to live for intergenerationally, not like they used to, and it’s this situation that Lewis’ type of argument is addressing. Moreover, academic work like Lewis’ really only circulates among precisely the type of people who are already part of the professional-class radical-liberal subset, the people we don’t need.

What would reach the people we do wouldn’t so much be an academic refutation as a positive statement of something else.  

Things are similar on the issue of drugs. Carl Hart made news arguing that hard drugs like heroin can be a safe part of a responsible adult life, an anomalous opinion to say the least, and one at odds with the lived experience of millions of working-class people. As Guastella says “The United States witnessed a 51% increase in overdose deaths between 2019 and 2021. In 2022, over a 100,000 people died from drug overdoses. To put that in perspective, it would be as if the entire city of South Bend, Indiana vanished in one year.“

Yet being “anti-drug” is the start of a longer argument, one that has the problem that just about every anti-drug strategy, including mass incarceration, has been tried. Guastella says people on the left need to broaden their historical understandings and look not only to tiny, rich Scandinavia, but to the leftist traditions in the Global South as well.

Maybe China’s Communist Party can claim to have overcome the deadly colonial legacy of opium addiction, but to say the least, the left wants civil liberties and reintegrative justice too, a set of goods such that it’s not clear who we should look to who has done it. That’s a question our minds should take up more urgently than arguing against defeatist academic musings that are already well enough outside the mainstream.

What can be done about family breakdown and drug crises are difficult questions, ones that could divide smart, principled partisans of the working class as much as unite them, and that is not the kind of piece Guastella set out to write. His is a polemic of the kind that leftist traditions, indeed all traditions, have, and it’s making points I don’t dispute.

The question I’m left with is rather about the Internet as it stands as a place where academic and cultural questions seem to make themselves central to any political discussion such that they are said to dictate the moral standing of people to even participate in the first place. Unfortunately, Guastella is neither demoting cultural concerns nor posing concrete alternative ideas to the fashionable pessimism of the group of people we all seem to agree are killing us.

I don’t know that the Internet is always inimical to mass political organizing, but academia is. The simplest leftist analysis begins with asking about the mode of production, and academics are individuals who produce individually.

We make a living and occupational gains by presenting ourselves as inspired individuals heroically challenging stagnant conventional wisdom with unique insight. Our livelihood is jeopardized not just by others’ points of view, but we gain exposure and notoriety by magnifying our disagreements into ruptures in the moral structure of history… or some bullshit like that.

It’s not news to readers that despite their lower salaries, academics are just as vindictive, adversarial, and proactively antisolidary as the rest of the professional class. It’s just that no white-shoe lawyer or finance bro I know is so indecent as to pretend at their work is for the betterment of humanity. But academics— that’s what we do. For some reason, the left has been consumed with contemporary academic tendencies to find sweeping schemes of oppression in small expressions of it, to present “radical” critiques with only faint hints of what can be done, to aggressively argue over minute differences in terminology, and to strongly and often imply that everything might be hopeless.

If this sounds like a familiar argument, I will take it a little farther to include many if not all of the groups and people I know who are actively working to solve the left’s middle-class problem. Often those groups of people want to counter boutique-subcultural critical theory, intersectionality, and identity studies with an equally academic Marxism, and more often than this, they simply want to present cultural critiques of their own.

In lib-critical left forums and publications, like Damage magazine, where Guastella publishes, Spiked, and even the venerable Nonsite and the like, culturalist takedowns of the professional middle class far outnumber prescriptions about organizing or even clear positions on the cultural issues like crime, abortion, and immigration themselves. Guastella’s piece doesn’t really point the way forward on the issues he highlights other than to tell us not to look on the world as middle-class liberals.

Why would this be? How did things get this bad? These are questions that have been occupying me for some time, even as I try to pry my way into the professoriat with my own obscure and self-indulgent pensees, and though I’ve got massive bibliographies I need to read, I still haven’t gotten there.

Some initial thoughts include the post-materialism hypothesis, that as countries’ economies transition from farming and industry toward services, their politics become more focused on the economy and less on culture. There is also Thomas Piketty’s Brahmin left and merchant right thesis that bears considering.

If I had a file folder where I would put all thoughts on how left politics has shifted toward individual intellectual commitment, theoretical reflection, and cultural critique, I would title that folder “academic liberalism.” In it would go not just half-finished tracts and thoughts about politics in general, but also how the academy itself has changed.

To get perspective, we badly need the insights of leaders like Guastella who are not themselves academics. It’s too bad he’s being pulled toward the same black hole we are.

Arguing Merits

As I get ready to start my second semester teaching at the University of Southern Mississippi, I have been thinking about my experiences and trying to read and think as broadly as I can about the task of teaching large and diverse student bodies in the present moment.

One writer I’ve found who addresses the challenges of public education from both pedagogy and policy perspectives is Freddie deBoer. I’m not the first to recommend him. His Substack newsletter is hugely popular, though there he goes a little too frequently for culture-war content than I would like, but a writer needs readers, and this is how you get the most readers at this moment, a topic for longer discussion. New York magazine recommended his book Cult of Smart as one of its 2020 must-reads, as would I.

The book makes a number of arguments, and one of the most that teachers should consider is how much factors outside their control impact how students learn at school.

DeBoer gives his main argument by comparing students to seeds: “We should strive for a world where all seeds grow in healthy, well-tended soil, out of a fundamental commitment to the equal moral value of all. But just as no plant can grow to its full potential height from poor soil, no amount of tending to the soil can make some seeds taller than some others,” and “to act as though every human being has the same potential in academic life is no more sensible than expecting every sapling to grow to the same height.”

In the book, deBoer continues using the seed metaphor to say that academic outcomes are overwhelmingly determined by genetics, a “hard” genetic determinist thesis advocated by the scholar Eric Turkheimer. However, deBoer concedes that it is difficult if not impossible to study human intelligence, learning, and life-outcomes with true scientific rigor because we can’t control experimental conditions.

In any case, my experience tells me that our influence as teachers is limited by a lot that’s out of our hands, whether it’s students’ genes or their broader familial and social situations. That is to say I share deBoer’s criticism of the thinking behind mainstream educational policy, which says that a combination of pedagogical heroism and student willpower can overcome literally any obstacle to learning.

De Boer roots this belief in Americans’ commitments to the idea of equal opportunity, that is, to meritocracy. Believers in meritocracy think that the extraordinary inequality of educational and socio-economic outcomes in contemporary American life only constitute a problem if they can be shown to be rooted in unequal opportunities.

Whereas conservatives are both normatively and epistemologically meritocratic— they believe we already have equal opportunity, and it makes this country great, liberals are only normatively committed. They see equal opportunity as a promise unfulfilled. Think Virginia Woolf’s famous passage about Shakespeare’s sister.

DeBoer falls outside the mainstream pro-meritocracy consensus. Speaking as a Marxist, he says “There is no a priori reason for society to privilege the interests of the talented, and no clear justification for a system of genetic aristocracy.”

He argues, and call me whatever you want, I agree, that the state and society need to dramatically intervene in our collective life to promote a much higher shared standard of living, much more equality of material outcomes, in housing, health care, and workplace governance.

DeBoer’s clearest normative commitment comes not from a Marxist thinker, but John Rawls, who argues that we should think about a just society through a thought experiment. Imagine we could design a society and polity collectively but didn’t know what race or gender we had to live as or what socioeconomic background we had before we were born.

Rawls’ bizarrely-made famous point is that legal and political equality require that we try to level out the unfair advantages some people have for no other reason than their birth. For de Boer, we should think about a society that is just as fair for the talented as the untalented.

DeBoer says it might be hard for blue Americans, who see themselves as egalitarians but would dread to be thought of as average, to accept that “There is no conflict in calling for political and social equality while denying that everyone is equal in ability, and no reason to presume that everyone needs to be equally capable of reasoning to participate in the the communal reasoning process.”

Here is the problem for me: DeBoer may be right there is no logical reason to connect equal rational powers to the public use of reason, but there is historical reason. As deBoer himself shows, the liberal thinkers as far back as Hobbes and Locke argued human beings are highly mutable because they are essentially equal prior to the accidental features of life in social systems.

Since the Enlightenment, voting rights have expanded alongside and were often conditioned upon the idea of universal education that progressive upper-class reformers intended to uplift the masses to their standard of thinking.

But it’s not limited to libs. No less than Leon Trotsky says that in a state of “Social construction and psycho-physical self-education,” we will see “The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or, a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”

What strikes me in the Trotsky quote is for all the radicalism, he is principally talking about acting on the masses to make them more like elites. This is for him a commitment to equality, but it’s not imagining what society or education might look like with different expressions of knowledge or learning, or what equality might look like if people cannot rise or fall through education any more than mountains.

This last possibility challenges de Boer’s faith in universal moral equality and dignity. If Turkheimer and others are correct, we cannot have a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, because standardized tests reveal profound differences in cognition that even the fairest wealthy social democracies have never altered. For de Boer, human beings’ equal socioeconomic needs confer equal socioeconomic rights by faith. In a society that doesn’t just tolerate but celebrates inequality, we’ll need to shorten the leap of faith.