Mean tweets
Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine:
Rich Anderson, the chairman of the Virginia Republican Party[,] wrote to the president of the University of Virginia yesterday. Anderson begins by explaining, “I understand the commitment that public servants make to serving with integrity, dignity, respect, and honor in their taxpayer-funded roles.” The letter concerns Donald Trump, though not in a way that follows intuitively from the premise that public servants must act with integrity, dignity, respect, and honor.
Anderson’s letter demands UVA open an ethics investigation into Larry Sabato, the director of the school’s Center for Politics. Sabato’s alleged ethics violation is a series of mean tweets from his personal account, concerning Donald Trump.
“Not an ethics violation, Your Honour.”
“Agreed. Dismissed.”
Anderson pretends that tweets harshly critical of Trump violate the UV Mission Statement’s elevated values.
Exactly how Sabato violated any of these guidelines by pointing out that the former president was a deranged narcissist, Anderson does not say. Indeed, if you’re going to take these mission statement nostrums seriously, a line like “Everything we do must fulfill our goal of instilling citizens with an appreciation for the core values of American freedom, justice, equality, civility, and service” would seem to require the University’s staff to oppose Trump.
On account of how Trump opposes and acts against all those core values, you see.
Of course the legal merits of Anderson’s demand are not the point. It is an exercise in harassment and intimidation. Republicans are flexing their political muscle as a threat to employees of public universities.
Republicans are flexing their cancel muscles.
The occasional Republican pose as defenders of free speech, or mockers of snowflakes, was always a transparent ploy; no abuse by the illiberal left can hold a candle to the illiberalism of a political party pledged to the whims of an authoritarian.
And not just any authoritarian, but one with a florid array of bad qualities and a total lack of the other kind.
“Reasonable” liberals who consider “both sides” and now decry the wokeness of the left as if it were a feature of progressives and liberals that is unique to the left, are both:
1. Ignorant of the greater degree of same from the Right and the fact that ever since “America: Love it or Leave it” bumper stickers were put on cars during the Vietnam War.
2. Playing into the hands of the conservatives who are using this impression to stave off the left in future elections.
Michael: You make a very good point. I might note that the crazier elements of “the left” do play into this. Partly because the right wing media always plays up the worst elements of woke-ness, of course
Brian – And I do think that the old ideas about what is “leff” and what is “right” don’t really apply anymore. Why, when I was a kid, the left were anti-vax. Now it’s the mainstream Republican and Libertarian position. Old school hippies are now Insurrectionists. The Left now seem to think that the gender structure needs to be enforced by medicalization, isn’t that wack?
We need a new marker system for how we denote the broad strokes of political community. Using the seating chart of the 18th century French Parliament doesn’t seem to be all that helpful anymore. The Left are the people we think are deluded and authoritarian, “we” are in the middle and reasonable, and the Right are deluded and authoritarian.