Category: Featured

There are many open, full-frontal assaults on liberalism. Conservatives, fascists, and communists have all attacked different aspects of liberal values to different ends — from free markets to individual rights to freedom of expression to democratic self-government. In the postwar era, liberalism came out on top. But there are no permanent victories.

Modern liberalism was experienced at fending off challenges that announced themselves at the front door, but one of the most successful anti-liberal challenges crept through the side gate. Critical Race Theory and related identitarian ideas fooled many of us into thinking it was just a new, strange version of liberalism. These ideas fooled us in part because they were so poorly understood even by those arguing for them.

In this essay, I’m using “liberalism” in the philosophical sense: the view that the basic unit of moral concern is the individual; that institutions should be governed by general, neutral rules; and that rights and due process are core to justice. The illiberal ideas I’m critiquing, on the other hand, treat groups — particularly racial, gender, and sexual identities — as the real subjects of politics, see “neutral” rules as a cover for domination by whites and men, and redefine justice as rebalancing power between groups rather than protecting the freedoms and rights of all individuals.

What I’ve come to see in retrospect is that we were witnessing large-scale entryism of a deeply and explicitly anti-liberal program into liberal spaces. But it happened in a genuinely confused and confusing way.

When I write about the failure of our schools to teach kids basic math, education writer Freddie deBoer complains that I am ignoring the obvious fact that some children are simply not that smart and will never master advanced math. “Big-time proponents of quantitative assessment like Kelsey Piper here also can’t accept that academic ability is normally distributed and that there will always be a bottom 50%/25%/10% … [people like Piper] act like it’s a matter of crisis when that testing reveals the inevitable reality that some people just aren’t good at school,” he wrote in a recent comment in response to my UC San Diego innumeracy article.

When I write about the failure of our schools to teach our kids how to read, deBoer complains that I am ignoring the obvious fact that some children are simply not that smart and can never be expected to read.

If I say we should adopt high-quality curricula and train teachers on them, deBoer complains that I am “big mad that we haven’t just waved the magic wand and saved the kids, which she insists (again and again) is something we could just do, if only we had the will.” Never fear, deBoer knows better: “Not all students are equally talented, and this can never change.”

The Karine Jean-Pierre press tour was perfect group chat fodder but I didn’t really have much to say about it until I saw Sarah Jones’ piece in New York Magazine: “Karine Jean-Pierre and the Return of the Girlboss.” In it, Jones characterizes Jean-Pierre, the former White House press secretary, as a #girlboss, which she defines as a woman whose “professional accomplishments outweigh moral considerations.” But that’s not what a Girlboss is!

Jones is not the only one to evoke the image of the Girlboss in relation to Jean-Pierre. In Becca Rothfeld’s beautifully scathing review of Jean-Pierre’s new book Independent, she calls the former press secretary an artifact of “the age of pantsuits, the word ‘empowerment,’ the musical ‘Hamilton,’ the cheap therapeutic entreaties to ‘work on yourself’ and ‘lean in’ to various corporate abysses.”

Jean-Pierre isn’t a Girlboss — in fact, calling her one is an affront to real Girlbosses who at least believed in competence and effort. Rather, she represents a post-Girlboss moment where striving has been replaced by pure performance and where one’s identity is trotted out as a ready-made shield.

Whatever your gripes with Girlboss feminism, to be a Girlboss is to steadfastly believe that hard work, professional excellence, and success could lead to gender equality. Jones’ definition ignores the Girlboss’ naked ambition as well as her pollyannaish but sincere belief that collective benefits would come from her success.

Jean-Pierre contains neither the desperate energy of the striving perfectionist nor even the pretense that her ascension should provide concrete benefits to the groups she superficially represents. Rather, she is something utterly different and unreservedly worse: Jean-Pierre is what comes after the death of the Girlboss, after the strivers have been driven underground, after a yearning for excellence has been mocked into oblivion.

It’s the crime, stupid.

That’s all I could think when I saw the latest numbers from our newest survey at The Argument, where we polled voters on their attitudes about immigration — and the policies that may get them to support more of it.

Contrary to what many may think, Americans are not inherently anti-immigration. In many cases, voters have clear and positive impressions of the contributions immigrants have made, both to the country and to their local communities. But support for immigration has still seen a marked dip since Donald Trump’s first term.

Why? Here’s a big reason: A nontrivial chunk of American voters are linking immigration to crime.

When it comes to immigration’s impact on the economy (+11), culture (+22), and overall in their local communities (+14), Americans view the impact of immigration positively. But when it comes to public safety (-16), it’s a different story altogether.

Just 21% of Americans think immigration has had a positive impact when it comes to public safety in their communities, while 37% think that the impact has been negative. That makes it the only tested dimension on which the public has a net-negative view of immigration’s local impact.