The second and third volumes of Stoppard’s trilogy on 19th C. Russian revolutionaries, The Coast of Utopia, is mostly set in exile, but Voyage, the first volume, is set in Russia. A brilliant speech opens its second act: Alexander Herzen, appearing for the first time, addresses the audience, explaining both a children’s game and picture book titled ”What is wrong with this picture?” and the situation of Russia under Nicholas I. Herzen gives some examples of what is horrifically wrong under Nicholas’s autocracy, and concludes “Something is wrong with this picture. Are you listening? You are in the picture.” It is the most theatrically brilliant moment in the trilogy. Herzen suggests that we do not seem to take in the grotesquerie of what is happening, or are perhaps merely afraid to speak of it. I think he is also implying that whichever is the case, in not noticing what is supremely visible and in not speaking about what is clearly outrageous we are to a degree complicit in such things, also more vulnerable to them happening to us.
This is pretty much John McWhorter’s strategy in Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He opens his book with a section titled “What kind of people?”, which begins with three episodes of either loss of employment or what might be considered constructive dismissal for what McWhorter would probably consider impiety, all three asserted verbal improprieties, and episodes presumably selected for their sinister absurdity. The first—a white writer briefly criticizing two mixed-race writers—resulted in the first writer being implausibly pilloried as a racist, then suspended from and soon resigning from her job, one of the best in her field. The second episode consists of a woman being implausibly pilloried as a racist, then fired from a good and important job, and the third recounts the case of a man being implausibly pilloried as a racist and fired from a job at a progressive think tank. How implausibly pilloried? Take only the third case, where one of the best Democratic political data analysts brought on this fate by tweeting a study from a Black Ivy League professor of political science showing that in the late ‘60s violent protests made voters likelier to vote Republican than non-violent ones did. The other two cases are not visibly less absurd, and after each anecdote McWhorter asks “What kind of people do these things? Why do they get away with it? And are we going to let them continue to?” This is a contemporary version of Herzen’s question in Voyage, and while the stakes are fabulously smaller than they were for any subject of Nicholas I, they are not absolutely trivial. When I was a boy some failures to conform to the pieties and verities of the moment with sufficient noisy enthusiasm, which then led to loss of employment, were in liberal circles stigmatized as McCarthyism. Nowadays, not so much.
McWhorter proposes some interesting answers to his first and second questions. His book is short, sometimes a brilliant polemic, and I have the impression that for some people it is fascinating because of their astonishment at seeing in print what had previously been only fleetingly considered or half-expressed, even to themselves, and only very cautiously expressed to others. This is part of McWhorter’s point: the term he uses for the people he thinks aspiring theocrats, ‘Electists’, denotes probably less than a third of the Democratic electorate, but he thinks they have managed to bully into silence a very large number of other Democrats. The bullying is empowered by both the power of slander and the threat of unemployment. McWhorter does not doubt Electist sincerity, but if pressed would probably note both that the sincere can still exercise a covertly or even openly sadistic will to power, and that, as Mill noted, “the odium theologicum, in a sincere bigot, is one of the most unequivocal cases of moral feeling.”
How many are really at risk? Who knows? But there is some indirect evidence of how many feel themselves at risk: serious polls state that a little over half of American undergraduates are afraid to speak honestly about contentious questions, one poll says the number is two thirds, and the cowed seem to be evenly distributed across the political spectrum. I know many academics who have been advised by friends to be more cautious, in fact to be very cautious indeed. McWhorter is obviously uncowed, but he’s also Black, tenured, and pretty fearless. Tenure is relevant here because it often protects free speech by the tenured—a decreasing portion of the professoriate. Being Black may matter because one of the most dreaded slanders and libels is the charge of racism, which inflicts great reputational loss, and Black academics probably have partial protection from that particular slander. At least for now, McWhorter’s also a regular contributor to the New York Times, so maybe things are changing: it’s a long road that has no turning. But neither tenure nor color are anything like absolute protections, so McWhorter’s courage deserves some respect. As a learned, experienced, celebrated and observant academic friend noted a few years ago, courage is the rarest fucking thing in the world.
One of the more contentious of McWhorter’s answers to those first two questions is that we are dealing with what he terms a new religion, one he dubs ‘Electism’. McWhorter, not a religious man, seems to mean that a religion is something one should not waste time arguing about, because the devout are immune to argument about the tenets of their faith, but it is worth arguing with people of good will. So neither his Electists nor real racists are his target audience. For my money ‘Electism’ as religion works best as a metaphor, and is certainly not a completely persuasive account of the history of religious disputation, but the longer I pondered it the more I think McWhorter’s on to something very important. One cannot read, hear or talk to the people he calls Electists without realizing that one is risking what are in effect charges of heresy or blasphemy by speaking one’s mind, even very politely. How often someone is risking more isn’t clear. McWorther is ingenious in extending his metaphor, e.g. he notes that he does not doubt that to be White in America is to automatically enjoy certain unstated privileges, but that the Electists’ “White Privilege” is something else, and remarkably close to original sin—an irredeemable taint with origins in the distant and inaccessible past, one that has on some Electist accounts forever impaired White reason and White will (hence the unending necessity to “do the work” while being assured that the tainted soul will never be washed clean of sin). His Electists are evangelical, superstitious, apocalyptic, ban heretics, punish blasphemy, possess a clergy (I’d add, also inquisitors), and seem far more concerned with their own spiritual health, and the spiritual health of the rest of us, than they are with articulating any clear and detailed political program for improving the situation of poorer Black Americans. So the metaphor, admittedly flawed, remains illuminating and suggestive.
One of McWhorter’s concerns is the fate of his own daughters—he does not want them to think that they can best make their careers by always claiming exceptional vulnerability and fragility. My sense is that McWhorter, who I’ve heard nastily accused of being, in effect, the Black Seamus Heaney—’every Englishman’s favourite Irish poet’—is probably less interested in the observed effects of ’Electism’ on whites than he is in what he fears are its consequences for Black Americans. He thinks a number of contemporary pieties—American racism is as savage as it ever was, race is the invariant core of one’s identity, etc.—are not merely preposterous but very dangerous. He does not mention what I’d count as one of the more pressing dangers, which is the chance of Electism’s abusiveness during a period of stalemated politics and a precarious economy bringing back into power a Trumpean national government, one perhaps led by a much less feckless fool.
McWhorter, who has recently assured his readers that he’s never voted for anyone but a Democrat, does not seem to be looking for work in the next Republican administration, and in a recent interview acknowledged that many recent threats to free enquiry are coming from the Right. I think he’s right about that, which doesn’t mean he was wrong before, or that the threat from the Right makes the threat from his ‘Electists’ trivial, or a red herring, and thus for the moment exempt from attack. To quote Lenin, “both are worse”.