When a member of the American Nazi party spoke at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, he did so at the invitation of a leftwing student group. As a stunt to promote the event – part of a series which also featured Malcolm X, the conservative William F Buckley, communists and a member of the fringe rightwing John Birch Society – the students wore Nazi uniforms.
All such guests were “greeted politely”, according to the feminist scholar Jo Freeman, and no one tried to stop them speaking. Debates about what the speakers had said, not whether they should have been allowed to say it, “dominated student bull sessions for days”.
Contrast that episode with another recounted by the libertarian journalist Robby Soave. When a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union spoke at the College of William & Mary in Virginia in 2017, activists declared liberalism “white supremacy” and surrounded her, chanting “Shame, shame, shame” until she abandoned the stage.
Older audience members, knowing the ACLU’s history as an advocate for free speech, due process, criminal justice reform, abortion rights and other issues historically dear to the left, must have felt bewilderment – and maybe even the hair-tingling realization of a character in a slasher movie. The phone call was coming from inside the house.
How and why has the left changed? When did it adopt so many attitudes – identitarianism, censoriousness, puritanism, a propensity for moral panics – traditionally associated with the conservative right? Panic Attack, from All Points Books, which publishes authors right and left, offers itself as a guidebook for the confused. As a libertarian – and, he notes, a millennial – Soave, a staff writer at Reason, positions himself as usefully outside the fray: sympathetic to some of the activist left’s goals but skeptical of their means.
The decision to adorn the book with blurbs from Tucker Carlson and Meghan McCain is unfortunate, not only because it gives the false impression it is another rightwing screed against snowflakes. It will also prevent the book from reaching the audience that would most benefit from reading it: the left.
Some of Panic Attack covers ground well-trodden by Fox News commentators and Wall Street Journal editorials: trigger warnings! Safe spaces! It will also be old hat to any reader steeped in the quasi-religious “woke” discourse that saturates higher education, Twitter and an increasing share of the media.
It is unsurprising that university campuses – “where the grievances are significant but the stakes are low” – are the petri dishes of the woke left, but Soave doesn’t buy the argument that these are just silly college kids. I don’t either. They’re intelligent, deadly serious kids at elite schools, who graduate and accept elite jobs at elite institutions, and there is growing statistical evidence that we are seeing a kind of second long march through the institutions.
Similarly, although the election of a toxic xenophobe to the White House shocked and mobilized activists, Soave doesn’t see this new assertive left as a reaction to Trump alone. There are deeper causes: the influence of academic theories like intersectionality and critical theory; changing parenting attitudes; the Great Recession; the growth of a massive industry of HR officers and diversity tsars; frustration with the centrist tack of the Democratic party.
Panic Attack is a methodical, earnest and often insightful work of reporting and analysis, not a fiery polemic. Investigating the limits and self-defeating tendencies of the social-justice left, Soave believes “intersectionality” has become a snake eating its own tail. To him, it is a discourse that claims to embrace the complexity of the human experience yet more often reduces human beings to categories; a crusade against privilege often led by well-heeled students at outrageously expensive universities; a movement for inclusivity that is frequently exclusive, polarizing and toxic.
“[F]raming a specific issue in identitarian terms makes it less appealing to people who do not identify with the category of marginalization in question,” Soave argues. This, he says, makes issue coalitions “less diverse” and “prone to tactical errors, such as engaging in performative acts that confirm the wokeness of the in-group but scare off” prospective allies.
Though most of the book is about the digital-age left, Soave also looks at the right. Like Angela Nagle and Shuja Haider, he sees leftwing outrage culture and rightwing trolling culture as symbiotic and self-perpetuating, though he takes pains to avoid a false moral equivalence between the social-justice left and the racist alt-right.
It is “wrong to blame the left for the alt-right’s bad behavior and odious beliefs”, he writes. “The alt-right is a white nationalist movement, wholly undeserving of public sympathy” and “a testament to the enduring power of racism”.
The left’s infatuation with identity politics and outrage culture is a fatal mistake, Soave argues, in part because it plays directly into the hands of the alt-right. By “turning away from bedrock principles of liberalism, free speech and inclusion, the left has made it easier for people to swallow the red pill. Shutting down abhorrent far-right speakers backfires in that it distracts from the speakers’ messages, casting them as martyrs and making their critics on the left seem like the intolerant ones.”
Reflexive accusations of racism and sexism have created a cry wolf problem – and efforts by left-leaning institutions and platforms to narrow the window of acceptable discourse have had the opposite effect. Soave quotes the psychologist Steven Pinker: limiting people’s exposure to controversial ideas means that when they are exposed for the first time, those ideas are like a “bacillus to which they have no immunity”.
We are faced with not only viruses of intolerance but superbugs, and they grow stronger every day.
