Anne Applebaum’s re-published essay: ‘The New Puritans’ from October 2021. That is framed by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. Note that brevity is not an attribute of Neo-Cons: exhausting the readers patience, and short circuiting critical thinking, via the exercise of a self-serving verbosity is central, in fact, the sine qua non of the Straussian! The word count of this essay is 7,896 !
Here are two telling paragraph on Applebaum’s that frame her report on a select number of the victims of ‘the internet mob, the office mob, or the peer-group mob’:
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I have been trying to understand these stories for a long time, both because I believe that the principle of due process underpins liberal democracy, and also because they remind me of other times and places. A decade ago, I wrote a book about the Sovietization of Central Europe in the 1940s, and found that much of the political conformism of the early Communist period was the result not of violence or direct state coercion, but rather of intense peer pressure. Even without a clear risk to their life, people felt obliged—not just for the sake of their career but for their children, their friends, their spouse—to repeat slogans that they didn’t believe, or to perform acts of public obeisance to a political party they privately scorned. In 1948, the famous Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik sent what he later described as some “rubbish” as his entry into a competition to write a “Song of the United Party”—because he thought if he refused to submit anything, the whole Union of Polish Composers might lose funding. To his eternal humiliation, he won. Lily Hajdú-Gimes, a celebrated Hungarian psychoanalyst of that era, diagnosed the trauma of forced conformity in patients, as well as in herself. “I play the game that is offered by the regime,” she told friends, “though as soon as you accept that rule you are in a trap.”
But you don’t even need Stalinism to create that kind of atmosphere. During a trip to Turkey earlier this year, I met a writer who showed me his latest manuscript, kept in a desk drawer. His work wasn’t illegal, exactly—it was just unpublishable. Turkish newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses are subject to unpredictable prosecutions and drastic sentences for speech or writing that can be arbitrarily construed as insulting the president or the Turkish nation. Fear of those sanctions leads to self-censorship and silence.
Applebaum engages in an unsurprising use of historical/political hyperbole of the Soviets, while neglecting, the most proximate occurrence of Backlisting of the McCarthy Era in America!
The partial list of victims:
one academic told me.
A journalist told me
One professor
Another person suspended
Ian Buruma
One editor said
one academic told me
Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor
Daniel Elder, a prizewinning composer
poet Joseph Massey
Stephen Elliott, a journalist and critic
one of the academics I interviewed
David Bucci, the former chair of the Dartmouth brain-sciences department (suicide)
Nicholas Christakis, the Yale professor of medicine and sociology
Robert George, a Princeton philosopher who has acted as a faculty advocate for students and professors who have fallen into legal or administrative difficulties,
Joshua Katz, a popular Princeton classics professor,
Mike Pesca, a podcaster for Slate
Amy Chua, the Yale Law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,
Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld,
This list of victims is interrupted by examples of ‘Franco’s Spain. Stalin created “troikas”—ad hoc, extrajudicial bodies that heard dozens of cases in a day. During China’s Cultural Revolution…’.
Secretive procedures that take place outside the law and leave the accused feeling helpless and isolated have been an element of control in authoritarian regimes across the centuries, from the Argentine junta to Franco’s Spain. Stalin created “troikas”—ad hoc, extrajudicial bodies that heard dozens of cases in a day. During China’s Cultural Revolution, Mao empowered students to create revolutionary committees to attack and swiftly remove professors. In both instances, people used these unregulated forms of “justice” to pursue personal grudges or gain professional advantage. In The Whisperers, his book on Stalinist culture, the historian Orlando Figes cites many such cases, among them Nikolai Sakharov, who wound up in prison because somebody fancied his wife; Ivan Malygin, who was denounced by somebody jealous of his success; and Lipa Kaplan, sent to a labor camp for 10 years after she refused the sexual advances of her boss. The sociologist Andrew Walder has revealed how the Cultural Revolution in Beijing was shaped by power competitions between rival student leaders.
Again no mention of that indigenous American Political Inquisitors, the McCarthy coterie , or its weapons, the in-order-too of maintaining one’s status were being a ‘friendly witness’, naming names, and the Loyalty Oath for those working or applying for jobs. And if in the Entertainment field being ‘cleared’ by ‘Red Channels’.
I have just reached page 14 of my copy of Applebaum’s essay. In total, there are 27 pages. Just from these 14 pages, its clear that Applebaum is writing propaganda of a very particular kind! ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt warned against an internal enemy: ‘that coddled students have learned to fear free speech’.Applebaum constructs a victimology, and the Inquisitors who seek to destroy what James Madison so prized! Applebaum supplies the answer to the besieged professors. Note that professors are the single class, of civic political actors, who qualify for ‘moral and legal support’!
Robert George has created the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group that intends to offer moral and legal support to professors who are under fire, and even to pay for their legal teams if necessary. George was inspired, he told me, by a nature program that showed how elephant packs will defend every member of the herd against a marauding lion, whereas zebras run away and let the weakest get killed off. “The trouble with us academics is we’re a bunch of zebras,” he said. “We need to become elephants.” John McWhorter, a Columbia linguistics professor (and Atlantic contributing writer) who has strong and not always popular views about race, told me that if you are accused of something unfairly, you should always push back, firmly but politely: “Just say, ‘No, I’m not a racist. And I disagree with you.’ ” If more leaders—university presidents, magazine and newspaper publishers, CEOs of foundations and companies, directors of musical societies—took that position, maybe it would be easier for more of their peers to stand up to their students, their colleagues, or an online mob.
This New York Times essay from December 16, 2009 should puts Prof. George into proper historical/political perspective:
Headline: The Conservative-Christian Big Thinker
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At the center of the event was Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and a Roman Catholic who is this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker. Dressed in his usual uniform of three-piece suit, New College, Oxford cuff links and rimless glasses, George convened the meeting with a note of thanks and a reminder of its purpose. Alarmed at the liberal takeover of Washington and an apparent leadership vacuum among the Christian right, the group had come together to warn the country’s secular powers that the culture wars had not ended. As a starting point, George had drafted a 4,700-word manifesto that promised resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same-sex marriage.
Two months later, at a Washington press conference to present the group’s “Manhattan Declaration,” George stepped aside to let Cardinal Rigali sum up just what made the statement, and much of George’s work, distinctive. These principles did not belong to the Christian faith alone, the cardinal declared; they rested on a foundation of universal reason. “They are principles that can be known and honored by men and women of good will even apart from divine revelation,” Rigali said. “They are principles of right reason and natural law.”
Even marriage between a man and a woman, Rigali continued, was grounded not just in religion and tradition but in logic. “The true great goods of marriage — the unitive and the procreative goods — are inextricably bound together such that the complementarity of husband and wife is of the very essence of marital communion,” the cardinal continued, ascending into philosophical abstractions surely lost on most in the room. “Sexual relations outside the marital bond are contrary not only to the will of God but to the good of man. Indeed, they are contrary to the will of God precisely because they are against the good of man.”
…
Anne Applebaum assumes that the reader will not do an internet search for Prof. George. As a reader of the New York Times, I recalled reading this news story.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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