In the span of a little over a week, we saw two manifestations of Conservative reaction to idea of diversity and equality. While at first these stories appear to be far removed from one another, I would argue that they are, in fact, intimately linked. Indeed, the form of reaction encapsulated by the first case, and the way the public reacts to it, enables the more violent and aggressive form of reaction displayed in the second case in a way a lot of people don’t appreciate.

First, The Google “Anti-Diversity Memo” Makes A Nice Collegial Argument That Women Are Inherently Worse At Programming And Liberals Are Authoritarian Thought Police…

The first story broke last Friday when it was revealed that a “memo” criticizing Google’s diversity policies and claiming women were genetically less capable as programmers was going viral among Google’s internal staff. The media picked up on the story, and people denounced both the writer, mid-level engineer James Damore, and tech culture in general for its latent undercurrent of misogyny and resistance to diversity. By the end of the week, Damore was fired, nominally for propagating hurtful stereotypes that disrupt Google’s morale, but mostly because he was a liability who would have hurt Google’s public image and legal defense against harassment and/or discrimination suits if they hadn’t fired him.

In a lot of ways, the reaction to the whole episode seems somewhat out of proportion. As Vox noted, the whole episode was rather trivial in and of itself. The “memo” was essentially just a message board rant by a mid-level employee at Google with no actual influence on company policy. Perhaps James Damore is depressingly typical of the tech sector, and his memo crystallized a lot of people’s anxiety towards the sector’s abysmal record on diversity and the imbalance between Silicon Valley’s influence and lack of accountability. But in and of itself it didn’t really amount to much.

To be sure, it is wrong headed. It seems to have come out apropos of nothing, and the actual diversity policies its complaining about are so modest that it’s baffling anyone could feel so threatened by them. Google’s diversity policy isn’t some sort of hard set quota system that they plow ahead with, damning any real world considerations as it goes. Pretty much no EEO policy works that way, nor do the people who implement them want them to. Google’s diversity policy, and really everyone’s diversity policy, basically amounts to a vague goal to more diverse in the future, and they try to achieve this through good recruiting practices that make them more accessible to a wider swathe of the population and job training/education programs that seek to slowly correct imbalances in the candidate pool.

Indeed, the fact that most diversity policies are so modest and have so little impact on people like Damore lead to the conclusion that he’s either grossly misinformed or opposed to the idea in and of itself. That impression is reinforced by the way he couches his argument on the basis of cherry picked and misinterpreted scientific research, largely ignoring counter points. Beyond that, the memo devolved into a pretty boilerplate complaint about political correctness, dressed up in more modern rhetoric of “ideological echo chambers” and so forth, because Damore can’t understand why publicly antagonizing and belittling whole groups of people based on inherited traits is now considered a social taboo, while criticizing someone over a voluntarily assumed system of political beliefs is not.

But what really stands out about the memo to anyone who has read it, is just how dull it is. Many might have expected to find a fire breathing diatribe, but instead just found the long form rambling of someone who seemed to fancy themselves an expert on an issue they clearly know very little about. It tries so hard to establish a veneer of cool academic fair mindedness, even going so far as to pretentiously add citations, that it couldn’t have been too outrageous because that would have required it be stimulating in some way. In and of itself, it’s completely devoid of any interesting insights, and reads like a thousand other posts you can find scattered around message board complaining about PC culture or affirmative action or whatever.

But a number of people looked at the conciliatory tone and the affected thoughtfulness and decided “hey, even if I don’t agree with this guy, his point is well made, and he’s harmless”.

… Meanwhile, In Charlotteville, Outright Nazis And Klansmen Rioted And Plowed Over A Bunch Of People

If the Google “anti-diversity” memo was underwhelming, the events in Charlottesville this weekend were anything but. Over the weekend, various groups alt right groups, including a good number of White Supremacists, Neo-Confederates, the Klu Klux Klan, and outright Nazis converged on Charlottesville, Virginia, for their planned “Unite the Right” rally. Nominally the rally was intended to protest the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee from a downtown park, but more generally it was intended to flex their new found prominence under the Trump Administration. On Friday night, hundreds participated in a torchlight march chanting “white lives matter” and Nazi slogans like “blood and soil”. Then on Saturday between 4,000 to 6,000 marched through Charlottesville brandishing confederate flags, swastikas, weapons, storm trooper helmets and other paraphernalia. Predictably, the whole thing rapidly escalated into large scale rioting, as alt right participants brawled with counter protesters, culminating in one alt right participant James Alex Fields plowing his Dodge Charger through a crowd of counter protesters, killing one and injuring dozens.

To be sure, there was a fair amount of build up to this in recent years. Barely concealed racism and threats of violence were a common feature of Tea party protests. Trump’s campaign for the presidency helped crystalize it into something a little more explicit, as the alt right was drawn to his appeals to small minded prejudice and attitude of “just go ahead and smack people who disagree with you”. Trump’s victory (in the electoral college) was taken as further encouragement by the alt right and the like, and suddenly torch light marches and victory parades by the KKK began to pop up here and there.

But even by the admittedly low standards of 2017 and the downward spiral leading up to it, the whole episode was still shocking. Suddenly the various levels of abstraction that characterized political reaction since the 70s seemed to fall away, and once again we were faced with mass violence in the interest of overt bigotry. How did any of this get even remotely close to the political mainstream again?

Well, it was a long slog, but by God the right normalized it.

These Are Two Sides Of The Same Reactionary Coin

Now, at first glance there seems to be a world of difference between the self-indulgent diatribes of techies on the one hand and violent acts of terrorism by unreformed Nazis and white supremacists on the other. Silicon Valley is far away from Charlottesville, and misogyny in the tech sector is a less immediate threat than torch wielding white supremacists marching through town, running over people who disagree with them. If one group ever ran into the other, they might dismiss one another as nut bars and cucks respectively (or they might start selling each other bit coins). Hell, the “I just have concerns about affirmative action and liberal group think” crowd can even sound innocuous at times, and most people tend to see them as such.

But when you look into what people in that crowd are actually saying, and it’s not clear that they’re substantially any better. Their presumption of genetic determinism is largely same. Their sense of victimization by liberal social mores is the same. Their framing of politics as an argument between left wing constructivist philosophies versus conservative willingness to grasp the objective truth is the same. And while they may like to phrase their goals as something of a compromise, their end game is essentially the same: a status quo that disenfranchises people and acquiesces to systemic brutality. In short, they only sound more reasonable. Peel back that veneer of thoughtfulness and you largely come to the same toxic ideology.

And indeed, the presence of these more conciliatory sounding, but still ultimately awful arguments like that have given cover to the resurgence of the more violently reactionary type. It enabled them the extremists on the far right to take on the conceit that they really are the rational ones, ready to deal with truths delusional liberals won’t. It emboldens them by giving them a sense of mainstream acceptability they otherwise wouldn’t have. And when people on the left point out that the apparent moderates are really nothing of the sort, the backlash against “liberal censorship” is taken as justification for violent “resistance”.

And the lines are becoming ever more blurred, as radical alt rightists recognize just how much cover they can get by putting up the appearance of civility and open mindedness. Take this comment from one attendee at the “Unite the Right” rally:

“As a white nationalist, I care for all people. We all deserve a future for our children and for our culture. White nationalists aren’t all hateful; we just want to preserve what we have.”

That was this guy…

The point is, we can’t just condemn the outright Fascists rioting through the streets while giving a pass to that nice Charles Murray, who just wants to have a nice civil discussion wherein he argues black people are genetically less intelligent than whites. You can’t wring your hands sanctimoniously about those mean old liberals refusing to hear out noxious right wing arguments “in good faith” while others making similar arguments have normalized beating the hell out of people they don’t like. Simply condemning the outright extremists while excusing the people whose arguments are substantially the same but dressed up in layers of civility suggests that the only thing wrong with toxic reactionary ideologies is their presentation.

Conclusion

Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun, and many people who follow the history of such things recognizes this pattern well enough. Philosophy professor John Holbo noted a similar dynamic when reviewing The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830—1860:

Here’s what surprised me: the only writer in this group I had read before was George Fitzhugh, who turns out to be unrepresentative. (The editor of this volume says he was popular and influential , but most of these other writers tried to distance themselves from him, because he was not respectable and argued for stuff like expanding the disenfranchise – I guess you would call it – to include poor whites.) Slavery must be defended because the Pope is a socialist! (Yes!) Fitzhugh would have made a good blogger and lit up Twitter.

I thought the whole book would be like that: the rhetorical equivalent of Preston Brooks versus Charles Sumner. Paranoid-style jingo triumphalism plus loopy-cranky pseudo-scientific stuff plus fight-or-flight bursts of logic, concluding in abortive, daft neo-Feudal utopias that evaporate back into conservative stubbornness.

But most of these writers are barely polemical. The tone is concessive, gentleman-scholarly, mild, punctuated by patronizing sighs and arched eyebrows, to add some tone. Of course slavery is … unfortunate; but you can’t expect this old world to be perfect so we must make the best of it together. Does anyone have a plausible, practical plan for abolishing slavery, starting tomorrow? No. So what are we talking about? Just a bunch of Northerners who won’t be personally called on to do anything so painful. Yet they expect Southerners to give up most of their wealth, and destroy the value of their land in the process? Is that plausible? Abolitionism is so wrong not because slavery is so right – it isn’t! – but because utopianism must always fail. Indeed, it must always cause suffering, by the law of unintended consequences. Better to respect existing property rights, even though we know that if you look far enough in the past, there will always be ugliness at the root. It is the wonder of human institutions that beauty may flourish even from ugliness! (It is only utopians who do not appreciate this!)

And of course, after the Civil War, very little changed. As the war receded into the history books, people like William Archibald Dunning sought to reframe the whole affair and reconstruction afterwards as a matter of radical abolitionists and rapacious northerners destroying the south and empowering former slaves for their own deluded or cynical ends, all in high minded academic terms. Then when the Civil Rights movement campaigned to overturn the Jim Crow system, it was gentlemanly fellows spearheading the reaction as some kind of high minded defense of civility and liberty against tyrannical government used in the interest of equal opportunity.

But however civil the framing was, the end result was still the same. No matter how conciliatory the commentators sounded in their defense of slavery, they still perpetuated the inhumanity of the system and rallied the South to its violent defense. No matter how academic the scholars in the Dunnings School tried to sound, they still justified the murder of tens of thousands in Redemption and the disenfranchisement of millions for roughly a century. No matter how high minded their stated defense of Jim Crow was, they were still giving cover to mob violence, bombings, and institutionalized brutality.

And people keep getting away with it, because the public largely accepts the superficial niceties at face value. William F. Buckley may have been siding with murderous bigots for most of his career, but gosh darn it, didn’t he seem so collegial while he did so?

Well we need to stop that and recognize ugly, toxic ideologies for what they are. It doesn’t matter that some people who front such ideas try to maintain a sense of civility and fair mindedness. They may not be as immediately threatening as people wearing swastikas and brandishing baseball bats, but if you don’t confront the one you’re going to end up with the other.