You Can't Just Say "Oh, That Doesn't Matter" About Every Single Political Question

Back in the early-to-mid 2010s, I often wrote about developments in campus politics that concerned me. You know what I mean - the rise of illiberalism among college students, growing threats to free expression and academic freedom, an institutional assumption of profound emotional fragility among students and an associated paternalism towards them, the dominance of a certain identity-obsessed approach to left politics, the rise of an abstract and academic vocabulary that seemed destined to alienate regular people…. You don’t need me to reprosecute that case here.

To my considerable frustration, the most common response at the time was not to say “those politics that the college students at elite colleges express, they’re the right politics.” Most people, even most left-leaning people, did not defend campus politics on the merits; had they done so, we could have had a productive debate. No, most people, especially in the media, said some version of “they’re just college kids, it’s just crazy places like Yale, it doesn’t matter, why do you care?” Again and again and again, the arguments that defined the progressive consensus were arguments to irrelevancy. It wasn’t so much that I was wrong, it was more that I was focusing on the wrong thing, and also old man yells at cloud, and also it’s a little weird that you care about college kids so much, isn’t it Freddie? Not a good look! Such were the tactics of the time. Few people were saying that it was good when, say, students at an elite college tried to shutter the campus newspaper because they published a conservative editorial. Instead they were saying that it just didn’t matter.

Whoops!

You know what happened next. By 2020, the concepts, vocabulary, rhetorical strategies, and social norms that dictated campus politics had spread from the campuses and into the media, the nonprofit sector, certain aspects of government, and the front-facing parts of many corporations. The activist discourse so recently dismissed as irrelevant had become the basic terms under which politics were debated. Plenty of people rejected those politics, as the basic nature of partisanship and culture war hadn’t evaporated. But the language that was used to discuss politics, the topics of interest within politics, certain assumptions about what constitutes the core disagreements of politics, the purpose and goals of political organizing and elections, the scope of change that would be necessary to achieve real progress - all of these had changed radically over the course of the prior decade, and it was under those terms that the various sides debated. You might have been the kind of person to mock the way that “white supremacy” had replaced “racism” in our culture. But you had an opinion on that question because that was a change that had legitimately happened in our culture.

And campus politics, particularly the way they were brought from campus into media and nonprofit land and the corporate world, had everything to do with that shift. College students at elite colleges have a way of graduating and becoming highly overrepresented in important industries, and particularly in idea-generating and culture-creating industries like media, academia, Hollywood, government, or the nonprofit sector. And because they are both the class that aspires and the class that defines what our culture wants us to aspire to, they have a massively disproportionate impact on how our society tells its own story. In particular, they have great control over how we define our political problems, frame their potential solutions, and fix our place in the political spectrum relative to both. Such is the stuff of democracy. (...)

Having lived through the past decade, I am consistently amazed at how often I am told that I’m fixating too much on this or that niche, that I shouldn’t care about particular trends I see in social media, that nothing that happens on YouTube matters…. I just don’t understand how people can maintain that stance after the past several decades of American public life. Even if you think there are more factors involved in the social justice turn in contemporary left politics from the start of the second Obama administration to the start of the Biden administration, there’s no question that highly motivated subcultures played a huge role. People have talked about the academic humanities as a dying and impotent fringe for a long time, and yet ideas from that world became inescapable and powerful in a remarkably short amount of time. The alt-right was always numerically tiny, and yet its influence on the Republican party and our culture wars was massive. How can you tell me that subculture X just doesn’t matter, when American politics has become so mimetic and so defined by the most motivated 10% on any given issue? (...)

But things do matter. Our discursive environment matters. In particular, we live in a world in which the distributed opinions of many people who aren’t individually influential matter. I make my living in media. Recently, Twitter’s stranglehold on media culture has been seriously challenged. But there’s no question that since, say, the 2008 presidential election, Twitter has had more of an influence on professional media than any individual person or publication. And so how can you simply dismiss the importance of that network and what gets said on it? #MeToo was, before it was anything else, a social media campaign. (That’s why it starts with a hashtag!) Are you really going to say that had no effect on Hollywood in the past five years? Really? And yet any time I refer to anything that happens on Twitter, ever, I get a lot of performative eye-rolling from readers. If I speak in general terms, they say I haven’t provided evidence. If I screencap specific individual tweets, they say “oh those are just a few random people.” And it’s transparently the case that they do so because they don’t want to grapple with the specific point I’m making, or they don’t want to deal with the irrefutable power that distributed opinion has in our society, or both. 

by Freddie deBoer, FdB |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Everyone Can't Do Everything (FdB).]