The Moral Unseriousness of Centrist & Conservative Pundits

Jamelle Bouie almost never misses. In this video that’s just shy of 10 minutes long, he chastises American political & cultural pundits for their lack of moral seriousness w/r/t their focus on “wokeness” instead of the real harms being done by the authoritarian Trump regime. (And he worked in a reference to Jonathan Frakes saying no.)

I bring this up because this is just a great example of a phenomenon I’ve been struck by over the past year. Which is that, in the midst of a government that is systematically dismantling Americans’ rights, that is systematically dismantling the post-World War II world order, that is systematically tearing apart the social safety net, that is trying to exert nearly totalitarian control over large parts of American life, which is constructing concentration camps and throwing migrants into them, which has killed two Americans on the street and is looking to suppress as much as possible dissent, even bringing the full force of the federal government against people it wrongly accuses of wrongdoing — as we observe all of this, so many of our pundits and professional commentators are still obsessed with people they got mad at in 2020 and 2021.

They are obsessed with fighting the specter of wokeness — whatever that misappropriation of African American vernacular means. They look at overzealous college students, overbearing HR departments, or colleagues who put pronouns in their signatures as tantamount to a Cultural Revolution. And meanwhile, as the Secretary of Defense quite literally purges Black people from the highest reaches of the military, it doesn’t look like anything to them.

They don’t even comment on it. The Republican Party has turned pretty openly against liberal democracy. Republican lawmakers are confirming election deniers to lifetime appointments. They’re nominating election deniers to high-ranking offices like governor. And meanwhile, pundits, reporters, the press — they’re obsessed with “Hey, did Francesca Hong once say that she thought we should cancel Thanksgiving?”

I would note that the free speech absolutists are awfully quiet these days too.

Bouie was reacting specifically to this David Brooks piece and this one from from Ross Douthat (with the amazing titular admission that he can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys these days)¹ and possibly this one too. Michael Hobbes has been talking about this on Bluesky as well:

There were excesses in 2020 but they were mostly low-stakes efforts by well-intentioned people to address real injustices.

The excesses of the right during the same era were far more harmful. The reckoning we need now is about how elites lost sight of that.

…

Centrists convinced themselves annoying leftists on twitter were an equivalent threat to Jan 6 insurrectionists. They wildly inflated the threat of left-wing authoritarianism while ignoring how it was taking hold on the right.

Meanwhile, the right never meant any of it. They moaned about “cancellation” for a decade but embarked on mass firings as soon as they took power. They pretended to care about “free speech restrictions” and “educational indoctrination” while embarking on them every chance they got.

The excesses of the Woke 1 era mostly amount to cringe public statements, harmless vocabulary updates and loss of prestige for public figures.

The backlash to Woke 1, on the other hand, is imprisoning dissidents, dismantling public education and eroding democracy. That’s what needs reckoning.

1. Real “are we the baddies?” energy from Douthat here. ↩

• Jamelle Bouie
• politics
• Ross Douthat
• Tyler Austin Harper