What Happened Today: January 30, 2023
Police firings in Memphis; Reform Jews stand with Omar; Djokovic wins 10th Down Under
The Big Story
A sixth Memphis police officer was placed on leave on Monday after the department charged five other officers with second-degree murder for their involvement in the death of Tyre Nichols. Pulled over on suspicion of reckless driving, Nichols was repeatedly beaten in the head, struck with a baton, and pepper-sprayed while in police custody. Three days later at a hospital, he died from what an independent autopsy commissioned by the Nichols family says was “extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating.” Nichols’ encounter with police took place on Jan. 7. But the incident dominated national headlines after police released video footage of the arrest on Friday that showed multiple officers beating and tasering Nichols while he was restrained.
Though Nichols as well as the five police charged with murder were all Black, commentators were quick to racialize the event. “One of the sad facts about anti-Black racism is that Black people ourselves are not immune to its pernicious effects,” CNN’s Van Jones wrote in an op-ed. Rep. Maxwell Frost from Florida added in a since-deleted social media post, “Doesn’t matter what color those police officers are. The murder of Tyre Nichols is anti-Black and the result of white supremacy.”
Following the arrest of the five officers involved in Nichols’ death, the Memphis police department disbanded the 40-person special unit Scorpion that had been created in 2021 to combat the rampant homicides and violent crimes that surged in Memphis from 2020 to 2021.
In the Back Pages: The Power-Mad Utopians
The Rest
→ Ahead of a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Israelis and Palestinians to calm tensions. The call comes after a Palestinian gunman killed seven Jewish worshippers last Friday outside a Jerusalem synagogue—the day after nine Palestinians, including at least one civilian, were killed when Israeli military forces conducted a raid in the West Bank to thwart a planned terror attack. “To take an innocent life in an act of terrorism is always a heinous crime, but to target people outside their place of worship is especially shocking,” Blinken said after landing at Ben Gurion Airport. “We condemn all those who celebrate these and any other acts of terrorism that take civilian lives no matter who the victim is or what they believe,” he added, a reference to the widespread street celebrations by Palestinians across the West Bank, Gaza, and elsewhere.
→ The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the New Israel Fund, J Street, and several other leading organizations within the Jewish Reform movement have signed a joint letter condemning House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) pledge to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from her post on the House Foreign Affairs Committee because of what McCarthy described as “repeated antisemitic and anti-American remarks.” McCarthy is referring here to Omar’s previous comments that American Jews have used “their Benjamins” to control Congress, which was just one statement that several members of both Democratic and Republican parties have called out for being a blatant antisemitic trope. Partisan conflicts over committee assignments have only intensified in recent years, and this one is no different in that, already, three GOP House members have said they won’t support McCarthy, which means that if two other members of the party beg off the effort, McCarthy won’t have the majority required for Omar’s removal. The episode has us at The Scroll curious as to what readers might make of the Reform movement leadership coming to Omar’s defense (which you can read about here), with a poll here for you to send in your response:
→ Multiple security checkpoints around a Peshawar mosque failed to detect the explosives carried by a suicide bomber on Monday who blew himself up, killing 47 people and injuring 176 others in one of the deadliest attacks in Pakistan since an Islamic State suicide bomber murdered 58 worshippers at a Shiite Muslim mosque in in March 2022. Entering a mosque packed with about 400 worshipers, the attacker detonated his explosives from the front row of the gathering just as the prayer leader was about to say “Allah is the greatest.” “We couldn’t figure out what happened, as the bang was deafening. It threw me out of the veranda. The walls and roof fell on me. Thanks to God, he saved me,” a policeman named Mushtaq Khan who was attending the service told reporters on Monday. The bomb destroyed the upper level of the mosque and left an unknown number of people trapped underneath the rubble who rescuers continued to try to free on Monday evening.
→ New York Republican Rep. George Santos is running out of federal and state agencies that haven’t yet opened a probe into his possible criminal activity, as the Justice Department requested that the Federal Election Commission pause any enforcement or sanctions against the newly elected legislator while it conducts its own investigation. Reports of Santos lying about his Jewish ancestry and his work and life experience and committing campaign finance violations, plus an ongoing criminal probe by Brazilian law enforcement on suspicion of Santos using stolen checks at a Rio de Janeiro store, have driven calls for Santos to resign. At the moment, Santos stands at the center of investigations by the New York State Attorney General, the district attorney in Nassau County, the district attorney in Queens County, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FEC, and now federal prosecutors.
→ Australian officials continue their hunt for a highly radioactive container that fell off a truck somewhere between an iron mine and a depot site along a long stretch of desert highway. Small enough to fit in a person’s hand, the quarter-inch-long silver capsule contains enough cesium 137 that even just standing near it for a short period of time could lead to skin burns, radiation sickness, and possibly cancer. Used to measure iron ore density, the capsule was lost by a transportation vendor hired by mining group Rio Tinto sometime between Jan. 12 and 16, and has been missing since.
→ Number of the Day: 280,000 hours
Composers of the music for customer-service holds—and maybe a few contemporary pop artists—aren’t going to like the sound of what Google engineers are arranging in the lab. The tech giant says MusicLM, its software powered by artificial intelligence, can create any genre of song from a text prompt. Other companies have tried to solve the AI music composition riddle, though their results have so far been poor because of technical limitations that don’t appear to apply to Google. With audio samples to back up their claim, the MusicLM creators released a research paper explaining how they derived the program that relies on a database of 280,000 hours of music to generate tracks like “enchanting jazz song with a memorable saxophone solo and a solo singer.” Google said that possible misuses of the software, including copyright infringement on existing songs, will keep the software from a public release—for now, at least.
→ Aryna Sabalenka overcame Elena Rybakina in a cracking three-set Australian Open final over the weekend to take her first major championship. On the men’s side, Novak Djokovic claimed his 10th Australian Open title in a remarkably easy victory over upstart Stefanos Tsitsipas. It was Djokovic’s 22nd major trophy overall, tying him and Rafa Nadal for the all-time record. In the streets of Philadelphia, Eagles fans were climbing light poles to celebrate their return to the Super Bowl after a victory on Sunday in the NFC championship.
→ Canada will take one more step in its experimental drug-policy campaign by decriminalizing possession of any hard drugs in British Columbia on Tuesday. Though drug trafficking itself will remain illegal, for the next three years any adult found in possession of personal-use amounts of cocaine, fentanyl, morphine, heroin, ecstasy, meth, or other hard substances will no longer face criminal charges but rather be presented with information with treatment programs they’ll have the option to attend. “Given our understanding that substance use is a health issue, not a criminal issue,” Jennifer Whiteside, British Columbia’s minister of mental health and addictions, told Bloomberg, “we need to take this further step to address the shame and stigma.” British Columbia has been on the forefront of progressive drug-policy reforms going all the way back to the late 1950s, when it opened one of the world’s first methadone clinics. More recently, lawmakers legalized recreational cannabis, but the province has suffered from a sharp uptick in both drug-related crimes and deaths. According to BC’s coroner, in October 2022 the province was averaging almost six overdose deaths every day. And while 70% of all overdose deaths last year were victims between the ages of 30 and 59, 2022 saw an increase for the sixth straight year of overdoses among those who were 50 or older.
TODAY IN TABLET:
About Those Amy Winehouse Paintings by Jeremy Sigler
An aging art critic educates Gen Z on Jimi Hendrix, the pleasures of Adderall, and the mystery of Gerald Laing, the forgotten pioneer of pop art
Lithuanian Time Travel by Rokhl Kafrissen
Rokhl’s Golden City: The Yiddish past, present, and future of Vilnius
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The Power-Mad Utopians
America needs a broad popular front to stop the revolution from above that is transforming the country
By Michael Lind
What happens in politics when one major party, or a major faction in both parties, commits itself to doomed utopian projects of social and economic engineering and seeks to capture and use government to impose its vision from above? In such cases ordinary political consensus and compromise become irrelevant. What is needed, in such cases, is the broadest possible coalition to defeat the mad and impossible schemes of these utopians.
Twice in the last half century utopian politics has emerged in the U.S.—once with the Republican party as its vehicle, and now with the Democratic party as its base. Old-fashioned conservative “fusionism”—a synthesis of anticommunism, moderate free market economics, and the genteel traditionalism represented by Russell Kirk—was replaced in the wake of the Cold War by what might be called Fusionism 2.0 and its allies on the hawkish left. This post-Cold War coalition, which culminated in the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, was a radical movement, not “conservative” in any sense. It was based on the simultaneous promotion of three utopian projects: spreading “the global democratic revolution” through “wars of choice” and “humanitarian interventions” in the Middle East and elsewhere; radical libertarianism in trade and immigration policy, combined with the repeal of the New Deal through the privatization of Social Security and Medicare; and the imposition of “family values” as defined by the evangelical Protestant minority that formed the base for the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority.
To say that these were utopian projects does not imply that they did not address genuine problems. For example, following 9/11, Washington had to respond to the transnational terrorist threat. But the U.S. did not have to topple Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, nor remain in Afghanistan for two decades after al-Qaeda’s local base was disrupted. Preventing terrorist attacks on the U.S. did not require President George W. Bush to declare in his second inaugural address that all non-democratic regimes everywhere must be subverted and overthrown and that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” This was utopianism at its most deranged and dangerous.
All three of these revolutions from above by the Bush Republicans—the global democratic revolution, the libertarian economic revolution, and the attempt to universalize evangelical Protestant morality—were, and remain, deeply unpopular with the American public. Already by 2008 the public had grown weary of the Forever Wars. Obama and Trump both ran on promises of a more restrained foreign policy (Trump delivered, but Obama added two Middle Eastern disasters, in Libya and Syria, to those in Iraq and Afghanistan). George W. Bush’s proposal for partial privatization of Social Security was so unpopular among voters that Republicans refused even to debate it when they controlled the House and Senate. As for the religious right, the American public has always been divided on abortion, a fact reflected in state-level differences now that the Supreme Court has overruled Roe V. Wade. The anti-gay rights crusade of the religious right, meanwhile, backfired. By 2021, 55% of Republicans supported gay marriage. The maladroit Moral Majority is now the Moral Minority.
It is in the nature of radical utopian projects in politics that they lead to rule or ruin. In the case of Bush-era Fusionist Conservatism 2.0, all roads led to ruin. Hubris produced a nemesis in the form of Donald Trump, the Anti-Bush who won the Republican nomination by denouncing the Iraq War, promising not to cut Social Security or Medicare, and embracing gay rights (though not transgender ideology) and appointing openly gay Republicans to high-ranking positions. Far from being the beginning of a white nationalist takeover, as Democratic partisans absurdly claim, the Trump presidency was the Thermidorean Reaction to the radical Bush revolution.
Today, the threat of utopian politics comes from the radicalized center-left, not from the radicalized center-right. The term “progressivism” was revived in the 1980s and 1990s by Clintonite “Third Way” Democrats to distinguish their business-and-bank-friendly version of the center-left from the older New Deal farmer-labor version. But by the 2020s, “progressivism” came to mean something quite different—a commitment to utopian social engineering projects even more radical than those envisioned by the crackpot Bush-era neocons, libertarians, and religious right.
Three social engineering projects define progressivism in the 2020s: the Green Project, the Quota Project, and the Androgyny Project.
The Green Project is not limited to mitigating global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by industry and energy production. By itself, decarbonization is a technical project that can be carried out by methods like building nuclear power plants and replacing coal with natural gas in electrical generation.
The Green Project or Green New Deal is not satisfied with decarbonizing energy sources. It invokes climate change as an excuse to radically restructure the society of the U.S. and other advanced industrial democracies, from the way that food is grown to where people live to how people behave. Under the banner of the Green New Deal or the Green Transition, various lesser ideological projects on the left—veganism, replacing cars and trucks with mass transit, urban densification, antinatalism—have rallied, even though none of these is necessary for decarbonizing the energy supply.
The Quota Project, embodied in the rote bureaucratic phrase “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI), is another utopian project. Its goal is the radical restructuring of the U.S. and other Western societies on the basis of racial quotas, so that all racial and ethnic groups are represented in equal proportions in all occupations, classes, academic curriculums, and even literary and artistic canons. DEI is affirmative action on LSD.
For the Quota Project, antiracism is the public justification. But quota-based tokenism is not a solution for specific cases of discrimination against individuals—which can and should be dealt with by race-neutral anti-discrimination laws. Nor does the Quota Project have any real solutions to offer in the case of class or cultural differences which—even in the absence of racism, conscious or “structural”—would result in some groups doing better than others in various occupations. Like the Green Transition, the Quota Project is a radical utopian program of social reconstruction in search of an excuse that might justify it.
The third of the three utopian projects that define contemporary trans-Atlantic progressivism is the Androgyny Project. This goes far beyond civil rights and humane treatment for victims of gender dysphoria and has nothing to do with the hard-won rights of gay men and lesbians. The Androgyny Project holds that gender identity is independent of biological sex and purely subjective. If a middle-aged man claims that he is a woman, then progressives favor requiring local government to retroactively falsify his birth certificate to show that he was “really” born female and “misassigned at birth.”
Far more comprehensive than “trans rights,” which affect fewer than one percent of the population, the Androgyny Project seeks to redefine all male and female human beings as generic, androgynous humanoids whose sex is a matter of subjective self-definition rather than objective reality.
The bizarre theory that sex is entirely a social construction has led to much of the trans-Atlantic establishment to attempt to impose speech codes on society. Instead of “mothers,” the androgynists insist that we say “birthing people.” A “woman” becomes a “person with a cervix." It is easy to get confused by the weird jargon. During the 2020 presidential primaries, Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro declared that every “trans female”—that is, a biological male incapable of pregnancy and childbirth—should have access to abortion, when he meant to say every “trans male” (that is, female).
Like all utopian social engineering projects, the Green Project, the Quota Project, and the Androgyny Project are at odds with reality and are doomed to fail. The Green Project is doomed by physics and engineering. Today 80% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels.
Without reliance on nuclear fission or, perhaps, in the future, nuclear fusion, the transition from fossil fuels may never take place at the global level, though it might happen in a few small countries. Politicians can make all the commitments they like, but most energy is likely to come from fossil fuels in 2050, 2100 and perhaps beyond. Instead of resembling the energy transitions of the past—from wood to coal and from coal to oil, gas, and nuclear—the present-day green movement is best viewed as a puritanical moral crusade like Prohibition, with Demon Oil and Demon Gas substituted for Demon Rum and Demon Whiskey.
The Quota Project is doomed by its own internal contradictions. Rigid systems of racial quotas cannot work in societies like those of the U.S. and Western Europe in which immigration is constantly changing the relative proportions of different races and ethnic groups in a national population, while rising rates of interracial marriage are blurring the boundaries among racial categories.
In the name of DEI, public, private, and nonprofit institutions now regularly engage in illegal but tolerated racial discrimination to artificially increase the representation of Black Americans and Hispanics at the expense of so-called “non-Hispanic whites” and so-called “Asian and Pacific islanders” (the Census terms for “race” themselves are incoherent and absurd).
If the goal is that every occupation, every club, every reading list, and every sports team in the U.S. have exact proportions of each “race” defined by the census, then every ten years following the latest census the racial composition of corporate boards, university faculties, sports teams, and artists displayed by museums must be readjusted, with some groups losing their shares and others increasing their shares. Suppose that a wave of immigration from Asia shrinks the relative share of Hispanics and Black Americans in the U.S. population. Does that mean that jobs, grants, and congressional districts should be taken away from Black Americans and Hispanic Americans and given to Asian-Americans, to prevent Black American and Hispanic “overrepresentation”? Far better are the alternatives of race-neutral anti-discrimination laws, protecting individuals of all races, and race-neutral reforms that help economically disadvantaged individuals of all races.
The Androgyny Project, for its part, is bound to crash against reality in the form of human biology. I predict that in a generation the “progressive” policy of so-called “gender-affirming health care” will be viewed in hindsight the way the prescription of lobotomies and chemical castration as cures for homosexuality in the 1950s is viewed today.
It might be objected that reactionary conservatives have long denounced many quite reasonable reforms as “utopian.” That is true. And they have often been wrong to do so. But that does not alter my point.
New Deal energy policy, which sought to protect consumers from price-gouging private electric utility monopolies, was not crazy in the way that the project of replacing all fossil fuels with solar, wind, hydropower and ethanol is crazy. The movements for equal civil rights for women and for gay men and lesbians did not require the redefinition of “women” and “men.” The conservatives who warned that desegregation was a mad utopian project that was doomed to fail were wrong. The conservatives today—and sane centrists, and liberals, and leftists—who warn that pressuring or forcing everyone into agreeing that some men can give birth is a mad utopian project that is doomed to fail are correct.
An obvious question arises: if these utopian projects are so inherently at odds with reality, then how can widespread elite support for them in any given era be explained?
The answer, in the case of today’s progressivism as well as various ideological manias of the past, is a combination of cowardice, careerism and cash.
Cowardice: nobody on today’s center-left wants to be ostracized for pointing out that solar and renewable energy cannot power an industrial civilization with seven or eight billion people. In the same way, no Soviet scientist in Stalin’s USSR wanted to be the first—or even the second or third—to point out that Comrade Lysenko’s theories about the inheritance of acquired characteristics were wrong.
Careerism: DEI provides lots of lucrative jobs, fellowships, HR positions, deanships, professorships, foundation grants and corporate gifts. Similarly, the open-ended Global War on Terror/global democratic revolution paid for a lot of mansions, cars, vacations, 401K contributions, and expensive private school tuitions for various government and nonprofit apparatchiks in the Washington, D.C. suburbs and elsewhere.
Cash: Prophets are followed by profiteers. When the prophets of “antiracism” demand reparations for African Americans, what they really mean, explain the profiteers, are government subsidies for historically-African American universities, businesses, and nonprofits—that is, indirect subsidies for African American professional and managerial elites, not the African American working-class majority. When Green zealots declare that climate change is an emergency that requires warlike mobilization, what they really mean, the profiteers tell us, is that the tax code should subsidize private investors in solar and wind plants that are set up to take advantage of those subsidies as well as guaranteed purchases by electric utilities. When radical androgynists insist that gender is fluid, they create new business opportunities for great numbers of self-appointed gender experts, online influencers, diversity consultants, and the pharma companies and surgeons in the medical-industrial complex who profit from private and public insurance payments for “gender-affirming health care.” Apocalypse in the streets, lobbying in the sheets.
All three of these progressive utopian projects—the Green Project, the Quota Project, and the Androgyny Project—will ultimately fail. Of that we can be certain. But we don’t have to wait for them to collapse of their own contradictions and from collisions with recalcitrant reality. Before they can do further damage, we need to stop them in their tracks.
We are constantly lectured about the dangers of “vetocracy” and “paralysis”—often by people who regret the fact that elections and checks and balances slow down or block the particular proposals they favor. But when proposals are destructive or at odds with empirical reality, like the war on fossil fuels, radical race and gender tokenism, and radical androgynism, then they ought to be slowed down or blocked altogether. Although Barack Obama did not act on his own maxim, “Don’t do stupid shit” is an achievement in itself. A bad status quo is better than a reform that makes things worse.
In international relations theory, it is a truism that “revisionist” coalitions (like the Axis alliance in World War II) which seek to overturn the existing world order need to be limited in membership in order to be effective, while status quo coalitions that seek to thwart the revisionists should be as large as possible, like the United Nations alliance against the Axis which, by 1945, included most of the former fence-sitting republics of Latin America. The same applies to domestic politics as well. It took a broad-based coalition of liberals, social democrats, and populist conservatives to thwart the utopians of the Bush era center-right, and it will take an equally broad and varied coalition to block the insane social engineering projects of the Biden era center-left.
As the progressive juggernaut crashes through the institutional landscape of American society, it is creating ever growing numbers of angry or frightened refugees—not merely conservative and libertarians and populists, but also former progressives who simply will not pretend that men can get pregnant, along with pro-industry socialists who reject the pastoralism of the wind-and-solar Green fanatics.
The immediate necessity in American politics is to reject partisan and ideological purity tests in order to form the largest possible anti-progressive front—one that will include militant Enlightenment atheists and orthodox Jews and Ayn Rand libertarians and Trad Caths, pre-2010 neoliberals and old-fashioned labor liberals and reactionary paleoconservatives, small businesses and big businesses threatened by harmful Green New Deal energy policies, left-liberal professors who do not want to sign diversity statements and nuns in Catholic hospitals who refuse to pretend that men are women and women are men.
By its nature, a broad anti-progressive front must include Democrats as well as Republicans and independents. Although the Democratic party has been hijacked and turned into the primary vehicle for progressive zealots, many Democratic politicians and most Democratic voters do not share these views. To date, sensible Democrats have been shamefully silent. Although few have spoken up to reject the crackpot crusade to “defund the police,” no prominent Democrat has dared to criticize unnecessary surgical castrations or hormone therapy and mastectomies for patients who suffer from gender dysphoria.
That will have to change. The struggle to break the power of the new utopian progressivism must be a struggle within the Democratic party to reclaim the power now held by a small cadres of well-organized and well-financed progressive radicals. Freed from a forced association with Green lunatics, antiracist lunatics, and androgynist lunatics, tomorrow’s center-left might focus again on sensible real-world projects like raising wages and increasing economic security for all.
Once the progressive juggernaut has been first slowed and then stopped and stripped for parts, former members of the anti-progressive front may well fall out among themselves, as members of victorious defensive coalitions often do. Yes, there is a danger that following the defeat of radical progressivism, the default option might be Clinton-Bush economic neoliberalism. But a restoration of pre-woke fin de siècle free market neoliberalism would be temporary, because it no longer inspires anyone.
Violent resistance to today’s progressive revolutions from above must be ruled out, needless to say. But the diverse members of the anti-progressive front can and should use every peaceful method, from voting in elections to lawfare (litigation) to peaceful protest and satire, in order to frustrate, delay, damage, cripple, divert, stall, and ultimately topple and dismantle the three lumbering juggernauts of green lunacy, equity lunacy, and gender lunacy.
Move over, Antifa. Antiprog is on the way.
Reform: delusional thinking doesn't get crazier than this. And no doubt, it's another one of those cases of a small group of lunatics in charge of national organizations acting against the views of their members. An oft-told story.
Very on-the-mark essay by Michael Lind. The coalition needs to be broad and also to come out of its state of "pluralistic ignorance," where many stay not only silent, but isolated, unaware that most others think as they do. Reinforced by propaganda and fear, this isolation and silence block the catalysis of a large, energized base.
Yay! I loved the back pages article! What a great read and it actually made me feel hopeful for the first time in 3 years of this seemingly unending madness on the left of which I used to belong. Thank you!🙏