The Daily Signal - #395: Social Justice Challenges America's Founding Ideals

Episode Date: February 12, 2019

Social justice -- you’ve probably heard the term. It’s a buzzword, but it’s also an ideology. When you peel back the layers, it becomes quite clear that this new social justice ideology stands directly against America’s founding principles -- things like blind justice and equality before the law. Noah Rothman writes about all this in his new book “Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America.” He joins us to discuss.We also cover these stories:•California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, pulls National Guard troops from the border.•Freshman Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar of Michigan, after getting serious flack from both parties after tweeting what many consider to be anti-Semitic messages, apologizes.•The National Down Syndrome Society releases a new video celebrating the accomplishments of men and women with down syndrome.The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal Podcasts for Tuesday, February 12th. I'm Kate Trinker. And I'm Daniel Davis. Social justice, you've probably heard the term. It's a buzzword, but it's also an ideology. When you peel back the layers, it becomes quite clear that this new social justice ideology stands directly against America's founding principles, things like blind justice and equality before the law. Noah Rothman writes about all of this in his new book, Unjust, Social Justice, and the Unmaking of America.

He'll join us in studio to discuss. But first, we'll cover a few of the top headlines. Well, President Trump is calling foul on Democrats for what he says is a brand new demand in border negotiations. Democrats are now pushing for a cap on the number of beds available in ICE detention centers, and that's creating a real roadblock for Republicans as they try to reach a deal this week. The government is set to shut down again on Friday, unless the two parties can agree on a government funding and border security bill. President Trump tweeted over the weekend, quote, the Border Committee Democrats are behaving all of a sudden irrationally.

Not only are they unwilling to give dollars for the obviously needed wall, the overrode recommendations of Border Patrol experts, but they don't even want to take murderers into custody. What's going on? California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, tweeted Monday, The Border Emergency is nothing more than a manufactured crisis, and California's National Guard will not be part. of this political theater.

End quote. And he's not all talk. Newsom plans to remove all but around 100 of California's 360 National Guard troops at the border, according to the Associated Press. Governor Michelle Luhann Grisham of New Mexico issued a similar order last week, saying per NPR, I reject the federal contention that there exists an overwhelming national security crisis at the southern border. Well, freshman Democrat Ilhan Omar of Minnesota,

is getting serious flack from both parties after tweeting what many consider to be anti-Semitic messages. It all started with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who threatened to take some action against Omar and Rashida Talib, another freshman Democrat, over their past anti-Israel positions and statements. In response, Omar tweeted, it's all about the Benjamin's baby. That's quoted from a 1997 rap song by Puff Daddy, but the meaning there was suspect. It's all about the Benjamin's, meaning what exactly? Jews? Well, Omar soon provided more clarity after a journalist challenged her to spell out what she meant. Who's paying members of Congress to be pro-Israel? Omar responded with one word, A-PAC. That's the largest pro-Israel group in the country. While House Democratic leaders were

quick to issue a statement on Monday, saying, quote, anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel's supporters is deeply offensive. And then Omar issued her own apology. Quote, My intention is never to offend my constituents or Jewish Americans as a whole. We have to always be willing to step back and think through criticism just as I expect people to hear me when others attack me for my identity. This is why I unequivocally apologize, end quote. While Virginia Democrats considered this weekend beginning impeachment proceedings against lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax accused of sexual assault by two women, they've now halted, reports the Wall Street Journal. Virginia Democrat Patrick Hope, who is in the House of Delegates, told the journal, the impeachment process is about investigating to find the truth.

I am open to discussions on other avenues that would accomplish the same goals. Meanwhile, Fairfax maintains his innocence telling the Washington Post, even when faced with those allegations, I am still standing up for everyone's right to be heard. But I'm also standing up for due process, end quote. The Hill reports that Fairfax has been put on leave by his law, firm Morrison and Forrester as they investigate the claims. Well, the Houston Chronicle dropped a bombshell report on Sunday, detailing the first findings of a six-month investigation into sexual abuse claims in Southern Baptist churches.

The report found over 700 claims of sexual abuse in the past 20 years. Many of the victims were children. The accused men were pastors, youth ministers, deacons, and volunteers. Many of them were convicted and sent to prison, where nearly 100 now remain. The Southern Baptist Convention is America's largest Protestant denomination with over 47,000 affiliated churches. In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, August Bado, interim president of the denomination's executive committee, said his first response was anger, anger that this could ever have happened in Baptist churches. He told the interviewer, quote, you are not my opponent, you are not the opponent of the Southern Baptist Convention in your reporting. You're helping us.

I'm all for shining the light of day upon crime." On a slightly better note, the National Down Syndrome Society just released a new video that contrasts the dreary predictions of medical professionals with the realities of the full lives of many people who live with Down syndrome. Down syndrome? Well, there'll be a lot of limitations. Are you sure about that? They tend to do well performing only the simplest of tasks.

I am a lobbyist on Capitol Hill. A regular life with lasting relationships. We'll be together for 14 years. Their cognitive ceiling limits their ability to work. I own a business. The business owner who spoke in that video portion that we heard, Colette DeVito, has a bakery with 13 employees. According to the Today Show website, the 26-year-old told today, I love to bake. I had been taking baking classes since I moved to Boston.

I tried to get a job and they said I was not a good fit. And I had to open a cookie company to also create more jobs for people with disabilities. Well, up next we talk about social justice with Noah Rothman, author of a new book. Are you looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues? Sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. Each Tuesday in the Agenda, you will learn what issues Heritage Scholars on Capitol Hill are working on. What position conservatives are taking? and links to our in-depth research.

The agenda also provides information on important events happening here at Heritage that you can watch online as well as media interviews from our experts. Sign up for the agenda on heritage.org today. And we're joined now by Noah Rothman. He is the associate editor of Commentary Magazine and author of the new book, Unjust, Social Justice and the Unmaking of America. Noah, thanks for coming in and joining us. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

So Noah, obviously, we live in a time of increasing un-executive. uncertainty, political and cultural change happening all around us. And your book really, I think, gets at the heart of so much of what's troubling us. Why do you think America needs this particular book at this moment? Well, social justice has become a catch word, sort of a phrase that if you're not really too familiar with it, might seem pretty unobjectionable. It's just a way to think about fairness and equality and a just society and writing historical wrongs. What could be more American than that?

In practice, however, in the hands of its activist class, it has become the antithesis of the kind of blind, objective justice that we see meet it out in courtrooms. Its adherence believe in things like the fact that meritocracy is just a myth, that individual agency is a lie. Your destiny is in many ways set as a result of your accidents of birth. That separatism, racial demographic, or otherwise, is good explicitly because it prevents discomforting social situations. and the color blindness in institutions is naive at best and maybe even dangerous. And when I explain to social justice activists on the left that this is exactly what white supremacists believe, they sort of look at you funny. These are lies. They're myths.

They render you gullible and subjective. And there are obstacles in the pathway to addressing real racial discrimination, institutional or otherwise, which is real. And I don't deny it. But this, the prescriptions in the hands of social justice activists amounts to creating institutions that are dedicated to discrimination. in order to achieve equality. And there is no justice in that. The cure for the ills of bigotry is not more bigotry. Okay.

Well, you anticipated like 30 of my question. So good work. I've been doing it out. I want to touch back on one point. You said you noted that there was similarity between the way identity politics folks and white supremacists think. Could you expound a bit on that relationship? Yeah, sure.

I mean, there is a philosophical foundation for social justice, which is pretty unobjectionable and is rooted in Catholic, teachings in the 19th century and in the late 1960s, early 1970s, John Rawls put some meat on these bones. And he identified how we could meet out historical justice in a just fashion by thinking about justice, not in any sort of courtroom sense, as sort of a finite commodity that is distributed, either equally or unequally. And in order to achieve just society, you have to create institutions that meet out

this justice in a fair way, by an enlightened way. And the only way to do that is to create this theoretical construct called a veil of ignorance from which this enlightened distributor would operate behind. So his biases, conscious or otherwise, could not be satisfied. Social justice activists on the right and the left have no use for that veil. The veil is an obstacle. It's an anti-scientific construct to identify who is truly oppressed, who has obstacles put before them by unseen forces, real or imagined, that have robbed them of that which is their due. And they appeal to a strong hand to satisfy them and to provide redress for these historical grievances. White nationalists,

white supremacists, the alt-right, believe precisely this. They have a slightly different foundational philosophical foundation, but the outcomes that they advocate are the same as the social justice left. And the philosophy that they operate from is so similar that I decline to make a broad distinction. Yeah, so in that social justice kind of paradigm that you just outlined, identity really becomes the currency, right? It's victimhood and its status based on your identity. Totally different from the system we've inherited based on the individual rights. natural rights of each person, regardless of identity. What do you see happening to our country if we begin to build a system on this identity Olympics hierarchy?

Well, I just don't think American institutions are designed to satisfy these desires on the part of the social justice left or right. They advocate for inequality in order to create equality, and American institutions are resistant to that paradigm. So what happens to you when you create these existential moral dilemmas that you believe, institutions are simply ill-equipped to address two things. One, you withdraw, you become disengaged. You say that the system is flawed. It's irreparable and my activism isn't worth anything. So you back out of the political process. The other, and more dangerous response to that is to radicalize, to become resolved to attack the foundations of the system that is so immoral and so beyond repair. And that is why, in my view, we've seen a lot more street violence in the last decade than we've seen in perhaps a generation, political violence in which the social justice right or left and the white nationalist right are. fighting each other in the streets, literally in meleys in the streets, in part because of the narcissism

of small differences. They are so similar that their distinctions are what prevail in their imaginations. When outside observers look at these two sides and see just different flags, but very similar individuals. So how did we get to this point? I mean, just last week, Stacey Abrams, who of course gave the Democratic response to the State of the Union, published an article about identity politics in which she took them quite seriously. Obviously, the United States has a history of racism and we've tried in different ways to address it through affirmative action and other measures. But why now at a time when I think many of us would say things perhaps are the most equal they've ever been in this country? Is there this resurgence in these issues?

Yeah, I liked Ms. Abrams essay in a lot of ways. I didn't like her prescriptions. I think they're frankly counterproductive prescriptions. But the book is not an argument against self-actualization or racial awareness. To argue that would be to argue from a place of ignorance. We need to understand one another and have racial discussions complicated or otherwise. And what this argument is is essentially against creating institutions that are dedicated to identity politics as a governing ethos. And that's essentially what Candida Abrams prescribes. She suggests that we need to have a much more identitarian philosophy and that all of us need

to operate from behind an understanding that our identity predominantly is what generates our understanding of the world and our policy preferences and that all of, everything, every conflict, every desire stems from one source, and that is identity. And I just frankly think that that's antithetical to the ideals of the founding and the Constitution and the Federalist papers. You know, when social justice activists hear the word American ideals, or the term American ideals, they reject it and they get very frustrated by it because America has never really truly lived up to its ideals.

And that's fair and true. However, it's a misunderstanding of what an ideal is. An ideal is an aspiration. And aspirations may not ever be realized, but that does. doesn't make them less aspirational. It is something to which you aspire. And the rejection of American ideals is, I think, a paradigmatic failure on the part of both the social justice right and left. Yeah. And it's a clean break from even the civil rights movement, right? Martin Luther

King framing the civil rights movement in terms of natural rights, America's founding principles, expanding those to actually become more fulfilled than they had been. So you say in your book that it's not just liberals, though, that are falling for this new identity politics paradigm. So who else is falling for the ruse? Well, the social justice right, anybody who's embraced a sort of identityitarian philosophy as a response, in fact, in many ways, to the social justice left. We've seen an uptick and rhetoric on the part of many members of the right to embrace the kind of identity politics, either based around class or ethnicity

or race and gender and what have you, that we hadn't seen prior. Conservatism properly understood rejects these philosophies, their counterproductive to achieving a critical mass of support among voters and also to achieving your policy preferences, which have less to do with identity and race. But they reject the notion that identity and race have less to do with this. They embrace the social justice left's paradigm that suggests that all conflict and all disparate sources of grievance and remedies for those grievances stem from one particular place, which for them is identity.

In a way, it's very Marxian because it prescribes instead of class as a unifying force, of disparate conflict, identity and race and gender and what have you. So we're seeing a lot of, let's say, woke companies these days. There seems to be a lot of pressure on companies to participate in social justice and really have moral positions. How do you see social justice playing out in the corporate world? Yeah, I mean, that's pressure from below. It's not like these corporations are doing anything other than satisfying the fiduciary

responsibility they have to their investors and their patrons. This is something that Americans like. Every survey shows that they want to see their corporations engage in divisive cultural issues, which sort of mimic politics. They're not really politics properly understood. It's not legislative affairs. It's really just irreparable, often reconcilable, cultural differences. But it's a testament to how gullible social justice ideology makes people because this is not politics. And wearing somebody's face on your shoe doesn't make you a more political person.

But you feel like you're politically engaged. It's a way to satisfy the desire, a noble desire, to participate in politics without having to do any of the homework. I don't have to really understand what you're talking about. My favorite story that I talk about in the book is, to exemplify this phenomenon, is the fearless girl statue in downtown Manhattan. So there was, I think it was early 2017. There was a bronze statue of an elementary school-age girl standing arms akimbo directly across from the Wall Street Bull. And it was said to be this really powerful challenge to patriarchal structures in the financial services industry and a call to get more women into C-suite executive positions in that industry. And Democrats feted this thing like you wouldn't believe.

They had Bill de Blasio saying this is a real challenge to men. It made men uncomfortable. It was hard to find men who were uncomfortable, but they had to be. Assumed they were. Elizabeth Warren made a pilgrimage down there, stood next to the statue with a caption, Fight Like a Girl. It was really a celebrated idol. And it wasn't long before we started to investigate where this came from. It was sponsored by a firm called State Street Global Advisors.

It was a commercial for this firm. And it allowed them to escape scrutiny that they really deserved, if you looked at some of their investing advisors or investing pamphlets about talking to women who are interested in investing. It contained a lot of stereotypes, negative stereotypes. And it advised people to really not ruminate on concepts for too long and engage in emotional thinking and not reach. reasoning thinking it was. Yeah, that's exactly what women want to hear. Don't think emotionally. Social justice activists would have looked at that and said, huh, but they didn't. They sort of overlooked it. And it wasn't long before we've realized why they were conducting this, this advertisement. After a Department of Labor audit, they were found to have been systematically

discriminating against their female employees that paid about $5 million to about 300 female employees and 15 African Americans who were discriminated against. And all of a sudden, the fearless girl thing sort of disappeared. And you had people like Gail Collins in the New Times saying this was the most powerful protest since an antebellum protest that desegregated the gender segregation on the trolleys. But everybody just sort of backed away from it because they'd been had. This was a ruse and you were the rubs. This was a work. And it's the social justice activists who are the targets of this sort of thing and they don't seem to know it. So I just want to follow up. You mentioned that your research showed that companies were responding

to essentially market demands with these. And I was surprised by that because I mean the country, you know, politically and otherwise seems pretty much. down the middle. Wouldn't it be that any company taking a side on this issue, no matter what side, is potentially a downside? Yeah, you would think. I mean, that was the reasoning status quo ante, but American consumers, first of all, for most major firms, the bread is really no longer buttered at home. There's a lot of influence from particularly Europe and the coasts and the elite culture, which is much more to what the, much more of the market forces that these firms respond to. But these polls that say that people like this sort of thing are not limited to,

Republicans like this too. Republicans want to see their brands take a stand just on issues that they like, even though, and they're generally cultural issues. They're rarely the sort of stuff that you would see adjudicated in a court or addressed in legislation. It's much more just cultural distinctions that allow them to, to plant a flag. It's a very human response. I mean, identity politics is a force of human nature and to say we can't have identity politics anymore is to argue against human nature and against the tide. I'm not doing that. But I am saying that this sort of response is a shallow response. It's not politics. It's culture and identity and staking out a ground for yourself. And while that's probably an inevitable thing, to the extent that it renders you gullible and manipulable by people who are trying to sell you something, I mean, that should be a red flag. So this identity politics worldview, it seems to me it has more institutional power than it's ever had, arguably, I mean, in the universities and the media and whatnot.

So it's kind of at an apex there. And yet at the same time, it's really being challenged, I think, unexpectedly by some kind of prophetic voices. Obviously, your book, others like Jordan Peterson are kind of flying under the radar to give young people a real strong critique of this. Do you think that this identity politics worldview is going to hold together over the medium to long term? Or do you think people are going to see its weaknesses and they're going to fall back to a kind of American individualism, rights of the individual? Well, the trend is going in the wrong direction. And I frankly don't, I mean, I'd love to say that my book and the many other books and people, voices louder than mine who are getting a lot of traction, are going to reverse this trend. But we really are talking to a narrow field, unfortunately.

The vast majority of Americans and consumers of politics, big and small scale, they like this sort of thing. And I don't see that reversing anytime soon. I provide some prescriptions as to how I think you can reverse it based on self-interest alone, that a pragmatism. would compel you as either somebody who identifies more with the Republican Party or the Democratic Party to identify a set of legislative designs that you want to see happen, big, broad legislative proposals that are economic, or in various other terms that are really genuinely legislative issues and social issues. It can't necessarily be remedied by that. And to the extent that these ideas make your program less appealing to a critical mass of voters, they're unproductive.

and so I recommend if you're trying to stigmatize these ideas, and I think they need to be stigmatized, to talk to people who might be attracted to them for legitimate reasons and say, well, you might have perfectly legitimate reasons why you believe this sort of thing. And I might too, but they're unproductive. They're getting in the way of the goals that you and I share in the effort to attract 50 plus one at the polls. And Republicans and Democrats have models to appeal to. The stigmatization of the Birchurcher movement by Buckley and Kirk and Goldwater, and the ouster of the communists from the organized labor movement in the 1940s are both models to which the two parties can appeal to stigmatize an idea, not to purge its own members.

No political coalition would ever do that with a self-interest would ever do that. But you can identify an idea, isolate it, and stigmatize it. And I also recommend creating a new emphasis on civic education properly understood. The federalist papers, the Constitution, the sort of thing that we've de-emphasized in public education. And perhaps are a legislative remedies to that, although I'm reluctant. to recommend them, I do, because we do need to understand what civic education in this country truly was. It's not about diversity or identity. It's about the founding ideals and the parchment upon which this country is founded. So in the course of researching this book, unjust, did you

look at other countries at all? Has the social justice course gone further in other countries that we can learn from? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, I don't speak to other countries' experience because I can't. That's not my experience. This is really very limited to. the United States with a possible exception of a couple of trends in the UK, but generally this is all about America. The idea for the book occurred to me, however, when I was in Ukraine, took a government-sponsored trip to Ukraine, and I like other conservative bloggers have been writing about identity politics and the deleterious force that it is, the strain on the social compact. But I saw it in practice in Ukraine when we were treated to a conversation with the country's chief prosecutor who explained to us that it was not in their interest or in our interest. frankly, to force them to prosecute individuals who are pro-government forces and were engaged in

violence in the Maidan and the revolution that ousted the Anseon regime, which was pro-Russian. And why should you want us to? They're on our side. This was no sort of justice that I'm familiar with. This looked a lot more like revenge and tribalism. And it occurred to me that that's really what social justice is in its modern form. It has become identity politics in practice as an alternative governing ethos that is in many ways antithetical to the American experience. but we're moving in the wrong direction.

So this is an attempt to try to reverse that trend. Well, the book is called Unjust, Social Justice, and the Unmaking of America. Noah Rothman, thanks for taking the time. My pleasure. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast, brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud, and please leave us a review or rating on iTunes to give us feedback. We'll see you again tomorrow.

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