The culture wars are, to quote Pat Buchanan, a struggle "for the soul of America," and they've been consuming our political discourse for centuries. As Andrew Hartman writes, "the history of America, for better or worse, is largely a history of debates about the idea of America." Are we a racist country? Should gay people be allowed to marry? What about gun control, abortion, transgender medicine, affirmative action, equal pay for women, book banning, deplatforming, cancel culture, safe spaces and so-called wokeness?

Fought on many fronts, the outcome of this war can have to state the obvious profound real-world consequences. Last year, there were 693 mass shootings that left 703 people dead and 2,842 injured, and a recent study found that overturning Roe v. Wade could cause a "21% increase in the number of pregnancy-related deaths," with this disproportionately affecting Black women. Children go through active shooter drills in school, and transgender people are sometimes denied the treatments prescribed by their doctors. Pay inequality makes being a single mother difficult, and the question which books our children are allowed to read could shape a whole generation's understanding of the American project. The list goes on.

How, then, should one engage in the culture wars? What actions can one take to make a difference? Or is all of this really just a distraction? Is the best way to bring about real change in the world to sidestep the often-heated public squabbles over values and ideas?

These are among the central questions that Dr. Liam Kofi Bright, a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics, addresses in his fascinating new paper "White Psychodrama." Bright's focus isn't the culture wars in general, but the particular battle among white people over race relations in contemporary America.

To understand what's going on here, Bright offers an insightful breakdown of the situation, which he conceptualizes as a cast of characters, on the one hand, and a narrative that gives rise to their disputes, on the other. Let's begin with the characters:

First, you have the Repenters, who "see the group they identify with as having committed horrible crimes globally and domestically, and they are ever so aware of the ways in which present material conditions generate continued deprivation for black people alongside relative comfort for many white people." As such, Repenters are wracked by "an overwhelming sense of guilt," a hard-to-shake feeling that one is blameworthy for having benefited from historical injustices, and for continuing to benefit from the racist systems currently in place.

Repenters are wracked by "an overwhelming sense of guilt," a hard-to-shake feeling that one is blameworthy for having benefited from historical injustices, and for continuing to benefit from racist systems.

To ease this guilt, Repenters might encourage their workplaces to openly celebrate diversity, make a point of following people of color on social media and supporting Black-owned local businesses. Some will seek guidance about proper racial etiquette from books like Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility." Through such "self-work," by acknowledging their special position in society and trying to improve the world around them in small but meaningful ways, Repenters aim to foster "a positive self image" as someone on the right side of history, and hence not personally or at least not actively part of the problem.

Next, you have the Repressers. This group is keen on downplaying the importance of race in America. They advocate for a "colorblind" approach to understanding inequality, and are quick to dismiss those who single out skin pigmentation as "playing the race card." Repressers worry that people are "too easily offended" over "mere" peccadillos like wearing Blackface at Halloween, and suggest that those who whine about such infractions fail to appreciate just how far America has come from the bad old days of slavery and Jim Crow.

Our country has made great progress with race relations, in this view, and we currently live in the most racially tolerant society ever. Sure, there may still be instances of racism here and there, but Repressers insist that these are individual rather than systemic in nature. Hence, talk of "white privilege" is overblown and only makes the problem worse by foregrounding racial identity. Repressers deal with the problem of guilt not by repenting for their whiteness but by repressing any discussion of race in the first place.

As you may have experienced first-hand, these two characters cannot stand to be in the same room together. They don't get along, and never will. Imagine a "woke" progressive white person in the same room with Dennis Prager or Sam Harris. How long could this last before a shouting match erupts?

Yet there is a third character in the fight as well, an important supporting role played by well-educated nonwhites whom Bright dubs the "PoC intelligentsia." As he describes the situation, not without amusement:

Of course the rest of us do not simply sit by and watch the whites duke it out amongst themselves. If nothing else they still have ownership of the stuff and a democratic majority, so most of us are dependent on them for making a living. How then have the PoC intelligentsia people of colour sufficiently engaged in politics to be tapped into the white culture war and the historical narrative underpinning it responded to the opportunities and challenges presented thereby? With a dexterous entrepreneurial spirit! Which is to say, by cashing in.

This "cashing in" is possible because both Repenters and Repressers draw from the PoC intelligentsia to support their perspectives. On the one hand, PoC intellectuals function as "bearers of black thinkers' insight" who are willing to affirm the guilt-stricken worldview of Repenters. On the other, one finds a handful of prominent Black thinkers no less inclined "to give voice to an intelligent version of the Represser narrative."

Repressers admitthere may still be instances of racism here and there, but insist that these are individual rather than systemic in nature. Hence, talk of "white privilege" is overblown, and only makes the problem worse.

The mainstream media (including Fox News), which are largely white-owned, will eagerly prop up the voices of PoC intellectuals in each camp, and indeed "a vital part of Repenter strategy for alleviating guilt [is] that they listen to such voices." "Repressers are not as tied to this strategy," Bright notes, "but if one is troubled by accusations of racism the fact that black thinkers agree with your perspective will be salient and interesting."

Here we have the cast of characters in the American culture war over race. But there's a twist: despite the obvious differences between Repenters and Repressers, these characters actually have a lot in common. For example, they both accept that the ideal that we should aim for is a racially egalitarian society in which, to borrow Martin Luther King Jr.'s immortal words, people should "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

They also concur that America is far from this ideal today. They will generally acknowledge facts such as that the median net worth of Black households in 2019 was $24,100, compared to $188,200 for white families, Black people still greatly outnumber white people in U.S. prisons, and the unemployment rate for Black people is nearly twice as high as for white people. Hence, both characters agree that while America should be egalitarian, it is in fact far from this: There's a glaring mismatch between reality and ideal, and that's a problem.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

The defining difference between these two groups is how they react to this problem. As alluded to above, Repenters react by feeling guilty and trying to assuage this feeling through attitudinal shifts and everyday acts. In contrast, Repressers react by trying to avoid the question of race altogether by suppressing talk of racial differences, which they disparage as "identity politics."

Yet in both cases the dual strategies of assuaging and avoiding are ultimately aimed at one thing: relieving the cognitive dissonance produced by the aforementioned mismatch, which is why Bright labels this a "psychodrama." As he writes:

Repenters and Repressers are engaged in a fundamental conflict, but it is a conflict over how to psychologically manage the results of living in a materially deeply unequal society, not a conflict about how or whether to reduce that material inequality.

This leads to one of the most important points of Bright's article: Even though both characters affirm the ideal of racial egalitarianism, both are invested in perpetuating the status quo as are, to a lesser degree, the PoC intellectuals, who personally profit off the endless white psychodrama. It's one thing for Repenters to put a "Black Lives Matter" sign on their front lawns after a white police officer kills an unarmed Black person, but quite another to, say, support "defunding" police departments. After all, Bright notes, defunding the police "could actually upset the ability of the police to perform the social function of protecting their lives and property."

Meanwhile, Repressers will respond to such incidents by looking for any reason at all to minimize the role of race. They will insist, for example, that the police officer is just one bad apple in the orchard. The problem isn't the police, but some particular police, which makes calling for police departments to be defunded completely absurd. Don't blame the institution for the actions of single individuals!

Both sides affirm the ideal of racial egalitarianism, but in fact both are invested in perpetuating the status quo as are, to a lesser degree, the PoC intellectuals who profit off endless white psychodrama.

The result of all this is that nothing changes. Neither Repressers nor Repenters are keen on the sort of fundamental, systemic renovations of America's social, political and economic infrastructure needed to actually solve the problem to fix the mismatch between reality and ideal. As Bright makes the point, neither side's strategies "involve surrendering white wealth and are thus relatively advantageous to white elites when compared to seriously redistributive policies that might actually advance the material welfare of black people."

In a phrase, the culture war over race tends to resist rather than promote change. It's a psychodrama among whites that both feeds off and sustains the status quo of material disadvantages, inequalities, and injustices experienced by people of color.

So how does one break free of this cycle? One possibility begins with this question: Did you in any way feel seen while reading the profiles of Repenters and Repressers? Was it uncomfortable? As Bright observes, while "none of the above characters are entirely unsympathetic, in so far as one sees oneself in them it is probably with a profound sense of unease."

Speaking for myself, yes. I have at times fit the Repenter stereotype. I've gone out of my way to signal, both to myself and others, that my concern for racial equality and justice is deeply held, genuine and passionate. I've preferentially shopped at Black-owned stores, tried to amplify PoC voices on social media and elsewhere, and included a "BLM" hashtag on my Twitter profile. In the most minimal sense, I've "done my part" to "not be a part of the problem," and in the process I felt a little better about myself as a white person.

That counts for something. But the crucial point is that none of these actions address the underlying root causes of the reality-ideal mismatch. As Bright told me by email, "it is certainly worth investing some of your time in doing something to ameliorate things where they are hurting you or those around you." But when such efforts take the place of working toward real change, they are not nearly as commendable as they might feel to people like me. "Please don't pretend that you doing" such things, Bright continues,

is really in my interests. The psychological and communal work of coping with a sense of guilt and unease is something yinz will have to work out for yourselves; but it should be done in tandem with, rather than in lieu of, work to redistribute resources and control to the multi-racial proletariat.

Hence, a practical upshot of Bright's paper is that by seeing oneself in the characterological mirrors that he holds up to our faces, white people, in particular, can begin to extricate themselves from the never-ending, status-quo-perpetuating psychodrama of the culture wars. After all, as Bright notes, "earnestly trying to win the culture war in the sense of achieving victory for either Repenter or Represser is a fool's errand; if those are the teams then the only winning move is not to play."

Bright argues that "earnestly trying to win the culture war ... is a fool's errand." If Repenters and Repressers are the competing teams, "the only winning move is not to play."

Fortunately, though, these are not the only teams. Bright points to yet another archetype that he identifies with himself, the ironically detached narrator of the drama (to paraphrase his words). He calls this fourth character the Non-Aligned person, a term borrowed from the Cold War, during which countries not formally allied with the Western or Eastern blocs were part of the "non-aligned movement."

Unlike Repenters, Repressers, and the PoC intelligentsia, Non-Aligned persons resist getting swept up in the white psychodrama over race relations in America. They understand that the culture wars cannot be won, are perpetuated by the "racialised psychopathology" that they simultaneously generate and hence are nothing more than a distraction from what really matters.

The Non-Aligned person thus aims "to act in such a way that they can earnestly see themselves as sensibly working towards the eradication of the material inequalities between racial groups." Their goal is to secure "the physical and cultural conditions necessary for nonwhite people to enjoy republican freedom."

What might this look like in practice? One example might be putting the police under community control, an idea advocated by the Black Panther Party 50 years ago, perhaps with the ultimate aim of abolishing the police force altogether.

Another draws from the work of Olfmi Tw, a philosopher at Georgetown University. In his recent book "Reconsidering Reparations," Tw examines how anthropogenic climate change will disproportionately affect PoC and the global South. "Climate change," he writes, "threatens to turn existing forms of injustice into overdrive at every scale of human life," and hence "our response to [the] climate crisis will deeply determine the possibilities for justice (and injustice) in what remains of this century and if we survive to the next." Tw continues:

It is not that every aspect of today's global racial empire is rooted in the impacts of climate change. But every aspect of tomorrow's global racial empire will be. Climate change is set not just to redistribute social advantages, but to do so in a way that compounds and locks in the distributional injustices we've inherited from history. If we don't intervene powerfully, it will reverse the gains toward justice that our ancestors fought so bitterly for, ushering in an era of what the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights calls "climate apartheid."

Tw thus argues that we should address the impending climate catastrophe through a sort of "forward looking vision of reparations, concerned with what sort of world we can make together," quoting Bright. This approach "very much mirrors the concerns of the Non-Aligned person," as it focuses on changes to the fundamental, underlying conditions social, political and economic that may be required to achieve racial equality and justice in the future, in a world increasingly turned upside-down by massive flooding, mega-droughts, wildfires, sea-level rise, famines, biodiversity loss and other climate-related disasters.

I find this very compelling: There is, it seems, simply no way to resolve the mismatch between reality and ideal without addressing the fact that, as Tw notes, climate change will exacerbate and reinforce the underlying causes of present-day problems. But achieving this end will require radical shifts in the racial power dynamics that currently exist. It will require overturning what Charles Mills famously called "white supremacy," or "the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today," which would mean white people giving up their accumulated wealth to achieve racial egalitarianism, not just within America but the world more generally.

Are Repenters and Repressers willing to do this? No, which is precisely why the Non-Aligned person does not engage in their bickering but, instead, uses what resources they have to investigate alternative solutions focused on reshaping global systems themselves, rather than on tweaking particular components of the system currently in place the very system responsible for the endless series of culture-war flashpoints that Repenters and Repressers, along with the PoC intelligentsia, are constantly fighting about.

If you're tired of the culture wars over race, the best way to end them may not be paradoxical as this may sound at first to try and "win" them. The take-home message of Bright's illuminating discussion is that we need to build a Non-Aligned movement. At the very least, he writes, "it is imperative that we cease investing our psychic energy in the white bourgeoisie's culture war. It will never get better, and only makes us worse."

Read more

from mile P. Torres on philosophy and the future

Read the original:

"White Psychodrama" and the culture wars: A self-reinforcing cycle, going nowhere - Salon

Jos Marichal is a professor of political science at California Lutheran University.

Does Twitter have a censorship problem or a misinformation problem? On September 13th, 2022, a handful of House Republicans demanded that the Biden administration hand over to Congress selected communication between the administration and tech companies.The members of Congress accuse the administration of coordinating with Facebook and Twitter to censor stories and Tweets regarding COVID-19 under the guise of preventing misinformation. While preventing misinformation is a critical issue, its not Twitters only problem. Equally important is the question of how we can better argue with one another without creating more hatred and antagonism, or as political philosopher Morton Schoolman put it, how can Twitter eliminate violence towards difference while at the same time standing for democratic principles?

Over the last two years, Twitter has taken steps to reduce the amount of misinformation users see. In 2021, the company claims it adjusted its algorithm to reduce exposure to Tweets by users whose posts reflect behaviors that distort and detract from the public conversation. While this addition by subtraction approach may have the effect of creating more polite, or even more accurate, discourse (along with keeping users interested in the site), its effect on democratic health may be as bad as its benefits. While eliminating anti-democratic or simply false posts are an important tool for maintaining a healthy public, the deeper problem with Twitter lies is the way users argue politics with one another.

We Twitter users are generally not nice to each other when we disagree. We are often not generous in presenting the opposing sides views, or in presenting our own views to those whom weve identified as bad-faith actors. We presume nefarious motives about our opponents. This leads many to argue that the problem with social media is too much arguing. But agonistic political theorists like Chantal Mouffe maintain that arguing is not only good for politics, its what defines it. Argument highlights the contest between reciprocity [with our in-group] and hostility [towards our out-group] that creates politics. Without this contestation, there is no politics. The end of contestation means the end of politics. On issues where there is no grounds for agreement, our only non-violent/non-coercive option in a democratic society is to keep arguing.

But if argument is essential for politics, does that extend to invidious trolling or bad-faith efforts to demean opponents? Another agonist political theorist, William Connolly, suggests that a lack of generosity and distrust towards fellow citizens (not institutions) breeds the ressentiment or disengagement from the political community that serves as the hallmark to democratic backsliding. Indeed, the more platforms become toxic, the more they censor themselves. In unpublished research I am working on with my colleagues Don Waisanen and Carrie Anne Platt, we find that the vast majority of Facebook users we surveyed about political discussion employ more avoidance and censoring strategies online when compared to their off-line behavior.

In other work, my colleague Richard Neve and I found that many Twitter conversation threads had practically no alternative perspectives offered. We studied the top 75 most retweeted users on a given day and found comment threads largely devoid of counter-arguments. Eliminating counterarguments, or even misinformation, might make for more engagement on Twitter, but it does not help users engage in productive arguments. Former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey admitted the limited nature of the companys approach in a series of Tweets in 2018:

We arent proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough While working to fix it, weve been accused of apathy, censorship, political bias, and optimizing for our business and share price instead of the concerns of society. This is not who we are, or who we ever want to be Weve focused most of our efforts on removing content against our terms, instead of building a systemic framework to help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking. This is the approach we now need.

Over the past four years, however, Twitter has kept its focus on misinformation, understandably because of the substantial challenge of electoral and COVID-19 misinformation. But as Dorsey recognized, any effort to increase the overall health of political discourse on Twitter will need sustained critical reflection, development and implementation. This task is not technical in nature. The value of political engagement cannot easily be judged without taking into consideration substantive considerations concerning meaningful speech.

Agonism gives us a different starting point for addressing Dorseys concerns. A key distinction between agonism and antagonism is the latters commitment to a political association with the other. An antagonistic discourse is one in which one sees opponents as an existential threat rather than as a competitor.

What would an agonistic, good arguing Twitter look like? How could we add to, rather than subtract, from the plurality of voices on Twitter? Rather than have a policy of subtraction, I propose Twitter use its algorithms to identify antagonistic threads and populate them with orthogonal perspectives and narratives that force users to draw out their own value positions and confront them with generously presented counter-arguments. Even if these orthogonal stories, data points or arguments were largely ignored, it would remind users that there are reasonable and plausible counter-narratives in the public discourse.

This eat your broccoli approach is not a cure-all solution. This is a uniquely fragile point in time for liberal democracy. The authoritarian impulse in many countries to re-establish a sense of hierarchy and order undermined by globalization and cultural and demographic change often plays out on social media platforms. Calls to redress the injustices of racism, colonialism, and sexism and other axes of oppression are often met with threatening and dehumanizing language. There is a persuasive case to be made that Twitter and other platforms should simply eliminate discourses that reinforce systems of oppression.

There is indeed value in deplatforming content that promotes violence or undemocratic views. But the job of repairing a public sphere cant simply be left at removing noxious content. Even with the mixed record of successwith deplatforming, the unwillingness of Twitter users to meaningfully engage with difference remains. Most people on Twitter do not want agonistic engagement. They prefer to have their worldviews amplified. Or they come to platforms like Twitter for the thrill of abstract, drive by conflict. On platforms like Twitter, argument is disembodied from its subject. There is no ability to find the commonalities that would undergird a sense of political association. Hence, disagreement is an ambient, disembodied provocation. It is a hostile challenge to ones sense of emotional and sometimes physical safety.

Re-embodied in place, people disagree on all sorts of things and get on with the work of living collectively. Those who disagree on student loan forgiveness might share a love for the New York Knicks or a passion for needlepoint. But these commonalities would only organically emerge from being in community. That is something that Twitter cannot do.

Dr. Marichal is a professor of political science at California Lutheran University. He specializes in studying the role that social media plays in restructuring political behavior and institutions. In 2012, he publishedFacebook Democracy (Routledge Press)which looks at the role that the popular social network played on the formation of political identity across different countries. His most recent work (with Richard Neve and Brian Collins) looks at they ways in which social media platforms encourage antagonistic political discourse and how they could be regulated.In addition, Dr. Marichal (with collaborators) is using computational social science methods on a number of projects including an examination of fracking debates on Twitter, a study of candidate branding in 2016, and a study on political talk on Facebook. In 2018, Dr. Marichal organized a mini-conference on Algorithmic Politics for the Western Political Science Association. Currently, he is working on abook that looks at the damaging effects of algorithms on democracy by creating an algorithmic mentality among citizens.

Related

Continue reading here:

Regulating Misinformation on Twitter is a Problem, But There Are Bigger Ones on the Horizon - Tech Policy Press

Noah Bookbinder is the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and a former federal corruption prosecutor.

Before, during, and after the January 6 attacks, Donald Trump turned to social media to energize supporters with the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 presidential election. Nearly two years later, Trump has a new platform to enact the same old playbook. With Truth Social emerging as a megaphone for misinformation and extremism, tech companies that are serious about upholding their publicly professed commitments to prevent the promotion of violent content must ban Truth Social from their online stores.

Back in April, and again in August of this year, my organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), called on major tech companies, like Apple and Google, to ban Truth Social from their online stores, pointing to its risk to democracy and insufficient content moderation policies. Its a step in the right direction that Google has not approved Truth Social for its online Google Play store, citing concerns over its insufficient content moderation policies. But the app still remains available for download on Apples App Store.Between February and August of this year, the app has been downloaded approximately 3 million times, with a major uptick in downloads following the FBI search of Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort.

Donald Trump launched Truth Social, a Trump Media & Technology Group product, earlier this year after he was permanently suspended from Twitter due to the risk of further incitement of violence after the January 6 insurrection. No longer able to reach his 88.7 million Twitter followers and spread election falsehoods, Trumps Truth Social platform is providing a new venue to spread misinformation-stoked militancy.

Since the federal government retrieved highly classified documents from Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago residence this past August, Trump has repeatedly vilified the government agencies involved and has deftly used Truth Social to ensure that his anti-democratic messages are disseminated widely. Since then, researchers have tracked an escalation of violent rhetoric from the far right, mirroring the increased chatter we saw on online forums just before the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Truth Social app has seen a spike in downloads, as Trumps supporters flocked to the platform. These individuals didnt join the platform in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago search simply to show solidarity. Instead, they came to Truth Social to intimidate and mobilize.

As part of that mobilization, Truth Social users publicly shared the contact information of those involved in the court-approved search, including that of FBI personnel, the magistrate who signed the court order in the Mar-a-Lago search, and their family members. Although personal information was later removed from the platform, the verbatim text had already spread across the platform, leaving private citizens vulnerable to those who might intend them harm.

We know all too well that violent threats can quickly escalate from rhetoric to reality. The individual who died attempting to breach the FBIs Cincinnati office just days after the Mar-a-Lago search is a case in point. He reportedly used his Truth Social account to issue violent threats calling for federal agents to be killed on sight and urging people to be ready for combat. He announced his deadly plans to attack the FBIs field office on Truth Social, underscoring the real threat behind such ominous posts.

Instead of de-escalating this volatile situation and condemning the attack on the FBI, Trump used Truth Social to undermine the credibility of federal law enforcement and promote the narrative that he, and by extension, his supporters, are under attack by many sinister and evil outside sources. To make matters worse, some of these posts promote QAnon and QAnon-adjacent content, tapping into conspiracy theories and misinformation. A recent post from Trumps account stating that it takes courage and guts to fight a totally corrupt Department of Justice and the FBI illustrates that he is attempting to use his more than 4 million followers on Truth Social in the same way that he used Twitter in the lead up to the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. As the attack on the Cincinnati FBI field office demonstrates, Trumps strategy of using social media to spread false narratives and fan the flames of violence is still working today to inspire political violence and civil unrest.

If Truth Socials threat to democracy werent enough, the app is also facing a host of financial woes that should give companies further pause. According to recent news coverage, a deal with a special purpose acquisition company that had been on track to merge with Truth Socials parent company stalled after failing to secure sufficient shareholder support. It seems as though potential financial backers dont view Truth Social as a sound or stable investment. They rightly recognize that the risksboth financial and reputationalare simply too high.

The longer Truth Social remains available for download, the longer it serves as a threat to our democracy and a megaphone for Donald Trump to continue his attempts to destabilize our country and spread misinformation. Its time for tech companies to make the decision that is best both for their bottom line and for the democracy in which they operate by deplatforming Truth Social.

Noah Bookbinder is the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and a former federal corruption prosecutor. He previously served as chief counsel for criminal justice for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Related

See the rest here:

It's Time to Stop Platforming the Big Lie Playbook - Tech Policy Press