How Can We Live Together?

This is the first installment of a new column by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò.

In 1962, eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell received a series of letters from Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, inviting him to a debate. Russell not only declined the invitation but replied quite generally that “nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us”—since “every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterized the philosophy and practice of fascism.”

Today we face political forces that are pursuing a campaign of mass deportations, federal occupations, and extrajudicial military executions of civilians without trial. Perhaps these forces are best described as “fascist,” as Mosley had labeled his supporters; perhaps they are better described with some other term of art or likened to some other particular regime responsible for the horrors of the twentieth century. But such debates are, at best, academic. Whatever noun we use to label the “cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution” of our day, we are confronted with a set of choices about what and whom to associate with that are not entirely different from the ones Russell confronted.

The way we lived with each other before involved exactly the “social shame and cultural pressure” that Klein and other influential voices now come to condemn.

The response of one prominent figure to our moment is a far cry from Russell’s. Following the shooting of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Vox cofounder and podcast commentator Ezra Klein wrote in the New York Times that Kirk was “practicing politics the right way” because he was willing to show up and argue with college students. (Apparently this is what passes for “moxie and fearlessness” among some of my fellow members of the chattering class.) Amid backlash, Klein doubled down, insisting that “we are going to have live here with one another”—as an introduction to an interview with far-right former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro.

Much about what Klein offers here is objectionable: the appeal to debate as “persuasion,” which confuses the mere appearance of giving and responding to reasons with the substance of good-faith rational inquiry; the silence about the fact that the watchlist Kirk spearheaded generated death threats, along with other evidence that would complicate the narrative that Kirk did politics the “right way”; the breathtaking carelessness or outright dishonesty in deflecting objections to the specific accuracy of this portrayal of Kirk with claims about the general appropriateness of political violence. Klein has himself spoken cogently about the risks and rewards of the attention economy in shaping real-world politics, saying that “attention is the most important human faculty” since a person’s life is simply “the sum total of the things you’ve paid attention to.” For him to ignore this much in order to lend the weight of his considerably large audience to volunteer as participant in a state-sponsored propaganda offensive is, at best, deeply irresponsible.

But I am stuck on one bit in particular, which Klein offered during his Shapiro interview in response to an outpouring of criticism for the whitewashing portrayal of Kirk in his op-ed. He contends that living with one another on the basis of “social shame and cultural pressure” cannot work and would not be worthwhile if it did: a nation where such things flourished would not be “a free country.” What could Klein possibly mean by this? We are indeed going to have to live with each other, barring apocalyptic violence—but we already have been for quite some time, and doing so has not required revisionist history of the sort we are now witnessing about one Charles James Kirk in particular. The political ascendancy of right-wing fractions of the U.S. adult population is new. But their existence, of course, is not: they were not born in the summer of 2020, recent efforts to blame their intransigence and bigotry on whatever missteps may or may not have occurred during the George Floyd protests notwithstanding. A key aspect of the way we lived with each other before these self-styled epochal developments involved exactly the “social shame and cultural pressure” that Klein and other influential voices now come to condemn: “political correctness” as it was known in earlier days, or “wokeness” as it has come to be rebranded in recent years. This shame and pressure did not rely principally on the “the force the state could bring to bear on those it seeks to silence,” as Klein rightly laments. For that kind of strong-armed enforcement of moral norms, Klein could look to the mass deportation campaigns, criminal prosecution of political organizers, and overt state censorship championed by his current right-wing bedfellows. But “PC culture” did indeed involve the shame and pressure Klein decries: a moral etiquette that directed people on how to avoid offense and stigmatized those who did not play by its rules, causing even “top bankers” to think twice before saying things like “retard” or “pussy” in the wrong sort of company. Klein is right about one other thing: we should not kid ourselves about the existence of people whose values diverge sharply from our own, or their numbers. I like to think I appreciate this point at least as well as most. I grew up in the same solidly Republican region of Ohio that produced Vice President J. D. Vance. The Bell Curve, a massive 500-plus-page work that purported to show there was a genetic basis for racial differences in IQ, spent months on the New York Times’ bestseller list while I was in preschool. Somebody read it, including, perhaps, those members of the local Klan who left their literature on my family’s driveway just a few years later—thankfully, a much shorter read for a third-grade me who found it while waiting for the school bus. Not all overt bigots hid behind robes or discreet book clubs, however. Some of them were willing to skirt the PC rules: the disparaging reference to the ghetto, the thoughtful suggestion to go back to Africa, the occasional “hard R.” But these were the exception. This kind of behavior got you suspended at school, in hot water with HR, disinvited from dinner parties. In other words, it was the kind of behavior that would make the Bertrand Russells of the world think better of association with you.

Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply.

The norms of political correctness thus set basic ground rules for social life—at least, in politically mixed company. These norms lorded over a motley moral crew. The vocal opponents of PC culture included out-and-out bigots, of course, but also slightly more sophisticated ones who exploited the plausible deniability of abstraction in their appeals for the right to express—and the genuine or performed credulousness of helpful partners like Klein—to help clear social space for the overt stuff. The deniability was plausible because there were other sorts who opposed PC culture: those with libertarian leanings who simply and genuinely resented any imposition on their expression, edgelords who delighted in line-stepping who saw the minefields of conversation around race and gender as an exciting obstacle course, and those who seemed to afford their prejudices and their political values oddly equal weight. PC defenders were likewise heterogeneous, including some who genuinely found bigotry as such intolerable, social climbers and people-pleasers who had never found a rule they wouldn’t studiously mind, and hall-monitor types who enjoyed any pretext for putting people in their place. The challenge for Klein and his fellow travelers is to specify what sort of ground rules could make life livable and social situations manageable for such a wide array of people whose values, commitments, and interests differ so sharply—that is, on terms other than various sorts of segregation or the most naked forms of domination and subjugation—if not precisely “social shame and cultural pressure,” now contemptuously referred to as “political correctness” or “wokeness.” We might more accurately call it exactly the “civility” that centrists like Klein otherwise pretend to champion, even while they seek to hollow out even this meager social protection of its efficacy. These codes of neighborliness or of common decency are, in other words, the bare minimum for us to exist peacefully as profoundly different people who nevertheless share the same time and place. Common decency, then, stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association, as Russell exemplified. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply. This arrangement certainly risks some measure of injustice, inaccuracy, and overreach: a careless joke or comment here or there need not a bigot, much less a dyed-in-the-wool fascist, make. But admitting such possibilities, seeing this kind of basic social norm enforcement as fundamentally at odds with living in a free country is deeply delusional. Not everyone you go to school with is invited to your birthday party, not every coworker and neighbor to the cookout. Deciding the level of intimacy with which you will live with the people around you is an utterly mundane part of living in the world—yes, even a free world—and doing so on the basis of other people’s character and conduct informs those decisions for anyone with values that stretch beyond those of cynical self-protection and into the territory of things like “basic self-respect,” “respect for others,” and “basic integrity.” Russell was not infringing on Mosley’s freedom by deeming him unworthy of polite conversation—even if he had done so for questionable rather than principled reasons. He was simply exercising his own freedom, alongside a better set of values than Mosley had. A free world would expect as much: indeed, it would require it. The point is that the possibility of overreach is a price worth paying exactly because shame serves as a robustly liberal alternative to the political violence that Klein and company rightly abhor. It is, quite literally, the least one can do to ensure rules of social conduct that upheld minimal levels of dignity for all involved. Most of the alternatives involve either subjugation, combat, or both. Put another way: designating disrespect and denigration as beyond the pale, as grounds for exclusion from polite company, is “turning the temperature down.” Klein and others are helping to turn it up.

The norms of political correctness set basic ground rules for social life—at least, in politically mixed company.

That is not to say that we can’t try to shame better. We don’t need either the blinkered, toothless standards of 1990s “political correctness” or the exuberant overreach of 2010s social justice culture—neither, ultimately, was equal to the task of squaring the new egalitarian aims of political life with the inegalitarian history that produced our social and political habits. But we do need the core aspect of them that makes Klein so uncomfortable: Russell’s expectation that those who relate to others as though they are not worthy of respect ought to be treated with the regard that orientation deserves. We can admit that the feeling of shame can not only be constructive, but also deeply corrosive—whether one internalizes shame or is prompted to the emotion by others’ disapproval. But so, too, are some of the moral and personal failures that give rise to that disapproval. In some cases, these are poisonous enough to merit the harsh medicine of shame and shaming. If not during the rise of fascism, then when? Very few of us are moral saints—certainly not me. Unlike everlasting, lofty, abstract principles, we who try feebly to live up to them down in the muck of reality face mucky obstacles: we get tired, impatient, envious, and angry. Our values and principles ask more than most of us are able to give—if they don’t, they are probably too weak to be worth holding. But we don’t have to celebrate our failures or, worse still, confuse them with our successes. This is one valuable function of shame: it reminds us of who we want to be when we fall short, a goalpost that is necessarily anchored to the lofty height that our conduct fell beneath. We also encourage and defend these general social standards when we hold others to them, and not just ourselves. It would certainly be ideal if we could do away with failure and falling short—if we could always be as good as our values. It would be ideal if Klein felt the burning commitment to justice that Russell felt, so much so that he similarly would not see the point in pretending to be “on the same side of a larger project” as the likes of Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro. And it would be ideal if he understood what liberal and egalitarian values are and what they demand of him and catered to that, rather than to the personal expedience of reading lines from the script of a fascist movement eroding basic democratic freedoms and aiming to subordinate whichever large swaths of the country are not simply removed outright.

But if he can’t manage that, he could still spare us the sanctimony. He certainly needn’t advertise this particular shortcoming in the New York Times. He could, if nothing else, have the common decency to be ashamed. Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.

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