The Junket Intellectual

Hey,

I’m going to start, reluctantly, by discussing Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

My reluctance stems from the fact I have zero interest in contributing to his cult of personality. Whatever you may think about Coates’ views on—or moral authority over—the issue of race is fine. If you’re a big fan, we probably disagree. I think the damage he did to the country and the racial conversation outweighs whatever positive contributions he made. 

Thanks to a listener question on a podcast yesterday, it occurred to me that Coates’ memoir, Between the World and Me, and Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton came out the same year. It was a sort of conflict of visions. Hamilton’s version of America was one where blacks and Hispanics could take ownership of—“culturally appropriate” if you want to use that dumb term–the founding. Miranda’s vision of America was dynamic, inclusive, innovative, and deeply patriotic without being propagandistic. Coates’ vision was of immutable white sin and grievance. 

In that conflict of visions, Coates won, at least among elites. Without Coates you probably don’t get the 1619 Project, which, in many ways, was a reply to Hamilton. You’d still get protests over George Floyd—a death that deserved to be protested, after all (though not violently). But I suspect that the celebratory coverage of the protests, even after they turned violent, wouldn’t have been so appalling if progressive elites hadn’t gone down the Coates rabbit hole.  

The thing is, long before we had the term “luxury beliefs,” one of the great signs of status was the noblesse oblige of performative guilt. A large segment of the chattering classes and their audiences simply enjoy wallowing in guilt—American guilt, white guilt, Jewish guilt, Christian guilt, capitalist guilt, even climate guilt. What they enjoy even more is feeling better about themselves by insisting that others don’t feel guilty enough, which is to say they don’t feel as guilty as me or us.

The point isn’t that feeling shame over American slavery and Jim Crow is misguided. They were indeed shameful and evil. But admitting that, which I do freely and honestly, is not enough. The Coatesian vision of “reparative justice” necessarily requires adopting notions of ancestral, hereditary, collective guilt—one of the most ancient and toxic of illiberal ideas (it lays at the heart of antisemitism for the last 2,000 years). 

Anyway, there are other reasons I was reluctant to write about Coates’ splashy return to public life. I don’t think he is all that fascinating. Which is to say, I don’t find him sufficiently interesting as a thinker or writer to feel powerfully motivated to read a long profile of him, even to criticize it. Also, Jeffrey Blehar did a fine job covering many of the points I would make, conveying a similar sense of ennui and resentment at the suggestion that Coates has a claim to everyone’s attention. 

But the biggest source of my reluctance is quite simple: I could not give the scrawniest malnourished rat’s ass about his views on Israel. Whatever you think of Coates’ authorial persuasiveness or authority (not the same thing!) to write about his personal experiences as a black man in America, he does, when writing about the topic, have the advantage of being a black man in America. But the idea that I should value his opinion above any rando on Twitter because he took a couple junkets to Israel and the West Bank is dead on arrival with me. 

Look, I come from a bit of a niche, professionally and personally. If you asked me for experts on animal husbandry, carpentry, or mechanical engineering, I wouldn’t be of much use to you. But people with real expertise or experience with Israel and the Middle East? How much time do you have? Because it’s a long list, spanning the ideological spectrum. And Coates isn’t on it. 

When he says, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel” I see it as a confession against interest more than compelling testimony or witness. The use of “stranger” instead of “stronger” is also telling. Maybe it seemed so strange because it wasn’t really racism at all? Or maybe the racism he “saw” was a kind of projection, an effort to make the wish the father of the thought. The reason thirsty people believe mirages in the desert are lush oases is at least in part because that’s what they want to see. 

And that’s the context I put Coates in. When it comes to Israel, he’s a joiner and a groupthinker. The dementia that causes Queers for Palestine to think they are allies of Hamas and Hezbollah and sees pinpoint targeting of terrorists as “genocide” but terrorists’ calls for actual genocide as mere “resistance” is contagious. 

Vive la résistance.

I don’t think antisemitism, critical theory, or postcolonial oppression theory (or whatever that stuff is called) entirely explains the virality of this stuff. That stuff is definitely part of the story. But I think there’s something more basic as well: resistance addiction.

Vast swaths of Western culture—elite culture, political culture, online culture, academic culture, and most especially pop culture—are obsessed with being part of a resistance. Everyone wants to play the rebel, fighting the system from the outside. Nobody wants to be cast as the responsible grown-up striving to make the system work. The system is supposed to be all-powerful, and yet no one wants to claim they’re part of it. 

Virtually any institution or entity that makes some claim of authority, or even self-confidence, can be a target of some “resistance.” The reason the punk eco-warriors throw paint or soup at great works of art? Because great works of art have cultural authority. Why tear down or deface statues? Because statues—even of abolitionists—evoke cultural confidence and elicit “you’re not better than me” resentment. 

Israel is a symbol of confidence, and many hate it for it. Its success, and its refusal to apologize for it, mark it out as an insult to the failures of its neighbors. And the spurious claims that it is a colonial outpost of America or the white West not only trigger outrage but vast amounts of sweet, sweet, self-flagellation-fueling guilt. Israel is a statue to topple, a painting to draw on with crayon. It is a target, at least in part, because it is a fashionable target for resistance addicts. 

Consider, for instance, the climate “resistance” crowd. Many on the right like to argue that they are just a bunch of Marxists using environmentalism for their “real” anti-capitalist agenda. There’s certainly some truth to that. And I can tell that story quite easily. 

But maybe that story gets the motivations wrong, at least for a lot of people. Maybe the people who joined the anti-capitalist resistance in the first place did so not so much because they hated capitalism, but because hating capitalism was the cool thing to do for people who want to cosplay rebellion and resistance. We like to think that ideology can fuel rebellion; for a lot of people, the desire for rebellion causes them to shop around for an ideology. 

This would explain Greta Thunberg’s segue from bleating “How dare you!” at supposed climate criminals to roaring “Crush Zionism!” Anti-Zionism is just so hot right now—Thunberg is simply Ferris Bueller-ing, jumping in front of the latest parade and pretending to lead it. If it offends you that I sound like I’m not taking Thunberg seriously, let me clarify: You’re right. I don’t. 

This would also at least partially explain the maddening tendency of Israel haters to abandon consistency whenever the topic moves from Israel. They decry Israel’s fictional “genocide” but yawn at actual genocide elsewhere. They decry homophobia but see Hamas and Hezbollah as part of their popular front. Israel is illiberal because it’s Jewish and there should be a high wall between religion and state. But countless actual Muslim theocracies are fine, because they are the authentic anti-colonial expressions of oppressed peoples. Or something. 

In other words, it’s cool to “resist” Israel because that gets a rise out of people. Go and blaspheme Odin or Zeus, and see who pays attention. Blaspheme Jesus or Allah and—hooboy—people will pay attention. 

Talking about Israeli “genocide” offends people because it’s a lie and parasitically feeds off the horrors of the Holocaust. Talking about actual Chinese or Syrian genocide is a drag, man. It doesn’t get a rise out of people, it just creates all sorts of obligations and inconveniences. In other words, resistance-cool explains all of the intellectual double standards because they aren’t intellectual double standards at all. The standard is what is fashionable and what isn’t. 

And you know what else it would explain? A lot of the same jackassery on the new right. 

Because it’s pretty much the same jackassery. A whole herd of independent minds are coming to Washington, D.C., this weekend and they want you to “Join the Resistance” to: the “Military Industrial Complex,” the “Medical Industrial Complex,” the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” the “Academic Industrial Complex,” and a whole bunch of other complexes. 

The new rebels can’t even bother with coming up with new language sometimes; they just copy the old left, talking about fighting the power and taking on the establishment. Most of the new right intellectuals and Trumpy “Intellectuals®” simply mimic slogans—and occasionally the policies—of the left, because that’s either the only “resistance” language they know or the only language that’s recognizable as resistance talk to an audience that learns everything it knows from TV. 

In his book Regime Change, Patrick Deneen (an actual intellectual) pays cutesy homage to Leninist language, while Steve Bannon just outright calls himself a Leninist. All the people who “know what time it is” sound like Weather Underground wannabes. (The Weathermen’s name had a somewhat similar connotation, in that it was inspired by the Bob Dylan lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Both imply a moment at the precipice when inexorable change is coming.) 

I think some of the famous lefties who have moved rightward in recent years are admirable and serious people. I think some of them are crackpots or worse. But one of the things that helps explain the migration of some of them is the desire to be part of a resistance, to be transgressive and play the role of the maverick, to challenge pieties and offend the establishment. Another thing that helps explain some of them is the same audience capture we see on the left. When the audience’s tastes move, the people who cater to that audience often move with them. Robert F. Kennedy Jr,—a lifelong lefty—is now a darling of the new right. His views haven’t changed that much; the market just moved, and he moved with it. 

Maybe, just maybe, we’d see less asininity on the left and right if we taught people that resistance for its own sake is not noble or courageous or cool. Just because Hollywood churns out a constant stream of stories of heroic resistance fighters doesn’t mean that being a resistance fighter makes you heroic. History is full of resistance movements that were evil, vicious, and cruel. And when they came to power, they availed themselves of the opportunity to prove it.