We must firmly reject the notion that speech is violence. Dissent isn’t violence. Disagreement isn’t harm. That’s because politics isn’t an identity; it isn’t a denial of someone’s identity to disagree with them. We know this in our everyday personal relationships—we disagree with those we love most of all, on a regular basis.
Another option is available politically for those who wish to fight the authoritarian left: the formal expansion of anti-discrimination law to include maters of politics. Many states bar discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, religion, age, and disability amongst other standards. Yet you can still be discriminated against based on your politics. If we wish to hold the authoritarian Left to its own standards—if we wish to use the bulwark of the law to prevent discrimination by limiting free association—then why give the authoritarian Left a monopoly on anti-discrimination law?—Ben Shapiro, The Authoritarian Moment
Though Ben Shapiro’s latest tome, The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent, is meant seriously, it is so full of internal contradictions and so lacking in self-reflection that it is often unintentionally funny in a way that rivals Trump at his covfefeing best. For example, early on, he chastises Barack Obama for campaigning on unity “for all Americans more broadly” and then casting that aspiration aside to pursue progressive policies. And yet, only a few pages earlier, Shapiro makes exactly the same move (though in the opposite direction): first, he calls for unity (waxing nostalgic about a time when the “core American freedoms” that he supports were “perceived to be beyond debate” and asking us to once more “agree on the individual freedoms that come with being an American”), and then casts that ideal of unity aside to advocate for a set of conservative policies (which Shapiro perversely describes as a “neutral” “moral” and formerly consensus view). Apparently, Shapiro believes that the only way to heal the US is to implement policies that have been rejected by a majority of Americans (as the number of votes cast for Democratic candidates suggests), on the laughably counterfactual ground that an invisible majority of Americans support the policies he likes—or, if they don’t, it’s not because his ideas are unappealing, but because a cabal of leftists—who are somehow simultaneously “idiotic” yet powerful, and small yet ubiquitous—have managed to delude that majority into rejecting policies that, deep down, they want.
Who Are the Real Victims?
To his credit, Shapiro’s book opens with a short discussion of the 6 January riots, in which Trump supporters, egged on by the former president and by prominent Republican politicians, attempted to use violence to prevent Joe Biden from assuming office. This event was the culmination of months of brazenly cartoonish efforts by Trump and his increasingly narrow pool of allies to lie, sue and bulldoze their way to “democratic” victory in spite of a clear Biden win. Shapiro minces no words in describing the rioters as “right-wing authoritarians” engaging in “criminal evil.” But rather taking the logical next step of ruminating on how the US conservative movement could have ended up supporting an openly authoritarian leader, he quickly turns the tables by asking, “What if the primary threat to American liberty lies elsewhere? What if, in fact, the most pressing authoritarian threat to the country lies precisely with the institutional powers that be?” The thesis of his book is that these institutions are dominated by the political left, who are determined to do everything they can to silence and marginalize conservative voices.
One of the remarkable aspects of The Authoritarian Moment is that Shapiro, who has spent a truly heroic amount of time whining about whiney victim culture, seems to have only just discovered intersectional theory. He concedes that Kimberlé Crenshaw has “posited, correctly, that a person could be discriminated against thanks to membership in multiple historically victimized groups.” But he then claims that American institutions are not discriminating against such groups, but against conservatives. As he puts it:
Perhaps the problem is that you attend church regularly. Perhaps it’s that you want to run your business and be left alone. Perhaps it’s that you want to raise your children with traditional social values. It could be that you believe that men and women exist, or that the police are generally not racist, or that children deserve a mother and a father, or that hard work pays off, or that the American flag stands for freedom rather than oppression, or that unborn children should not be killed, or that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
So, in a twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan—there is an oppressive culture after all, but its conservatives who have been the victims all along.
This is not the only time that Shapiro has cast himself as opposed to hyper-partisanship on the left, while espousing hyper-partisanship in the other direction: he agrees that institutions oppress and victimize people, but insists that the victims are not people of colour, but conservative pundits and activists. He criticises the left as overly litigious, yet calls for laws and lawsuits to protect conservatives from discrimination. He sees postmodern academics as evil for advancing what he calls an intolerant and “illiberal” agenda, and yet says that agenda should not have been “tolerated” by their peers. He believes that scientific objectivity and truth exist—except when it comes to issues like climate change, in which case the left are merely voicing their excessively puritanical “opinion.” He concedes that we “shouldn’t be deliberately rude,” but calls those who disagree with him “evil,” “idiotic,” “annoying crap,” etc. He devotes two pages to litigating the question “is Dr. Jill Biden an actual doctor?”, before immediately criticizing the woke left’s “quibbling” over language mere paragraphs later.
Consequently, it is hard to take anything Shapiro says seriously. He is remarkably consistent only in being inconsistent. He even acknowledges this, arguing that, if the “authoritarian Left is going to utilize nasty tactics in order to force institutions to cave to them, [we] have to make clear that the Right could do the same.” And Shapiro is relentlessly one-sided: he almost never engages with any significant counterarguments to his positions. He devotes more words to describing the demerits of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the all-women remake of Ghostbusters than to analysing the ideas of Theodor Adorno, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez or the founders of Black Lives Matter. Indeed, his typical attempt at an argument consists of quoting someone out of context, insulting them or dismissing their opinion without explanation and then galloping on to the next put down. Despite Shapiro’s disdain for social media companies, his is truly a debate style made for the 280-character age.
The Problems With Meritocracy
Shapiro’s relentless one-sidedness greatly diminishes the impact of the few interesting arguments that he does make. For example, he rightly points out that cultural power has become concentrated in the hands of a few social networking firms—and that this is a serious problem. He even concedes that most individual firms are not philosophically committed to competitive capitalism, but are profit-seeking ventures that will encourage government regulation or intervention as long as it benefits them. But at the same time, he continues to assert the existence of a genuinely free market that runs according to the precepts of classical liberalism. This is sheer fantasy: even two and a half centuries ago, Adam Smith was already complaining that big firms engage in “conspiracy” to sway government policy: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
It is high time for Shapiro and his ilk to recognize that the free market is at best a mere Platonic ideal and at worst a square circle: it never has and never will exist in this world.
Another example of Shapiro making an interesting point and then failing to realise its implications is his justifiable indignation at the tendency of elite schools to produce a “new ruling class” that has “little in common” with the majority of citizens. Study after study has shown that more students at elite schools come from the top 1% of families than from the bottom 50–60%. Yet Shapiro insists that “economic strata [are] not the main divider” between the “ruling class” and everyone else. This decision to disregard class issues seems tactical, since examining such socioeconomic dimensions would entail asking serious questions about wealth inequality—questions Shapiro would probably rather avoid. Although Shapiro dismisses the work of Thomas Piketty, Piketty has done a much better job of exploring this topic. In Capital and Ideology, Piketty distinguishes between an elite and well-educated “Brahmin left” that is primarily concerned with cultural progressivism and indifferent to economic equality, and an equally elite and driven “nativist-merchant” right that is both pro-business and socially anti-liberal. Piketty claims that these two elite groups dominate politics in most major countries, in part through their control of the party system and that it is precisely these groups’ shared lack of interest in economic equality that has generated a sense of powerlessness and anger in many citizens.
This brings me to the main problem with Shapiro’s book: its fetishization of meritocracy. Apparently, for Shapiro, the best system is one that broadly espouses the socially conservative norms of the Reagan era for the sake of maintaining unity and stability, yet promotes a highly volatile meritocratic competitive environment—in which the most deserving are rewarded with success. (He rarely mentions the necessary corollary of a meritocratic system: the vast majority of people fail to rise to the top, and society’s blames their failure on their own inadequacies. Bafflingly, Shapiro implies that this arrangement is politically neutral or that there is a consensus in favour of it—an unproven assertion. He frames anyone who disagrees with the idea of a meritocratic system as being a disintegrationist or revolutionary. For example, Shapiro criticises Barack Obama and Joe Biden for undermining the meritocratic system through redistributive policies such as affirmative action: he sees such policies as giving some people an unearned and therefore unfair advantage, with the result that performance standards decline—deriding such measures as “wokist” and “insulting tripe,” “insulting to those who achieve in the meritocracy … even more insulting to those who are assumed victims of the system.” Why they are just “assumed victims” and not actual victims is never explained.
In fact, there is nothing especially anti-meritocratic about what Barack Obama and Joe Biden have been trying to achieve. Indeed, many of the efforts to provide resources and opportunities to historically marginalized groups have positively reinforced and celebrated the meritocratic system. The point of programmes like affirmative action has never been to produce equal social outcomes, but to provide equality of opportunity to people from all backgrounds. The idea is to remove or compensate for racist, sexist and other barriers and create a level playing field, while maintaining a competitive social system with winners and losers; those who wind up at the top will then presumably more closely mirror the diversity of the general population.
A meritocracy like that is better—more meritocratic—than what came before. But we need to be more radical still, and question whether meritocracy is a desirable system. Even if everyone could compete on a level playing field—an ideal that we are far from having achieved—it would still make little sense to describe some people as meriting vastly more than others, since so much of where we wind up in life depends on morally arbitrary circumstances and events. Even if no one were to fall behind as a result of systematic racism or patriarchy, random variations in natural ability, upbringing and a thousand other factors that have nothing to do with personal merit would be determinative. Thus meritocracy is, like the free market, a mythical ideal. It ignores the irreducibly complex interdependence of human life in order to prop up a utopian aspiration: namely, that any social system could possibly ensure that people get what they deserve. Rather than thinking in such terms, we should ask what people need in order to flourish.
The Authoritarian Moment resembles Shapiro’s earlier book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, in being miles wide and an inch deep. In his rush to condemn as many of his enemies as possible, he occasionally hits on some valid targets. But Shapiro lacks both the patience and the self-awareness required to offer a rigorous conservative take on our present authoritarian moment and accurately diagnose why there has been a turn against liberal democracy in the United States and elsewhere. Shapiro is correct to suggest that many of us on the left would be wise to refrain from illiberal behaviour. But he is wrong to then fling at his audience the schoolyard taunt, “If you do it, then we should do it too!”
In this book, Mr. Shapiro’s mantra can be summarized as “the left is taking over the country and you (Republicans) need to act to oppose them.” That is the same mantra he has promulgated in all his published books, but with a different twist. Mr. Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew, but he sounds more like an Evangelical Christian. There is nothing lost in this “spiritual” connection. What you need to know about Mr. Bennet is that he is a “paid” propagandist for the Conservative right. He says he is a writer. What he doesn’t tell you is that the Conservative Right pays for his writing. This is important to know because Mr. Shapiro is not interested in the truth. He is interested in advancing the agenda of the people he works for. You see, Mr. Shapiro must make living, and he found his niche writing on behalf of the Conservative… Read more »
Non-college-educated “regular Americans,” I suspect, were once less reflexively distrustful of experts and intellectuals than they are today. Probably few AREO readers these days have heard of the “Little Blue Books,” stapled 3 ½” by 5″ paperbound booklets on a wide variety of subjects, published in Girard, Kansas by the socialist and atheist journalist Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889-1951) from 1919 until his death in 1951. Over 500 million copies of some 2,000-odd Little Blue Books titles were bought and read by millions of working-class, rural, and lower-middle-class readers unable to afford hardbound books or a college (or even high-school) education, but attracted by the promise of self-improvement through his mail-order “University in Print.” At 25¢, then 10¢, and finally for many years just 5¢ each, those booklets included literary classics, popular science, philosophy, history, humor, biographies, psychology, self-help and how-to topics, but also many titles on socialism, atheism, sexual enlightenment (including… Read more »
I think Thomas Piketty’s 2020 argument in “Capitalism and Ideology” that the left in most industrial countries has abandoned its roots in workers’ movements, becoming what he calls the “Brahmin left,” an ideology of highly educated elites, with a “progressivism” concerned more to do with cultural (e.g., racial, gender, sexual) issues with than equality may also be relevant for the issues addressed in a couple of recent AREO posts on the Covid-19 pandemic! David Fuller in “On Bret Weinstein, Alternative Media, Ivermectin and Vaccine-Related Controversies,” AREO, August 12, 2021, and isa Johnston in “The Delta Variant and the Censorship of Inconvenient Information,” AREO, August 16, 2021, have both expressed a certain sympathetic interest in allegations that the “mainstram” media, organized medical profession, and Biden administration have been attempting to suppress (even censor) or at least marginalize “unorthodox” information and theories about the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccines, the Wuhan “lab leak” theory.… Read more »
This review is exactly what Shapiro is writing about, the stupidity of censoring dissent in what is promoted as a free society. The contradiction, while obvious, is apparently lost on this vacuous reviewer. liberavoce.home.blog
As soon as I read this headline «The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro. Review», I immediately thought that our dear Matt McManus would be the author of the article.
And I was not mistaken! Reading optional 😉
“Piketty distinguishes between an elite and well-educated “Brahmin left” that is primarily concerned with cultural progressivism and indifferent to economic equality, and an equally elite and driven “nativist-merchant” right that is both pro-business and socially anti-liberal. Piketty claims that these two elite groups dominate politics in most major countries…”
This claim is basically that our lives are dominated by a political duopoly of neo-liberals versus neo-conservatives. That could well describe much of recent US political history but I think it’s a simplification worldwide. Live under two major parties, one centre and one right, and the result over time will be the kind of poor quality-of-life indicators we see in much of the US. Have more diverse multi-party systems, like in much of Europe, and you will tend to do better. You’d also likely be better at exchanging a range of opinions without too much emotional distress.
Asian Americans have higher poverty rates than African Americans in New York City, yet they dominate the selective public high schools with test based admissions. Maybe economic deprivation isn’t the problem and cultural pathology is?
“the free market is at best a mere Platonic ideal and at worst a square circle: it *never has* and never will exist in this world.”
Only if it *defined* out of existence, which Wokesters and their pals love to do.
To the contrary, some markets are far freer than others. Lenin’s NEP was freer than War Communism, Gorby’s perestroika was freer than the prior Brezhnev system, etc.
Until such time as folks like Matt. M. deign to stop resort to these cheap linguistic ploys, they’re just not worth taking seriously, except when they take shots at such low-hanging fruit as Shapiro.
This review is hugely MISLEADING. For example, McManus lambasts Shapiro, arguing that the latter <>. However, these policies that Shapiro is trying to ‘conserve’ (preserve/defend) are LIBERAL values not “conservative policies”: the neutral state, freedom of expression for all views irrespective of political content, the primacy of the individual, equality before the law, secularism, a large private sphere around individuals. All of these are actually agreed upon by conservatives, even if only to use the freedoms and negative liberty they protect, to then launch into an assault on those very values from which they themselves benefit. This shows the hypocrisy of those who hate liberal values but depend upon them in order to destroy them. They want them for themselves so that they can remove them from others. This is a cheap review and succeeds mainly in deception of naive readers.
Wow! Areo is getting piled on by people who are NOT its audience, and the writer of this review is one such person.
This may be harsh be harsh but my observation is that Shapiro simply isn’t that smart. He’s made his name creating YouTube clips of him arguing with idiots and it’s convinced him he can engage in a serious manner with complex ideas.
The opening quote is spot on and he should probably have limited himself to such sound bites.
Hard to argue with much of what Matt MCManus has written, although I doubt his take on affirmative action would stand up to a critique like those made by Sowell or Loury.
But he is wrong to then fling at his audience the schoolyard taunt, “If you do it, then we should do it too!” McManus is right, it’s a little childish to launch this provocation, but deep down there’s also a kind of “questioning” there. If conservatives were behaving like most radical progressives today, what would that be classified as? Progressives (socialists or I don’t know how many denominations) are creating a “new McCarthyism”, this no sincere counterargument is made because everyone knows it’s true. Every criticism made of the super moralizing right decades before is being repeated by those who claimed to fight it before. I think progressives are putting child teasing into practice: “you did it now we’re doing it to you!” It seems a cycle of hypocrisy, the myopic right imputing these defects only to the left, and the left itself in the same path, including its “good… Read more »
Yup, this guy again. Knew it was him from the moment I started reading. He’s a one-note tune, you can predict what he’s going to say before he says it. “CONSERVATIVES BAAAAAD!” he bloviates, totally ignoring Shapiro’s obvious disconnect from conservatism. Why’s this guy even on Areo? Attitudes like his aren’t being censored. He doesn’t need an IDW platform when he marches in step to the preferences of the powerful.
“Apparently, Shapiro believes that the only way to heal the US is to implement policies that have been rejected by a majority of Americans (as the number of votes cast for Democratic candidates suggests), on the laughably counterfactual ground that an invisible majority of Americans support the policies he likes…”
To be fair, most polling data show that progressive policies become much less popular when follow-up questions are added (ex. “Would you prefer universal healthcare if it meant compromising your private insurance plan? Re: No” etc.)