New Yorker festivalgoers only want to hear from people who agree with them, or who don’t seriously challenge their worldview.
Rod Dreher, commenting on the New Yorker’s invitation and almost immediate disinvitation of Steve Bannon as a boycott formed.
@ReaderJohn I’d say there is a difference between only wanting to hear from folks who agree with me, and not wanting journalistic institutions providing a platform to someone who doesn’t want that very institution to exist, let alone vast swaths of people.
@vasta @ReaderJohn Vasta is correct here. Creatures like Bannon and his ilk have managed to leverage the liberal ideal of open discourse to Trojan Horse notions ethnic cleansing and white supremacy as “just having debate.” We can acknowledge Dreher’s bleating for the bad faith it is and that Bannon's pogroms are off the table. I can and will object to the discussion or debate of the ethnic cleansing of my family as not a fit topic for civilized society. Dreher sees things differently. After all, to him, the untermensch are abstracts, hypotheticals, and our final solution is a worthy topic for Atlantic or New Yorker round tables. Bannon would be destroyed in debate, right? The commenters on that TAC article and Dreher himself seem like the sort who would have arrived to the Wannsee Conference imagining a lively debate over racial categorization. Too late they realize that's not how these things work, and they’ve already signed on for the grim work at hand.
@donmacdonald @vasta @eli @frostedechoes
I think you all err in non-platforming one of the most forthright and intelligible voices capable of explaining how we got Donald Trump for President. You'll certainly never get an intelligible story from Trump himself, and those whose sentiments are "never Trump," including me, need to understand what makes his voters tick, not just glibly dismiss them as fascists and fans of genocide — characterization a believe (and certainly hope) are mistaken.
If you prefer some echo chamber, though, have at it.
@donmacdonald @vasta @eli @frostedechoes Fredrik deBoer appears to think we've all been had — and he thinks so pretty vividly. it doesn’t matter if you deplatform Steve Bannon
@ReaderJohn deBoer is an interesting voice. Unlike the many, many online commentators who are extremely performative in their iconoclasm (yet somehow always managing to comfort the powerful), deBoer is truly orthogonal to established ideologies. I think he's mostly right here, in the sense that kicking Bannon out of some elite ideas festival is not going to have some large practical effect. That said, I do believe it is important in a moral sense to place some ideas and discussions as unacceptable in polite society. I probably came in a bit too hot in my earlier post, but that's what I was trying to get at; that shame and social ostracism are tools at our disposal, and we should use them.
Sigh. I didn't mean to get into politics today, yet here we are. Perhaps I'll post some artwork as a palate cleanser.
@ReaderJohn I acknowledge that from my previous post I seem to be dismissing Banon and his ilk as “merely” fascists. Sorry about that. That being said, I still feel he doesn’t deserve a platform. He has shown that he’s capable of building his own, and seems to have been successful at using it. I don’t seem any indication that his presence at this event would have prompted any sort of discussion. He’s an expert user and maker of megaphones.
@donmacdonald @vasta @eli @frostedechoes
The deal's done; the New Yorker had little choice but dump him under the circumstances.
I'm not going to lose any sleep over our tiff and hope none of you do either.