Nobody shares all their private complaints with an audience, but how do we know how much to share and with whom? Certainly, in the name of various kin

On Left Straussianism | The Point Magazine

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2021-10-27 03:30:08

Nobody shares all their private complaints with an audience, but how do we know how much to share and with whom? Certainly, in the name of various kinds of shared commitments, it seems best to hash out your differences in private: a team of magazine editors need not disclose every editorial dispute to an article’s author; a couple’s well-being is usually best served by avoiding arguments in the presence of the in-laws. But how far does the strategic logic behind these decisions extend into public intellectual life? Should we attempt to publicly air disagreements with those who are, broadly speaking, on the same “side” of a political, social or spiritual debate as we are, or should we shelter those disagreements from public view in the name of some greater good?

In our issue 18 “Letter on Denialism,” we criticized the habit among leftist and liberal commentators of denying the existence of political projects that have become the targets of right-wing criticism (e.g. “cultural Marxism,” “political correctness,” “identity politics,” etc.), as opposed to defending, evaluating or proposing a new vocabulary for discussing them. We received plenty of thoughtful responses—both supportive and critical—including those who questioned the logic or accuracy of our argument. But given the article’s emphasis on what we saw as a counterproductive tendency to evade the prospect of substantive disagreement in liberal and leftist publications, perhaps the most challenging current of criticism had to do with the questions raised above. This was the charge that, regardless of whether what we said was true or persuasive, the potential “costs,” to quote one of our interlocutors, of publicly airing our criticism of progressive rhetoric were such as to render the practice inadvisable and possibly self-incriminating. Another commentator expanded on the point: although criticizing others on one’s side was permissible in “the smaller circles of the university, scholarship, conversation, and personal writing,” he wrote, the “political-intellectual public sphere” was a place where intellectuals should be singularly focused on “positioning” themselves to achieve their political objectives. In fact, our refusal to appreciate the impermeability of the wall separating the private (or semi-private) and the public spheres was enough to raise the suspicion that we were not operating in good faith: that we were trolls or “crypto-conservatives” who, under cover of pretending to want to improve progressive discourse, really hoped to undermine it.

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