The right-wing culture war just got worse. Liberals need a better response.

The right-wing culture war just got worse. Liberals need a better response.

People protest outside the offices of the New Mexico Public Education Department in Albuquerque. (Cedar Attanasio/AP)

By Greg Sargent

Columnist

Today at 11:36 a.m. EST

With the culture-warring around education and race from Republicans and the right escalating, some Democratic strategists have issued a new call for a more aggressive response. This would entail hitting Republicans for trying to stoke civil conflict, politicize the classroom and suppress discussion of hard historical truths.

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That’s all fine, but it raises a deeper question. What principles can Democrats and liberals set forth that could form the basis for their own answers on these issues?

I propose looking for an answer in the tradition called “egalitarian liberalism.” Developing this might help clarify our own commitments, and the true nature of our differences with the culture warriors.

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This week, Christopher Rufo, who created the conflict over “critical race theory,” tweeted: “It’s time to clean house in America: remove the attorney general, lay siege to the universities, abolish the teachers unions, and overturn the school boards.”

These folks are flush with crusading zeal: After winning in Virginia by harnessing parents’ frustrations over a host of issues, including “wokeness” invading school curriculums, they believe the purge of subversive cultural leftism is only beginning.

That messianic right-wing fervor creates an opening to capture a middle ground. But what should this middle ground look like?

We just caught another glimpse of these possibilities in Virginia, where members of a local school board drew national attention by suggesting burning books that they deemed culturally heretical. Parents have now revolted against an effort to ban such books, and the board nixed the ban.

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Right-wing overreach presents opportunities for liberals to get this right, by balancing the calling out of illiberal woke excess with prosecuting the case against cynical right-wing white-grievance-mongering.

The core dispute

The right’s line has been to tar vast swaths of “wokeness” — antiracism, racial equity and critical race theory, which examines how racism gets baked into law — as a kind of slippery slope to Stalinism.

The underlying claim is that these tendencies are fundamentally illiberal. They submerge liberal individualism by classifying groups as either oppressor or oppressed. They treat slavery and its legacies as the indelibly defining fact of U.S. history, denigrating the foundational role of liberal ideals and the United States as irredeemably incapable of realizing them.

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The discussions of structural racism imply a vaguely Marxist desire to smash and overturn societal structures to build a new world atop the rubble. The state must correct for racial inequities by cutting down the successful and enforcing “equality of outcomes.”

The question of how to respond involves asking how we can restate the goal of achieving liberal moral equality that acknowledges the good and the bad in all the new developments on the cultural left.

Egalitarian liberalism

A start might be a return to egalitarian liberalism’s core commitments. This tradition corrects for conventional liberalism’s focus on “formal equality of opportunity,” by insisting that comprehensive social and material resources must go to those in vastly unequal starting positions, to achieve real equality of opportunity.

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This real equality of opportunity is generally described in different ways. Sometimes it’s described as giving people the resources to develop and pursue their visions of the good, or to achieve the “capabilities” to flourish, or to achieve “dignified self authorship.”

The basic idea is that the ideal of true equality of opportunity — or those alternately described ideals — is compromised by unequal starting circumstances rooted in arbitrary socioeconomic factors. Liberal moral equality requires giving people resources to overcome those circumstances, but not necessarily to equalize the outcomes that result from the free use of those resources.

That’s why some liberal egalitarians accept inequalities, provided that prior imperative is met. We’ve of course failed miserably to achieve that imperative, which is one reason liberalism is in some trouble. But can we apply this basic balance to the current debates?

The wokeness discourse

Here’s what that might look like. We state unequivocally that the legacies of slavery, white supremacy, Jim Crow and racism enshrined into laws are a key cause for many examples of vastly unequal starting circumstances.

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This means the wokeness discourse is salutary when it tries to tease out the ways these legacies continue to create vast inequalities in socioeconomic circumstances and in access to the resources needed to achieve human flourishing. It’s unclear why trying to pin down the role of race in all this is itself objectionable.

But the discourse can indeed go off the rails.

A good example is this video that offended a lot of Virginia parents. It depicted Blacks as starting a footrace with built-in disadvantages. That might be crude, but it’s defensible: Socioeconomic disadvantages resulting from the legacies of racism are real.

At the same time, it also seemed to imply that the entire White race is privileged, with no mention of the fact that many Whites face similar disadvantages. Egalitarian liberals are supposed to be concerned with the barriers to human flourishing faced by all.

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Similarly, school materials that teach that various cultural traits and values are definitionally extensions of race are obviously illiberal or worse. Various forms of white sensitivity training plainly stray into all kinds of illiberal excesses.

But trying to achieve a more decent society in which people treat each other as moral equals, amid evolving understandings of how racism’s legacies really function, is complicated and bound to produce such excesses. This fact shouldn’t undermine that general goal.

Indeed, as Samuel Moyn explains, such excess are an inevitable feature of social movements, which cannot know in advance what level of change society will tolerate.

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Or take critical race theory. Rhetoric about smashing societal structures to root out systemic racism doesn’t seem particularly liberal. But it’s in keeping with liberal commitments to point out that anti-critical race theory laws appear deliberately drafted to put teachers on edge about communicating the full truth about white supremacy and its lingering impacts.

The basic point is that it’s consistent with liberal egalitarian ideals to reckon with the ways that group-on-group discrimination has created barriers to human flourishing for individuals. As Jacob Levy details, the much maligned “identity politics” is actually about achieving greater liberty for individuals who have been disadvantaged by group-targeted discrimination.

A complication

There’s a complication here. Opponents of wokeness often accuse it of wanting state-enforced equality of outcomes. The difficulty is that looking at outcomes actually is a way to help gauge how the legacy of group-based discrimination has created barriers to individual flourishing.

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Indeed, as Felicia Wong and Kyle Strickland detail, this sort of analysis has been necessary to demonstrate that less egalitarian forms of liberalism — which stipulated that formal equality of opportunity without adequate provision of social resources could achieve racial equality in practice — have utterly failed.

This has opened up an attack from the right. Critics of the antiracist movement deride it as preoccupied with disparate group-based outcomes. But those outcomes are real. And the response to them can be in keeping with liberal egalitarian commitments, built around the goal of boosting individual self-determination by providing resources to address vastly unequal starting circumstances rooted in arbitrary factors — including, yes, race.

All this is complicated with no easy answers. But egalitarian liberals can say that this is a work in progress, and that they are operating from a far more developed vision of justice than their right-wing opponents are. And a far more liberal one.