The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, July 11, 2024

Notably: We’re a pretty literate culture, with well over a quarter million books published every year, not counting the self-published mill. But it’s rare that a book causes that combination of controversy and genuine interest across the culture–that a book be talked about like, say, Taylor Swift. It happens once in a while. There was Silent Spring, the Rachel Carson birthing of the environmental movement. Updike’s Couples got him on the cover of Time in 1968, if for the wrong reasons, the same year Myra Breckinridge made Gore Vidal a household name, though Myra didn’t get him on Time’s front page, and both got beaten by Arthur Hailey’s Airport for best-selling fiction book of the year, a year that had a cookbook atop the non-fiction list–a cookbook, at the height of the Vietnam slaughter, which drew zero entries in the year’s to-10 non-fiction sellers. Even Couples and Myra didn’t have the effect of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind in 1987. The book was a best-seller for a while (it didn’t make it higher than 10 for the year, with a Bill Cosby volume winning the top spot that year), but there’s rarely been a book by an obscure intellectual talked about and debated for so long. There were books like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time which everyone bought and everyone talked about but no one ever read (I couldn’t crack Hawking, but I’ve read all three Gulag books twice, as Soviet-era travel books). There was The Bell Curve in 1994, the attempt by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein to cloak bigoted phrenology with a numerological twist in intellectual pretensions. The New Republic devoted an entire issue to refuting it. Somewhere along the way the United States briefly looked like it was going the way of Rome in Gibbon’s hands when Robert James Waller became everyone’s sensation, even Clint Eastwood. That pandemic thankfully passed. More recently, we had The 1619 Project, the wonderful Nikole Hannah-Jones-edited rewriting of American history from a Blacker perspective. My point about all this is this: none of the books that got everyone talking, however controversial, got banned from school or public libraries (Updike and Vidal aside). They got debated, argued over, battled over. With one exception: the state of Florida’s education board banned The 1619 Project from all Florida schools. A sweeping, unprecedented ban. Not The Bell Curve. But The 1619 Project. Imagine why. 

—P.T.

But in the United States, movements of the left, even those organized around the rights and empowerment of specific ethnic or racial groups, have rarely if ever argued for limiting the rights of other groups or individuals. Social justice movements are sometimes accused of reverse racism and bowing to illiberal methods to achieve their ends, of suggesting that their lives and those of their followers matter more than the lives of others, that the attainment of justice for them should come at the expense of those who are either not with them or are against them. In truth, these movements rarely, if ever, make such claims or demands. Rather, in speeches and writings, in demonstrations and electoral mobilizations, they fundamentally insist we acknowledge that over the course of our history the subordinated groups they represent have been treated as if their lives don’t matter, as if they are of little value, as if they are readily expendable, as if our conceptions of rights and expectations of justice do not apply to them. And so, their goals have been inclusion because they are refused it, and empowerment because they are deprived of it.

–From Steven Hahn, Illiberal America: A History (2024).

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