The Struggle to Achieve Innovation

 Inventing new things is hard. Getting people to accept and use new inventions is often even harder. For most people, at most times, technological stagnation has been the norm. What does it take to escape from that and encourage creativity?

“Technological progress requires above all tolerance toward the unfamiliar and the eccentric.” — Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches

Writing in The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, economic historian Joel Mokyr asks why, when we look at the past, some societies have been considerably more creative than others at particular times. Some have experienced sudden bursts of progress, while others have stagnated for long periods of time. By examining the history of technology and identifying the commonalities between the most creative societies and time periods, Mokyr offers useful lessons we can apply as both individuals and organizations.

What does it take for a society to be technologically creative?

When trying to explain something as broad and complex as technological creativity, it’s important not to fall prey to the lure of a single explanation. There are many possible reasons for anything that happens, and it’s unwise to believe explanations that are too tidy. Mokyr disregards some of the common simplistic explanations for technological creativity, such as that war prompts creativity or people with shorter life spans are less likely to expend time on invention.

Mokyr explores some of the possible factors that contribute to a society’s technological creativity. In particular, he seeks to explain why Europe experienced such a burst of technological creativity from around 1500 to the Industrial Revolution, when prior to that it had lagged far behind the rest of the world. Mokyr explains that “invention occurs at the level of the individual, and we should address the factors that determine individual creativity. 

Individuals, however, do not live in a vacuum. What makes them implement, improve and adapt new technologies, or just devise small improvements in the way they carry out their daily work depends on the institutions and the attitudes around them.” While environment isn’t everything, certain conditions are necessary for technological creativity.

He identifies the three following key factors in an environment that impact the occurrence of invention and innovation.

The social infrastructure

First of all, the society needs a supply of “ingenious and resourceful innovators who are willing and able to challenge their physical environment for their own improvement.” Fostering these attributes requires factors like good nutrition, religious beliefs that are not overly conservative, and access to education. It is in part about the absence of negative factors—necessitous people have less capacity for creativity. Mokyr writes: “The supply of talent is surely not completely exogenous; it responds to incentives and attitudes. The question that must be confronted is why in some societies talent is unleashed upon technical problems that eventually change the entire productive economy, whereas in others this kind of talent is either repressed or directed elsewhere.”

One partial explanation for Europe’s creativity from 1500 to the Industrial Revolution is that it was often feasible for people to relocate to a different country if the conditions in their current one were suboptimal. A creative individual finding themselves under a conservative government seeking to maintain the technological status quo was able to move elsewhere.

The ability to move around was also part of the success of the Abbasid Caliphate, an empire that stretched from India to the Iberian Peninsula from about 750 to 1250. Economists Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein write in The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492 that “it was relatively easy to move or migrate” within the Abbasid empire, especially with its “common language (Arabic) and a uniform set of institutions and laws over an immense area, greatly [favoring] trade and commerce.”

It also matters whether creative people are channeled into technological fields or into other fields, like the military. In Britain during and prior to the Industrial Revolution, Mokyr considers invention to have been the main possible path for creative individuals, as other areas like politics leaned towards conformism.

The social incentives

Second, there need to be incentives in place to encourage innovation. This is of extra importance for macroinventions – completely new inventions, not improvements on existing technology – which can require a great leap of faith. The person who comes up with a faster horse knows it has a market; the one who comes up with a car does not. Such incentives are most often financial, but not always. Awards, positions of power, and recognition also count. Mokyr explains that diverse incentives encourage the patience needed for creativity: “Sustained innovation requires a set of individuals willing to absorb large risks, sometimes to wait many years for the payoff (if any.)”

Patent systems have long served as an incentive, allowing inventors to feel confident they will profit from their work. Patents first appeared in northern Italy in the early fifteenth century; Venice implemented a formal system in 1474. According to Mokyr, the monopoly rights mining contractors received over the discovery of hitherto unknown mineral resources provided inspiration for the patent system.

However, Mokyr points out that patents were not always as effective as inventors hoped. Indeed, they may have provided the incentive without any actual protection. Many inventors ended up spending unproductive time and money on patent litigation, which in some cases outweighed their profits, discouraged them from future endeavors, or left them too drained to invent more. Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, claimed his legal costs outweighed his profits. Mokyr proposes that though patent laws may be imperfect, they are, on balance, good for society as they incentivize invention while not altogether preventing good ideas from circulating and being improved upon by others.

The ability to make money from inventions is also related to geographic factors. In a country with good communication and transport systems, with markets in different areas linked, it is possible for something new to sell further afield. A bigger prospective market means stronger financial incentives. The extensive, accessible, and well-maintained trade routes during the Abbasid empire allowed for innovations to diffuse throughout the region. And during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, railroads helped bring developments to the entire country, ensuring inventors didn’t just need to rely on their local market.

The social attitude

Third, a technologically creative society must be diverse and tolerant. People must be open to new ideas and outré individuals. They must not only be willing to consider fresh ideas from within their own society but also happy to take inspiration from (or to outright steal) those coming from elsewhere. If a society views knowledge coming from other countries as suspect or even dangerous, unable to see its possible value, it is at a disadvantage. If it eagerly absorbs external influences and adapts them for its own purposes, it is at an advantage. Europeans were willing to pick up on ideas from each other. and elsewhere in the world. As Mokyr puts it, “Inventions such as the spinning wheel, the windmill, and the weight-driven clock recognized no boundaries.”

In the Abbasid empire, there was an explosion of innovation that drew on the knowledge gained from other regions. Botticini and Eckstein write:

“The Abbasid period was marked by spectacular developments in science, technology, and the liberal arts. . . . The Muslim world adopted papermaking from China, improving Chinese technology with the invention of paper mills many centuries before paper was known in the West. Muslim engineers made innovate industrial uses of hydropower, tidal power, wind power, steam power, and fossil fuels. . . . Muslim engineers invented crankshafts and water turbines, employed gears in mills and water-raising machines, and pioneered the use of dams as a source of waterpower. Such advances made it possible to mechanize many industrial tasks that had previously been performed by manual labor.”

Within societies, certain people and groups seek to maintain the status quo because it is in their interests to do so. Mokyr writes that “Some of these forces protect vested interests that might incur losses if innovations were introduced, others are simply don’t-rock-the-boat kind of forces.” In order for creative technology to triumph, it must be able to overcome those forces. While there is always going to be conflict, the most creative societies are those where it is still possible for the new thing to take over. If those who seek to maintain the status quo have too much power, a society will end up stagnating in terms of technology. Ways of doing things can prevail not because they are the best, but because there is enough interest in keeping them that way.

In some historical cases in Europe, it was easier for new technologies to spread in the countryside, where the lack of guilds compensated for the lower density of people. City guilds had a huge incentive to maintain the status quo. The inventor of the ribbon loom in Danzig in 1579 was allegedly drowned by the city council, while “in the fifteenth century, the scribes guild of Paris succeeded in delaying the introduction of printing in Paris by 20 years.”

Indeed, tolerance could be said to matter more for technological creativity than education. As Mokyr repeatedly highlights, many inventors and innovators throughout history were not educated to a high level—or even at all. Up until relatively recently, most technology preceded the science explaining how it actually worked. People tinkered, looking to solve problems and experiment.

Unlike modern times, Mokyr explains, for most of history technology did not emerge from “specialized research laboratories paid for by research and development budgets and following strategies mapped out by corporate planners well-informed by marketing analysts. Technological change occurred mostly through new ideas and suggestions occurring if not randomly, then in a highly unpredictable fashion.”

When something worked, it worked, even if no one knew why or the popular explanation later proved incorrect. Steam engines are one such example. The notion that all technologies function under the same set of physical laws was not standard until Galileo. People need space to be a bit weird.

Those who were scientists and academics during some of Europe’s most creative periods worked in a different manner than what we expect today, often working on the practical problems they faced themselves. Mokyr gives Galileo as an example, as he “built his own telescopes and supplemented his salary as a professor at the University of Padua by making and repairing instruments.” The distinction between one who thinks and one who makes was not yet clear at the time of the Renaissance. Wherever and whenever making has been a respectable activity for thinkers, creativity flourishes.

Seeing as technological creativity requires a particular set of circumstances, it is not the norm. Throughout history, Mokyr writes, “Technological progress was neither continuous nor persistent. Genuinely creative societies were rare, and their bursts of creativity usually short-lived.”

Not only did people need to be open to new ideas, they also needed to be willing to actually start using new technologies. This often required a big leap of faith. If you’re a farmer just scraping by, trying a new way of ploughing your fields could mean starving to death if it doesn’t work out. Innovations can take a long time to defuse, with riskier ones taking the longest.

How can we foster the right environment?

So what can we learn from The Lever of Riches that we can apply as individuals and in organizations?

The first lesson is that creativity does not occur in a vacuum. It requires certain necessary conditions to occur. If we want to come up with new ideas as individuals, we should consider ourselves as part of a system. In particular, we need to consider what might impede us and what can encourage us. We need to eradicate anything that will get in the way of our thinking, such as limiting beliefs or lack of sleep.

We need to be clear on what motivates us to be creative, ensuring what we endeavor to do will be worthwhile enough to drive us through the associated effort. When we find ourselves creatively blocked, it’s often because we’re not in touch with what inspires us to create in the first place.

Within an organization, such factors are equally important. If you want your employees to be creative, it’s important to consider the system they’re part of. Is there anything blocking their thinking? Is a good incentive structure in place (bearing in mind incentives are not solely financial)?

Another lesson is that tolerance for divergence is essential for encouraging creativity. This may seem like part of the first lesson, but it’s crucial enough to consider in isolation.

As individuals, when we seek to come up with new ideas, we need to ask ourselves the following questions: Am I exposing myself to new material and inspirations or staying within a filter bubble? Am I open to unusual ways of thinking? Am I spending too much time around people who discourage deviation from the status quo? Am I being tolerant of myself, allowing myself to make mistakes and have bad ideas in service of eventually having good ones? Am I spending time with unorthodox people who encourage me to think differently?

Within organizations, it’s worth asking the following questions: Are new ideas welcomed or shot down? Is it in the interests of many to protect the status quo? Are ideas respected regardless of their source? Are people encouraged to question norms?

A final lesson is that the forces of inertia are always acting to discourage creativity. Invention is not the natural state of things—it is an exception. Technological stagnation is the norm. In most places, at most times, people have not come up with new technology. 

It takes a lot for individuals to be willing to wrestle something new from nothing or to question if something in existence can be made better. But when those acts do occur, they can have an immeasurable impact on our world.

Growing Socialism in America

 It is a truism of contemporary politics that the 2016 presidential election upended American democracy. Yet, if Donald Trump’s unexpected victory, and the fallout from it, threw the established political order into crisis, it is not the right that now appears poised to make the greatest gains. Rather, it is the left. Since 2016, a new socialist movement has started to take shape in the USA. After decades at the margins of political life, the radical left is now growing rapidly, making startling inroads among young people and progressive Democratic voters.

These developments, rooted in from the 2007 to 2008 financial crisis and the frustrated hopes of the Obama years, coalesced in Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. Since then, the rising influence of the far left has been exemplified by three interrelated trends: first, an increase in public support for socialism and for Sanders’s progressive reform agenda; second, the emergence of a growing number of popular left-wing candidates for local and national office; and third, the explosive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America as a mass-membership group representing the leading edge of the new socialist left.

The rise of socialism in the USA is particularly notable because it has happened at a time when in much of the developed world, the left has found itself mired in stagnation and organizational decline. In this chapter, I trace the growth of the new socialist left in the USA. Its emergence, I argue, reflects a historical irony: today, the historical marginalization of American socialism has been transformed from a weakness into a strength. 

Unlike in Europe, the US left was never a mass force, and it had no presence in the electoral arena: yet, in the long run, its very isolation meant that it bore no responsibility for the transformation of postwar capitalism over the past four decades. Untainted by any history of left governance, socialists in the USA are able to present themselves as a definite (if not always clearly defined) alternative to the political status quo. 

At the same time, I argue, the socialist left’s very newness also means that it faces a series of dilemmas that must be resolved if it hopes to continue advancing. Centrally, these revolve around issues of program and strategy, the left’s relationship with the Democratic Party, and a number of controversial political issues. Underlying all of these questions is the deeper problem of how to develop a stable social base at a time when organized labor remains historically weak and workplace militancy is episodic.

The current socialist revival has deep historical roots. Its origins lay in the restructuring of American capitalism beginning in the 1970s. The decades since have witnessed a steady rise in social inequality and economic insecurity and a concomitant decline in wage growth and unionization (a familiar story for advanced capitalist democracies during these years). 

As in Europe, those trends were overseen by governments of both the right and the center-left. In the case of the USA, the rightward turn of the Democratic Party did not give rise to any new political formation to fill the resulting vacuum. As mainstream liberalism veered toward ever more business-friendly policies, the absence of any strong traditions of socialist organization meant that there was little basis for a challenge from the left. At best, during the 1980s and 1990s, small and isolated groups of radicals found themselves joining liberals in their (largely unsuccessful) efforts to defend the fruits of a bygone era of welfare expansion and social reform—Civil Rights legislation, protections for women, and the limited federal anti-poverty programs established during the 1930s and 1960s. 

Yet, as inequality rose and business became increasingly organized and effective in the political arena, policy outcomes tended more and more to reflect the priorities of the very rich rather than the public as a whole.

As a result, the functioning of American democracy took on the appearance of an empty ritual, which could no longer mask the overwhelming dominance of those with concentrated economic power.

All of this came to a head following the 2008 financial crisis. The fallout from the crash highlighted the devastating consequences of four decades of welfare retrenchment and an economy built on low-wage employment and skyrocketing personal debt. It also raised expectations that something would be done to improve the situation. Those hopes were embodied in the person of Barack Obama, whose election in November 2008 was a seminal event, not just because of the sea change in public attitudes around race and racism it signaled but because of its impact on a generation of younger voters. Coming of age in the context of the Iraq War and the inequities of the pre-2008 boom, they saw in Obama’s election as both a repudiation of the presidency of George W. Bush and a harbinger of much larger changes in American political life.

Yet, to a great extent, those hopes would be disappointed. The initial belief that Obama’s election represented a transformative moment in American political life would soon give way to disillusionment on the left; while Obama himself often managed to avoid the brunt of that frustration (and retains today a high level of personal popularity, especially among Democratic voters), his administration failed to stem the tide of rising social polarization and political frustration.

In office, Obama reneged on several key campaign promises while implementing heavily watered down versions of other proposals. Even his signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, would come to be seen by many of his supporters on the left as hopelessly compromised by a number of key concessions to the private insurance, health provider, and pharmaceutical industries.

More generally, Obama oversaw the continuation of policies and approaches on issues that would soon become flash points for popular protest. In 2011, anger over rising inequality, and the government’s unwillingness to crack down on the banking and financial industries provoked a wave of mass occupations of public parks and urban centers under the slogan “Occupy Wall Street.” 

As a social movement, Occupy shared many of the weaknesses of other recent mobilizations in the USA: for instance, the lack of a sufficient organizational base or political strategy, and a tendency to grow explosively and collapse just as suddenly. Yet the breadth and dynamism of the movement was indicative of the feeling that had built up in much of American society that the economy was rigged against them.

Not long after that, another wave of protests swept the country after a series of high-profile shootings of unarmed African-Americans. Those demonstrations, known by the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter,” were largely framed around claims of widespread police bias and demands for an end to extrajudicial killings by law enforcement: protestors pointed to the hundreds of people who die every year at the hands of the police, disproportionately black, a large number of whom are unarmed and guilty of only minor offenses or nothing at all. 

Yet the movement also reflected deeper tensions over the extent of racism and inequality in the Obama era. These protests exposed the limits of black political representation at a time of historically unprecedented levels of incarceration—particularly of young black men—while highlighting widespread poverty and deprivation in the segregated neighborhoods that dot American cities.

In the long run, neither of these movements could be sustained, and they left in their wake little in the way of concrete institutional reforms. Yet, in a broader sense, their impact on American politics was significant: above all, they brought to the fore issues and concerns that would later help galvanize the new socialist movement. They were particularly significant for a layer of younger activists, who came of age after 2008. These leftward-moving millennials are part of a generation whose lives have been shaped by a multitude of pathologies characteristic of contemporary American capitalism: far more likely than their parents to have a college degree, they now face a labor market where that does not guarantee stable employment; in which jobs often come with low pay and no security, opportunities for advancement are limited, and access to decent and affordable health coverage—let alone other benefits, like a pension—is anything but certain.  The challenges of the millennial job market are compounded by massive levels of student debt, which, along with the rising costs of housing, have made it unlikely that many young people will ever have the option of buying a home.

It is no wonder then, that by 2016, these millennials were expressing views on a range of social and economic questions that put them far to the left of previous generations.  Young people in the USA are not just more supportive of proposals like the “Green New Deal” and a federal jobs guarantee. They are also more negative in their outlook on capitalism. Indeed, survey data suggests that this was central to their political evolution in recent years, with one 2018 poll reporting a “12 point decline in young adults’ positive views of capitalism in just the past two years and a marked shift since 2010, when 68% viewed it positively.” As a result, today, “Americans aged 18 to 29 are as positive about socialism (51%) as they are about capitalism (45%).”

These attitudes are at odds with the views of older Americans, especially those over the age of 60.   In fact, younger Americans diverge from their parents and grandparents on a wide variety of issues: for instance, they are more favorable toward immigrants and immigration, more supportive of measures to promote gender equality, and far friendlier toward increased legal protections for LGBT people. They are also much less enthusiastic about American nationalism, the police, or the use of military power by the American government. Sociologically, their lives also diverge from the pattern set by earlier generations: they are, for instance, much less likely to be affiliated with a religious organization or to describe religion as important to them. 

Having grown up in the post-Civil Rights era, they are also less discriminatory in their outlook and attitudes and less likely to embrace the “dog-whistle” politics of thinly veiled bigotry and coded racism. In fact, while white Americans as a whole are largely hostile toward systematic efforts to redress de facto segregation and racial inequality in American society, younger whites are more evenly split on the question—with opinion polls suggesting that a majority of those under 30 were supportive of the #BLM movement.

These generational divisions came to the fore during the 2016 presidential election. In the campaign for the Democratic nomination, younger voters overwhelmingly supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton; the same group also reported the greatest levels of opposition to Donald Trump during the general election. While in the USA, the common cliché is that young leftists inevitably turn into rock-ribbed conservatives as they hit middle age that has not always been the pattern. In fact, during the 1980s, younger Americans were among the most enthusiastic supporters of Ronald Reagan. In 2016, however, Sanders appealed to these voters by focusing on issues like rising income inequality, mounting student debt, and the gross inequities of the private health insurance system. The concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, he argued, was indicative of the stranglehold of the “1%” over political and economic life in the USA. The solution was a “political revolution” to wrest control of the democratic state from their hands. 

Sanders campaign platform included a variety of far-reaching reforms to be paid for through a tax raise for high earners and corporations. Of these proposed measures, he particularly highlighted the need for a universal system of publicly provided medical coverage (“Medicare for All”), a rapid increase in the federal minimum wage, and the introduction of tuition-free college education at public universities. This policy agenda represented a move toward what he termed “democratic socialism.”

What exactly Sanders meant by this was never entirely clear, but he often compared American capitalism unfavorably to the traditional social democracies of Scandinavia. 

This message resonated widely during the campaign, especially in parts of the “Rust Belt,” where Trump would go on to win several important states that previously swung Democratic. In the general election, Clinton, who ended up losing a third of all counties nationally that Barack Obama won in both 2008 and 2012, failed to turn out lower-income voters who had come to the polls for Obama, and she was heavily defeated in poorer rural areas which had tipped toward him.   In purely electoral terms, Clinton’s loss reflected the failure of a strategy that emphasized winning support among higher-income suburban voters at the expense of voters in regions suffering acute levels of poverty, insecurity, and unemployment.

Whatever the explanation for the historical weakness of American socialism, the consequences have been significant. For the US left, the impact has been severe. In the second half of the twentieth century, it meant decades of general isolation and sustained organizational weakness. Politically, the absence of a strong electoral socialist or labor party meant that the American left was closely tied to mainstream liberalism. Most importantly, that connection was reflected in the dominance of the Democratic Party as the primary vehicle for progressive electoral politics.

Given recent events and our history, and the rapid rise of a new socialist movement since 2016 was to be expected. While the factors that have driven this socialist revival—starting with the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and culminating with Trump’s election—are not hard to identify, it was impossible to predict that an obscure senator from Vermont could inspire such a dramatic change in the fortunes of the left. 

This situation also reflects a historical irony: it is precisely because the American left did not enjoy extensive support or a high degree of institutional power during the postwar era that it has escaped the general disillusionment with American politics more recently. In that sense, the left’s past weakness has now become a source of strength in contrast to the situation facing Europe’s social democratic and labor parties.

That same legacy, however, means that the emerging socialist left now has to confront a number of crucial political and organizational issues. The very newness of groups like DSA means that they are able to sustain a high level of excitement and optimism while major questions about political program and strategy, organizational structure, and political priorities remain unanswered. While the return of socialism to American political life shows no signs of slowing down, in the long run, the answers that are given to these questions will help determine the future direction of left politics in an age of deep-seated social and political crisis.

Dawn of the Woke

Article by Lance Morrow 

Published in The Wall Street Journal on August 2, 2020

I was a Senate page boy for a couple of summers in the early Eisenhower years. Joe McCarthy was in full cry. I would ride in the Senate elevator with him sometimes or sit near him in the toy monorail subway car that runs between the Capitol and the Senate Office Building. He had black smudges under his eyes and a hearty Elks Club way with the tourists he encountered in the halls of the Capitol. He wore rumpled dark-blue suits and gravy-catcher ties, and from time to time he would emit a mirthless chuckle (heh heh heh). If you got close, he gave off a whiff of last night’s whiskey.

Years later, that smell—stale, heavy—merged in my mind with the moral odor of McCarthyism, a sour American memory. Saint Thérèse de Lisieux, the Carmelite known as “The Little Flower,” was said to have emitted a strong scent of roses at her death—“the odor of sanctity.” Joe McCarthy produced the opposite effect.

So does the cancel culture, which is the 21st century’s equivalent of McCarthy’s marauding. The country’s myriad cancelers emit the odor not of sanctity but of sanctimony, and of something more ominous: the whiff of a society decomposing.

What’s happening on the American left—with surreal rapidity, like the fall of France in 1940—is sinister. 

Wokeness and the cancel culture represent not idealism but virtue gone clinically insane. Look up the word hysteria: “a psychological disorder whose symptoms include . . . shallow, volatile emotions, and overdramatic or attention-seeking behavior.”

The indignant woke, who imagine themselves to be righteously awake and laying the foundations for a more just and humane world, ought to pause—to draw back for a moment, and consider the possibility that they are, as it were, fast asleep, caught up in strange, agitated dreams: that they have become a mass joined in a cult of self-righteousness, moral vanity and privilege. One of these days, they will have to be deprogrammed and led back to the real world. Woke institutions will need to be fumigated.

The woke are especially obsessed with two areas—sex and race. In their dream, nature’s basic working arrangement—sex, male and female, the business of procreation that ensures the survival of the species—dissolves in a frolicsome alphabet soup of identities; human meaning works itself out not in the mind, not in thought or art, but in the territory that lies south of the navel, in restless genital experiments. Men become women on their own say-so, and may bear children, if they choose: Death to the one who denies it! Even pronouns have become narcissistically discretionary.

As for race: In the eyes of the woke—and in most media accounts—this summer’s eruptions (protests, demonstrations, riots, precinct-house occupations, and the “summer of love” in Seattle’s “occupied protest”) have been “overwhelmingly peaceful.” It’s not really true, but the woke are addicted to the meme of their own harmlessness, and so they will it into truth. Destruction, in fact, has been extensive—and inexcusable. Those hardest hit have been residents and shopkeepers in black and other minority neighborhoods that are left in the wreckage after those who did the damage—among them many white anarchists and antifa people—have gone back to their parents’ basements.

Michael Tracey, a journalist from Jersey City, N.J., returned from a monthlong tour of cities around the country, inspecting the damage. He reported, in an article on the website UnHerd: “From large metro areas like Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul, to small and mid-sized cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana and Green Bay, Wisconsin, the number of boarded up, damaged or destroyed buildings I have personally observed—commercial, civic, and residential—is staggering. Keeping exact count is impossible.”

McCarthyism and the cancel culture—which is the military wing of wokeness—are most alike in their power to conjure fear. It was fear that kept McCarthy up and running for several years, and it is fear—of losing a job, losing an assistant professorship, losing one’s good name, one’s friends, fear of saying the wrong thing and bringing down ruin on one’s head, fear not to sign a party-line faculty petition—that fortifies and sustains the cancelers.

What can be done? The gravest casualty of the 1960s was adult authority, which vanished from the land around the time of 1968’s Tet Offensive. Ronald Reagan provided an apparition of authority for a while, but then Bill Clinton, frisking with an intern, restored the adolescent model. The best remedy for the cancel culture would be resistance by strong adult leaders—university presidents, newspaper publishers, heads of corporations and so on—capable of standing up to Twitter. But the odds are against such a miracle. The woke, like hyenas, hunt in packs, and those in authority are craven.

In time, McCarthyism burned itself out. The senator—censured by his colleagues in 1954—withdrew into alcoholism and died three years later. Wokeness will prove harder to kill than McCarthyism. McCarthy was a B-movie monster. Wokeness is a zombie apocalypse.

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Mr. Morrow is an American essayist and writer, and a senior fellow 

at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C.

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Antifa... The Natural Product of the U.S. Educational System

COMMENTARY by Roger L. Simon

Antifa or antifa—lower case a, if you prefer—may have gotten its start in Germany, but it is flourishing here in the United States as never before.

This growth occurred even though truly achieving the movement’s stated goal—anarchy—would create chaos leading to civilizational destruction of a likely unparalleled extent in human history in our industrialized and high tech nation of 330 million.

The deepest causes of their violent and more than slightly deranged behavior are undoubtedly personal and psychoanalytic in nature. 

The story of the Seattle grandmother  who identified her, bomb-throwing grandson from video of a protective vest she bought him—he said he was “peaceful”— is a novel crying out to be written.

But whatever the psychological profiles of the individual Antifa members, almost all of them share one thing in common... They went to American schools.

And those schools, with only a few notable exceptions, talked down and continue to talk down the United States of America to one degree or another from kindergarten through PhD..

It is, to my knowledge, unique in history that the public and private educational systems of a country so thoroughly and consistently criticize the country itself. (The Chinese Cultural Revolution did it briefly, but Mao’s immediate central government was always supported.)

For decades now our schools have been self-replicating machines, preaching to college students, directly or indirectly, the leftwing gospel according to Howard Zinn (and the Frankfurt School and so forth) and sending them out in turn to preach this junior varsity, critical theory Marxism themselves as teachers at whatever level at all manner of institutions throughout the country.

The youngest of those levels is perhaps the most dangerous because they are the most impressionable.

Antifa members are therefore only doing what they have been taught all along, getting rid of a cancer called the United States.

This connection between Antifa and the teaching profession is so profound some insist the majority of those hidden behind the black masks are indeed teachers. Others, needless to say including the liberal media, have denied this.

It’s impossible to know for certain. Antifa, like some Islamic terror groups, does not have a formal leadership structure; why would they need it? They also don’t keep records.

This, however, is probably a case where the cliché about smoke and fire applies. Whether Antifa is 50 percent teachers or 20 percent teachers, it’s a lot of teachers.

Any reader of websites like :The College Fix" or "Campus Reform" can see the extent to which almost all our schools have their tentacles buried deeply into the supposed social justice causes espoused more militantly in the streets by Antifa.

The governors and mayors of the localities where the riots are taking place are themselves the products of the same educational institutions. This may account in part for their reluctance to crack down. Some part of them is identifying with the rioters.

They want to burn it down, no matter if the violent protests lead to the renaming of this country as New Venezuela, figuratively and literally.

Antifa is an excruciating public manifestation of a very deep infection that has metastasized throughout our society from the schools.

It will only get worse if we don’t change our educational system—pronto.

Ironically, the beginnings of this change are one of the few, perhaps the only, good things to emanate from the pandemic.

With schools shut or online, many are evaluating whether the system serves our young people, practically (in terms of careers) or ideologically.

What kind of education is it when 95 percent of college professors vote Democrat, and mostly left Democrat at that?

Viewpoint diversity, anyone? Shall I home school my child? Shall I send him or her to college so they can come back for Thanksgiving in an Antifa t-shirt and accuse me of being a capitalist pig when I just spent fifty grand for their tuition?

Something is wrong with this picture.

Change is undoubtedly coming. As a wise man once said, “Faster, please.” I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of mush brains throwing fire bombs at police stations.

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Roger L. Simon is an award-winning author, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and co-founder of PJ Media. He is also a graduate of two Ivy League institutions to which he no longer donates—not that they need the money. Find him on Twitter and Parler @rogerlsimon.

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The Psychology Behind the Cancel Culture Debate

ALTITUDE

News, Analysis and Opinion from POLITICO

Article by JOHN F. HARRIS — ALTITUDE is a column by POLITICO founding editor John F. Harris, offering perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption.

Revenge, the old saying goes, is a dish best served cold. Indignant statements warning about the rotten state of contemporary political discourse, on the other hand, are dishes served hot.

Recent weeks have produced a rush of solemn manifestos and bristling jeremiads deploring cancel culture and the alleged demise of intellectual diversity and tolerance for opposing ideas in newsrooms and universities. These spurred counter manifestos and jeremiads deploring the deplorers as out of touch, privileged, prejudiced.

Fresh off the grill, these sizzling entrees are enticing. But left to cool even a few days it is striking how quickly they turn virtually inedible: How did a generation of journalists and public intellectuals suddenly become so sour and self-involved? Do the rest of us really need to take this debate as seriously as the debaters take themselves?

The July 7 letter in Harper’s by 153 prominent authors and academics had the sonorous tones of something written for the ages, a courageous expression of universal ideals, to be read and appreciated even years from now. It asserted a cleavage between liberal values, animated by “the free exchange of information and ideas,” and “the forces of illiberalism” on the left and right who seek to shut down people and opinions they find offensive through “public shaming and ostracism.”

But these are not really words for the ages. “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” likely will soon be viewed as an artifact of these particular time, just like “A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate” written as rebuttal.

That is because the exchanges are only on the surface about ideology and free speech. They are more fundamentally about psychology—in particular the mix of pride and anxiety that flow within even the most self-assured writers in this disruptive moment.

Chaos and anger are everywhere. The fight-or-flight instinct inside everyone has been activated. The writers who signed the open letter—including such famous names as Salman Rushdie, Malcolm Gladwell, and J.K. Rowling—decided to fight. But in trying to project collective strength they illuminated collective insecurities.

Among the most consistent critiques classical liberals have of a rising generation on the left is that they have been conditioned on college campuses to put undue emphasis on group identity. It’s common to hear people making fun of younger colleagues for the way they claim a right to protest that they feel “unsafe” around arguments and people they disagree with.

But race, sex and ethnicity are not the only categories of identity politics. Being a distinguished writer—for whom self-respect and the respect of others flows from success in a certain arena, where the prevailing customs, values and ego rewards are well-established—is itself a form of identity. Being disrespected and scorned by people you normally think of as the home team—not right-wing agitators but fellow progressives—does indeed feel unsafe.

The human instinct when something bad happens to someone you know is to establish psychic distance, to give oneself reassurance that this couldn’t have happened to you. (“Well, you know he was a smoker.” “What was she thinking, trying to fix the electrical system herself?”) 

The agitated tone of the Harper’s letter came precisely because its signatories easily could imagine bad things—firings, brutal public excoriation—happening to them. This is true in the case of journalists James Bennet, ousted as New York Times opinion editor after publishing an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton that outraged many colleagues, or Stan Wischnowski, the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer who resigned after someone on his staff carelessly wrote a racially insensitive headline.

I was not asked to sign the Harper’s letter. (Oh, good suggestion: I will check my spam folder.) I am sympathetic to its arguments. The writers may be exaggerating the threat to liberal discourse but they are not imagining it. I am a strong admirer of Bennet, and we once published an interview discussion of themes highly relevant to the current uproar. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I would have had the wit to anticipate that the writers were affixing a large kick-me sign to their backs. I wasn’t surprised people on Twitter and elsewhere accepted the invitation.  The better way to defend liberal intellectual values might have been through arguments that actually demonstrated liberal intellectual values.

The liberal mind, or so it seems to me, gravitates instinctually to the concrete and particular, as against the instinct of more rigid ideologues to embrace spacious abstractions. But the open letter in Harper’s seemed almost purposefully abstract: “We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.”

So if Fox News executives, due to the pressure of commerce or conscience, decide one night that this time Tucker Carlson has gone too far with his scab-picking monologues and kick him off the air, would that be another terrible example of cancel culture? No, no, most of the letter-signers would surely say: We are talking about protecting people making good-faith, intellectually honest arguments, not for-profit demagoguery. But that qualification makes the point: Context matters, and the letter-signers might have anticipated that their vague but emphatic generalities are not the best affirmation of liberal thought.

The Harper’s letter also denounces the tendency to dissolve complex debates in “a blinding moral certainty.” It is a laudable trait of the classically liberal mind to try to reckon with the potential merits of the opposing side’s view, rather than to simply assume or assert the other side’s iniquity.

But the open letter did not do that. While classical liberalism has a winning record within the broad history of American intellectual life, within the history most relevant to younger writers and activists—say the past quarter-century—it is not hard to see why this philosophy would look weak and timorous. The instinct of liberal intellectuals to see all sides, to critique the power establishment from within rather than attack it frontally from outside, arguably contributed to the debacles of the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crash. The tendency of liberal centrists to believe that political debate is basically on the level, while the right cynically exploits the reality that modern politics is often not on the level and is more about power than ideas, arguably helped vault Donald Trump to the presidency.

The historic weakness of classical liberalism is a tendency to equivocate and delay even on questions that do demand blinding moral certainty, like confronting the rise of fascism in the 1930s or Jim Crow for decades before the 1960s. The historic strength of liberalism is that it usually rises to the occasion eventually. A political philosophy that embraces relativism over absolutism, that prefers the practical over the theoretical, that encourages conflicting perspectives rather than orthodoxy, that appreciates contradiction and contingency, is a lot more durable over the long haul. Critics on the left who have disdain for this squishy worldview should acknowledge that historically societies that draw hard lines against offensive speech nearly always do so in the name of protecting established power, not attacking prejudice or empowering marginalized voices.

But this, too, is getting a bit abstract. And abstraction may be the greatest hazard to constructive political debate in this age, as we huddle at home on keyboards and see colleagues, if at all, by Zoom screens. What is striking about the various speech manifestos is how they refer to fellow writers who happen to disagree as though they are distant strangers, odious stick-figure characters. One feels this distance in both directions in Bari Weiss’ complaint to New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, in a public resignation letter, as she berates colleagues who she says bully her and allegedly regard “history itself [as] one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.”

One feels that distance again in the open-letter rebuttal to the Harper’s letter as it lashes signatories for invoking “seductive but nebulous concepts and coded language to obscure the actual meaning behind their words,” the aim of which is “to control and derail the ongoing debate about who gets to have a platform.”

These days, many more writers have a platform than ever before. The question is how to use it. The external world—its problems and remedies—is a more compelling subject than the internal psychology of writers.