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Notes -
There’s an interesting staff writer at The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper, who among other things is a sort of rare left-wing Black critic of left-wing academia (a sort of “origin story” here). When interviewed about said piece, and touching also on his opinions about the Arday scandal and aftermath, he was posed this question about not playing into the hands of conservative critics of left-wing academia (and left-wingers more broadly):
This had me thinking about “emergencyism” more broadly. I’m kind of coming around to the idea that this particular brainworm is, at risk of “both-sideism”, a pretty fundamental and widespread issue. On the left we have the above position. On the right we have a parallel idea that Republicans and Trump specifically only might have this small window of time to ‘correct’ and even avenge mistakes of the past, so they need to be thorough and extreme in order to punish those who allegedly schemed against them, abused institutional trends or structure for years, or implemented anything vaguely woke-sounding. Potentially even moderates, maybe they vote in low quality but comparatively “harmless” candidates for office too much (especially in the primary phase, to count).
Emergencies of course are dangerous, historically speaking. While there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, we still note examples as classic as the Reichstag fire and associated “emergencies”, Sulla in Roman times, various military juntas; we have Japanese internment, post-9/11 AUMF abuse (especially post-Iraq), assorted Cold War surveillance abuses, etc locally. At least top of my head, IRL they are legion. Real emergencies, abused.
Yet emergencyism as depicted is actually about moral or political panics, and the lowered self-standards that can accompany them. We’re talking here about witch trials, McCarthyism, satanic panic, Iraq WMDs, super predator fears, so on.
Harper himself I think feels a bit extra jaded because in his telling, excessive and even immoral racial justice drives occurred simultaneously with him getting tenure as a university professor and also the university’s unionization drive failing (crushed in part by the same firm Amazon used to suppress their own).
Properly, emergencyism seems to be a subset of a type of blatant partisanship, which is interesting because most of the advocates likely don’t think of themselves as partisans. Potentially it’s also downstream of bad-faith politics. However I tend to think that that’s too convenient an excuse. Most people aren’t actually thinking about things in terms of game theory. And ultimately this is not about “the other side” - it’s about YOU. What are MY morals? Obviously morals are cheap until challenged, and aren’t worth much if they never survive a challenge. It takes courage for a political group to embark on a course of self-betterment even in the face of dastardly opposition. Right?
Or are we totally in a post-moral political hellscape where might makes right and morals are dead?
(And more topically - do you agree that emergencyism is a thing on the left, and do you think it’s a thing on the right two, or that’s the wrong lens to use to make sense of the Trumpist blob?)
I once read an article criticising Naomi Klein, in which the author pointed out that, in 2007, Klein published a book called The Shock Doctrine, whose central thesis was the existence of a strategy called "disaster capitalism", in which political actors exploit the chaos of natural disasters, wars, and other crises to push through unpopular policies such as deregulation and privatization. In her subsequent book, This Changes Everything, Klein argued that the climate crisis cannot be addressed in the current era of neoliberalism, and hence that the only solution is to instate Full Communism.
Huh. Political actors exploit the chaos caused by natural disasters to implement unpopular economic policies, you say?
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