Yglesias and Fear of a Black Intellectual

Liberal centrist inadvertently demonstrates the truth of critical race theory

Image credit: yvonne n, CC

Reactionary centrist pundit Matt Yglesias recently appeared in The Argument with a defense of liberalism. You might think, at this moment, that he’d use his platform to fight against open fascism or violent authoritarianism—against the assault on our Constitutional order, the right wing effort to silence speech, the rollback of voting rights, the terrifying archipelago of concentration camps going up to hold the regimes designated ethnic enemies.

But then you wouldn’t know Matt Yglesias. Fascism, pfft, who cares. What really riles him up is the spectacle of Black thinkers questioning the good faith of Matt Yglesias and his heroes. The true danger to liberalism right now is…critical race theory (CRT).

As silly as that sounds, it is in fact much sillier; Yglesias engages with none of CRTs major thinkers or ideas, preferring to sneer at a bunch of right-wing bugaboos—microaggressions, Tumblr leftists, “defund the police.” In fact, Yglesias practically boasts about not having read much of anything on CRT. “Critical Race Theory and related identitarian ideas,” he says, “fooled many of us into thinking it was just a new, strange version of liberalism.” Yglesias is the innocent, good faith liberal, confronting some bizarre new fauna. His ignorance is the sign of his virtue and purity. To know too much—to read beyond scattered passages from an introductory text—is to be taken in.

I have read more on CRT than Matt Yglesias, and I could go through and explain why his argument is horeseshit. But sociologist Victor Ray has already done that better than I could. So instead I want to briefly talk about, not Yglesias’ reasoning, but his unreasoning. The most interesting part of his essay, I think, is not the (shallow, uninformed) gesture at stringing thoughts together, but the structure which confers upon him authority through his bold assertion of lacking basic expertise. Why are we supposed to give him credit for being vacuous? Why is the intellectual project of liberalism best defended by a vaunting ignorance?

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Liberal hens, enforcing the pecking order

Yglesias’ ignorance and innocence isn’t just factual; it’s also metaphorical. He titles his essay “The fox in liberalism’s henhouse.” The female defenseless innocent hen here is liberalism; the fox is critical race theory. The fox, as you’d expect given its foxy nature, is wily and crafty. Yglesias was understandably fooled at first. But, he says, “What I’ve come to see in retrospect is that we were witnessing large-scale entryism of a deeply and explicitly anti-liberal program into liberal spaces.”

Entryism refers to the infiltration of a political party by outsiders who want to subvert it—Trotskyites trying to take over Labour in the UK, or Larouchites attempting to amass power in the Democratic party. In this case, though, academic Critical Race Theorists were not, in fact, launching a nefarious campaign to somehow subvert liberalism. CRT’s critiques of liberalism were quite up front, even if Yglesias cannot understand them—and that critique mostly was not aimed at undermining liberalism, but was instead attempting to get liberalism to live up to its own commitments.

As just one example, critical race theorists might point out that the liberal world order has as a practical matter been funding a massive genocide in Gaza in the name of defending an apartheid state. The stated commitments to liberal ideals (equality, free speech, voting rights, opposition to mass slaughter) are in opposition to actual structures of discipline, funding, and murder. Is it an attack on liberalism to point that out?

The colonial context here is not an accident. CRT is an intellectual tradition largely developed by African-Americans to analyze and critique the systems which subjugate them. Its insights are parallel to, and intertwined with, the insights of other global decolonial movements. Those insights consist, often, of the fairly straightforward observation that liberals in practice very frequently—even systematically—exclude colonized people from their liberal ideals.

Here for example is liberal hero John Stuart Mill from the Principles of Political Economy:

The sacred duties which civilized nations owe to the independence and nationality of each other, are not binding towards those to whom nationality and independence are certain evil, or at best a questionable good.

Colonizers do not need to respect the right of the colonized; the liberal order does not extend to them. Racist, colonial exclusions are at the center of the core thinkers of liberalism, including, but not limited to, Mill. That seems like something liberalism should deal with.

Alas, as Edward Said points out, liberals often do not in fact want to think through these exclusions. Said is not generally thought of as a critical race theorist, but he comes from a parallel decolonial tradition. He quotes that Mill passage in his important 1993 volume Culture and Imperialism; he also talks about contemporary reactions to decolonial critiques of liberal pieties.

Said for example discusses Orientalist Bernard Lewis’ enraged, frightened reaction to the suggestion that university curriculum should include more texts by women, non-Europeans, and non-white people.

Lewis—speaking as an authority on Islam—took the extreme position that “if Western culture does indeed go a number of things would go with it and others would come in their place.” No one had said anything so ludicrous as ‘Western culture must go,” but Lewis’s argument, focused on much grander matters than strict accuracy, lumbered forward with the remarkable proposition that since modifications in the reading list would be equivalent to the demise of Western culture, such subjects (he named them specifically) as the restoration of slavery, polygamy, and child marriage would ensue. To this amazing thesis Lewis added that “curiosity about other cultures,” which he believes is unique to the West, would also come to an end.

In short, when confronted with a critique of liberalism’s exclusions, its defenders often double down, insisting that those exclusions were not an error, but are instead absolutely essential. Women, Muslims, Palestinians, Black people—if they are allowed to speak, the entire liberal project will collapse into barbarism and ignorance. Mill’s exclusion of the bulk of the world from the liberal order was not an oversight, per Lewis. If we do not subjugate them with our civilization, they will subjugate us with their barbarity—using, as the thin edge of the wedge, apparently, novels by Chinua Achebe and philosophical works by Edward Said.

Reverse colonial foxes

The paranoid fantasy that Lewis indulges is an example of reverse colonialism. I’ve written about reverse colonialism several times in recent weeks. It refers to narratives in which colonizers imagine being overrun or invaded by those they’ve colonized. It was developed as a concept to discuss a pattern in science fiction stories like War of the Worlds and Red Dawn. I think it’s relevant far beyond that though; once you start thinking about reverse colonization, you see it everywhere in fascist, racist, and colonial discourse and tropes.

It shows up, for example, in Bernard Lewis’ panicked fear that the novels of the colonized will infiltrate and destroy the Western canon. And it also shows up in Yglesias’ decision to frame the writing of Black academics as some sort of dangerous effort to seize, devour, and dispossess, by force, by stealth, by fang and claw, the innocent and virtuous heritage of liberalism.

Yglesias doesn’t need to understand these writings deeply because—like the works Lewis wants to exclude from the Western canon—the culture of the excluded is not really culture anyway. It is “strange” Yglesias says, and its precepts were “poorly understood even by those arguing for them.” Outside the metropole/henhouse of virtuous Western liberalism reside weird, nefarious thoughts of no value and no tradition worth discussing or acknowledging.

Yglesias’ refusal to do the reading is itself a statement about who matters and who should matter, about whose thoughts can be assimilated into the liberal order and whose can’t. It is in fact the same statement that Stuart Mill made—or, as pioneer of critical race theory Charles Mills drily observed, “European humanism usually meant that only Europeans were human.”

More, if we look at the obsessive reiteration of reverse colonialism, we can see that not only are Europeans the only humans, but that they are the only humans because they have subjugated non-Europeans, and, most terrifyingly, they may cease to be human if they should cease to subjugate and become the subjugated. This is why for Yglesias the fascists like Chris Rufo are ultimately of less concern than Black academics being targeted by Chris Rufo. The fascists are evil, sure, but they are not going to overturn established hierarchies. That is the task of those nefarious non-white strange, empty, but deadly and terrifying foxes. When white liberalism is threatened, it turns out, Yglesias is more concerned about protecting the whiteness than the liberalism.

This is in fact the central argument of critical race theorists like Charles Mills. Mills argues that the liberal ideal is—not in theory, but in fact—a white liberal ideal, and that the whiteness is central to, not incidental to, the liberal tradition as it is actually practiced. “A lot of black thought, Mills points out, “has simply revolved around the insistent demand that whites live up to their own (ostensibly universalist) principles.”

If Yglesias wants to “defend” liberalism from that critique, the path forward does not start with sweeping dismissals of Black thinkers he has not read. Want to show that liberalism is a valuable bulwark against liberalism and fascism? Then it behooves you to try to abide by your own principles and act as if you believe that Black people and colonized people have intellectual traditions and ideas worth engaging with and building upon. Similarly you should avoid framing Black thinkers as dangerous duplicitous outsiders, whose presence in liberal spaces will lead to the usual reverse colonial nightmare.