No-one Has Ever Understood Any Political Theory

Our discussion of Critical Race Theory omits the fact that none of us know what we’re talking about

You’ve probably heard of Critical Race Theory. You might have an uncle who rants about it until fire shoots out of his ears, or an ex-classmate who writes Facebook posts about how it’s merely an effort to ensure that history books mention slavery at least once. CRT is on Fox News 30 hours a day, so it’s not surprising that parents are showing up at school board meetings to rail against CRT or that about half the states are advancing bills that ban teaching ideas associated with CRT in public schools. 

It’s true that some legitimately batshit stuff is popping up in K-12 education. I find it incredible that anyone could argue that a concept like ”math is white supremacist” isn’t racist, unless they’re arguing “it’s not racist, it’s stupid,” in which case I partially agree. It’s hard to tell how widespread instances of teachers advancing far-left weirdness are; teachers expressing their personal views in class isn’t a new phenomenon. At my public high school, I had a chemistry teacher who would read Psalms to the class. I remember a Catholic teacher debating the ethics of alcohol consumption with her mostly-Baptist students, thus laying bare Southern Virginia’s version of the Sunni-Shia divide. It would be better if teachers didn’t do things like that. But I can’t tell if this stuff is happening more often or if we’re just getting better at recording it; if smartphones had existed in the '90s, I would have become a YouTube millionaire off of my born-again French teacher’s obliquely-rendered tales of her formerly-awesome sex life alone.

These bills seem like a bad idea. I understand what people are worried about -- they picture a kindergarten teacher holding a peanut butter-covered celery stick over a white toddler’s head and yelling “no snack until you apologize for the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921!” But most states’ bills fail to make the important distinction between discussing an idea and endorsing an idea. That stifles debate, which constricts learning. In this article, Jeffrey Sachs describes how most of the bills contain vague language that would render many topics possibly out-of-bounds. I’ve written about the chilling effect that happens when unclear rules narrow the limits of acceptable speech, and I’m against it whether it’s the right or the left that’s doing it. A better tactic to root out ideological craziness is the tried-and-true method of keeping tabs on your child’s education and -- if you don’t like it -- becoming such a colossal pain-in-the-ass that school administrators give you what you want just to shut you up.

This whole escapade started with an activist-led effort to ban Critical Race Theory. It’s led to endless explainers trying to answer the question: “What is Critical Race Theory?” It’s an interesting question, but one that I think has practically no relevance whatsoever to current events. Because at the end of the day, I think probably no-one in history has ever truly, really -- I mean really, really, for reals -- understood a political theory.

I think I have just enough education to make this argument. I have a master’s degree, and I can attest: If true knowledge comes with a certain level of education, if there’s an amount of school that makes the lightbulb click on and you think “I get it now”, that moment does not arrive at the MA level. I was, am, and always will be a very confused man. The only thing I knew for sure when I got my MA was that I didn’t want to go for a PhD, which is like getting to the OT-8 level of Scientology and thinking “yeah but I’m not going for Beyond Operating Thetan -- that’s just a scam.” 

The main thing you learn in grad school is how to pretend like you’ve got it all figured out. That’s why most classes involve reading one percent of a book and then bluffing your way through a discussion group in which everyone acts like they read the whole thing. This prepares you for a final exam in which you have to prove that just enough jargon tumbled into your ear and stuck to your brain to fuel future bullshit sessions. This is key: Opaque academia-speak will keep people from being able to prove that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Using words like “praxis”, “constructivist”, “meta-game”, “polymorphic”, “modalities”, and “dialectic” is the political theory equivalent of a chimp making its fur stand on end to look bigger. It makes a challenge less likely. 

You might be thinking: “I understand a political theory.” I’ll concede that you may understand a theory better than just about anyone, or that you may understand it as much as it can be understood. But political theories can’t be completely understood because they don’t have distinct boundaries. After all: What are the borders of, say, liberalism? Liberalism has been developed by countless thinkers over hundreds of years, and it’s still developing. What’s canonical? Who decides? People generally agree that individual rights are part of it, and also freedom of expression, but if I say “yes, and also the right to have sex with puppets,” who’s going to officially rule that out? What council will meet to pass an edict on puppet sex? Some theories are well-developed, but absolutely none are clearly-defined.

Political theories also aren’t weather-forecasting models that spit out reasonably-accurate results; they’re labels we slap onto groups of ideas. It’s like music: If you’re talking up-beat tempos, horns, black-and-white-checkered Vans, and late-’90s white kids desperately searching for something to call their own, you’re talking ska. In political science, if you’ve got Otto von Bismarck, power dynamics, copious “told ya so”-ing over the demise of the League of Nations, and history’s worst people back-justifying their awfulness, you’ve got realism. To the extent that political theories try to be predictive models, they tend to fail spectacularly. I’ve long thought it’s strange that we still have Marxists even though a central prediction of Marxism -- probably the central prediction of Marxism -- is that socialism will evolve from industrial capitalism. Marx made that prediction in 1848, and he clearly meant that socialism would evolve soon, as in probably-right-then-in-the-revolutions-of-1848. Not 200 years in the future. It would seem that history disproved Marxism, but we still have Marxists. And of course we do, because no-one really understands any political theory.

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Critical Race Theory is a thing. It has founders and acolytes and a Dewey Decimal number. But it’s mostly just the label we slap onto a group of ideas. Which ideas, specifically? No-one can say -- I refer you to the afore-mentioned Nicaean Council on Liberal Puppet Sex that doesn’t exist. Conservatives act like CRT is the spaceship from Monty Python’s Flying Circus that zaps people with a laser and turns them into Scotsmen, except instead of Scotsmen, it turns them into America-hating radicals. I think they have the causality backwards: People have beliefs, and sometimes we describe those beliefs as Critical Race Theory. CRT is just the latest Poisonous Idea Infiltrating Our Schools in the Fox News narrative; at other moments it’s been Sharia Law or Socialism, at this moment it’s CRT.

I find nothing new about the worldview associated with CRT. “AmeriKKKa Sux” has been the far-left’s favorite narrative for as long as I can remember, and CRT seems to just be the racial component of AmeriKKKa Sux. The debate that began with the 1619 Project -- what I’ll call the “AmeriKKKa Sux” vs. “America Rulz!” debate -- is one that I want no part of. It seems glaringly obvious to me that America is a mixed bag, containing lots of good and lots of bad. But of course I think that -- I’m a liberal, and if liberalism has an organizing principle, it’s “shit is complicated.”

I’ve expressed my concern about what’s happening on the left. To summarize that view: I think the prioritization of group loyalty over empiricism that rendered the right completely brain dead is starting to happen on the left. But I don’t trace what’s happening to a powerful new theory; I trace it to environmental factors. I think changes in the media landscape have boosted narratives that reinforce tribalism at the expense of news that strives for objectivity. And I think the brutal murder of George Floyd created an environment in which saying things like “defunding the police is a bad idea” or “Kendi’s theory of anti-racism is not good” seemed tasteless at best, and dangerous to one’s livelihood and social status at worst. This allowed far-left views on race to surge in the absence of pushback. 

Things seem to be changing again. People who once banged the “defund the police” drum are now swearing that they didn’t, and the cult of Robin DiAngelo seems to be on the wane. With any luck, we’ll ditch the hippie nonsense but achieve actual, meaningful police reform. If so, maybe this era of American politics will be seen as an expression of the dichotomy between liberal and leftist worldviews that validates late-Marcusian theories on praxis. Or maybe this iteration of the left/right dialectic would suggest that contemporary politics has evolved beyond a meta-game and we’ve witnessed an evolution in post-modern social consciousness. And, yes, maybe any or all of that is true -- you can’t prove those theories wrong! But a far more likely explanation is that -- to quote Homer Simpson -- “it’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.”