There is a rich irony brewing in our culture. On the one hand, people often feel uncomfortable weighing in on issues involving groups to which they do not belong. For example, a man might feel uncomfortable expressing his opinions about abortion, particularly while in groups populated by many women. On the other hand, people are often content to point out when members of groups to which they do not belong express treacherous opinions. It is not uncommon, for instance, for a man to reprimand a pro-life woman for setting back the interests of women by defending her pro-life views. The cultural uptake of these two impulses is, I think, both contradictory and immoral.

Legal scholar Mari Matsuda wrote that “[t]hose who are oppressed in the present world can speak most eloquently of a better one” (346). I think it is because our culture has bought into this line of thought that we have succumbed to the first impulse. A man might think to himself that he should not voice his opinions about abortion, especially among women, because women possess authority to discuss the issue that men lack. The oppression women have faced as women places them in a better position than men to speak of a better world when it comes to abortion politics.

The second impulse, that of rebuking ideological dissidents in oppressed groups, is rationalized in different ways. Some think that a pro-life woman deserves censure when she expresses her views because she has a duty to be a good role model for other women; others think it is because she has a duty to show gratitude to feminists who have made her current way of life possible by continuing their activism; still others think it is because she must be in solidarity with other women by expressing views most other women subscribe to rather than the ones she does express.

Whatever the merits of the rationales for these impulses, they contradict one another. The first impulse cautions against participating in debates one is not qualified to participate in. The second impulse recommends that we participate in those debates. The man who tells a woman she harms other women by expressing her pro-life views has taken a stand on the issue of abortion, since he thinks the pro-life position is harmful to women. When asked moments later about his own views on abortion, he may insist that “it’s not his place to discuss issues that primarily concern women.” But he’s already taken a stand.

These impulses not only contradict one another, but are also each immoral. The strongest case for the immorality of the second impulse finds itself in the vulnerability of oppressed people. Women are already oppressed, so why should we go out of our way to make the lives of pro-life women harder than they already are by treating them as defectors? There is a line between criticizing the arguments advanced by a pro-life woman and criticizing the pro-life woman herself on the grounds that she does not live up to some ideal that women should live up to. While the former is always permissible, I think the latter rarely is. Isn’t feminism, at its core, about liberating women from the oppressive expectations of others after all?

The first impulse, by contrast, is immoral because by censoring your own views about certain matters, you make it harder for others to get to the truth of the matters in question. Making the world a better place is a collective effort, and we need to pool together the best intellectual resources at our disposal to enable us to make it better. Sometimes, the best intellectual resources when it comes to reasoning about the abortion issue will include the ideas of men.

But what of the thought that men are unqualified to reason about the abortion issue because they have not been subject to the oppressions women face? Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy once observed that the views of outsiders have historically been crucial to helping insiders make sense of their circumstances. Take, for instance, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. As a Frenchman, Tocqueville produced valuable insights about American society and the relationship between industrialization and democracy––insights that are studied to this day in the academy. Why couldn’t it, therefore, be the case that men could produce valuable insights about the abortion controversy as outsiders of womanhood?

When our contributions to public discourse could move us closer to a better world, we should contribute. This requires that we overcome our impulse to bite our tongues when we have that nagging feeling that it is not our place to share our views about certain matters. Men who have thought carefully about abortion should feel free to express their views; whites who have thought carefully about affirmative action should feel free to express theirs; and so on. As I said before, making our world a better place is a collective effort. And the efforts of all those who have thought carefully about these issues are needed to make our world better––not just the efforts of those whom you would expect to have vested interests in these issues.

We need also to ignore the impulse to reprimand those in oppressed groups who deign to flout the ideological lines their groups seem committed to. This is in part because we need people to feel comfortable volunteering their perspectives so we may make our world better, and in part because it is wrong to place expectations on vulnerable people to behave a certain way when it is expectations of this very kind that lead to their vulnerability in the first place.

It is tempting to succumb to these impulses, especially when we live in a culture that ceaselessly seeks to rationalize them. But acting on both impulses pulls us in opposite directions. We pride ourselves on staying in our lanes when we remain silent as debates concerning people unlike us rage on yet take it upon ourselves to identify and reprimand treasonous behavior by those unlike us. And acting on both impulses impoverishes us with respect to our goal of collaborating with one another to make our world better than it is. It seems we have some unlearning to do. But until we have done it, we will remain suspended in the irony that is modern identity politics.

Thanks to Andrew Jason Cohen for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this post.

Going around the internet recently is a photo of a sign quoting John Stuart Mill “Landlords Get Rich In Their Sleep.”  The sign is apparently in a bank, suggesting that the bank thinks it would be a good idea for you to get a loan enabling you to own property, but the meme seems intended to criticize the idea that being a landlord is a good thing, by supplying the passage from Principles of Political Economy from which the quote is ostensibly drawn.   The meme creator has posted the following: “Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing.  The increase in the value of the land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.”  But that’s not quite what Mill says.  The meme cites Book V, chapter 2, section 5 as the source.  The first sentence in the meme is mostly accurate, but the second sentence is not in the text at all.

Mill is arguing in this section that it is not improper to tax landlords, because the value of land to which they have title accrues in value without them having to do anything.  “Suppose that there is a kind of income which constantly tends to increase, without any exertion or sacrifice on the part of the owners….  In such a case it would be no violation of the principles on which private property is grounded, if the state should appropriate this increase of wealth, or part of it, as it arises….  Now this is actually the case with rent.”  Mill is certainly not saying, as the meme implies, that landlords aren’t entitled to rents, only that it’s not unjust to tax them on rents.

But there’s a different level on which the meme is wrong-headed, and wrong to conscript Mill into its purpose.  The word “landlord” had a slightly different meaning in the 1840s than it does today.  Landlords used to be literal lords, who had title to lands on the basis of royal privilege.  While it might be fair to characterize them as not working or taking risks, it’s certainly false in today’s context.  While we continue to use the same word, landlords of today aren’t literal lords, just regular people who own properties from which they can derive rental income.  This very obviously does involve work and risk.  Mid-19^th-century objections to aristocratic landlordism do not tell us anything about today’s rental market, nor do they undermine the reality of the work and risk a property owner of today must incur, and without which there’d be an even greater housing shortage.  Apartment buildings don’t grow on trees.

A story this week in the New York Times about the Minneapolis school district raised some interesting questions about racism, liberalism, and individualism.  The story explains how Minneapolis school officials “assigned families to new school zones, redrawing boundaries to take socioeconomic diversity — and as a consequence, racial diversity — into account.”  This is in response to legitimate concerns that Minneapolis, described in the story as “among the most segregated school districts in the country,” has tangible gaps in academic performance by race.  “Research shows that de facto school segregation is one major reason that America’s education system is so unequal, and that racially and socioeconomically diverse schools can benefit all students.” 

The article elaborates on the problem: “Research has shown that integration can deliver benefits for all children.  For example, Black children exposed to desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education experienced higher educational achievement, higher annual earnings as adults, a lower likelihood of incarceration and better health outcomes, according to longitudinal work by the economist Rucker Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley. The gains came at no cost to the educational achievement of white students.  Other research has documented how racially and economically diverse schools can benefit all students, including white children, by reducing biases and promoting skills like critical thinking.  Racially segregated schools, on the other hand, are associated with larger gaps in student performance, because they tend to concentrate students of color in high poverty environments, according to a recent paper analyzing all public school districts.”

So the plan is to increase integration, not necessarily by bussing black students to predominantly white schools, but by bussing white students to predominantly black schools.  Predictably, not every family is enthusiastic about this.  But what I found interesting about the story is that it highlights the ways in which a structure can have outcomes that are racist even if individual actors within that structure aren’t racists.   Many people bristle at the terms “structural racism” or “institutional racism” because they take them to imply that individual actors are racists.  People who use these terms typically don’t mean to imply this (though some do), but this distinction can get lost in the shuffle.  One specific anecdote in the article is helpful here.

Heather Wulfsberg, of Minnetonka, had her daughter reassigned to North High School.  She appealed this decision, but let’s see why.  Wulfsberg, “who is white, had intended to send her daughter, Isabella, 14, to Southwest High, a racially diverse but majority white public school that is a 10-minute bus ride from their home.  The school offers an international baccalaureate program, as well as Japanese, which Isabella studied in middle school. Isabella’s older brother, 18, is a senior there, and Ms. Wulfsberg envisioned her children attending together, her son helping Isabella navigate freshman year. So Ms. Wulfsberg appealed the reassignment to North, citing her son’s attendance at Southwest, and her daughter’s interest in Japanese. (North offers one language, Spanish.)  She was also concerned about transportation. There was no direct bus, and Isabella’s commute could take up to 55 minutes. She would also have to walk from the bus stop to school through an area where frequent gun shots are a problem.”

If Wulfsberg had said something like “I can’t bear the thought of my daughter going to a majority-black school,” it would be clear these are unsupportable reasons.  But the preceding paragraph gives all perfectly legitimate reasons.  Isabella can’t continue learning her language.  She would spend 2 hours a day on the bus.  Is it reasonable to force Heather to do that to Isabella?  I don’t see that it is.  And Heather didn’t either, so Isabella is going to private school.  On the community Facebook page, Heather was called a racist.  ““They were like, ‘Your cover is, you want academics for your kids, and underneath this all, you really are racist,’” she recalled. “It’s a very scary feeling to do a self-examination of yourself and think, ‘Am I?’”  She paused, reflecting. “But I don’t believe I am. I really don’t.””

I have no idea whether she is or not, but she certainly can’t be called a racist for the reasons given here.  So in this case, the parents in the community Facebook group were in fact using something about structural racism as a personal accusation, precisely what the coining of the term was meant to avoid.

It’s possible of course that both (a) the evolution of American public schooling has been heavily influenced by racism and yields outcomes that are demonstrably unequal and (b) parents like Heather aren’t motivated by racism at all.  But then we’re stuck with a conundrum: what’s the fix for (a)?  If the answer is “Isabella’s good must be sacrificed for the greater good of helping ameliorate racial inequality in schools,” you’re certainly in for rough time getting Heather to agree.  Another approach might be systemic: since the outcome problems are systemic, it wouldn’t be crazy to think the solution would be systemic as well.  The anarchist response “don’t have public schools at all” is probably correct, but politically unfeasible.  But even if we have public schools, there’s no reason they have to be structured the way they are.  One reason for the disparity in schools is that in most districts, local property taxes pay for the schools, so wealthier suburbs have better schools than poorer areas (this affects poor white areas too of course).  So maybe don’t tie school funding to local property taxes.  Or maybe don’t have school districts be drawn like Checkpoint Charlie.   Any rigidly drawn district would have some families living at its fringes – why prohibit those kids from attending school in the next district?  The classic pro-choice argument is: figure out what the state government spends per pupil, and then give that money to the families to spend on whichever school they think is best, public or private.  This would eliminate geography-based funding discrepancies.   We address the problem of people not being able to afford food not by having state-run farms and grocery stores, but by giving people money for food.  Why not give them money for school?

Back in September the Urban Institute published a ‘blog post arguing that “Equitable Research Requires Questioning the Status Quo”. The author—Lauren Farrell—argued that both “objectivity” and “rigor” were “harmful research practices” that should be rectified.

Not surprisingly, this has generated a flurry of responses from persons with more conservative leanings eager to defend “objectivity” and “rigor” in research. Also not surprisingly, some of these responses have been hyperbolic. Writing for Persuasion, Zaid Jilani claimed that these claims were “emblematic of the struggle between truth and social justice that is taking place across many left-leaning institutions in the United States.”

There’s a certain irony to this response to Farrell’s argument, for in their rush to defend objectivity and rigor many of their putative proponents have abandoned both.

Farrell writes that an appeal to objectivity

“…allows researchers, intentions aside, to define themselves as experts without learning from people with lived experience.  Objectivity also gives researchers grounds to claim they have no motives or biases in their work. Racism, sexism, classism, and ableism permeate US institutions and systems, which, in turn, allows for research that reproduces or creats racist stereotypes and reinforces societal power differences between who generates information… and who is a subject…”

With respect to rigor, she writes that

“…researchers often define rigor as following an established research protocol meticulously instead of ensuring data are contextualized and grounded in community experience”. This understanding of rigor, she holds, “does not guarantee trustworthiness or accuracy.”

It might be that some of Farrell’s critics have been “triggered” by her use of certain words (“objectivity”, “rigor”) without paying attention to how she is using them or her intended message. If these terms are removed, Farrell’s claims become utterly anodyne. To paraphrase:

“…researchers should not define themselves as experts without learning from people who have direct experience of the subject the researchers are studying. They should recognize that their work might be motivated by pretheoretic commitments or be biased in some way…” 

And

“…researchers should recognize that established research protocols might not lead to results that are trustworthy or accurate unless the data that they gather are placed in proper context and accurately reflect the experiences of the persons who are the subjects of research.”

But these claims shouldn’t be controversial. Consider how they’d apply to Nancy MacLean’s much criticized work Democracy in Chains. (MacLean argues, in brief, that James Buchanan and public choice theory was at the heart of a stealthy conspiracy funded by the Koch Brothers to protect the privilege of rich white men.) For Farrell, MacLean should not have defined herself as an expert in this area without learning from people who knew and worked with Buchanan to ensure that she was getting her facts right. She should also recognize that her interpretation of documents and events might be biased by her ideological antipathy to libertarianism—and taken pains to correct this. And she also should have recognized that despite her extensive documentation of her sources her adherence to this established research protocol of her discipline (history) is no guarantee that her work will be trustworthy or accurate unless her data is placed in proper context and reflects the experiences of those who are the subject of her research.

But isn’t the problem with Democracy in Chains that MacLean failed to be objective and rigorous? If so, how could her methodological failures support Farrell’s rejection of “objectivity” and “rigor”? The answer is simple. Although Farrell takes herself to be rejecting “objectivity” and “rigor” what she is really arguing against are appeals to these values that mask poor research methodology.

To be sure, she should have been clearer about this. But to rush to condemn her for rejecting “truth” in favor of “social justice” on the basis of this ‘blog post is to commit the very errors in research that she decries.

The CDC released data last month showing how women fled NYC at the height of the pandemic to give birth, largely as a reaction to fear of overwhelmed hospitals as well as restrictive birthing policies.

What’s interesting about the data, from my perspective, is how clearly it demonstrates that it’s those with wealth who can avoid the limitations regulations create. New York State has regulated birth centers out of existence, largely through the burdensome and outdated Certificate of Need (CON) process, resulting in fewer options for precisely those people who can’t buy themselves out of these limitations.

Predictably, from the CDC data, white women were most likely to successfully escape the city. Black and Hispanic women were left behind, likely as a result of less flexible employment and fewer financial resources overall. Meanwhile, at the same time women downstate were desperate to find safe places to give birth during a pandemic, New York was prosecuting midwives who served an upstate maternity desert of low-income Mennonite women. The absurdity of the entire situation should be obvious, but in reality it demonstrates one of the primary ways in which regulations have regressive effects.

Certified professional midwives, licensed in 35 other states, are illegal in New York. As a group they tend to serve underserved communities, including low-income rural communities and communities of color. So when low-income New Yorkers looked around for out-of-hospital birthing options during a global pandemic it turns out they couldn’t find any, not because of a market failure, but because of simple and obvious government failure.

There’s a broader lesson here for classical liberals. Most people acknowledge that classical liberalism has a diversity problem, but it’s been hard to know what to do about it. I think one clear way libertarians and classical liberals can appeal more strongly to diverse populations, including women and people of color, is by emphasizing the way government regulations overwhelmingly harm the most vulnerable among us. While there’s been a lot of work done in this area in terms of criminal justice reform, the drug war, and immigration, women’s issues haven’t yet really gotten as much attention. And regulation in particular is still often discussed as an efficiency issue rather than a justice issue. Yet government-imposed barriers place real and disparate burdens on women and communities of color, creating serious impediments to accessing diverse providers on the one hand and wealth building among would-be entrepreneurs on the other.

The US administration has justified the withdrawal from Afghanistan by saying that the United States should not fight a civil war in another country. That war should be fought, they think, by the people themselves, not by a foreign power. Both Democrats and Republicans share this view, as apparently does the general public. Critics of the withdrawal object to the way the withdrawal was implemented, not to the withdrawal itself. They blast the failure of the government to evacuate Americans and others before withdrawal. But, all seem to agree, withdrawing is the right decision. The underlying idea seems to be that Afghanistan is a sovereign country, and that once the Al Qaeda terrorist threat was neutralized, the United States had no business remaining there. Afghan political problems should be solved by Afghans.

I think this is the wrong way to look at this tragedy. I will state my dissent in the starkest possible form: Afghanistan has no business being a sovereign state. If the only possible outcome of the political process is the rule of the Taliban, then the country is not a legitimate state, because the Taliban, one of the worst regimes of recent times, is not entitled to rule. I hope I don’t need to document what we can expect of Taliban rule. The Taliban will kill, torture, and terrorize everyone, women in particular. Saying that these atrocities are an incident of sovereignty or self-determination is too grotesque to be taken seriously. This is true even if the Taliban allows all Americans and others to safely evacuate, and even if Afghanistan (improbably) does not allow anti-Western terrorists to operate in its territory. For the focus is not us but them, the Afghans, who will be killed, tortured, and terrorized by these monsters.

What solution then? If the so-called international community is serious about human rights and human security, then it should send an international force, defeat the Taliban, and set up an international administration to rule the country in accordance with minimal international standards, as long as necessary, forever if need be.  The mistake of the US intervention is not that the United States was disrespectful of Afghan sovereignty. The mistake is that the United States was too respectful of Afghan sovereignty.