Archive for the ‘Culture Wars’ Category

Opinion | Ted Cruzs Excellent Adventure – The New York Times

But then, this is just what it means to be a Republican politician now. Accountability is out, distraction is in. You dont deal with problems, you make them fodder for zero-sum partisan conflict. As president, Donald Trump refused to treat the coronavirus pandemic as a challenge to overcome with leadership and expertise. Instead, he made it another battle in the culture wars, from whether you wore a mask to whether you remained away from public places. He spent more time trying to racialize the virus for cheap points calling it the China virus and the kung flu than he did giving guidance to the American public.

Yes, Trump is an easy target. But youll find the same dynamic at all levels of Republican politics. At no point during the Georgia Senate race, for example, did the Republican candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, produce a platform to rival the detailed policy proposals of their Democratic opponents. Instead, they ran on fear, identity and fealty to Trump. Are you ready to keep fighting for President Trump and show America that Georgia is a red state? asked Loeffler at one campaign stop. We are the firewall to stopping socialism, and we have to hold the line.

This turn away from even the appearance of traditional governance is most apparent among the newest members of the House Republican caucus. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, also of Georgia, is a glorified social media influencer, seemingly more concerned with making content for fans than bringing aid or assistance to her district. And shortly after taking office, Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina announced to his colleagues that he would be building his congressional staff around comms rather than legislation.

In his Inaugural Address, President Biden urged unity. This wasnt a call for bipartisanship. It was a plea to lower the temperature and to see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors. Politics, he said, need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path and every disagreement doesnt have to be a cause for total war.

Bidens appeal stands in stark contrast with the reigning ethos of the Republican Party as it exists today. Nothing, not even a deadly crisis, will turn Republicans away from a politics that rejects problem-solving in favor of grievance-mongering.

Our system has room for two major political parties. One of them, however imperfectly, at least attempts to govern. The other has devoted its energy to entertainment. It is a tragedy for the people of Texas that at this moment of danger, they have to deal with a government of showmen.

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Opinion | Ted Cruzs Excellent Adventure - The New York Times

Herman: The humbled state of the state of Texas – Austin American-Statesman

Ken Herman|Austin American-Statesman

The Dallas Cowboys, arrogantly self-appointed as Americas Team, have won only two playoff games this century. The once-vaunted Texas Longhorns now churn through football coaches as if there were term limits. Texan presidential candidates now cant even get the nomination of their own parties.

And now, the state with Texas swagger, the state of Giant and the real-life stories that inspired that Hollywood fable of oil and wealth and independence, the state that thinks of itself as the biggest and best, is dealing with the very cold slap in the face that its been a state living in a state of delusion.

So much oil. So much natural gas. So many other sources of energy. So much statewide suffering when all that power was for naught when winter blew through.

More than one non-Texan seems to be taking some measure of delight in twisting around our Dont Mess With Texas anti-littering slogan to point out that right now Texas is a mess.

Was this the week when TEXAS! was humbled into texas? Even the most arrogant of Texans that would be Sen. Ted Cruz was humbled into retreat. When reminded of his tweets mocking California power outages, Cruz tweeted: "I got no defense. A blizzard strikes Texas & our state shuts down. Not good. Stay safe!" (This was before he headed to Cancun.)

Secede? Heck, weve shown we cant even get our own power into our own homes.

Howd we get here? Maybe the leaders weve elected have been spending a bit too much time and rhetoric worrying about perceived issues such as who should use which bathroom when they should have been keeping an eye on keeping the lights on.

Were suffering and staggering through the consequences of a generation of Republican leaders including many whove prioritized the pandering of vote-seeking culture wars over the solid principles that once were GOP core issues.

The consequences include the previously imponderable, such as an Austin City Council members email with advice I never thought Id see from an Austin City Council member. Alison Alters guidance echoed that offered in song by the late, great Frank Zappa in 1974: Watch out where the huskies go. And dont you eat that yellow snow.

Alters less poetic, but timely, recent advice:

We know some residents do not have any water. Boiling snow or ice will make it microbiologically safe for consumption, but only if it hasnt been contaminated (think sludge or snow off the street). Use the absolute cleanest snow you can find.

Instructions on how to survive by boiling snow. Austin, Texas. February, 2021.

During this crisis, the anti-Washington hubris of many Texans gave way to welcomed help from the feds, including, so far, 729,000 liters of water, more than 50,000 blankets, and generators and fuel for hospitals and water facilities. Many Texans will be counting on more federal help in the days, weeks and months to come. Lives have been shattered. Lives have been ended.

The image of the Texas miracle has been frozen for now by a few days of very non-Texas weather. But the truth is, much as its been with COVID, the cold has exposed a quality-of-living gap too long ignored as a result of the your-own-bootstraps mentality repulsively repeated by a Texas elected official during the Big Freeze of 21.

Tim Boyd, mayor of the West Texas town of Colorado City, (pronounced colarayda, not like the state) turned to Facebook to showcase his heartless ignorance (and spelling deficiencies) in a post he acknowledged would hurt some feelings.

No one owes you are your family anything, nor is it the local government's responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Boyd posted on Feb. 16.

Only the strong will survive and the week shall parish, he warned. "Sink or swim it's your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I'm sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout. If you dont have electricity you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe. If you have no water you deal without and think outside the box to survive and supply water to your family.

But wait, theres more.

If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising! Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish. Folks God has given us the tools to support ourselves in times like this. This is sadly a product of a socialist government where they feed people to believe that the FEW will work and others will become dependent for handouts.

Not satisfied that hed delivered his message, his dishonor continued:

Am I sorry that you have been dealing without electricity and water, yes! But Ill be damned if Im going to provide for anyone that is capable of doing it themselves! We have lost sight of those in need and those that take advantage of the system and meshed them in to one group!! Bottom line quit crying and looking for a handout! Get off your ass and take care of your own family!

Why people who dont believe in government go into government is beyond me. This particular person realized he was ill-suited for government service and resigned after this post. But I fear that his brand of plain-spoken nonsense lies not far beneath the surface for many of our leaders who are politically savvy enough to keep it beneath the surface.

Attitudes like that allow many non-Texans to caricature what it means to be Texan. I recently was reminded of this assessment of Texas and Texans by a Brit who did a stint as a newspaper editor in Richmond, Texas near Houston.

Upon returning to Great Britain, Nicholas Maillard reported Texas was "filled with habitual liars, drunkards, blasphemers, and slanderers; sanguinary gamesters and cold-blooded assassins; with idleness and sluggish indolence, two vices for which the Texans are already proverbial; with pride, engendered by ignorance and supported by fraud.

Maillards description is blatantly ridiculous because at least two of those are inaccurate. And Im unaware if any gamesters I know are, or ever have been, sanguinary.

Maillard arrived in Texas on Jan. 30, 1840 and headed home that August (which means his assessment of Texans came despite never meeting Cruz). His critical review of Texans came in his 1842 book: The History of the Republic of Texas, from the Discovery of the Country to the Present Time and the Cause of Her Separation from the Republic of Mexico. It could have been subtitled Texas Sucks.

He was wrong. Nothing is as bad as he portrayed Texas. And, as we chillingly found out during the Big Freeze of 21, nothing is as great as Texas thought it was. There is, weve found, room for improvement.

Maybe we need this challenging reminder. Im sure our leaders do. Unfortunately, Gov. Greg Abbott initially instinctively retreated to finger pointing by going on Fox News Channel and somehow blaming this on the Green New Deal, something that, at this point, is just an idea in some politicians' heads

A few days later, with a politicians dexterity, Abbott simultaneously took responsibility and placed blame.

Im taking responsibility, he told reporters, for the current status of ERCOT.

Yes, the tragically misnomered Electric Reliability Council of Texas is overdue for overhaul. But the current state of generation of electricity in Texas is the product of a generation of GOP leadership. It would have been refreshing to have heard Abbott say to Texans: We failed you.

Because, despite what a now-former West Texas mayor told his folks, thats the truth.

Were still Texas. But maybe this is a good time for some introspection and ballot-box action about what it means to be Texas. If we learn from this, more power to us.

Continued here:
Herman: The humbled state of the state of Texas - Austin American-Statesman

Tribune Editorial: Utah schools need to open. The Legislature isn’t helping. – Salt Lake Tribune

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Students return to Highland High School in Salt Lake City on Monday, Feb. 8, 2021.

By The Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board

| Feb. 19, 2021, 6:30 p.m.

But it is the Legislature that holds the pursestrings and makes the policy. And, for many lawmakers, education is less a public institution than a culture wars wedge issue.

Lawmakers often cant seem to mention public schools unless it is to criticize, undermine or defund them, or to score political points by attacking the schools for engaging in social engineering or, well, not engaging in social engineering.

The health situation in Utah schools, even with no pandemics, suffers from our longstanding policy of stacking em deep and teaching em cheap, with too few nurses or counselors and sometimes hardly any room to turn around. It is hardly surprising, then, that many teachers, parents and students are not eager to return to school full time, and some school boards and administrators are reluctant to call them back, even as they acknowledge the limitations of remote learning.

These feelings survive despite growing scientific evidence that schools have not been the sort of superspreader locations that they were reasonably feared to be.

Younger children, to our great relief, seem particularly resistant to the coronavirus, both in terms of becoming ill and transmitting the disease to their older relatives.

In secondary schools, evidence suggests that students and their families are much more likely to contract the disease from places other than school, including typical teenage-heavy spots as shopping centers and restaurants, or just hanging out at each others homes.

One thing we should all take from this experience is that teachers are really important, and that dreams of replacing them with computers have been exposed as, well, flawed.

All of us, members of the Legislature particularly, should be working with schools and teachers, not against them, to make the necessary return to schools not only be safe, but feel that way.

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Tribune Editorial: Utah schools need to open. The Legislature isn't helping. - Salt Lake Tribune

How Eight CEOs Are Making Diversity Happen (Really) – Chief Executive Group

Genesys CEO Tony Bates

Following the murder of George Floyd last May, a tragedy that touched off months of protests and civil unrest, Tony Bates, CEO of call center technology solutions company Genesys, found himself in a place similar to thousands of corporate leaders. He knew he wanted to reach out to employeeswho numbered 5,500 across 70 locations around the worldin a personal, companywide email letting everyone know he took this seriously and that the company was looking at its own diversity practices to determine what additional measures could be taken.

But as he sat down to write it, he recalls, there was a level of anxiety for me, about the right words to pick. Am I going to offend someone? Am I pushing my own agenda? I really had to think about, how is this going to land on people? How are they going to absorb it?

In the end, he found the words, and Eric Thomas, who would eventually become the companys first global diversity, equity and inclusion officer, told him he was so grateful that someone at the CEO level was validating the issue and was willing to take a stand. He told me he shared it with his family, and they cried over it, says Bates. I realized in that moment that its really important not to shy away from this topic.

He followed that with a town hall that he calls a watershed moment for the company. Four employees from different racial backgrounds, including Thomas, were invited to share their stories about how they dealt with racial injustice growing up. I realized this was a moment to listen, not a moment for me to be prescriptive from the top, he says. The balance I think CEOs have to strike is you have to be brave and courageous enough. but realizing that in this area, you are out of your comfort zone. You dont have all the answers. But you can set the stage.

And then, he adds, as a leader, you look at the dataand the data clearly said we were not diverse enough.

Genesys is hardly alone, of course. While its impossible to track exact numbers across all U.S. companies, in August a USA Today analysis of the 50 biggest public companies, which arguably have the most formal and well-funded D&I programs, revealed that of the 279 top executives listed in proxy statements, only five were Blackand that included two who have recently retired.

But while many CEOs have earnestly been trying to move the needle on diversity, the reality is that it is often tough to budge. Diversitys really hardand inclusion is harder, says Johnny Taylor, CEO of the Society for Human Resource Professionals and a regular contributor to Chief Executive (see Eliminating the Empathy Deficit).

One of the biggest reasons these kinds of efforts fail is because management teams have not really figured out why they need diversity in their organization. Avoiding a lawsuit or being canceled on Twitter may be a legitimate goal, but its not enough to energize a companywide diversity initiative and make it successful. Nor will it be enough to say, simply, Its the right thing to do.

That is just not motivating language thats going to get your average CEO out of bed in the morning, says Michael Bach, founder and CEO of the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion. The right thing to do is to make money. And if you can make money while doing something like supplier diversity, then it sticks.

For diversity initiatives to have any hope of success, management has to go deeper into the strategic purpose for it, says Dr. Tiffany Jana, a diversity consulting practitioner with TMI Consulting. Like, how does this organization get better when we have more representative diversity across our employee base? How will it serve us? If you cant answer those questions, I would prefer you not embark on the journey.

At Otis Elevator, the motivation is not so much taking a stand on a social issue as employee safety; if employees working in the field, operating heavy machinery at great heights, feel emotionally unsafe, they may become dangerously distracted. Were in the life safety business, says president and CEO Judy Marks. We need their whole self there so they can go home every night.

This past year, Marks launched a new initiative, titled, Our Commitment to Change, which lays out numerous actions Otis will take to ensure that all 69,000 employees feel welcome, safe and heard. The multi-pronged approach will include an independent review of hiring, compensation and other business practices to uncover and eliminate biases; accelerating anti-racism, unconscious bias and inclusion learning at all levels of the company; and creating a new advisory group to build in transparency and accountability. This will be far broader than a CEO call to action, says Marks. There has to be a vision at the top and support from the top, but there has to be grassroots buy-in as well. And then we have to hold our entire leadership and management team accountable.

For many B2C companies, the motivation includes needing a workforce that reflects the market in order to design products that meet their needs. Kristin Groos Richmond,CEO and co-founder of Revolution Foods, which provides access to healthy, affordable meals to students and families, did an analysis and came up with some clear reasons why diversity needed to be a focus.

All of the communities we serve are highly diverse across a broad range of ethnic, racial, socioeconomic backgrounds, so we recognized pretty quickly that the only way to connect with them and create a respectful product is torecruit a team that would really reflect the communities we serve nationwide, she says, noting that diverse employees make up around 66 percent of the companys nearly 1,500 total, 40 percent of management and 30 percent of executive leadership. Its so important to have that diversity at every level of the company, she says. Ive always been a firm believer that the more diverse perspectives you can get around the table, the smarter youre going to be.

As proof, many cite a 2018 McKinsey study of 1,000 companies, which found those in the top quartile in ethnic and racial diversity in management were 33 percent more likely to have above-average financial returns, and those in top quartile for gender diversity were 21 percent more likely. But it wasnt statistics that convinced CEO Tom Shorma that WCCO Belting needed to be able to recruit from every possible demographic group; it was the manufacturing skills shortage in his small town of Wahpeton, North Dakota. In particular, he needed to appeal to women and to a growing population of new Americans. Weve done some unique things that have allowed us to first find great peoplewhether male, female, whatever race, creed, colorand then to give them all top-to-bottom opportunities for advancement.

For example, instead of conference room interviewsor as Shorma calls them, interrogationsevery candidate is taken on an extensive tour of the facilities, given a history of the family-owned company and shown how they might fit in there. When they walk the floor, they can see that half the workforce is women, says Shorma.

They then offer financial rewards to employees who recruit people they trust, which has had the intended effect of increasing the number of diverse candidates, says Shorma. They also instituted flexible scheduling, which has helped them attract and retain women, who now account for half of all employees and two-thirds of supervisors.

If you dont create a culture that respects diversity and gives all employees a voice, then recruitment efforts will be wasted. At Genesys, Bates is focused on bringing diverse groups forward so they can have a platform and voice to educate others. It sounds like a soft thing, but I think its maybe one of the most important things we need to do foundationally, so were all in a better place to understand it before we rush to metric this, metric that, benchmark against someone else. So, were on the beginning of a journey, and its less around classical benchmarks and more about, how do you want to tap into the culture and the mission and then map that back to success, he says. Because you could add X percent of folks but if its not a trusted, safe place that recognizes those communities, youre ultimately gonna spit those folks out.

Most agree that, for efforts to be successful, measuring progress is a must. But thats also where things sometimes get touchy because measuring an increase in diversity raises the specter of quotas and culture wars over affirmative action. Quotas are damaging because then people think there isnt equality on the other side, says Alessandro DiNello, CEO of Flagstar Bank. But theres almost nothing you can do successfully without measuring what youre doing.

Measuring progress on diversity goals is a clear way to show leadership is taking it seriously. One of the things DiNello made a requirement at Flagstar is having a diverse slate of candidates for every position and especially management-level positions, he says. I guarantee that if I dont say that and my CFO leaves, the list I get will be all White guysmaybe with one White femalebecause finding a minority candidate, whether Black, Hispanic or other minorities, you just have to work harder to find that person.

In July, DiNello hired a new HR chief,David Hollis. I didnt hire him because he was Black, but in terms of me being sure that my head of HR is going to do everything in his power to facilitate the choices that our hiring managers haveI feel good about that. I feel like maybe well make a little bit more progress more quickly. Well see.

At Dennys, the restaurant chain, CEO John Miller measures success first through feedback on the companys diversity programs, which include unconscious bias trainings and a Hungry for Education scholarship program to help combat childhood hunger and provide college scholarships to Black, Hispanic and Asian students. The company has also spent more than $2 billion through its supplier diversity program since it was initiated in 1993. And they do keep track of the numbers: about two-thirds of the total Dennys workforce is made up of minority groups, including half of all restaurant management-level employees. The board of directors consists of 44 percent minorities and 33% women, and Miller says they are committed to improving those numbers.

To Miller, the most important thing CEOs can do when addressing racism or talking about race is to be authentic. Being the loudest person in the room means nothing if you dont have the hard work and proof points to back it up, he says, adding that the biggest lesson hes learned is that moving the needle on diversity requires patience and a sustained long-term commitment. You arent going to hit a home run every day. But by consistently hitting singles and doubles day in and day out, youre going to look around one day and realize youve been a part of building something truly special.

Whatever you decide to measure, you have to first know what your baseline is, says Marks, and at Otis, it was something theyd never gotten a handle on before the new initiative was launched. We did not have a comprehensive set of metrics, of equity analysis, of really understanding where we arestrengths, gaps, opportunities. So we decided as a leadership team that if we were to just assess this ourselves,it wouldnt be objective and bias would be natural, she says.

To solve that, they brought in an independent, external expert, not a firm, but someone we knew whos got a passion for D&I and an incredible track record of it to evaluate where we are and help us map out where we need to go so that we can actually realize this vision and develop a formal long-term D&I strategy, she says. Weve given her full access to our repository of data and analytics to examine how we recruit, hire, develop, engage, grow and retain our colleagues.

Staying honest about where the company is on diversity is key to keeping unconscious bias at bay. Harvard professor Mahzarin Banaji, author of Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, says that its impossible to live in our world and not have cultural, racial and gender biases. In fact, she says, by age three, most children have begun to show biases similar to adults. The way to solve for this? Admit that [bias is] going to show up and you need to correct for it by just assuming that you are going to be biased, says Banaji. Because 80 percent to 90 percent of people show bias on our tests.

Mike Kaufmann, CEO of Cardinal Health, is well aware of that, which is why he reaches out to others to keep him honest. I surround myself with people I call truth-tellers, including some of our employees as well as individuals outside the company, he says. These are folks who I know are not going to tell me only what I want to hear. They give me the hard feedback on biases they might see in me and tell me how others are experiencing the choices were making in the work setting.

Kaufmann is working hard to advance diversity in the senior ranks and keeps a close eye on data. Around the world, nearly 40 percent of management-level employees and 51 percent of professionals are women. In the U.S., 25 percent of executives and 23 percent of managers are ethnically diverse. He requires diverse slates for all director and above positions and established a D&I steering council made up of senior leaders from across Cardinal Health who are charged with identifying anddiscussing barriers to D&I and challenging the status quo. All managers are required to take unconscious bias training.

Last February, before the shutdown, Kaufmann took his leadership team to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum that honors thousands of victims of lynchings and slavery. We left those sites humbled and changed and with a continued commitment to speak out about racial injustice, he says, adding that each CEO has to determine the best way to build a diverse and inclusive culture that is right for their company. Theres no one-size-fits-all. You have to thoughtfully create a multi-layered, multi-dimensional program that continues to grow and evolve with your organization.

All the CEOs interviewed acknowledged the difficulty in addressing racism in the workplace, particularly given how politicized the conversation around inclusion has become. But they also affirmed that CEOs, statistically majority White and male, cant wait to start talking about race and gender until they feel comfortablebecause they likely wont. I hear, I dont want to look foolish, I dont want to say something inappropriate, I feel awkward or Im not the right person, says executive coach Paul Eccher, CEO of Vaya Group, who works with clients on these issues. All of those are normal feelings, he reminds them, particularly for leaders who are self-aware enoughto know theyve lived a different life experience, a lot of this doesnt even make sense to them, and they grew up in a time when it wasnt talked about.

You may not feel entitled to make big bold statements about race, he adds, but youve got two ears, one mouth, so set up the venues to listen within your organization.

Keep in mind that who you are today, is a culmination of all your lifes experiences, says Michael Fichtel, CEO of Florida law firm Kelley Kronenberg. Certainly, I dont profess to have grown up in an environment where I can appreciate some of the things that other diverse groups or minorities have experienced. But I can read about it. I can study it. I can speak to people, and I can learn.

Fichtel says the firm has long made diversity a priority, but this past June decided to formalize it with a new D&I program and a new committee tasked with seeking out and utilizing employees diversity in ways that bring new and richer perspectives to the firm and its clients.

It is critical to stay humble on this journey, adds Fichtel, and to be prepared to admit mistakes when they happen. Because you are going to make mistakes. We all know that success doesnt come without some failures. Any successful CEO running a business knows that he or she has to take risks. So you treat it like you would any other issue in running a business you take chances and then learn from your mistakes along the way.

Originally posted here:
How Eight CEOs Are Making Diversity Happen (Really) - Chief Executive Group

On sitting out the new culture wars – The Week

The other day I had what Sam Leith has referred to in a slightly different context as "one of those hall-of-mirrors moments."

There I was, reading up on what a journalist unjustly pushed out of his left-wing muckracking gig (one with whom I disagree about nearly everything) had to say about the forced resignation of a reporter from a newspaper I no longer read over the meta-ethics of using a racial slur in a non-derogatory context during a field trip for rich kids to South America that probably cost more than six months of my mortgage. Then I checked my social media "feed" an appealingly porcine image, I now realize to discover that my attention was needed elsewhere. An actress who rose to prominence in a sport I loathe had been fired from a television program I have no plans of ever watching on an online streaming platform that I would never subscribe to for employing a tired but once-popular Holocaust-derived analogy in an argument about well, I really don't know, but I was supposed to be thrilled that she is now engaged in an unnamed new film venture with another journalist whose work I despise. Sandwiched between these two incidents was at least one other pseudo-controversy involving the inconsistent application of privacy rules at the aforementioned paper. It led to a once-pseudonymous blogger, who was supposed to be the subject of an abandoned profile, outing himself and then being written about in a somewhat nastier manner by the same publication. This in turn gave rise to dozens of impassioned defenses of the unlucky scribe by countless other 40-something male bloggers, including one prominent defender of polygamy.

"What the hell am I doing with my life?" I thought. In all of these and goodness knows how many other cases or whatever the word is supposed to be for these extended online roleplaying sessions, what was being elicited was an intense fury that, upon a moment's reflection, I realized I did not actually feel. This is not because I do not care about truth or justice or any of the rather grand-sounding words trotted out by online philosophes whenever we do these things, but because even when I squint and see how they enter at least proximately into the incident, it is not clear to me what my being outraged would accomplish. If anything, one suspects that by expressing my own anger, I would be giving tacit assent to the modish outrage that seems to be the only means by which we have public conversations in this country.

There are practical considerations here as well. One is simply a matter of what might be referred to as "coalition building." I am a social conservative with certain clearly defined and indeed rigidly held views about issues that are more serious than any of these epiphenomenal personnel disputes by several orders of magnitude. I do not wish to cheapen, for example, my opposition to abortion by making it synonymous with the hypothetical rights of gamers to enjoy unproblematized (as their opponents might put it) depictions of violence against women on their XBoxes. Yet this is precisely what seems to be happening. On current trends it seems likely that in five years most right-of-center public discourse in this country will take the form of blog posts full of sentiments like "This two-spirit furry blogger might want to legalize bestiality, but at least he has the courage to admit that the sky is blue." The fact that, in a contest whose basic premise I reject, one side might be slightly guiltier than the other of various procedural offenses does not require me to enter referee mode and declare one the winner by T.K.O.

I understand that professing my indifference to so-called "cancel culture" to utter at last the dreaded phrase is likely to be met with accusations ranging from seemingly righteous anger (how dare you be indifferent to truth?) to the somewhat more reasonable one of hypocrisy. It is certainly true that if I totally refused to engage with these questions I would not be able to write for this website. But I do this only under duress, and with a conscious resolution not to engage when there is no clear issue of justice involved. (This is why I have no trouble defending the high-school student slandered in early 2019 by CNN and The Washington Post, who was rightly awarded damages in the seven-figure range). I have failed in this as in so many other resolutions more times than I could count. But the objective, a studied disinterestedness that allows me to stand neither above nor below but simply very far away from these tawdry spectacles, still seems to me worthwhile.

Here I think the best way of illustrating my point is to mention yet another recent example of the tendency I am simultaneously decrying and refusing to engage with: the increasingly commonplace and utterly ludicrous contention that Western art music is the product of some kind of white supremacist conspiracy that is perpetuated every time someone praises or even listens to a work such as Fidelio. Attempting to rebut a person who says that Beethoven was merely an "above-average" composer and that the centrality of tone in 19th-century music is a racist plot is a mug's game. One's intended interlocutors are simply not arguing in good faith.

There are only three conceivable responses to such idiotic assertions. The first, that of the indefatigable John McWhorter, is to attempt meaningful adult conversation, which is a bit like trying to convince someone making fart noises that your preferred translation of an 11th-century Japanese court romance is worth reading. The second is performative indignation. This often feels good and occasionally allows us to enjoy feelings of camaraderie. But among other things I worry that when something becomes a wedge issue in these culture-war arguments, sooner or later the actual object in this case the music of Beethoven recedes into the horizon, merely instrumental if not irrelevant. (This is a familiar pattern in the so-called "canon wars" of the last few decades: The entire modern history of the conservative movement might as well be the story of otherwise intelligent 20-somethings devoting their lives to defending "the products of Western civilization" without betraying even the slightest familiarity, much less sincere interest, in this vaguely defined corpus.)

The third possible response is the one that seems to me the most reasonable. It is silence. Never mind the other considerations. The truth is that I cannot change the fact that all of America's institutions political, economic, cultural are controlled by mendacious philistines. But I can ignore these people, robbing them of the only thing that really matters to them: their ability to impose their will upon me and millions of others who belong to an implied audience they do not deserve and which, absent our unforced participation, would not enjoy. Truth and beauty exist in a realm beyond the Twitter troughs of half-literate journalists.

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On sitting out the new culture wars - The Week