Kulturkampf

[benji]

A couple days ago Literary Hub, a well-regarded lefty arts publication that often publishes political takes, ran an article by Peter Coviello, the former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College and currently a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. Coviello’s article is about how, after former Bowdoin African Studies major Zohran Mamdani hit the spotlight, Coviello started getting inquiries from journalists asking what he remembered about him. (Coviello writes that he’s not sure he ever had Mamdani as a student, but might have.)

This part stuck out at me:

Beneath its humdrum requests, every email said more or less the same thing: Can you explain how reading certain things can turn a person into a socialist—and, possibly, a terrorist-sympathizing antisemite? It’s a storied gambit of the right at its most grimly predictable. “People read Foucault,” the redoubtable David Brooks once wrote, in an actual column that I’ve all but committed to memory, “and develop an alienated view of the world.” God, did I love this. An “alienated view of the world”! Not by, like, trying to pay rent or having an insurance claim denied—no, no, it was probably the Foucault you read in 2003. Anyway, it was clearly time to get the elaborate machinery of manufactured bewilderment and sour indignation up and running again. [emphasis in the original]

So I clicked the link to check the context of the quote. The column in question, written amid the heat of the summer of 2020, is about a pessimistic strain in lefty thought, particularly among black intellectuals:

Many conservatives and moderates say these ideas come from campus culture. People read Foucault and develop an alienated view of the world. The blunt facts, however, suggest that, overstated or not, these writers are responding to something real in the world, something real in the world both of the less educated and of the highly educated. People are responding to the failure of the mainstream, moderate, progressive formula for how to create a more equal pluralist America.

So Brooks is arguing against the notion that “People read Foucault and develop an alienated view of the world.” He’s presenting this as a view he disagrees with.

In the comments:

Freddie deBoer
5d

Yeah I look around at the state of the United States and think "the problem is Bowdoin professors"

Karen
A Feminist Changes A Lightbulb
4d

Have you ever read anything written by a right winger? Because if you think the Left has the bigger problem here, I have some news for you.

Resting
5d

Is it at all possible the LitHub piece was actually agreeing and appreciating David Brooks phrasing and making the same point? I can read the selection you quoted that way. It would of course be confusing to a reader unfamiliar with the column.

Bob Eno
4d

Mr. Nicholas, Once again, he did not get the quote wrong. He actually said nothing untrue -- David Brooks did write it, just as Coviello said. What Coviello did was either to misread or misremember Brooks' column and construe Brooks as stating his own idea rather than ascribing it to others and suggesting it was a common response to minimize statements of those reporting experiences of racism, which he'd come to feel was not legitimate.

If you've read the Brooks column I think you might agree that it is one of Brooks' most interesting but most unclear op-eds, and the ascriptive nature of the phrases in question relies entirely on the "however" of the following sentence. Recalling a column like that and mischaracterizing the phrase because of sloppy reading, memory, or self-fact check is the type of error that anyone who is not perfect can make. It is not a "pretty major error." It's an error *anyone of any ideological persuasion* could make, and that used to be the sort of lapse editors routinely saved authors from.

What's a pretty major error in my view is taking this screw-up and inflating it until it's a symptom of intellectual rot over the huge range of an entire side of the political spectrum. It's "gotcha," "pearl clutching," "bothsideism," or whatever stupid meme you want to invoke, and that sort of stuff is destructive -- it can play no role in getting us out of the insanity of the present moment. I read Jesse Singal because I take his project to be precisely getting us out of that insanity, and I think it's a lot more important to call him out on what I see as his error than to pile onto Coviello.