Back in August Johnson posted his thoughts about “The Unusual Hashmi Case”. A 2003 graduate of Brooklyn College, where Johnson is on the faculty, Syed Fahad Hashmi is being held on charges of providing material assistance to Al Queda. But the focus of the post isn’t Hashmi’s situation, it’s the efforts of two of his former instructors to protest the conditions of his detention, pursued under the banner Educators for Civil Liberties. It’s too bad that people who organize these fights against injustice are drawn to expansive names like that. The Organization for Truth and Fairness from the lacrosse case is a classic of the genre. Hashmi’s supporters weren’t that grandiose, but one case, no matter how serious, is not a surrogate for the whole realm of civil liberties.

A petition is central to the effort, and I have to admit I cringe at the thought of another statement of concern making the faculty rounds—the Support Bill Ayers petition I mentioned in the last post shows how strong the bandwagon effect can be with those things. The one for Hashmi is quite a bit more focussed and substantive, though. The main issue is the special administrative measures dictating that he’s to be held in solitary confinement and severely restricting his communication with anyone, including his attorney. The petitioners believe these measures are excessive and unnecessary and should be lifted.

Johnson has nothing good to say about the undertaking, but he’s particularly hard on “[the] commentary about the case’s possible effects on free speech and the academy” from Hashmi’s former instructors. I don’t have the background to fully judge the legal issues, but it seems to me that Johnson’s most convincing point is about how constitutionally protected speech and associations are valid evidence of a defendant’s “state of mind.” And in general the petitioners’ claims are more speculative and probably weaker as they turn from Hashmi’s plight to the chilling effects of the case on activists or in the classroom. According to Johnson, this amounts to “cross[ing] over from one-sided to merely bizarre.” That’s overstating the problem quite a bit. In fact, it strikes me as a better characterization of Johnson’s attack on the petitioners.

The first version of Johnson’s post is as one-sided as anything Hashmi’s supporters produced, and it’s no credit to Cliopatria, the high-minded blog for academic historians where it was posted. Like the Ayers/Khalidi piece I wrote about last time, a rewritten and expanded version appeared on Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), Johnson’s blog about the lacrosse case. In this case the time lag was much longer, the extent of the changes much greater. The result is much more narrow-minded and polemical, so it fits right in on DIW.

It seems like some of the legal issues that Johnson has been so insistent about in his analysis of the lacrosse case would carry over. The two cases are quite different, and I’m not suggesting that he should necessarily have approached the Hashmi case with exactly the same attitude and exactly the same issues as he brought to the lacrosse case. But terrorism, like sexual assault, demands a difficult balancing act from the justice system, one that’s vulnerable to political manipulation and abuse. Something could be made of the parallels, I’m sure. For Johnson, though, the only connections worth making are in the realm of the academic culture crusade. It seems that his approach to the legal issues in the Hashmi case is largely determined by the professors he’s attacking—what they stand for, he opposes. In his view, the fact that the claims of the two organizers have been endorsed by so many other professors, “says more about the rush-to-judgment attitude of the academy than any violations of civil liberties by the government.” That rush-to-judgment attitude is at the heart of Johnson’s case against the Duke faculty, and what really ties Hashmi’s petition to the obsessions that drive DIW is that, among the signatures, Johnson found “no fewer than eleven members of the Group of 88” (as always, the “Group” is where the action is). The table-thumping rhetoric is a DIW staple—if only Johnson could brandish a sheaf of papers the demagogic effect would be complete. [Here’s what Johnson has to say about the differences between the Cliopatria and DIW posts.]

I’ve picked out a few of the highlights (or lowlights)—unless noted, quotes are from the DIW post. Besides Johnson’s own “rush-to-judgment attitude” towards the charges against Hashmi, what’s striking about the critique is how primitive a lot of it is. He’s a remarkable specimen, though—an anti-intellectual intellectual who assumes that the people he’s criticizing are as shallow and monomaniacal as he is.

• Rushing to judgment is a no-no… except when it gives your argument more rhetorical bite. Berating and denouncing guilt-presuming professors is a major preoccupation on DIW, but apparently the standard that applies to comments about the Duke lacrosse players doesn’t extend to Hashmi:

  In 2006, a former Brooklyn College(!) student named Syed Fahad Hashmi was arrested in Britain on charges of providing material assistance to Al Qaeda. At the time of his arrest, Hashmi sought to travel to Pakistan, carrying with [him] such items as a large amount of cash, night vision goggles, and sundry military apparel. Hashmi is currently awaiting trial in the United States, which is holding him without bail.

  These incriminating details, which weren’t in the Cliopatria post, make the case against Hashmi sound quite strong—it’s hard to imagine why anyone would be taking piles of cash and night vision goggles to Pakistan except to help terrorists. Johnson’s sources don’t inspire much confidence, though. His first link is to an MSNBC article that cites, first, “a terrorism expert and NBC News analyst” and then “Law enforcement sources.” The information about the goggles is “based on a USA TODAY review of public records and reports from Justice, Commerce and the Pentagon.” Wasn’t one of the lessons of the lacrosse case that sources like this should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism, since prosecutors and investigators are known to overstate their case, and “Experts can have agendas, too”?

  Johnson seems to have some reservations about the case against Hashmi:

  Given the Bush administration’s record on civil liberties in terrorism-related cases, it’s possible to believe that Hashmi has suffered improperly. […]

  The Chronicle of Higher Education, a non-partisan, non-ideological journal that covers college and university issues, produced an article that appropriately described the case against Hashmi as “murky.”

  Commenter “One Spook” objects that “the prosecution has said very little about its case,” which “could very well mean that it is quite strong.” In response, Johnson backpedals:

  I agree with you completely. By “appropriately murky,” I only meant to say that the facts known publicly—facts largely, as you point out, framed by the defense—don’t point to any clear case of either civil liberties violations or likely innocence.

  That’s a strange claim to make after presenting the essence of the government’s case as unqualified fact. The Chronicle article by Allie Grasgreen is more detailed and more circumspect (It’s no longer available for free at the magazine’s web site, but here’s a pdf). Though she was only able to interview Hashmi’s attorney (the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment), there’s no imbalance of “facts largely… framed by the defense.” What Grasgreen describes as “murky,” anyway, is the government’s allegations.

  The details in the indictment against Mr. Hashmi are murky. Among the four counts are allegations that he conspired with unnamed persons to provide “material support or resources”—including money and military gear—to co-conspirators who delivered the materials to Al Qaeda members in Pakistan. The materials were to be used by Al Qaeda against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the indictment says.

• Expect self-serving spin from a defense brief… except when the defense is arguing for your team.

  [P]olitical science professor Jeanne Theoharis, the statement’s author, has said that the signatories take no position on the merits of Hashmi’s guilt or innocence. Yet their petition and the remarks of the petition’s two chief sponsors (Theoharis and political science professor Corey Robin) read as if cribbed from a defense brief.

  That’s from Cliopatria—maybe even Johnson realized that DIW was not the place to scoff at someone else for sounding like a defense brief. As I already pointed out, there’s never been much critical distance between him and the various legal teams that have represented lacrosse players, not even after the action moved from criminal to civil proceedings. My impression is that Until Proven Innocent is the same—just scan the source notes for “Joe Cheshire interview,” “Jim Cooney interview”, and “Brad Bannon interview.”

  In December 2006, the defense’s request to change the trial venue for the three indicted students was, for Johnson, “yet another in a string of extraordinary defense motions.” A few days later he noted that he knew of “no other criminal case in which the statements and behavior of the students’ own professors constituted grounds for a change of venue.” He wrote more or less the same thing eight months later, but framed it more dramatically as “the first time in American history,” and he’s cited the motion on other occasions as damning evidence against the “listening” statement and its endorsers. But it was never considered in court, and it seems like even a sympathetic critic should be able to treat a defense motion as something less than an automatic slam dunk, even if it makes a compelling case (and this one does, on the back of Mike Nifong much more than the Duke faculty, though).

  More recently, with his Obama-partisan hat on, Johnson analyzed a 30-page motion from the defense as if it was the judge’s ruling in their favor, and more importantly, against Sarah Palin’s flunkies in the Alaska state legislature (it was a “Troopergate” thing). Scott Eric Kaufman should know better than to trust what Johnson says about his own sources, but the opportunity to really stick it to Gov. Palin was too good to pass up, and he let himself be fooled into posting “second-class, legally-mandated snark” instead of “first-rate, smack-down snark.”

• In the mind of the simple-minded extremists at Duke, guilt and due process are mutually exclusive. The name of one of those extremists, it seems, is so full of significance that it can stand as a complete sentence:

  Wahneema Lubiano. Her authorship of the guilt-presuming Group of 88 statement (something “happened” to Crystal Mangum; “thank you” to protesters carrying “castrate” signs; the signatories would hold firm “regardless of what the police say or the court decides”) didn’t exactly identify her as a friend of civil liberties.

  Based on their attitudes and actions since 2006, Lubiano and her Group colleagues would be about the last people expected to stand up for due process or the rights of the accused.

  Whether the “Group of 88 statement” (the “listening” statement, that is) is really “guilt-presuming” is a matter of opinion. But granting that it is for the sake of argument, how does a “guilt-presuming” statement that makes no legal demands and carries no legal authority automatically imply a position on civil liberties? It’s possible to believe someone is guilty of a crime and also entitled to due process. I imagine that in the right circumstances, even Johnson is capable of the mental gymnastics it takes to hold onto both ideas at once—lawyers have to do it all the time, don’t they? (The phrase “regardless of what the police say or the court decides” has nothing to do with the students’ civil liberties unless it was the prevalence of racism and sexism at Duke that the police were investigating.)

  Just as he assumes that Rashid Khalidi’s favoritism towards Arab-American students is categorical, Johnson assumes that Lubiano’s antipathy to the lacrosse players is all-encompassing. And it does seem like an extremist should have simplistic, unbalanced opinions, though assuming that the person under scrutiny is an extremist and therefore one-dimensional is about as superficial as a critic can get. If Johnson is taking such a superficial approach it would explain why he’s so confident that Lubiano’s agenda was tied to guilty verdicts being handed down in the lacrosse case and that Khalidi would have joined the “Group of 88” had he been at Duke. It’s easy to guess what simple people are thinking and what they’ll do, and if they’re black women it seems to be especially easy. Perhaps the assumption is that, unless there’s unambiguous evidence to the contrary, they’re in the grip of mindless identity politics—a principle that could easily be extended to Palestinians, as well.

• When criticizing extremist ideologues and other wrong-headed types, insist on simple-minded, slavish consistency. To some extent, this is a corollary to the last point—simple-minded extremists should be both predictable and consistent.

  The “attitudes and actions since 2006” of “Lubiano and her Group colleagues,” are in response to one outrageous incident. Why is it that they “would be about the last people expected to stand up for due process or the rights of the accused”? I agree that, on the whole, the professors he’s referring to weren’t concerned about due process when they should have been. But most people pick and choose when to get worked up about such things—just look at Johnson’s reaction to the Hashmi case. Nonetheless he acts as if the commitment of these Duke professors to due process is summed up by their attitude towards the one case he happens to have written 1200 or so posts and a book about. To sign the Hashmi petition, they must have “suddenly discovered civil liberties.” It’s a claim full of forced sarcasm, so it may be giving Johnson too much credit to treat it as something he’s actually thought through. But consider this (and while you’re at it, note the effect of sneer quotes in the abbreviation he uses for Hashmi’s petitioners):

  According to the “Educators,” Hashmi’s civil liberties also have been violated because “under a plea agreement reported in the media, [alleged Hashmi confederate Junaid] Babar will receive a reduced sentence in return for his cooperation.”

  … [I]t’s possible… that Babar is lying. But it’s very strange indeed to claim that all testimony obtained as a result of a plea bargain automatically violates the civil liberties of a suspect. If the “Educators” really believe this point, however, perhaps they should petition the court to overturn convictions of such figures as Martha Stewart, Enron executives, or WorldCom executives. After all, each of those cases (like the Hashmi case) involved testimony obtained from plea bargains.

  The suggestion that the “Educators” really ought to take up the cause of a bunch of white-collar convicts they presumably find odious is as ridiculous as it is obnoxious, but it has no bite. The dull-witted assumption behind it is that there are no meaningful distinctions to be made between the various cases—as far as Johnson is concerned, apparently, a plea bargain is a plea bargain is a plea bargain (and it does seem like he’s letting the label do his thinking for him). Offhand I can think of two reasons why it’s likely to raise more concerns in Hashmi’s case than in the other ones Johnson dredged up. First of all, it’s likely than the government had more leverage over Babar, so he faced a starker choice. Second, the restrictions on Hashmi’s defense may make it hard for him to challenge Babar’s testimony. And I’m confident that the plea bargains in the three white-collar cases were challenged vigorously in court. Here’s a little snippet from CNN’s coverage of the Martha Stewart trial (Douglas Faneuil was the guy who copped a plea):

  The stockbroker’s defense attorney, David Alfel (ph), then began his assault on Faneuil. The 28-year-old admitted to using drugs, including marijuana, cocaine and ecstasy. Faneuil also told the jury about his plea bargain for having lied to government investigators.

  Will Hashmi’s defense be able to level an “assault” on Babar’s credibility? Likely not, it seems to me, though of course I can only speculate.

  Along the same lines, Johnson “assume[s] that each of the signatories is committed to advocating the repeal of all hate crimes laws.” If not, their objection to the government’s use of constitutionally protected speech and association is inconsistent. And he’s incredulous because Tim Shortell, a hot-headed Brooklyn College professor who once called religious people “moral retards,” had signed on to support Hashmi. Apparently a moment of rhetorical excess at the expense of religion disqualifies the man from sincerely caring about either the civil liberties or the suffering of a religious person. The model of human thought and behavior at work here has been liberated from any trace of subtlety. It has very little to do with the real world, but on the plus side the criticism must be incredibly easy to write.

It’s depressing to see this stuff treated as intelligent criticism, and there’s plenty more where it came from. Even smart and educated people seem to approach the culture war with a tribalistic mindset, though, which means that it will always have a receptive audience, inside and outside academia.

It’s ironic that Johnson takes the time to describe the Chronicle of Higher Education as a “non-partisan, non-ideological journal” and then ignores the non-partisan and non-ideological message, except for the one detail that he misrepresents. I think the author of the Chronicle article is appropriately skeptical of the various claims from all sides, but in the end she doesn’t leave the impression that the case warrants such a dismissive attitude.

This part sums up the underlying dilemma, as I see it, pretty well:

Chris Zambelis works as a political analyst on Middle East issues for Helios Global, a Washington-based risk-analysis firm. Mr. Zambelis wrote about Mr. Hashmi’s arrest in 2006 for Global Terrorism Analysis, a newsletter published by the Jamestown Foundation, and he says “there’s no doubt” the government’s actions against Mr. Hashmi, including the special administrative measures, are completely warranted if the allegations involving Al Qaeda are true. But, he reiterated, that’s a big “if.”

“If you want to give the government the benefit of the doubt on this, if there is something substantive that they’ve found that they want to pursue, obviously they are right in holding onto him,” Mr. Zambelis said. “At the same time, there are a lot of mistakes and a lot of people get brought in and roped into these plots, and it turns out they had nothing to do with them.”

I think it’s foolish to come to any firm conclusion about a case like this from news reports—the murk is just too thick. Most of us will either go with our gut reaction to the superficial information available to us or take the lead of an expert we find credible (which, I have to admit, sometimes amounts to pretty much the same thing). Zambelis strikes me as credible—he at least seems to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, which is a major asset in my book. The extreme measures being taken against Hashmi while he’s awaiting trial are a separate issue. In that department, Michael Ratner (president of the Center for Constitutional Rights) carries some weight—in the Chronicle article, he describes Hashmi’s treatment as “incredible” and “outrageous.”

Johnson nonetheless finds “no items in the Chronicle article, the few other publications on the case, or any public statements by the signatories point to even one specific violation of Hashmi’s civil liberties.” Given how tightly held the details of the case are, I’m not sure what could be produced that he would find convincing. Johnson grants that “it’s possible to believe that Hashmi has suffered improperly,” and if so he’s suffered far more from it than the lacrosse players did and has much less recourse. Maybe all of this adds up to a coherent, principled stand, but I can’t make it out.

As I wrote this post, I was curious whether there have been any new developments in the case. Apparently not, but I did come up with a couple of heated opinion pieces about the case from Nat Hentoff. Near the end of his DIW post, Johnson makes a sarcastic reference to the “born-again civil libertarians” from Duke who signed Hashmi’s petition. Johnson seems to be a bit of a fair-weather civil libertarian, himself. Hentoff, on the other hand, seems to be the genuine article. It’s instructive to see how he works through some of the issues surrounding Rashid Khalidi, too.

CODA

The DIW post that went up right after I wrote this post has a variation on a plea bargain is a plea bargain is a plea bargain. “Crime & Punishment” is about Michael Burch, charged with the Feb. 2007 rape of a Duke student and recently charged with another rape allegedly committed while he’s been out on bail. An ugly situation, and it seems likely that some of the authorities handling the case didn’t do their jobs very well—the judge who set Burch’s bail at $50K, for instance.

But, as Johnson said in response to my previous post, “DIW is a blog about the lacrosse case and its effects,” a place to “focus on the lacrosse case angle.” He does that to the max in response to Burch’s rearrest. In his post, he lists the differences between the way justice officials and Duke faculty and administration reacted to the allegations against Burch and the way they reacted to the allegations against the lacrosse team. That involves rehashing the horrific record of Duke and Durham in some detail, with special attention to the indictments against the faculty. Johnson doesn’t theorize about why the reactions were different, except by implication. The difference that’s obviously significant is that in the Burch incident the accuser is white and the accused is black. No other differences—between the circumstances or the charges or the evidence or whatever—are treated as significant when considering the differences in the way the cases were handled. So, although DIW is all about how Duke and Durham did most everything wrong after the lacrosse incident, they still should have done exactly the same thing in response to this other incident. Divergences aren’t evidence of better (or worse) judgment or of different circumstances, they’re evidence of double standards. Because a rape allegation is a rape allegation is a rape allegation. Or maybe it’s only interracial rape allegations that are like that.

There are, I’m sure, valid and illuminating comparisons between the two rape allegations and their aftermath. Quite likely they highlight, among other things, how badly the lacrosse incident was handled. The grim reappearance of Burch in the news could be a fine chance for reflection on a lacrosse-case blog, but DIW is too mired in mindless but smug tribalism to pull anything of value from it. Another recent entry—“Amazing”—is a showpiece of rampant tribalism. It turns out that Bob Steel, chairman of Duke’s board of trustees, invested in the movie being made from Tim Tyson’s book Blood Done Sign My Name. I think there are quite reasonable criticisms of both men for their behavior during the lacrosse scandal—I’ve expressed my own reservations about some of the things Tyson has said. But true to his word, Johnson looks at the investment through the pinhole of lacrosse-case tunnel vision. The bulk of his entry is parallel instances of one of his classic rhetorical formulas, good for prosecuting, crusading, witch hunting, and other special demagogic occasions—“the same Bob Steel who…” and “the same Tim Tyson who…,” each followed by the sins of the man enumerated. The transaction, on DIW, has nothing to do with a book or the incident it’s based on or a movie-in-progress, and the two men involved are nothing more than the ugly characters revealed by the scandal. It’s a great way to nurse a grudge.

If you google obama ayers khalidi, what comes up is mostly the ranting of people already certain about who to be more afraid of. It was in the interest of the Republican side to make the most of the two professors’ radicalism and their ties to Obama, and anyway, radical professors are a favorite specter of the Right. The academic world’s reflex to circle the wagons and shout “McCarthyism” is represented by the fulsome petition at supportbillayers.org, and the list of over 4000 names under it. But not all Obama supporters were sympathetic to Ayers and Khalidi, and the first line of defense from his camp was to downplay the connection.

I noticed one person conspicuously trying to play on both sides of the fence, to make the most of the radicalism but downplay the connection—KC Johnson. Inside Higher Ed tags him as someone who’s “frequently criticized academe for a lack of political diversity” when he’s dragged in for balance in an otherwise soft-headed article “In Defense of Ayers”. In fact he approached the controversy about Obama’s radical pals the same way he’s approached the Duke lacrosse case, not as a critic but as a crusader rooting out the extremists of the academic Left. As I’ve pointed out ad nauseum about his lacrosse-case stuff, his crusading mentality reduces people and issues to cartoonish black-and-white, and his reasoning, evidence, and rhetoric are all compromised. His defense of Obama shows how in the grip of it he is, because it’s not really a defense, it’s an attempt to capitalize on the controversy in order to promote the academic culture war as a Democratic party agenda.

Inside Higher Ed picked up Johnson’s take on the controversy from a post on Cliopatria, a group blog on the History News Network. I imagine that one reason the blog exists is to give academic historians a place to editorialize, but it’s a shame to see it used as a soapbox for misrepresentation and simple-minded polemics—my opinion hasn’t changed in the months since my testy exchange with Ralph Luker, the chief blogger over there. A premise of the site is that “history is complicated,” and behind this controversy are the complicated histories of several complicated people. Ayers went from being a fugitive militant radical to being a key player in Chicago school reform, apparently acceptable in that context to establishment figures from both parties. Khalidi was attractive to the International Republican Institute (chaired by John McCain) in the mid-90s because of his “coolness to the PLO” but a decade or so earlier was apparently, despite his denials, speaking for the PLO (I like this post by Ron Kampeas, Washington bureau chief for the Jewish news organization JTA, grappling with the ambiguity after being forced to back down from defending Khalidi against the PLO-spokesman charge). Johnson wants the two as poster boys for academic extremism—not exceptional but typical—so it served his purpose to leave intact the simplistic and superficial impressions that were already in circulation and contribute a little spin of his own to the caricature of Khalidi. All in all it does nothing for Obama but it’s a nice little gift to the Republican operative Johnson quotes who wants Obama to “own his friendships with individuals that are in some cases anti-American, anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist.”

A couple of days after it went up on Cliopatria, Johnson posted a modified version of the commentary on his lacrosse-case blog, Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), and the rhetoric and agenda-driven reasoning are ramped up somewhat in the process. The same thing happens with another KC Johnson polemic that initially went up on Cliopatria, this one about a couple of Brooklyn College professors who’ve been petitioning on behalf of Syed Fahad Hashmi, a former student detained on terrorism charges. In that one, the crusading logic is even more obviously in the drivers seat, especially in the rewrite, which panders to DIW loyalists with cheap rhetoric that Johnson couldn’t get away with on Cliopatria (I hope). The funniest part is a line about statements made by Hashmi’s supporters that “read as if cribbed from a defense brief.” Has anyone covering a legal controversy ever written more “analysis” that sounds like a defense brief than Johnson?

[For more on the Hashmi case, read the next post. There’s a response to this paragraph from KC Johnson in the comments.]

The tribalism runs deep in DIW. Wherever you look over there, including at the legal teams and their arguments, one side seems to have cornered the market on whatever’s honest, decent, sensible, and worthwhile. Mike Nifong’s efforts were pathetic and dishonest enough that an unbalanced impression of the criminal investigation is probably unavoidable. But Johnson’s treatment of the ongoing lawsuits has the same cheerleading slant. The way he describes “The Duke Motion to Dismiss”, it’s cynical legal maneuvering, or else “(scarcely credible) p.r. spin” straight out of Creative Writing 101. The “powerful response” from the plaintiff’s attorney, on the other hand, is beyond reproach or even criticism—no legal maneuvering there. It may be that Duke’s position is so weak that it can’t do anything but grasp at straws. But it’s hard to believe that such a lopsided characterization is the result of serious analysis. I haven’t tried to size up the lawsuits, but on one point I happened to look up, both sets of plaintiffs offer pure spin.

Though it’s toned down, Johnson brings the same attitude to his support for Obama. During the primaries a major focus of his Cliopatria posts was the disingenuous and muddle-headed nature of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Among the variations on the theme, “Clinton’s Rhetoric and Reality” has her making absurd claims of sexism in her concession speech, “Clinton’s Constitutional Conundrum” has her pandering to Guam and Puerto Rico, and “The Clinton Dozen” details the “latest in [her] campaign’s effort to play the race card.” And then there’s the other Clinton, who, in “Bill Channels Wilentz,” “[advances the] bizarre thesis that Obama, not the Clintons, played the race card in the nominating process.” I expect that a lot of the criticism is fairly well founded, and it often comes with interesting historical tie-ins. But like the DIW account of the lacrosse lawsuits, the overall impression is that only one side is playing politics.

Johnson is very good at framing a controversy or dispute so that he can efficiently sort the good/right/true from the bad/wrong/false and play them off against each other, or just dwell on the bad, which is more typical. Things can get ugly if the frames overlap, though. A bad joke that a mutual reader tried to post to DIW shows how ugly: “just to rib [Johnson], I wrote ‘Can’t we all get along?’ and suggested that perhaps he and Crystal [Mangum (the accuser in the lacrosse case)] should get together to co-host a rally for Obama.” Plenty of crude humor makes it through Johnson’s “lightest of touch” comment moderation, but this time, somehow, it didn’t.

In his analysis of “Obama and the Khalidi/Ayers Attacks,” Johnson tries to play in both the culture-war and campaign frames and finesse the clash. It seems to have been an opportunity that was too good to pass up. His argument, in a nutshell, is that Ayers and Khalidi are so unexceptional and integrated in the “groupthink academic environment” that Obama couldn’t be expected to avoid them. In other words, the depth of the problem turns out, somehow, to be his candidate’s excuse. Oh, and by the way, the Democratic party better get with the program, because it was their “poor record in promoting diversity of thought and pedagogical approach on the nation’s college campuses” that made Obama vulnerable in the first place. Talk about having your cake and eating it too!

On DIW it’s “The Lacrosse Case & the Khalidi/Ayers Controversy.” Here’s Johnson letting Obama off the hook—text removed from the Cliopatria post is overstruck, text added for DIW is bracketed.

For the GOP attack to work, Ayers and Khalidi have to be viewed as exceptional figures[—wholly unlike nearly all other professors]. Obama’s judgment can hardly be questioned if his “buddies” were not marginal characters but instead people who are like [resemble] lots of other academics, especially since Obama lived in an academic neighborhood (Hyde Park) and spent several years teaching at the University of Chicago Law School.

Yet the truth of the matter is that the basic [pedagogical and academic] approaches of Ayers and Khalidi fit well within the academic mainstream. Ayers is, after all, a prestigious professor of education (hardly a field known for its intellectual diversity, of course [as I have explored elsewhere]). Khalidi was of such standing that Columbia hired him away from the U of C, and named him to chair its Middle East Studies Department. From that perch, [he presided over a wildly biased anti-Israel curriculum, even as] he informed readers of New York that students of Arab descent—and only such students—knew the “truth” about Middle Eastern affairs.

I lived in Hyde Park for six years, and I can’t tell you how many of my friends turned out to be unrepentant terrorists. Or, well, maybe I could… but I don’t have any political ambitions, so never mind. The DIW commentariat was no more more impressed than I am by Johnson’s clumsy sleight-of-hand, which insults not only the reader’s intelligence but the candidate’s as well. It would be understandable if it took a while before Obama realized that the Education professor putting together that big grant was once wanted for planting bombs in federal buildings—even in academia, believe it or not, that’s a singular bio. But Khalidi’s involvement with the Palestinian cause was ongoing and obvious, and over time it was the basis for conversations that included, by Obama’s account, “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.”

My impression is that Johnson’s fans mostly brushed the lame excuse aside. Rantburg sums up the real message of the post:

Prof. Johnson is certainly correct about the American academy: once you venture away from the hard sciences, you encounter a world in which people like William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, Ward Churchill and others like them are not just ordinary and common-place, but both accepted and powerful.

David Thompson thumps the same drum but at least has a little more imagination in conjuring up outrageous academic villains—after all, his banner promises comic books, and what could be more entertaining than vanquishing “far left fantasists” intent on “‘groom[ing]’ youngsters with the ‘correct’ political outlook”? (it’s a lot more fun than the actual research, that’s for sure).

The bone Johnson throws to DIW readers in the passage I quoted is the comment about Columbia’s “wildly biased anti-Israel curriculum.” Elsewhere, the revised version is sprinkled with references to Duke’s all-purpose band of extremist stick figures, the so-called “Group of 88.” Khalidi is, in Johnson’s account, not only overvalued and hostile to America’s true friend in the Middle East but also ready to pass dismissive and self-serving judgment on the students he’s supposed to be teaching. If that sounds a lot like the “Group” profile, well, lo and behold, a few paragraphs later Johnson reads his tea leaves and declares that “[i]f Khalidi or Ayres were employed at Duke, doubtless they would have joined the Group of 88.”

Johnson doesn’t give a link to that New York magazine article, but when I tracked it down I found that Khalidi’s comments are not nearly so clear-cut. True to form, Johnson whittled them down to just the bullshit that suits his agenda.

“Most kids who come to Columbia come from environments where almost everything they’ve ever thought was shared by everybody around them,” [Khalidi] says. “And this is not true, incidentally, of Arab-Americans, who know that the ideas spouted by the major newspapers, television stations, and politicians are completely at odds with everything they know to be true. Whereas kids from, I don’t know, Teaneck. Or Scarsdale. Or Levittown. Or Long Island City. Many of them have never been exposed to a dissonant idea, a different idea, as far as the Middle East is concerned. And so you have a situation where it’s going to be problematic.”

Whatever this is, it’s absolutely not a blanket claim that one group owns the “truth” and the other doesn’t. The essence of it is that one has experienced more dissonance than the other, which doesn’t seem like such a controversial claim. Are the Jewish-American kids who go to Columbia more likely than the Arab-Americans to come from a relatively homogeneous community in which they’re well integrated? I believe they are. And are the students of Arab extraction more likely than the Jewish ones to encounter views on the Middle East that clash with their own views? Yes—public and political opinion in the US is overwhelmingly pro-Israel. Now just because Khalidi’s basic claim is plausible doesn’t mean it’s right, and even if it is right the differences between the groups might not be as stark or as significant, in practice, as Khalidi seems to think—that’s where my skepticism really kicks in. But there are all sorts of ways to object to this passage without misrepresenting it.

The article is about the controversy over the classroom behavior of professors in Columbia’s Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC). It’s well worth reading—the reporter, Jennifer Senior, gives a good account of both sides. Khalidi is quoted extensively. He’s “passionately invested in the future of Mideast studies,” and therefore on the defensive, since he sees the charges against his department as a “huge club” that’s being used to attack the field as a whole. But he doesn’t dismiss the charges, which date from when he was still in Hyde Park palling around with Obama.

“You know,” he concludes, “it could be the case that there are students who have serious grievances and it’s the case that threats to our academic freedom have developed over the last two years. This is a situation where you have to assume it’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Johnson’s analysis of “Obama and the Khalidi/Ayers Attacks” was a daredevil attempt to walk and chew gum at the same time. He failed miserably—not a surprise, since his heart wasn’t really in it in the first place. His talents run in the opposite direction, towards mind-numbing moralistic either/ors, and in that department the differences between him and Sarah Palin are mostly a matter of vocabulary and accent.

• js mill conservatives stupid critique
• john stuart mill quote conservative stupid
• john stuart mill i didn’t mean to say that conservatives are stupid people
• i did not intend to suggest that all conservative people are stupid but i did intend to suggest that all stupid people are conservative.

There’s another cluster that doesn’t seem to be as historically informed:

• stupid conservatives
• why are conservatives stupid?
• conservatives are stupid jokes
• stupid things conservatives say
• every stupid person i know is a conservative

Like Obama said to Letterman, it’s silly season in American politics—it seems like we’re really outdoing ourselves this time. I’m guessing that’s the spirit behind most of those searches (I’m not sure what the spirit behind the search on “lawn guys are stupid” was, though). Nothing spreads election-season cheer like a discussion of the innate stupidity of the other side, especially when the theory is endorsed by a certified Great Thinker.

The long-winded googler was definitely wrong about what Mill intended to suggest, dumbing it down by exaggerating the relationship (and I’d be willing to bet the query didn’t come from a conservative). This quote, apparently from a letter Mill wrote to a Conservative MP, seems to be what the searcher had in mind (emphasis added):

What I stated was, that the Conservative Party was, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. Now, I do not retract that assertion; but I did not mean to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.

Mill was commenting on a tendency he observed in a political party in mid-19th-century England—capital-C Conservatives, who he considered not inevitably but generally stupid.

One objection I found to the philosophy professor’s wisecrack is that those Conservatives of yore were not conservative in the current sense of the word. And I found other suggestions, reading over that controversy, about what Mill probably didn’t mean to say. A recent New Yorker had an article by Adam Gopnik about Mill, and it has a fine paragraph about what Mill did mean to say (hat tip):

After Harriet’s death, Mill entered Parliament, in 1865, as a liberal backbencher, and did about as well as intellectuals usually do there. He was often hooted, and became notorious for having once described the Conservatives as “necessarily the stupidest party.” What he meant wasn’t that Conservatives were stupid; Disraeli, who was running the Tory Party then, was probably the cleverest man ever to run a political party, and Mill’s own influences from the right were immense and varied. He meant that, since true conservatism is a complicated position, demanding a good deal of restraint when action is what seems to be wanted, and a long view of history when an immediate call to arms is about, it tends to break down into tribal nationalism, which is stupidity incarnate. For Mill, intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one’s own case to consider it as one of many; a child becomes humanly intelligent the moment it realizes that there are other minds just like its own, working in the same way on the material available to them. The tribal nationalist is stupid because he fails to recognize that, given a slight change of location and accident of birth, he would have embraced the position of his adversary. Put him in another’s shoes and he would turn them into Army boots as well.

Applying that to the present is no trouble at all, which might mean that it’s not really Mill but Mill remixed according to Gopnik’s modern sensibility. Either way, our supposedly conservative president has just pushed through a massive public bailout of the banking system. Calling it “capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down,” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tx) sounds like the one demanding from his party some “restraint when action is what seems to be wanted.” And, turning from economic catastrophe to political farce, the nomination of a stunningly insular 44-year-old to be vice president—that looks like the problem of having “a long view of history [or anything else] when an immediate call to arms [or the pressing need to get elected] is about.”

And then there’s “tribal nationalism.” It’s not something that comes up in any of the passages I’ve read about Conservatives from Mill’s writings. But in Subjection of Women, he has this to say about stupidity and tribalism:

Stupidity is much the same the world over. A stupid person’s notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so those whose opinions and feelings are emanations from their own nature and faculties.

Whether it’s true to Mill or not, Gopnik’s line about the absurd significance given to an accident of birth captures my feelings about flag-waving, love-it-or-leave-it patriotism and a few other conservative staples. These days “stupid” is a vague and childish word, though—it’s a playground insult. If it’s replaced with “ignorant,” the ideas rings truer. And “tribal nationalism,” for the present, is as sensitive to internal red state/blue state borders as it is to international ones. With those caveats, I think the charge that “Barak Hussein Obama” is a closet muslim and that he pals around with terrorists—appeals to ignorance and fear as well as stupidity—are fine examples of the modern-day degeneration of conservatism into tribalism. It seems that it’s gotten so hot that it’s even burning McCain, and while he didn’t set all the fires, his campaign hasn’t shied away from fanning the flames—that’s what Palin is there for.

I have to admit that I get some satisfaction watching McCain struggle to tamp down the ugliness that he had apparently hoped to mobilize and then channel. But my side is quite capable of getting into the same kind of trouble—every so often the sans-culottes get riled up and want to chop off some Establishment heads. In the Duke lacrosse case—a pretty good microcosm of American culture-war politics—the strident, intolerant tone was set by zealots from the left, who went for a different part of Establishment anatomy (and if that doesn’t count as a stroke of sheer stupidity, I don’t know what would). Timothy Burke’s latest post, about how demoralizing he finds the “infinitely escalating spiral of spew from hardcore opponents of Obama,” drew a comment from a San Franciscan who keeps quiet about his support of McCain for fear of vandalism and ostracism. I wish I could think of a good reason to doubt him, but I can’t. The real problem, I’m afraid, isn’t conservatives, it’s people.

Google turned up a blog entry by David Friedman that sums up the facile political tribalism of internet debates. I think he’s right that human beings are wired to make that kind of in-group/out-group distinction. But it also seems self-evident that a genuine intellectual would reject tribalistic reasoning as a matter of course. Apparently that’s not the case, unless you make it part of the definition of “intellectual.” Judging from his blog, Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), you’d be hard-pressed to find a more committed tribalist than KC Johnson—in fact I feel like I’ve finally found the word that captures the relentless polarization of Johnson’s Wonderland. In an article I recently criticized, historian Alan Kors starts by idealizing academia as a place that’s utterly hostile to ideological tribalism but then turns to a political pitch that smacks of tribalism, or so it seems to me. It makes sense, I guess, that Erin O’Connor’s reacted to my criticism by confusing me with a whole tribe of “critics.” But before I get to that, a look at the dark side of team spirit…

One of the starkest incidents of tribalism stirred up by rape allegations against the Duke lacrosse team was literally about turf. A couple of weeks into the saga, a couple of Duke students at the Cook Out (a drive-through restaurant) were surrounded and physically assaulted by young men shouting that it was “Central Territory,” referring to historically black North Carolina Central University, where Crystal Mangum, the team’s accuser, was a student. Mangum’s graduation last month provoked a strident op-ed in the Duke Chronicle by Kristin Butler, and the rhetoric of tribal antagonism has flared up again.

You don’t have to go far to see what a hot button Butler pressed—the 500-plus comments that follow her column make it pretty clear. She told Eric Ferreri of the News & Observer that “she’s surprised by the level of reaction she has received, but regrets only that her writing didn’t spark a more constructive dialogue.” Writing that she’d “never again take an NCCU degree seriously, and neither should any other self-respecting Dukie” because “NCCU’s ‘seal of approval’ no longer guarantees good character” wasn’t an invitation to constructive dialog (and since when have colleges been handing out diplomas that guarantee the good character of their graduates?). As she frames it, the problem is that NCCU has done things that are hostile and insulting to upstanding Dukies such as herself. She makes a number of good points that transcend that frame, but her interest in them, and in NCCU in general, pretty much starts and ends with whatever happens to impinge on Duke.

Butler’s chauvinism is most obvious when she writes about Solomon Burnette, a notorious enemy of Duke who graduated from Central last year.

Burnette, you may recall, robbed two Duke students at gunpoint in 1997. After finishing a 13-month prison sentence, he had the audacity not only to enroll in Arabic classes on our campus in April 2007; Burnette also penned a column I and many others interpreted as inciting physical violence against white Dukies in his student newspaper.

Burnette’s column is a nasty piece of work, for sure. The paper’s editors must have some discretion in choosing editorials, and it’s mind-boggling to me that they rationalized this one. NCCU chancellor James Ammons made it clear that, unlike Burnette, he believed that “the facts do matter in this case and every legal case and violence is not the answer.” My understanding of the first-amendment advocacy of groups like FIRE is that toleration for outrageous, irresponsible, and ignorant self-expression like Burnette’s is the real test of our commitment to freedom of speech. Perhaps his suggestion that violence is, in fact, the answer puts him over the line—it’s something that Butler could have argued, anyway, instead of dwelling on just how scandalized she is.

Rev. Carl Kenney, a Duke divinity school graduate and freelance writer, stepped in as Butler’s opposite number, more or less. But Kenney’s reaction also reflects his ambiguous history as an African American who attended Duke. It seems that the choice didn’t sit well with some black Durhamites who weren’t shy about letting him know just how they felt. After working to moderate that reflexive distaste for Duke, Butler’s column left him “feel[ing] like stuffing [his] head in the sand.”

Kenney’s sense of betrayal has a counterpart in the racially-charged animosity that bubbled over into violence early in the scandal. The Cook Out incident and other threats directed at Duke students led to a heightened security consciousness around campus, and according to Charles Piot, Duke’s black male students came under suspicion and scrutiny. Tribal logic is especially hard on the folks with divided or ambiguous loyalties, who don’t obviously fit in one place or the other.

But it seems to me that Kenney gives in to tribal logic, too. He makes little if any effort to separate what I think are natural and appropriate questions about Mangum’s status at NCCU from Butler’s way of raising them. Knowingly making a false felony accusation is a felony for a good reason—it’s terribly destructive. It’s easy to get fixated on the drama of poor black woman vs. rich white men (adding adjectives to taste) but the damage spreads to women who have been raped and those who will be in the future, and it spreads to communities and institutions—the scandal ground its way through Durham as tabloid news and, as NCCU alum W. Russell Robinson says in his response to Butler, “everyone lost” (with that point and several others Robinson seems, to my ear, to be saying that it’s time to set the tribalism aside). Mangum wasn’t held legally responsible for the damage, and as Butler points out it seems that she wasn’t accountable to NCCU’s honor code, either. Instead she’s been awarded a degree in “police psychology.” It’s not clear what sort of major that is—I can’t find any mention of it on NCCU’s web site, which is odd. It’s drawn plenty of bitter sarcasm (“Police psychology? If it includes conning cops, she’s at the top of her class.”). Peel away the sarcasm, though, and there are reasonable questions that a degree in, say, Visual Communications wouldn’t raise.

Kenney believes that Mangum is just “a person getting a second chance after a mistake is made.” As far as I’m concerned she deserves a second chance as much as anyone else. But a second chance implies a fresh start, and with the dust still settling on the scandal and no sign that she’s faced up to her responsibility for it, it’s hard for me to believe that she’s reached that point. It’s not something I can settle one way or the other. What is clear to me is that it’s a situation that should be open to discussion, that calls for some reflection—more than a shrug (“she earned the credits, so here’s the diploma”) or tribal defensiveness (“she’s one of us so leave her alone”). I don’t know exactly how they should go about it—Ferreri mentions privacy laws that restrict the information NCCU can make public about Mangum or any other student, so they can’t and shouldn’t just open her files to the public—but surely there are ways for the school and its community to show that they’re grappling with the issues raised by her conduct. Maybe that would even dampen a little of the free-floating indignation.

I see that while I’ve been puttering away, KC Johnson has put up a post of his own about three reactions to Butler’s column—Kenney’s and two that I haven’t read. One must be in print but not on the web, since there’s no link, and according to the little note Johnson appended to his post, the other one was taken down soon after his went up. Someone posted it in the comments, though, so it’s not gone. Thank goodness.

Johnson’s latest is a by-the-books DIW post of a particular type, running down a list of critics. Tribalism is the main order of business—letting you know who’s wrong and cataloging their failings so you know just how wrong they are. Four numbered items this time—bang, bang, bang, bang. For people keeping score, it seems like a convenient format, though the score must be so lopsided by now that it’s hard to imagine anyone would still care. It seems to be less important to dwell on who’s right—it’s not like there’s any doubt. In this case Johnson just reminds his readers that Butler is an award-winning student journalist and leaves it at that.

He shows once again that he’s never more insistent about the value of facts than when he’s found one he can use to discredit an opponent. Only a certain kind of person would use a “damn-the-facts” argument. And only a true Wonderlander like Rev. Kenney would “fantastically assert” (or claim, demand, wonder, etc.) anything. Johnson and I seem to more or less agree on one thing, at least—some soul-searching on the part of NCCU would be a good thing.

Last week, Erin O’Connor responded to criticism of Alan Kors’ article, “On the Sadness of Higher Education” (originally in the New Criterion, but the full text is available from the Wall Street Journal). She’s

shocked by the amount of vitriol that was slung in Kors’ direction, not least because the academic establishment, if it does nothing else, readily grants authority to analyses based on personal experience and is so friendly to reflective memoirs that it even tolerates a few that have been exposed as fabrications. But Kors is no Rigoberta Menchu, and critics accord him no such authority.

Where did all this “contemptuous dismissal” come from? She gives two links. One is to a post of mine. The other is to the comments on a post in Timothy Burke’s blog, where there are lots of unflattering generalizations about conservatives but I’m the only person with anything to say about Kors’ article—possibly the only one who read it. O’Connor also points to comments on her original post about the article, where Mike cogently suggests that Kors “go[es] off the deep end” on one specific point, and Luther Blisset briefly outlines a more sympathetic perspective on the developments that Kors decries. The most far-reaching criticism is again from yours truly. I did quick Google and Google blog searches and found a number of people who clearly admired the article and only one mild objection—incidentally, part of a thoughtful post that takes on more urgent issues in higher education than the one I’m going on about.

So it seems I’ve become “the academic establishment,” or at least the bulk of it. As Wayne would say, I am not worthy! For one thing, I’ve never accorded a shred of authority to Rigoberta Menchu, haven’t given her any thought at all beyond reading the name here and there. And I’ve never ranked higher than Visiting Instructor—I hope the new title comes with a raise.

It’s disconcerting enough that O’Connor seems to be responding mostly to me but refers instead to “critics” without mentioning my name. What’s even stranger is how little she has to say about what I actually wrote. It’s true that I was sarcastic at times, and no doubt it annoyed her that I wondered out loud if a followup comment I left on her blog didn’t appear because she wanted to “duck the challenge.” But “contemptuous dismissal”? “Vitriol”? I don’t see it. I thought I made it clear that I admire the resonant case Kors makes that a wide-ranging, open-minded dialog of perspectives is the essence of academic intellectualism, even though I don’t understand why he sets the ideal aside when he turns to his political agenda. I quote examples of perspectives on the “therapeutic university” that, in counterpoint with his, suggest a more rounded understanding of the situation. I hoped that part might drum up some more constructive responses, but none of it seems to have registered with O’Connor, nor did the substantive points made by Mike or Luther or any other elusive “critics” floating around in cyberspace.

It’s clear that O’Connor has a great deal of respect and admiration for Kors, and that she’s moved by the “hopeless and defeated” tone of his essay. No problem there—that sort of personal reaction is good blogging material, and people should speak up for their friends. And I suppose looked at that way, it’s fine to point out that he’s “winding down a long, genuinely important career” during which he’s been “one of the most important and influential crusaders for free inquiry that we have.” But to O’Connor these points are not just personal appreciation, they’re somehow an answer to the “critics.” Kors’ fine qualities go hand in hand with the qualities of others who contribute to the “good fight—the fight that organizations such as FIRE, ACTA, the NAS, and individuals such as Mark Bauerlein and KC Johnson fight.” FIRE gets a rhapsodic paragraph, in which she remarks that in the time since it was founded by Kors and Harvey Silverglate, it has “definitively shaped the fair-minded defense of individual rights and free expression on campus… [and] given hope to those who want to believe that higher ed can be saved from itself, and who think it’s possible for the academic world to be usefully and substantively reformed for the good of all.” She’s standing with her tribe, in the firm belief that virtue is on their side.

And then there’s my tribe—the “academic establishment,” “critics” who adore Menchu but dismiss Kors, who deal in “vitriol” and “contemptuous dismissal.” “[H]ard core, uninformed cranks [who] continue to insist that FIRE is a right-wing organization devoted to advancing a right-wing agenda.” No doubt there are critics and cranks like that, but as far as I can see they aren’t involved in this little discussion. Based on my limited experience, supporters of FIRE seem to think that any and all criticism is outright dismissal or condemnation. All I’ve done is to question the highly partisan treatment of the lacrosse case on FIRE’s web site and poke a little fun at the rhetorical excesses of its cofounders. I have to wonder what sort of disclaimer it would take to keep from being lumped with the “hard core, uninformed cranks.”

I’m used to the tribalistic lumping, though no one has found a stranger or more furtive way to do it than O’Connor. It’s usually much more overt. The post KC Johnson wrote to introduce me to his readers started with a ten-paragraph narration of the “long, and torturous, path” of the “Group of 88 rehab tour”—a list of about a year’s worth of seemingly inexcusable and muddleheaded efforts to “rehabilitate the Group from its rush to judgment.” Finally, “[t]he latest stop in the Rehab Tour, a series of posts by Duke Music professor Robert Zimmerman.” I had no personal involvement with anything he lists and no contact with the other professors. But his readers are primed and ready for yet another of those kind of people. It’s easy enough for them to line up much of what I say with their reflexive beliefs about the tribe and whatever doesn’t line up can be ignored. Not that I’m complaining—it’s good for laughs and usually validates my analysis. And there are always a few people who are more curious and open-minded.

Johnson cultivates the tribalistic atmosphere but leaves its coarser aspects to his readers, many of whom happily answer to a title—“blog hooligan”—that sums up the violence and intolerance of tribalism remarkably well. And when it comes to conspiracy theories, the us-against-them mindset is just the ticket. Of the things that have been said about me, this is a personal favorite, from a couple of weeks ago:

If I were an attorney representing any of the plaintiffs in the lax civil suits, Zimmerman would be on my deposition list. He has been poking into what the Klan of 88 did and corresponding with at least some of them (or their enablers).

I can’t really explain how off the wall that is, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. What’s funny is that she (I’m guessing) starts with a reasonably astute analysis of my “modus operandi” in leaving comments here and there. Maybe it’s someone from the bowels of the poststructuralist humanities—someone who’s sophisticated at parsing texts—gone undercover to plant blatant evidence of the “faux juridicalism” that Robyn Wiegman, Wahneema Lubiano, and Michael Hardt wrote about.

It’s not just blog hooligans who are inclined to imagine the “Group of 88” and it’s “enablers” and “sympathizers” as a nefarious tribe. Apparently it’s possible to deplore the hooligans and still insist that Duke’s atrocious reaction to the lacrosse incident has an undeniable tribal “vibe”, or discount my analysis of people and things from Duke on the assumption that I’m acting out of tribal loyalty, or something very close to it. It’s only good sense to be skeptical about my loyalties and my objectivity, but skepticism can also turn into just another excuse to be dismissive.