The fox in liberalism’s henhouse

Critical race theory and the identity left presented themselves as updated anti-racism, but underneath the jargon was a clean break with liberal individualism.

Charlie the fox is not concerned at all about sharing a hen’s roosting pen. Here he is tucked up with his friend. March 18, 1955. (Photo by Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

There are many open, full-frontal assaults on liberalism. Conservatives, fascists, and communists have all attacked different aspects of liberal values to different ends — from free markets to individual rights to freedom of expression to democratic self-government. In the postwar era, liberalism came out on top. But there are no permanent victories.

Modern liberalism was experienced at fending off challenges that announced themselves at the front door, but one of the most successful anti-liberal challenges crept through the side gate. Critical Race Theory and related identitarian ideas fooled many of us into thinking it was just a new, strange version of liberalism. These ideas fooled us in part because they were so poorly understood even by those arguing for them.

In this essay, I’m using “liberalism” in the philosophical sense: the view that the basic unit of moral concern is the individual; that institutions should be governed by general, neutral rules; and that rights and due process are core to justice. The illiberal ideas I’m critiquing, on the other hand, treat groups — particularly racial, gender, and sexual identities — as the real subjects of politics, see “neutral” rules as a cover for domination by whites and men, and redefine justice as rebalancing power between groups rather than protecting the freedoms and rights of all individuals.

What I’ve come to see in retrospect is that we were witnessing large-scale entryism of a deeply and explicitly anti-liberal program into liberal spaces. But it happened in a genuinely confused and confusing way.

Most of the people spouting these phrases and churning out the takes had no more familiarity with the source texts than I did. They were giving us a copy of a copy of a Tumblr post paraphrasing a summary of something Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote, not faithfully reconstructing the core ideas in their original context.

And these disembodied memes represented themselves to a somewhat older cohort of progressives as natural extensions of basic liberal commitments to tolerance and human equality, rather than the challenge to liberal individualism that they genuinely are.

One of the signature developments of the new woke discourse was the sentiment that “it’s not my job to educate you” and that asking probing questions was a form of trolling called “sealioning,” so it was often difficult to press people advancing novel claims with unusual vocabulary exactly what they meant. But it is actually my job to educate you, so when conservative activist Christopher Rufo launched his crusade against what he characterized as “critical race theory” in American institutions, I thought it might be good to read about it.

How the fox got in the henhouse