I can only read the discussion of "aggressive conformism" at the end as a giant subtweet of cancel culture. There's a real, and sudden, movement in the political center against this idea (c.f. the Harpers letter), and pg is clearly picking a side.
Which is fine, I guess. I personally didn't think the letter was so awful. It's hardly the worst problem in a world where we have federal paramilitary units being deployed to pick fights with hippies, but there are excesses (David Shor for sure shouldn't have been fired).
The problem is there's a baby vs. bathwater issue with the reasoning. The same people who spit bile about Shor are the ones who just pushed BLM from a fringe idea that couldn't get purchase into something approaching social consensus. Did anyone see the ballgame last night? What's your position on Kaepernick now?
It's complicated. There's for sure a generational skew here, most of the signers were older established voices[1]. While there was some diversity, there were very few truly progressive voices, and what ones there were tended to come out later expressing that they were mislead about the way the letter would be presented.
The text of the letter is hard to argue against. The context in which it was presented, and especially the way it was leveraged on the right as an "a-ha!" moment to disparage many of the demographics that were supposed to have "signed" it was quite different.
Republicans view that letter as an admission of guilt on the part of the left, when the intent was to call back absolutist rhetoric everywhere. It didn't work.
[1] From the perspective of the activist left: the powerful looking to suppress checks on their power from new voices.
Which is fine, I guess. I personally didn't think the letter was so awful. It's hardly the worst problem in a world where we have federal paramilitary units being deployed to pick fights with hippies, but there are excesses (David Shor for sure shouldn't have been fired).
The problem is there's a baby vs. bathwater issue with the reasoning. The same people who spit bile about Shor are the ones who just pushed BLM from a fringe idea that couldn't get purchase into something approaching social consensus. Did anyone see the ballgame last night? What's your position on Kaepernick now?