I don't know anything much about Julia Carrie Wong, the Guardian's San Francisco correspondent, except that she once rang a colleague in London at midnight British time to upbraid them in tears about a leader.
But Brad de Long, who is obviously very clever, was impressed by a tweet of hers on the Harpers' letter and I think that this very clever man was instructively wrong.
The trivial point is obvious. Wong was attacking Jonathan Chait who had described as "insane" Jonathan Franzen's excuse for refusing to sign the Harpers' letter last summer which denounced intolerance on the professional Left. She claimed that if he had only read the whole quote Chait attacked it would have been obvious that Franzen was right.
She is able to make this claim only because she herself ignores everything that comes in Chait's piece after the epithet she quotes, in which he does consider Franzen's argument carefully and smashes it up.
So much for the trivial point.
The serious point is that the whole row is about a habit of mind which cripples thought and judgment. So Jonathan Franzen says he did not sign the Harper’s letter, because, he explained
"I felt it could be construed as somehow an attack on Black Lives Matter at a moment when that was just not the thing to do".
This rather begs the question: when is the right moment to do something that "might be construed" as an attack on Black Lives Matter? Would he sign the letter now that almost everyone has moved five scandals on? Of course not. There is never a moment in contemporary America when your words cannot be twisted into an attack on causes you in fact believe in.
Sometimes this is because your words will be twisted by the other side. When that happens your language is twisted to sound more radical than it actually is. That would be hard work with Jonathan Franzen and why should anyone bother? More often the misconstrual will come from inside the house. The people who attack you for giving aid and comfort to the enemy are always, notionally, on your side.
This has a malevolent aspect: there is a huge pleasure to be had from finding and denouncing witches, heretics, and class traitors: the more they are outside, the more we must be on the inside. But it also has a curiously innocent aspect, a kind of play acting. Tests of ideological purity have almost nothing to do with political reality. Real change arises from some combination of alliances of interest and shared cloudy fantasy. Propositional belief has nothing to do with it. If the Brexiteers had stopped to discuss what Brexit was supposed to mean — beyond "Brexit" — they'd have been riven into a thousand hate-filled factions.
The process of twisting what you say to give aid and comfort to the enemy is wonderfully illustrated by the rest of Wong's tweets: she thinks that the signatories of the Harper's letter cannot really mean what they say — that if they claim they don't want one set of opinions suppressed, this can only really mean that they supported the sacking of some other bunch of lecturers.
A significant number of the signatories have gone on to form the pseudo-intellectual backbone of the anti-critical race theory movement, which has already resulted in history laws, book bannings, and firings - not resignations, not investigations that go nowhere - of teachers.
If I had, perhaps unwittingly or with the best of intentions, lent my name to a project that revealed itself to be creating a respectable veneer for a reactionary, racist, and anti-intellectual movement, I would do literally everything I could to denounce it and mitigate the harm
And I might ask myself what biases or mistaken ideas had led me to join the project in the first place, rather than denouncing those who had the perspicacity to see what was really going on in the first place.
The demand that those who disagree with her perform grovelling self-criticism is not just a perfect illustration of progressive authoritarianism; it's also a reductio ad absurdum of the claim that your enemies on the Left are really on the side of your enemies on the Right.
At the time that the Harper’s signatories spoke up against the illiberal left or however they want to phrase their cancel culture claims, BLM protesters were being brutalized by cops, at the urging of the president and many members of Congress and other elected officials.
There were mass arrests, brutal beatings, the constant deployment of chemical weapons, and calls from powerful people to unleash military force on an overwhelmingly peaceful movement. By the end of the summer, multiple protesters were dead at the hands of armed vigilantes.
Because whatever you can say about the US police and even the Republican party in its present neofascist incarnation, one thing is absolutely certain: they don't give a damn about letters to Harper's magazine. Pretending that they do is just a retreat into magical thinking, another sign of the confusion of the "progressive" faction of the Left today.