8 Quick Thoughts on the Emmett Rensin Suspension
Some quick thoughts on Emmett Rensin, who was just suspended from Vox because of his tweets.
- This is the second case in two weeks of a leftist being fired or punished by a liberal outfit because of the content of his tweets.
- Political publications have the right to impose a line in order to maintain the political line of the publication. The American Conservative gets to conserve, Jacobin gets to Jacobin, and Dissent gets to dissent (or assent, as old joke goes).
- Vox, however, claims not to be that kind of publication. As Ezra Klein says in his statement on Rensin’s suspension: “We at Vox do not take institutional positions on most questions, and we encourage our writers to debate and disagree.”
- In disavowing the sort of political line that avowedly political magazines take, Vox doesn’t say “anything goes.” Instead, it defaults to a different kind of standard, one that is more familiar to the tradition of liberal political theory and jurisprudence:
But direct encouragement of riots crosses a line between expressing a contrary opinion and directly encouraging dangerous, illegal activity. We welcome a variety of viewpoints, but we do not condone writing that could put others in danger.
- But here’s the thing: In tacking back and forth between its various iterations of the standard—”direct encouragement of riots,” “directly encouraging dangerous, illegal activity” and “writing that could put others in danger—Vox is reverting to a standard of speech restriction that is more draconian than that of the Supreme Court of 1968. In Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Court finally articulated what we think of as the modern liberal doctrine of free speech when it held that it was only constitutional for the government to prohibit speech when that speech “is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Not mere incitement but incitement that “is likely” to incite or produce imminent lawless action. As Gawker said in its writeup of the Rensin situation, “Have you ever seen any riots started by media Twitter? How about riots started by Vox stories? Slate riots? Gawker riots? No.”
- If there is a precedent for this type of standard, it is the Supreme Court’s terrible McCarthyism cases, where it was the “bad tendency” test that was upheld. That was a test that predated the famous Schenck case of 1919 (which established the “clear and present danger” test) and that was revived during the reactionary 1920s and 1950s. It basically allowed the government, in cases like Dennis v. United States, to criminalize and prosecute all sorts of speech on the grounds that it might produce some terrible results in a far-off distant future.
- Critics will respond, however, that we’re dealing here not with the government but with a magazine, which has no power to arrest, try, judge, or jail a citizen. Of course, the standard for a non-government institution should be looser. But that’s where the McCarthyism precedent becomes even more important: Remarkably little of the McCarthyite repression in the late 1940s and 1950s had anything to do with police, courts, judges, juries, or prisons. Or even with congressional inquisitions. The great bulk of McCarthyite repression was leveraged through workplace sanctions. During that era, fewer than 200 people were arrested or went to jail for their beliefs. Anywhere from 20 to 40% of the American workforce, by contrast, was subject to investigations, firing, and other modes of discipline for their beliefs. More generally, in the United States, it’s a longstanding political problem that employees can be fired for their political beliefs; it poses a genuine challenge to the notion that this is a free society. It is, as I argued in my first book, the essence of “Fear, American Style.”
- As I said, this is the second case of a leftist being fired or disciplined by a liberal outfit in two weeks. The first was Matt Bruenig. If you think these firings are all of a nothing, that they have no bearing on questions of political repression or political expression, ask yourself this: Why have we not heard a peep from Matt Bruenig since his firing?
Update (6:30 pm)
It occurs to me that some might misconstrue what I’m saying here, so I want to be clear. I’m not claiming that these two cases of leftists being fired or disciplined constitute a full-blown McCarthyism. McCarthyism was a concerted, organized campaign, from the top down and the bottom up, to purge a both powerful and ascendant left from all sectors of the American life.
The American left may be provisionally, very provisionally, ascendant—and I’m not sure I’d even go that far—but we’re hardly powerful. I’m dubious we’re about to see a comprehensive purge of the sort we saw in the 1940s and 1950s for the simple reason that there aren’t so many of us to purge.
The reason I invoked the McCarthyism parallel is, consistent with a longstanding concern of mine, to highlight how potent employment sanctions and workplace coercion can be as a mode of engineering political consent.
That said, what really is going on with these cases of Bruenig and Rensin? Skeptics or outright defenders of Vox and Demos will say that these two violated basic norms and that their being fired and disciplined has nothing to do with their leftist politics or the liberal-ish politics of their employers.
I’m dubious of that theory. For starters, if Vox’s standard is that no one who encourages dangerous, illegal activity that could put others in danger is eligible for hire at Vox, it might want to start by purging its very own founder and editor-in-chief Ezra Klein, who advocated for the Iraq War.
What both Bruenig and Rensin have in common is that beyond being on the left, they are visible, vocal, and in-your-face advocates of a left that is willing to confront the complacencies of contemporary liberalism, as embodied by outfits like Vox and figures like Neera Tanden, whom Bruenig had targeted. Neither Rensin or Bruenig is willing to abide by the chummy and plummy rules of contemporary journalism and political commentary. They’ve marshaled an almost constitutional inability to rub elbows with their colleagues and peers to a political advocacy that is as bracing as it is uncompromising.
Where these types of writers—and the conflict between liberalism and the left—are as old as the hills, it’s hard to overlook the fact that these two writers are visible and vocal advocates of Bernie Sanders. While the Sanders-Clinton campaign is hardly the stuff of epic political conflict, it has bruised egos, and made personal conflicts political and political conflicts personal. Particularly on social media. Unlike previous electoral campaigns, it has pitted the semblance of a nascent left against the remnants of a regnant liberalism. Or neoliberalism. That these two cases involve neoliberal players with real access to the Obama administration and connections to a possible Clinton administration only raises the possibility they’re not just a personal much of a muchness. It’s not just personal, in other words, and it’s not just about social media.
And that is where the McCarthyism parallel again becomes relevant. Not, again, because this is McCarthyism, but because McCarthyism was also a battle between liberalism and the left. As much as the most powerful forces behind it were on the right and the Republican Party, there were strong elements of McCarthyism that were about liberals purging the left.
Again, we’re not there: the left isn’t powerful, and liberalism—or neoliberalism—is not in much of a position to be doing anything except holding on. But as we move forward with more Sanders-style challenges to the neoliberal orthodoxies of the day, as they get more and more powerful, expect to see more of these types of firings.
Update (June 4)
The day after Vox suspends Emmett Rensin for one tweet about a riot, they post article after article in praise of Muhammad Ali, who in 1972 wrote an entire poem in defense of the Attica prison riots. A poem that said, in part:
Better for my fight to wage
Now while my blood boils with rage
Less it cool with ancient ageBetter violent for us to die
Than to Uncle Tom and try
Making peace just to live a lie
I try not to get too outraged at everyday hypocrisy and bad faith—down that path lies madness—but reading these encomia and eulogies by people who would have not hesitated to denounce Ali in his day, I find it hard not to vomit.
Update (June 4, 2:30)
I was wrong about Rensin being a “visible and vocal advocates of Bernie Sanders.” He’s certainly defended Sanders against his critics, and has noted Sanders’s virtues and contributions to political movement, but he’s not a supporter proper, as someone pointed out to me on Twitter.