To review the bidding: I wrote that, having won the culture
wars, liberals faced a tactical question of how to treat the losers, with the
options being accommodation or taking a hard line. I offered my own tactical
judgment, based on four historical examples, that taking a hard line was the
better approach. The four examples were presented thus: “Trying to be nice to
the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in
Germany and Japan after 1945.)”
This was presented by the egregious Ryan Anderson as, “Harvard
Law Professor Says Treat Conservative Christians Like Nazis.”* (For obvious
reasons I’m not providing links to this or the next two versions.) Then it
migrated, first, I think, to Breitbart, then to, among other places Der Stürmer
American Vanguard, as “Jewish Harvard Prof Urges Liberals to Treat Evangelical
Christians Like Nazis.” Breibart added that I was a 70 year old professor, a
detail the relevance of which eluded me until I read some of the ensuing hate
mail: some used the detail to suggest that I was an intellectually enfeebled senile
old man unable to construct a coherent argument, while others calculated my
birth date and did the “if Hitler had won, your mother…” thing. (By the way, the
strike-through was the snark I resisted until now, not snark about the generic “negative
reaction” to my comments.)
I know that an author lacks control over the meaning others
give to his or her words, and of course it’s semantically consistent with those
words to read them as urging war crimes trials for the losers in the culture
wars, denazification, and the like (or, as one pained letter to the Dean of
Harvard College put it, gunning Christians down) – even though that’s not what
I intended. More temperate readings are possible, though, and so those who
offer the stronger readings can be queried about why they chose those readings
rather than other semantically possible ones (as can I be queried about why I
choose a more temperate reading; to say that one reading – the strong one or
the temperate one – is a reasonable one isn’t enough). The answer for Anderson
and Der Stürmer is clear to me: The strong reading is useful for rallying
the troops (for what in my view is a silly skirmish as the troops fall back in retreat). The answer for
most of those who sent me hate mail is also clear – about one-quarter
antisemitism, and almost all the remainder that the writers didn’t read what I
wrote but only what Anderson, Breitbart, etc., wrote, and so did not have their
own independent reading. I have my views about the answer for others, not among
the writers of hate mail, who gave the words the stronger reading, but
articulating those views would annoy them even more, which I really don’t want
to do.
The target of my “take a hard line” was a set of ideas
circulating among liberals and sensible conservatives about being accommodating
in victory (or, for the latter, being accommodating full stop), in
advance of any indication that doing so would actually contribute to healing
the wounds of war – about doing the equivalent of pursuing Andrew Johnson’s
policies for Reconstruction, or hoping with Felix Frankfurter that gradualism
in desegregation would bring about real change in the post-Brown South. I haven’t yet heard anything other than vague hopes
that accommodation rather than a hard line will be more effective, or some
hand-waving gestures in the direction of the thought (mistaken, I believe) that
only accommodation is consistent with a commitment to bringing whatever
national unity is possible after victory in the culture wars. (Of course all
this rests on the accuracy of my evaluation of the state of the culture wars,
which might be mistaken – though equally of course I don’t think it is.)
* By the way, somehow I got on Anderson’s e-mail list for “Public
Discourse” and continue to get e-mails from it even after I use Outlook to “add
sender to blocked senders list.” Help appreciated.