How bad flags trumped bad cops

Sam Smith

For the past ten days or so I have felt like I was in the 1980s again, back when it began not to matter so much what really happened as what one said or thought about it – or, to be more precise, what academics and commentators said you said or thought about it. It seemed like it had taken only a few hours to switch from being seriously interested in how our cops were mishandling blacks in various cities to being enthralled with the inner meaning of Rachel Dolezal’s ethnic identity and the meaning of the Confederate flag.

It was during the 1980s that the class gap between educated liberals and the people they were supposed to be concerned about widened dramatically. A study by economist Frank Levy of MIT showed that the yuppie phenomenon was a rarified one and hardly reflected what generally happened. In the ten years ending 1989, for example, the income of male workers aged 25-34 with a college education rose 7% while those with only a high school diploma fell 15%. And Robert J. Samuelson reported that the gap between the best and the worst paid college graduates increased, as did the gap between the best and the worst paid lawyers.

It was not only our manufacturing base that eroded, our base of understanding of what we meant when we spoke to each other was in shambles as well.

This shift was due in part to what the better educated were learning in college. I won’t bore you with the details of deconstruction, post-modernism and post-structuralism, but a few quotes from Wikipedia will give you a sense of that was going on:

- In the post-structuralist approach to textual analysis, the reader replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry. This displacement is often referred to as the "destabilizing" or "decentering" of the author, though it has its greatest effect on the text itself. Without a central fixation on the author, post-structuralists examine other sources for meaning (e.g., readers, cultural norms, other literature, etc.). These alternative sources are never authoritative, and promise no consistency.

- David B. Allison is an early translator of [deconstructionist philosopher] Derrida and states in the introduction to his translation of Speech and Phenomena:  “[Deconstruction] signifies a project of critical thought whose task is to locate and 'take apart' those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics.”

- John D. Caputo attempts to explain deconstruction in a nutshell by stating: "Whenever deconstruction finds a nutshell—a secure axiom or a pithy maxim—the very idea is to crack it open and disturb this tranquility. Indeed, that is a good rule of thumb in deconstruction. That is what deconstruction is all about, its very meaning and mission, if it has any. One might even say that cracking nutshells is what deconstruction is.”

- In Gender Trouble, [Judith] Butler also relied on deconstructionist language theory and Freudian psychoanalysis to argue that heterosexuality is structured in an ongoing series of losses stemming from a repudiation of homosexuality; as such homosexuality can be seen as constitutive of heterosexuality, necessitating its repeated repudiations

- Deconstruction is a method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary texts which emphasizes inquiry into the variable projection of the meaning and message of critical works, the meaning in relation to the reader and the intended audience, and the assumptions implicit in the embodied forms of expression. … Derrida started by stating that "from the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs.” Following Ferdinand de Saussure, he considered language, as a system of signs where words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words

Looked at a slightly different way, deconstruction helped teach a generation of educated liberals that words and symbols often trumped reality in importance and that they were far more important than, say, the fact that their class was increasingly becoming economically, emotionally and socially distanced from the very people an older generation of liberals thought were a  high priority of concern.

The Indigo Girls, who got their start in the mid 1980s, got a handle on it in a song, Deconstruction:

We talked up all night and came to no conclusion
We started a fight that ended in silent confusion…

We get to decide what we think is no good
We're sculpted from youth, the chipping away makes me weary
And as for the truth it seems like we just pick a theory
The one that justifies our daily lives
And backs us with quiver and arrows
To protect openings cause when the warring begins

To an activist journalist inspired by the likes of Saul Alinsky and who got going in the 1960s, the Dolezal and Confederate flag controversies seem strangely out of sync. In part this is because I believe a key goal of progressive activism is to keep the Rachel Dolezals on our side and to get the guys with the Confederate flag bumper stickers  there as well. Deconstructionism or PBS liberalism doesn’t help. Understanding the inner meaning of a flag doesn’t protect a single black from a rotten cop.

We live in society obsessed with symbols. Even intellectuals have come to believe that because they had, in many ways, replaced reality, we no longer had to pay as much attention to the real.

Thus America’s liberal class put Ferguson and Baltimore aside and turned instead to getting rid of a flag.