byAnastasia Berg and Jon Baskin
Nobody shares all their private complaints with an audience, but how do we know how much to share and with whom? Certainly, in the name of various kinds of shared commitments, it seems best to hash out your differences in private... But how far does the strategic logic behind these decisions extend into public intellectual life?
Should we attempt to publicly air disagreements with those who are, broadly speaking, on the same “side” of a political, social or spiritual debate as we are, or should we shelter those disagreements from public view in the name of some greater good?
In our issue 18 “Letter on Denialism,” we criticized the habit among leftist and liberal commentators of denying the existence of political projects that have become the targets of right-wing criticism (e.g. “cultural Marxism,” “political correctness,” “identity politics,” etc.), as opposed to defending, evaluating or proposing a new vocabulary for discussing them. We received plenty of thoughtful responses... But... perhaps the most challenging current of criticism had to do with... the charge that... although criticizing others on one’s side was permissible in “the smaller circles of the university, scholarship, conversation, and personal writing....the political-intellectual public sphere” was a place where intellectuals should be singularly focused on “positioning” themselves to achieve their political objectives.
In fact, our refusal to appreciate the impermeability of the wall separating the private (or semi-private) and the public spheres was enough to raise the suspicion that we were not operating in good faith: that we were trolls or “crypto-conservatives” who, under cover of pretending to want to improve progressive discourse, really hoped to undermine it.
It is useful to see such an argument spelled out. The assumption that public intellectual life is mainly about positioning helps explain some peculiar features of our public conversation, such as the extent to which it rewards posturing and selective criticism. But the rigid distinction these commentators drew between how we ought to talk to our trusted allies and how we should speak when we suspect we are being listened to by those without similar educations, political assumptions or moral fortitude... suggests the ascendancy among some leftist intellectuals of a public vs. private distinction that has traditionally been thought of as a product of elitist conservatism.
