A Mobbing by a Smearmonger

Roger Berkowitz

Jonathan Chait tells the story of David Shor, a social democrat and a data analyst who worked for President Obama. But Shor, who worked for the data analysis firm Civis Analytics, was fired for tweeting a “short summary of a paper by Princeton professor Omar Wasow. The research compiled by Wasow analyzed public opinion in the 1960s, and found violent and nonviolent protest tactics had contradictory effects.” As Wasow writes, “Protester-initiated violence, by contrast, helped move news agendas, frames, elite discourse and public concern toward “social control.”” 

In response to Shor’s tweet, Ari Trujillo Wesler, the founder of OpenField, a Democratic canvassing app, replied, sent a series of tweets accusing Short of “antiblackness.” One read, “YOU need to stop using your anxiety and ‘intellect’ as a vehicle for anti-blackness.” And Wesler tagged Shor’s boss, the CEO of Civis Analytics, leading to Shor’s firing. This is a classic example of mob behavior. Wesler is a “smearmonger,” one who smears good faith participants in public debates as bigots or tries to cancel or initiate a mobbing of people who disagree with them in good faith.  Attending to such smearmongering and mobbing is important. As Chait writes:

The preconditions that permitted these events to go forward are the spread of distinct, illiberal norms throughout some progressive institutions over the last half-dozen years. When I wrote about the phenomenon in 2015, a common response was to dismiss it as the trivial hijinks of some college students, a distraction from the true threats to democratic values. It certainly was (and remains) true that the right poses a vastly greater danger to liberalism than does the far left. My own writing output reflects this enormous disproportionality. It is also true that the intended (if not always actual) target of the left’s illiberal impulses — entrenched systems of inequality — remain an oppressive force in American life, and that the cause to dismantle them is just.

Nonetheless, it is an error to jump from the fact that right-wing authoritarian racism is far more important to the conclusion that left-wing illiberalism is completely unimportant. One can oppose different evils, even those evils aligned against each other, without assigning them equal weight.