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When Good People Do Bad Things, Should You Care? Depends on Whether You Have the Right Ideology Jim Naureckas ([link removed])


Persuasion: America's Mission

Garry Kasparov (Persuasion, 7/23/20 ([link removed]) ) warns that "the drawing of false moral equivalencies has started to dominate the mainstream"—hampering the hunt for the sins of the wicked by obsessing on the sins of the ideologically righteous.

Persuasion describes itself as an outlet ([link removed]) for "advocates of free speech and free institutions," and is described by Slate (7/10/20 ([link removed]) ) as "a newly launched 'intellectual community,' whose announced list of members overlaps heavily" with the signers of the Harper's open letter "on Justice and Open Debate"—"particularly, the core group that the New York Times credited ([link removed]) with having written the Harper’s letter."

As an example of the sort of debate Persuasion promotes, it recently published a defense of the United States by one of its advisory board members, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov (another Harper's letter signer), under the headline "America's Mission" (7/23/20 ([link removed]) ). The piece began with a list of "maxims" by which "ideologues whose agenda is power, not justice," have "hijacked" the "fight against oppression"—ideas, then, that Kasparov thinks you should reject.

After opening with "Compromise is weakness," Kasparov offered a series of these maxims that pretty much say the same thing:

* Flawed good is the same as evil.
* The exceptions are more important than the rule.
* Telling the whole story is so important that it is worth falsifying the plot.

If these maxims are wrong, then the correct approach must be: Don't waste time criticizing bad things done by good people; focus on bad things done by bad people instead.

What's striking to me is that this is precisely the point of Kasparov's fifth and final maxim—which, again, is what he says people "whose agenda is power, not justice," believe:

* The sins of the ideologically righteous matter not so long as we hunt for the sins of the wicked.

Not only is that opposite to the message of the three previous maxims, it's an accurate if somewhat snarky summary of Kasparov's whole piece: that while the United States has made "serious mistakes...along the road to deeper and broader liberalism," that should not be allowed to distract us from the fight against "the evil forces that have always opposed those gains, and now seek to roll them back." I can only figure that this kind of attitude only marks you as someone "whose agenda is power, not justice," if you have the wrong sort of ideology—not one that is truly righteous, like Garry Kasparov's.
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Featured image: Garry Kasparov at the 2017 Goldwater Dinner (cc photo: Gage Skidmore).


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