John McWhorter Takes on Jim Sleeper and Frances Fox Piven, and Confuses the Real Issue
John McWhorter today writes an interesting response to the attack made upon him at TPM Café by writer Jim Sleeper, who accused McWhorter and David Horowitz of both joining Glenn Beck in attacking Frances Fox Piven and thus endangering her life. As Sleeper puts it, “When Beck started in on Piven last year, the clever, sad writer John McWhorter did, too, as did right-wing provocateur David Horowitz.”
First, note Sleeper’s disingenuous style. He says Beck attacked Piven, the brilliant McWhorter whom he insults by calling him a “sad writer” then supposedly follows suit, and of course, so does Horowitz, whom Sleeper identifies as a “right-wing provocateur.” For the liberals who read Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo (TPM), these are code words so they know who the bad guys are.
Sleeper then says what he thinks of McWhorter. Because McWhorter criticizes Piven, he calls him “a young black linguist-turned-conservative racial bargainer.” This, of course, makes little sense, since Sleeper himself is a critic of Piven. But Sleeper thinks he has a right to do that, since by his own account, he is a bona fide left-liberal. But McWhorter is an African-American. To Sleeper, that means if McWhorter is a critic of Piven, he obviously is a conservative.
Of course, Sleeper thinks he is beyond criticism, since his self-definition is that he is “scathing of both left and right, not because both sides are equally bad but because Piven’s left plays inexorably into the hands of the more-powerful right. They do it every time, and they know not what they do.” Get it? He only attacks the left when the left inadvertently helps the right; therefore, only he- Jim Sleeper- has the credentials to criticize someone like Fox Piven.
Anyone who thinks Sleeper might have had the last word has to turn next to John McWhorter, who knows how to take care of himself. The first point is that McWhorter stands by what he wrote earlier about Piven, and indeed, reprints the essence of his harsh characterization of the theory she and her late husband, Richard Cloward, unveiled in the mid 1960’s. He writes:
I have written, often, that Columbia social work professors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (who were married) wreaked havoc on poor black communities in the sixties by openly calling on poor blacks to seek welfare payments rather than work. The story is simple and sad. Early last year I told it thusly in these pages, and see no reason not to simply present exactly what I wrote then. To wit, Piven and Cloward hoped that this would bankrupt the government and force a complete overhaul of our distribution of income. It wasn’t that they thought there was no work for blacks—just that it was beneath blacks’ dignity to do it. By 1968, the organization was staging more than two hundred protests a month, sometimes assisted by the Panthers.
….For three decades, welfare was an open-ended program, unconcerned with whether people got jobs or whether children’s fathers were present or able to work. The government never fell, and meanwhile black neighborhoods started falling to pieces. The near-fatherless tracts now thought of as normal would have sounded like science fiction in even the poorest black districts before the ’70s. Rarely in American history have people with such a destructive agenda had such power over the lives of the innocent. I wish Piven and Cloward had stayed obscure teachers instead of helping to ruin the lives of, for example, some of my relatives.
McWhorter not only does not back down, but notes how angry he is that Piven continues to argue that what she advocated was good and correct, which to McWhorter seems “callous.” But turning to Glenn Beck’s current attacks on Piven, McWhorter suddenly loses his own argument. Rather than acknowledge that Beck both accurately quotes Piven and says essentially the same thing as McWhorter is saying, he argues that the death threats against her “chills and disgusts me.”
I agree. I wrote previously that Beck should have taken them all off The Blaze.com, and should fire those who allowed them to appear there while he was on vacation. (Despite this, Piven on TV the other day listed me in particular, along with Fred Siegel and Stanley Kurtz, and Beck of course, as being responsible for the death threats.)
McWhorter continues to say he never is in favor of waging “witch-hunts… against anyone whose views I disagree with,” nor does he wish to paint Piven’s ideas as “inherently ‘un-American,’” and favors her right to express her views. But what he is really angry about is that Sleeper accuses him of “taking a page from Beck,” when as he points out, he was criticizing Piven and Cloward when Beck never had heard of her.
Unlike Beck, John McWhorter is a certified intellectual, a man with advanced degrees who writes carefully and seriously. I can understand how furious he is to be identified by Jim Sleeper as someone who has chimed in to Beck’s campaign, thus as he writes, “banging out a screed designed to shore up the base that Beck and his ilk preach to.”
So McWhorter is furious that he is subject to “constant misinterpretation,” and people think that he is a “right-wing Republican because I disagree sustainedly with many of the tenets of the Civil Rights orthodoxy and worked for a conservative think tank.”
I ask simply: why is John McWhorter so surprised at this charge? Welcome to the club! All of us who have moved away from the old liberal shibboleths have faced the same charge. If you break ranks—you are a right-winger, a member of the lunatic fringe, a fanatic rabid rightist, etc. etc. etc. You are no longer a heretic, as the old neo-Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher once put it, but a “renegade,” one beyond redemption. How dare you whom we used to respect now make the same argument as a hated figure on the political right? If you are, you too must be a rightist yourself.
McWhorter is easily able to show that he has written critically about Piven and Cloward since the year 2000, and as he says, “I do not need Glenn Beck to teach me my social history.” (In fact, I wish Beck would take some time out to read John McWhorter.) Yet Sleeper blasts him as a “conservative movement water-carrier.” He is deeply angry, since as McWhorter writes, “I am a cranky liberal Democrat.”
In making that known—McWhorter is ironically engaging in precisely the same tactic used by Jim Sleeper—who as we have seen, already has written that when he criticizes Piven and Cloward, it is because he wants to save the left, not reinforce the right. McWhorter’s saying that he too is a liberal, however, will not serve to soften the truth that his own critique of Piven and Cloward is more damning than anything Glenn Beck has written.
Not content with making his political allegiance known, McWhorter continues to specify that he “supports Barack Obama, reviles the War on Drugs, supports gay marriage, never voted for George Bush” and so forth. All of these make McWhorter a traditional liberal, not a black conservative. And he has a right to be angry that Sleeper writes that he has been “co-opted by the riches and fame offered him by the right wingers.” This too is an old charge. Piven said I had shifted from Left to Right because “the pay is better on the other side.” We all should be used to that canard by now. (How I wish it were so.)
Ok, so we now have learned John McWhorter is a liberal, not a conservative. Fine. That is his choice. But why is he so surprised that so many people think he is one? The answer is rather clear. Many of his arguments on black culture and the black experience echo that of those few black conservatives who proudly proclaim themselves conservative, like Shelby Steele.
I must add that when I met McWhorter years ago, I was already familiar with his work, and had profitably read one of his books. But I met him as a fellow speaker at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend, which as everyone knows, is a conservative event sponsored by a very conservative organization, now called the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
At that particular event, other speakers included Ann Coulter and Christopher Hitchens—the first a hard conservative; the second an iconoclastic contrarian who was and is an enemy of radical Islam. I did not assume that because McWhorter was there he considered himself a conservative. But we talked in particular about the Black Panther Party, and his own personal knowledge of the evil effect that group had on his own family. Much of what he said was in fact similar to the criticism of the Panthers made by Horowitz. McWhorter’s views were his own; he did not need Horowitz to instruct him about the Panthers. But he should not be surprised to find that his appearance at this event and the similarity of his critique to that of a white conservative would lead some to charge that he was a water-carrier for David Horowitz.
So I take McWhorter at his word when he writes that he has “disappointed countless right-wingers” who think he is another Shelby Steele or Ward Connerly. Fine. But does he really have to point this out, and condemn them in order to get people to listen to him? Can’t we assess the views of Steele or Connerly without branding them first, so that people will evaluate their arguments on the merits, and not on where they put themselves in the political spectrum?
And yes, as long as Glenn Beck is accurately quoting Frances Fox Piven, and I believe that he is, can’t we evaluate the truth or falsity of what he says even though he is on the right? If it is similar to the argument made by McWhorter, is Beck’s conclusion wrong because he said it, while McWhorter’s is correct because he is a liberal?
The truth is, a liberal and a conservative can both be right. And in the case of Frances Fox Piven, they both are.
Ronnie: Youn sound eminantly reasonable, to me.
As noted in response to your previous post, Sleeper, Dreier and others of their kind and style are driving traffic, not all of whom are true believers, and in the process you will gain a wider following. Your opponents can neither advance nor retreat from the positions they have taken without damage and people on sidelines can see this.
Yes, but it really stinks to be slurred, and the sneering, smirking insinuations that it all comes down to money (I haven’t noticed that there’s much money to be made on either the right or the left unless you’re a headliner like *gulp* Beck) always rankles.
That’s why both Ron Radosh and John McWhorter (whom I admire, even if he still thinks he’s a liberal Democrat) are stung by the slurs. That’s why they respond.
BTW, I agree entirely that McWhorter should not have played into Sleeper’s hands and used the same sort of argument.
“I wrote previously that Beck should have taken them all off The Blaze.com, and should fire those who allowed them to appear….”
And yet you blog for a site that regularly publishes comments like these:
“Fock Muslims, Muhammad (POS) the child rapist and Allah. Sue me!”
Maybe you consider the author of the comment just another “hard conservative,” like Ann Coulter.
Ron, did you hear about the rosenbergs event at nyu last knight?
I put the question to mrs. Schnier about her thoughts on your debate with her in 1983 in retrospect. Allen hornblum was there and gave me a copy of his Harry gold book (which is good b/c the main part of the capture story I dont know is how they caught “Raymond”) for asking a tough question and said he would tell you all about it
Yes. ALlen told me all about out. You have a lot of courage to speak up publicly in that crowd. Allen said you were terrific, and made all the right points. HE Was completely amazed!
So, thank you so much. I’m sure you ruined their night, hopefully you did!
Best,
Ron
I have read some of McWhorter’s work and he has always seemed intelligent and thoughtful, with views from both ends of the political spectrum.
Not sure how you can claim Beck’s attacks on Piven are at all accurate. I just read the entire original Nation article, and there is no mention of “revolution,” violent or otherwise. There’s also no mention of bankrupting the system. Instead there was an explicitly stated call for a guaranteed income, which Nixon also supported for awhile. Glenn Beck’s thoughts are clearly not his own, but the larger strategy of Murdoch et al seems to be an outright attack on nonexistent enemies.
Sorry to use your blog as a sort of “Radio Free PJM,” Ron, but Roger Simon, the CEO of PJM and author of the blog in question, rejected my comment. Big deal, I would normally say; happens all the time on PJM. But his piece, “Rabbis Spend $100K to Slam Beck for Slamming Soros,” is too infuriating to ignore.
Simon allowed comments comparing the rabbis to “sonderkommandos” accusing Soros or “revealing hidden Jews,” and many more containing similar lies. My comment, on the other hand, merely intended to give a broader history of Soros’s past. I provided two paragraphs from Wikipedia: the first, in which Soros describes an incident that happened when he was 13; the second in the words of the Wikipedia author:
‘I was told to go to the Jewish Council. And there I was given these small slips of paper…It said report to the rabbi seminary at 9 a.m….And I was given this list of names. I took this piece of paper to my father. He instantly recognized it. This was a list of Hungarian Jewish lawyers. He said, “You deliver the slips of paper and tell the people that if they report they will be deported.”’
“In 1944, at age 14, Soros lived with and posed as the godson of an employee of the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture. On one occasion, the official was ordered to inventory the remaining contents of the estate of a wealthy Jewish family that had fled the country. Rather than leave the young George alone in the city, the official brought him along.”
In the first instance, Soros’s warnings may have saved lives. In the second, Soros was taken along while the inventory was being done. He had no part in either the inventory or the later confiscation – and no cause for feeling guilt.
And for this, Simon allows Soros to be compared to “former death camp guards.”
Again, sorry to invade your blog, but maybe printing this will loosen up the PJM censorship.
It is very rare for a partially conservative individual not to burnish his present or former liberal credentials when defending his positions against attack. McWhorter is yet another man whose great practical abilities do not inform in him of an equal philosophical insight. That he replies in this way, or at all, shows he has not even earned his own confidence.
As a sidelight, I’m always amused by that charge that people like you have not had genuine second thoughts and reconsiderations but have simply sold out for filthy lucre. This is often from people like Piven who are well-paid and tenured professors, enjoying all sorts of job-related benefits, not to mention honoraria from frequent speaking engagements, royalties, and the like.
But if course she’s on the side of righteousness and deserves it all; it’s only her due.
McWhorter and Sleeper have written many good books and essays, but it sounds as if they’re both suffering from the “Wire” style of addressing social problems: you give yourself a pass for romanticizing your own role as special seer instead of acknowledging that what you are seeing ought to be utterly apparent to any honest observer — fueling immediate action, because the devastation wrought by these social policies continues to claim more lives than any war, while shredding what’s left of the social contract.
Not just black’s lives, either, though they are the characters of choice for many who turn these realities into “socially-conscious” entertainment/stimulation for educated audiences. Too often, that’s where the story ends, or with the usual “journalist-truth-teller goes after select big villains to save the helpless victims he alone understands.” An appealingly noir-ish main role for the teller, but it’s not the most effective way to actually change anything.
Whereas Glenn Beck is speaking to a much larger audience (sneeringly dismissed by virtually all talking heads), one that has much experience with these issues in their own families and in their economically diverse communities. The message he is sending is different, too, one of personal salvation through personal responsibility and actual reform of government programs, not mere observational place-marking among the well-educated. I’ve seen services in Protestant and Baptist churches, and the first time I turned in to his show, the similarity struck me.
Unfortunately, the debate over “who gets to speak about” urban dysfunction so quickly trumps efforts to address the dysfunction itself (which must include politics, and not Democratic party politics, for they defend the status quo). How silly that Sleeper seems aggrieved that Beck is now talking about issues that Sleeper talked about “first.” It’s not about him any more than it is “about” McWhorter’s political affiliation. A central barrier to addressing extreme social problems has always been bureaucrats who claim the poor, violent, and dysfunctional as their own private “turf” — similar claims by journalists is a poor turn of events.
Of course, of course, John McWhorter does not need Glenn Beck to teach him social history. But why is he, and Sleeper, so angry that Beck is reaching other audiences? The “death threat on the internet comment pages” stuff is overblown and not Beck’s fault. There is no way to know how much of that anonymous commentary is committed by Beck-haters inventing incidents to virulently cast aspersions on innocent people, as turns out to be the case in so many alleged “hate” incidents, particularly those in academic settings. Beck surely gets death threats, too — should Sleeper, et. al. be held responsible?
Watching McWhorter and Sleeper duke it out over their credentials by scapegoating a class of people they deem to be intellectually beneath them and unworthy of participating in public debate is extremely depressing to me because I have enjoyed their writing. And the fact that this despised cohort — religiously conservative, politically conservative, and, yes, Fox-news-watching folk — actually does more to address the fallout of extreme social dysfunction than all the intellectuals in the world makes the squabble just shameful. I have worked in social services for years, and the people who actually show up — to teach literacy and English, staff food banks, subsidize shelters, provide child protection, police the streets, be police and firemen — are predominantly conservative. So too (quietly) are many people working in the welfare industry (though not the political appointees making the good money at the top). I’ve had more than one such person tell me that Glenn Beck is giving them the impetus to speak up, instead of hiding their affiliations. I would expect genuinely concerned intellectuals like McWhorter and Sleeper to welcome these people, not scorn them.