Should everything Brian Cohen has ever written be printed out on paper, wadded up, and shoved down his throat?
In case you aren’t a regular reader of points and miles blogs written by sentient National Review articles, this installment of Windbag Mails is a response to a moronically-titled essay on The Gate, a blog by Brian Cohen: “Should every monument and statue ever erected just be destroyed?” I’m not going to link to it, because I don’t want to give him any incoming traffic. You can find it if you google “Should every monument and statue ever erected just be destroyed by Brian Cohen who is an epic chode.” Actually that’s a lie — what you’ll find when you google that phrase is an essay titled “Just destroy every monument and statue ever erected,” which is a shorter version of the exact same essay that Brian Cohen published in 2017, because he obviously feels very passionately about history.
I tweeted something out about this article a few days ago, but it has been sticking in my mind since then — and not, I assure you, because it makes a single good point. The thing about it that irritates the shit out of me is the smug civility of it all. “Civility” as a virtue is something a certain swath of white people just decided upon as a way to stifle most forms of dissent. The only inherent value in civility is that the people who insist upon it are never made to feel uncomfortable, so long as everyone else maintains civility at all times.
It’s telling that Brian Cohen approaches what is a monstrously racist argument with such civility, because the crux of his argument is that existing structures of polite society should be maintained at all costs. I should say up front that I’m quite sure Brian Cohen would bristle at being called racist. Like most white Americans, he has internalized that racism is bad, and like most white Americans, his response is to twist himself in knots denying that he’s racist rather than actually looking inward and wondering if articles that belittle and demean descendants of slaves who don’t like looking at monuments to the supposedly great men who enslaved their ancestors are, in fact, maybe a smidge on the racist side. But of course, because of the intrinsic badness of racism, saying something (or someone) is racist is perceived as an insult, and thus outside the bounds of civil discourse. In this way, the appeal to civility serves to shield a racist argument from ever being accused as such, which means that civility and racism are two sides of the same rhetorical coin.
“I’m just trying to have a civil discussion here, you’re the one who’s getting offended” is the calling card of a bad faith argument, since any disgusting ideology can have enough edges sanded down to be included in a civil discussion. (“Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”) A quick look at the way Cohen responds to comments in his post is a prime example of how this is used to shut out dissent. To wit:
Look how civil he is! He would never dare censor anyone, because — to quote his last comment — he’s a firm believer in “engaging in discourse.” So let’s delve into that discourse, because it really is an opulent buffet of obfuscatory bullshit, including well-known tactics like false equivalence, whataboutism, “I’m not racist, you’re racist,” slippery slope, and so on.
But, before we get into it, I think it’s important to acknowledge that if, after looking at everything that’s going on in the world right now, you think it’s a fucking statue of Robert E. Lee that needs to be defended, you’re an unequivocal piece of shit. Moreover, if this is your second time basically publishing the same essay in defense of statues, you’re an unequivocal piece of even shittier shit.
However, in case you had any doubt as to where Cohen stands, this paragraph about the Unite the Right rally makes it pretty fucking clear.
First, this paragraph is utterly steeped in the refusal to acknowledge larger context that so irritatingly pervades arguments like this. The Unite the Right rally was about the Lee statue in name only — the reality is that it was about intimidating people and pushing forward white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology. But it would be inconvenient for Cohen to include this fact in his civil discussion, because he’s trying to do the whole “both sides” dance here. There are some groups who support the statues, and some groups who oppose the statues — it’s a divisive issue, so of course there are two equally passionate sides, that’s all!
Remember when one of the Unite the Right protestors decided to drive his car into a group of counter-protestors and murdered one of them? That’s a mere footnote here: the protest “became violent” and “resulted in the death of one woman” — how did she die, you may ask? We may never know! Equally passionate sides, remember?
If you’re even somewhat reasonable, you may be tempted to consider the problem to be the heavily-armed group of white nationalists who willingly beat and murder those they disagree with, but according to Cohen, you’d be wrong. The real enemy is an evil triad of “destroying history,” “cancel culture,” and “mob mentality.” Don’t worry about the actual mobs who used to chase down black people and murder them contemporaneously with when the statues in question were erected — the mob mentality here is the one that says that people should be criticized if they support confederate statues, which is just so much more dangerous to someone like Brian Cohen.
After a dizzying torrent of “what’s next” examples ranging from the Statue of Liberty to Auschwitz, Cohen arrives at this conclusion. If you can’t even see his argument through his unctuous self-superiority, I don’t blame you. Basically, he’s using one bad-faith argument (slippery slope) to make another one (logical extension). This is really easy to do, and it’s the kind of argument that dumb people make to make themselves look smart. Here, I’ll show you:
“Gay people want to get married? What’s next, people can marry their dogs? I want to marry a banana, and you’re homophobic if you say that I can’t! Why don’t we just abolish marriage altogether, then no one will ever get offended that they can’t get married!”
“Women want the right to vote? What’s next, people letting their dogs vote? I want my banana to vote, and you’re sexist if you say that it can’t! Why don’t we just abolish elections altogether, then no one will ever get offended that they can’t vote!”
The whole “where’s the line” argument is especially idiotic, because the line here has been defined pretty clearly: confederate monuments. They exist to celebrate the people who defended the right to own slaves. Slavery is illegal, so we shouldn’t celebrate these people anymore. Line. Drawn. Let’s move on.
It turns out that to an unfortunately large group of people, statues are necessary to remember history. I don’t need to go through and debunk this outrageously inane argument, because I truly don’t believe that people who make this argument believe it themselves. It’s yet another example of people like Cohen refusing to acknowledge what’s in plain sight (that monuments generally exalt people and are not/have never been integral to history; also, that history includes many forms and you could just take a fucking picture of the monument and put it in a history book and people would remember it just fine), and instead reducing it to a broad concept with an implied intrinsic value: History.
(As an aside, I’m not sure if Cohen realizes it, but you could easily do the whole slippery slope/logical extension to his argument about history. “Where does it stop after preserving statues? Should we preserve corpses? What about when an important figure takes a shit? Maybe we should just put famous people in hermetically sealed rooms so every physical remnant of their corporeal form can be preserved, and then no one will ever get offended about erasing history every again!”)
Of course, History with a capital “H” is really a placeholder for “existing power structures.” Everyone knows that history is not some monolithic, objective record of events. History is written and recorded by people — usually white people, and usually white male people. The inability to see nuance is a hallmark of right-wing argumentation, although it’s particularly egregious in terms of how the right thinks of history. You get a sense of it when you meet someone who majored in History in college, and they talk about how annoying it is that whenever they tell someone that they majored in History, they ask them to name the year Henry VIII came to power or some such date. There aren’t entire departments at universities dedicated to memorizing dates on flash cards, you know.
The insistence that confederate leaders are “History” is both obvious and incredibly misleading. Obvious, because they existed and have been entered into historical record, but misleading because there were thousands of people around those memorialized with statues whose names have been lost to history, and many of those people were most likely doing infinitely more to advance the social good. “History” isn’t a record of what happened — it is the process by which events are recorded, prioritized, and allowed to influence what comes after.
Preserving monuments isn’t preserving all history, it’s preserving one particular history — specifically, the one that says that a handful of important white men created this country and must be exalted lest we lose our national identity as a nation built for (but not by) white people. Getting rid of monuments isn’t anti-historical, but it does mean that we need to reexamine our shared history to make sure if the tentpole figures we have celebrated for the last couple hundred years are really the ones who should hold us up going forward.
Of course, in the conservative bad-faith rhetorical machine, “reexamining our shared history to make sure if the tentpole figures we have celebrated for the last couple hundred years are really the ones who should hold us up going forward” gets chewed up and spit out as yet another reductive bugaboo that’s all too easy to dismiss: being offended. What’s so remarkable about Cohen’s article is how nakedly he adheres to these common tropes, almost as if he entered a few keywords into a Federalist Society content generator and then published the resulting dreck alongside some travel photos he’s taken over the years.
Civility dictates the terms of the debate. If you have a problem with something, you are only allowed to broach it according to the narrow terms set by the party who’s already in power. History is sacrosanct, and if you have a problem with it, you’re offended. Being offended is something you brought upon yourself by being too sensitive — in conservative rhetoric, it’s the worst thing you can be, even more than being wrong. See, if you’re wrong, you at least still participated responsibly in civil discourse — if you’re offended, then you’ve let your emotions take over, and it’s no longer possible to take anything you say seriously. Once someone is offended, it’s not necessary to interrogate why they might be offended, or what you’ve done to offend someone. It’s their issue to deal with, since you were just trying to to have a civil discussion.
To Cohen, people want to take statues down because they’re offended by them. He says this at the very beginning of his essay, in which he notes that statues are “considered to be offensive” (by who? by oversensitive libtards? by PC government sycophants?), and again at the end, with this absolute gem:
You hear that everyone? STOP BEING SO SENSITIVE and start learning! Just make sure that the people you learn from are the white people who put up the statues in the first place, since they’re the ones who are responsible for creating history!
Even though Cohen tries to couch his reactionary racism in a paean to greater understanding and tolerance, nothing in the preceding article demonstrates a shred of empathy for people who are justifiably upset that they have to look at monuments to the Avengers of Slavery every day. What Cohen wants is tolerance and understanding of himself by others who are just overly politically correct. And while he thinks of it as tolerance, what he’s actually asking for — and what the entire defend-the-statues movement is asking for — is deference and submission.
The only reason that, among all the police brutality and oppression of minorities laid bare the last few weeks, you would defend monuments is that you want to defend whiteness. Every associated concept here — attacking history, being uncivil, getting offended — is inextricably wrapped up in whiteness. History about and written by white people. Civility borne from academic contexts that were originally only open to white people. Reducing any criticism of white dominance to oversensitivity and offense. It’s all in service to one thing, which is to cement a singular view of American society as a white society.
Maybe it’s a stretch to call Brian Cohen racist. He probably has black friends, and he probably believes that everyone should have equal rights. Maybe he doesn’t even see color (he doesn’t care if you’re purple!). But he’s obviously unwilling to try to understand others’ perspectives, as evidenced by his gleeful use of the passive voice (“statues are considered to be offensive to some people”) or just shitting all over PC warriors who get offended by any little thing.
It’s telling that in the comment I posted above, he goes back to the free speech argument when a commenter tells him that the world doesn’t need another white person telling black people why they shouldn’t be offended by statues. (Of course he has to bust out “that’s racist against whites!” which is just the dingleberry on this whole diarrhea sundae.) Because of free speech, it’s his right to say what he wants, when he wants… but of course, the commenter wasn’t telling him that he was legally enjoined from commenting on this matter. The argument was that he shouldn’t, not that he couldn’t. But that’s the the crux of right-wing thinking right there — “I can, therefore I must.” Sure, he could look inward and try to understand why others might feel differently than he does, but he has an opinion, and he needs to say it! And of course that opinion is that people aren’t tolerant enough of him, because in the conservative mind, the white man is always the true victim.