One Year Later: Reflections on #MeToo

By: Jared Marcel Pollen

Social movements, like revolutions, tend to follow a similar cycle in the process of rewiring certain beliefs and norms of behavior. This was perhaps best diagramed by Crane Brinton in his book The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), a study of the English, American, French and Russian revolutions, respectively––and how all of these revolutions (with the American being the perennial outlier) echoed one another in their stages of development. The same pattern can be mapped onto intellectual life during any period of cultural change; for moments of cultural upheaval are themselves soft revolutions, in a way, smaller in the order of magnitude than revolutions that demand a renovation of state power. This cycle goes as follows: right-to-centre, centre-to-left, left-to-far left, back to centre, back to right. Or, put differently: exposure of tyranny, modest demands, modest demands not good enough, rise of the radical left, reign of terror, reaction to the terror. What happens after that can vary.

We’ll come back to that in a bit though. At the moment, the #MeToo movement has reached its first anniversary: the Harvey Weinstein exposé turned one-year-old this past weekend, Bill Cosby has been through a court of law and will see the inside of a jail cell in this life, and the Preminger-esque drama that was the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh has come to a close (we’ll return to that soon as well). Even as we are living in this, the second year of his highness, Donald J. Trump the first, the #MeToo phenomenon has been arguably the most journalistically exhausted subject in the Anglosphere, with scarcely a side of its episodic saga gone unexamined. (I say this because at the moment I am living in central Europe, and talk of it here has been, so far as I can tell, peripheral.) Thus, one’s proverbial two cents feel even less asked for than usual, but a few things are still discoverable, and need to be pointed out.

In relation to the cycle sketched above, the #MeToo movement continues to tarry (one hopes for not much longer) in the Terror phase. If you think that sounds hyperbolic, or unduly harsh, try to come up with another word that describes a) the vigilance with which accusers are rooted out and brought forward, b) the limpid motivation to destroy careers and eliminate transgressors from public life, and c) the fear (however unfounded) that men may have about their pasts and their behavior in the future. This is not to say there can’t be legitimate and just censure of sexual assault and misconduct during the Terror phase. The Kavanaugh case is certainly one of them. One more disclaimer (just in case): I support the #MeToo movement and believe it is long overdue. The reason I add this disclaimer is precisely that a feature of the Terror is the way in which even a modicum of criticism is perceived as opposition or treachery––the discourse at this point having all the nuance of a cudgel.

If #MeToo has followed the revolutionary cycle, then the first two phases (exposure of tyranny and modest demands) were short-lived. Signs of unthinking started to appear as early as December 2017, when Matt Damon reasonably suggested there is, “a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation,” and that both, while reproachable, should not be conflated. The response to this was what you would expect: You don’t respect women’s pain. What gives you, a man, the right to say that? You simply can’t understand what it’s like to be a woman. Really? Seriously? Seriously?
Yes, seriously.

Against Term Limits

In Practice, Theory

Guillaume LeBlanc from New American Perspective takes issue with President Trump’s suggestion of adding Congressional term limits.

In what was certainly a bid to win more good will with the populist right (and perhaps even the populist left), President Trump recently called for term limits on Congress. The reaction was much more subdued than I expected, although it did play out more or less as this sort of thing normally does: with the populists sharing articles about it, complete with complaints about “career politicians”, while only a few skeptics bothered to chime in to oppose it. And when it comes to the issue of term limits for Congress, put me firmly in the opposition camp.

Scalia and the Rule of Law

In Justice

Howl of the Day: Feb 22, 2016

“The law,” wrote Aristotle in his Politics, “is reason unaffected by desire”.

This view is complicated by Aristotle himself, particularly in his treatment of legislators, those who make the law, and foundings, when laws are born. But despite that, the view so expressed does not lose much of its basic persuasive impact, nor any of its practical importance. The difference between any regime and its degenerate form is often to be found in whether or not the law is regarded therein as an expression of passionless reason, and respected accordingly.

Perhaps no recent justice of the American Supreme Court was as concerned with this idea as the late Antonin Scalia. There have been and will, of course, continue to be questions about whether Scalia understood the issue sufficiently well, and whether he bore out his own view of the matter consistently in his actual judgements, and so on. But there can be little dispute that he regarded the issue as a central one and that he compelled others, friends and foes, to do the same.

The United States Supreme Court and Same-Sex Marriages: Did The Court Miss An Opportunity For Something Greater?

In Justice

By: Amar Khoday

Let’s give credit where credit is due. The United States Supreme Court did a tremendous thing for marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges.[1] It struck down state laws prohibiting same-sex marriage. In the words of United States federal appellate judge and legal scholar Richard A. Posner: “Prohibiting gay marriage is discrimination.”[2] The decision culminates years of litigation on the issue.

While I am delighted by the outcome of the decision, I am nevertheless going to be a bit of a downer here. Obergefell didn’t go far enough. How so?

Tag: US Law