“This is truly a stupid time to be alive,” Noah Rothman writes in his brilliant and urgent debut book, Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America. He’s talking about how people who fly the banner of “social justice” gin up a never-ending torrent of frivolous, neurotic, incoherent controversies over identity. He’s right; it is a stupid time to be alive. But Rothman’s book makes it a little less stupid.
While I was reading Unjust, the controversy du jour was about Liam Neeson. At a publicity event, Neeson mentioned that, many years earlier, someone close to him was raped and all he knew about the assailant was that he was black. Neeson revealed that he spent a fuming week pacing and hoping to be attacked by a black man so that he could take some violent revenge. The actor, who is a sort of cultural avatar of vengeance in his movie roles, had reflected honestly on a profoundly traumatic and evil emotional reaction he had, but which he did not act on, and which he regretted. Nevertheless, strangers who appointed themselves the police of public morality attacked him for being a racist. This fits within the narrative of Rothman’s book.
Rothman has analyzed a silly time in a very wise and productive way so that his readers can understand the issue, see what’s wrong with it, and know what to do about it. The book serves as a call to recognize and resist the problems social justice philosophy and its methods are causing: “Injustice committed in the name of tackling injustice.”
Everyone wants a just society, but as Rothman put it while publicizing Unjust, the trouble with “social justice” is that it isn’t social and it isn’t justice. It’s a clever play in the style of Voltaire’s famous line that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Rothman’s writing is clever throughout, usually to solid comic effect. The point about the term is that “social” justice is a bit like a “social” drinker or a “social” tennis player. Adding the adjective means it isn’t much of one at all.
Rothman begins by explaining the idea of retribution as justice and why it’s especially poisonous when grievances (many of which, Rothman notes, are legitimate ones) get held as a class and retribution is sought against other groups. Rothman essentially argues this wallowing and indiscriminate hate is where retributive justice plus identitarianism lead, as a matter of psychology. It’s what we must move past. The same “identitarian” thinking that was so quick to condemn Neeson’s words is pushing in the wrong direction, indulging the same impulse. The very people who imagine they are the solution are often the problem.
One of the best things about Unjust is Rothman doesn’t back down from making claims despite knowing it’s likely to be met with an angry response from those presenting an opposing argument. Rothman comes out swinging: “Many who dedicate themselves to social justice are pursuing a noble goal: equality and reparation for genuine historical crimes. But harboring grievance is toxic, and in the hands of an influential set of activists, social justice has turned poisonous. It appeals to our pettiness and stokes envy. It compels us to think of ourselves and those around us as victims inhabiting a complex matrix of persecution. While robbing us of our sense of agency, it entices us to take out our frustrations on our neighbors. It demands that we define people by their hereditary traits and insists that we take subjective inventory of the ‘privileges’ we acquire at birth. For social justice’s devotees, the American idea is a lie.”
Rothman’s first contention is theoretical racial “colorblindness,” and facially equal case-by-case judgment in general, need to be restored to their proper place and not as a widely accepted understanding of America’s reality but as our understanding of how to proceed justly. “In the eyes of some of its advocates, social justice is a way of addressing grievances that can’t be adjudicated by a legal system that is blind, by design, to injustices suffered by groups,” Rothman writes. “A system that ignores the intangible factors of historical and institutional discrimination, they say, does not deliver justice. In the case of present-day America, this is fatuous nonsense.”
After explaining what retributive justice is, Rothman goes into one of the more sinister aspects of its practice. If equality is understood merely as getting everyone to the same level, it’s as good to bring the higher people down as it is to raise the lower ones up. To explain, Rothman uses the classic Kurt Vonnegut story “Harrison Bergeron,” in which “everyone is finally equal” and “not only before God and the law” but “every which way.” How? It’s the future and a dystopic “handicapper general” makes sure that any born advantage gets taken away. Beautiful people must wear a clown nose, smart ones must have a distracting sound playing in their ears, and so on. In the same way, people under the “social justice” banner have tended toward handicapping and tearing down instead of building people up.
A significant strength of Unjust is that despite reading breezily and not being very long, at 235 pages, it is exhaustively argued and packed with relevant examples. Rothman is an associate editor for Commentary magazine and was formerly on a media beat, and uses that experience to his advantage. It doesn’t read like a compilation of articles or posts as journalists sometimes do at book length. Instead, Rothman intersperses many well-packaged, clearly presented, real-world episodes that demonstrate the theoretical arguments with which he is grappling. When he discusses the inherent factiousness of “intersectionality theory” in practice, he is ready with the details of how it turned the Women’s March from something inspiring to something divisive.
In a section about Fearless Girl, a statue of a young girl that drew international coverage when it appeared in front of the charging Wall Street bull, Rothman demonstrates why sweating the details matters and why accepting the narrative is untenable. The appearance of Fearless Girl was feted and politicians, including some running for the White House in 2020, went to pay respects to a supposedly inspiring symbol of feminist progress. But it turns out the placement of the “guerrilla art” was really a marketing ploy by a financial firm that, it later turned out, was sued by female employees for pay discrimination. It had also been condescending to female clients whom, in private documents, it called too emotional to think too hard. Words and symbols are cheap, ultimately.
Taken together, these kinds of examples make Rothman’s next major point, which is that, on top of the problems with the ideology, self-styled “social justice” devotees don’t behave in ways that are kind, productive, and just.
Quite the contrary.
On college campuses and other rarefied spaces where their activism flourishes, so too does nastiness and the sleazy abuse of social justice ideas as mere tools of power. This is a culture not limited to college campuses, as is often claimed, but one that’s “being adapted for mass consumption.” It’s becoming the de facto corporate and public ethos. People are constantly outraged.
Rothman, however, says it is not organic or worthwhile outrages that draw their emotion. Social justice has created a string of “controversies made for the social media age” that “produce the illusion for social justice advocates that they are engaging in genuine political discourse. They’re only obsessing over popular culture.” It’s insightful, and it explains why famous people and Hollywood productions take up so much of the focus when, morally, their misdeeds don’t carry any particular weight.
Rothman proceeds from analyzing the problem to seeking solutions. In a sparkling section, he draws several surprising historical analogies to explain that issues like the rise of social justice identitarianism have come up before, and what that means for us now. I won’t list all of these historical examples, except to say that the description of “wokeness” as a sort of intellectual Tammany Hall system of corrupt power and spoils for interest groups is deeply incisive and ironic. The advice he offers the intellectual Left about how to read a destructive faction out of its larger movement the way the Right did with the Birchers is given vividly and in good faith. One can only hope it is received in equally good faith.
Rothman diagnoses a certain fatalism among devotees of social justice, as though once they become committed to their ideology something flips in their incentive structure, and it becomes necessary for them to believe that bad things about America and the world will continue to be preserved rather than resolved. They become attached to that which they hate. What he urges readers of Unjust to find in themselves is the opposite, which is the will to oppose and resist destructive ideas permeating our culture without succumbing to bitterness or self-pity.
The most concrete solution Rothman offers is a renewed dedication, in schooling and culture, to basic civics.
With a sense of history and civics, it would be tough to chant in protest, “What do we want? A more perfect union! When do we want it? NOW!”
That chant is, in a way, what social justice advocacy amounts to. But to demand it now is to misunderstand why the word “more” is included in the phrase, “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice.” It’s there because society is a project. Real progress demands that we work at that project, rather than succumbing to defeatism and anger over the fact that it is not yet complete. Rothman’s Unjust is the most robust and most comprehensive case for getting back to work.
Nicholas Clairmont is an associate editor at Arc Digital and a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner.
