This is my first blog on my new, The Conscience of a Progressive, website. For those of you familiar with my academic work, I may occasionally write about issues of education, economics, and international development. However, I plan to focus this blog on my reactions to popular media, especially television news shows, with particular attention right now to Bill Maher’s Real Time on HBO.
My Bill Maher Report
I have long been a fan of Bill Maher. I’ve watched his shows – religulously, he might say – for years and have seen him do stand-up in person a few times. I’m less of a fan now that Trump has gone, and Bill has moved a little more to the right than he used to be – although I still think his satire can be very funny. But — in my view, of course — he is wrong-headed about many things. Most of what he is wrong about these days is his criticism of left/progressive views. Bill was very positive about Bernie Sanders for much of the 2020 presidential campaign. While not always agreeing with Bernie’s positions, Bill now would likely agree with much fewer.
Bill was pretty crazy on his show last Friday (June 11) about seeing people outdoors still wearing masks. He said it (the pandemic) is over, you can’t hide forever, stop cowering, life is a risk, and those who are outside wearing masks are morons. This is wrong in so many ways. The pandemic isn’t over, we still don’t know what the future holds, if you are not vaccinated, you should wear a mask, and even if you are vaccinated, a mask can’t hurt and might help. CDC guidelines are just best guesses about what is needed, and there is nothing wrong with people still being worried about variants and spread. Why such anger and hostility, Bill?! You’ve never been so angry and hostile about the morons who refused to wear masks during the high points of the pandemic when – in the unbelievable name of freedom – they were endangering us all!
But this is really a small issue. Bill is off base on some much bigger issues. He often finds rather extremist, very minority views on the left and treats them as widespread and as examples of what’s wrong with holding a left, progressive perspective. On Friday’s show, he made fun of two such views. One by a councilperson in Seattle who supposedly wanted to “decriminalize crime.” First, decriminalizing many current crimes is not a bad idea (Bill would agree with some, like marijuana possession). The person Bill cited sounded like he or she was way overboard, but Bill used it to repeat his criticism of the defund-the-police slogan. While this slogan may lose votes for the Democrats, most people who argue for it are not extremists – they don’t want to get rid of the police entirely, but just want, among other things, to switch some police funding to social services to prevent some of the problems police currently deal with. While Bill prides himself on having debates, I haven’t seen him invite a sensible defund-the-police perspective on his show.
This last was just a passing remark for Bill on last Friday’s show. He spent much more time on making fun of what he saw as another extreme view by the left – that racism today in the U.S. is worse than it has ever been. His evidence for this view was a quote from Kevin Hart, the comedian, that said something like “you’re witnessing white power and white privilege at an all-time high.” Bill then goes on and on about how, of course, the era of slavery and Jim Crow was much worse than today. Few people, if any, disagree with Bill’s point that there has been progress on racism and other social problems he mentions like sexism and homophobia. (Hart responded to not take him literally – Hart’s point might be and mine would be, in our current historical era where racism is named and shamed, white power and white privilege are still so pervasive, and openly so in this Trump-deranged era.) Bill’s point on this show and others is what exactly? That we should be grateful for progress? Of course, most everyone on the left is – but progress is slow, and racism is still virulent. Bill ended with “We’ve come a long way baby…even if we can’t declare mission accomplished.” Bill seems to want them all to talk about the progress we have made when they rightly focus on how far we still have to go!
Bill does this on a lot of shows – finds some rather extremist, off-the-wall view and uses it to critique the vast majority of what are very reasonable left progressive perspectives. The off-the-wall views are good for comedy but are not at all representative. Bill has been particularly dismissive of critical race theory (CRT), mischaracterizing it, having many guests — finding Black guests especially — who are critical of CRT without ever having a guest who defends it. CRT makes a lot of sense – Bill and many others don’t want to see American society as racist, but it is a very reasonable position to hold – and it is contrary to one of Bill’s Friday concluding remark, that “racism is not everywhere, it’s not in my house, it’s not in most of yours” (talking about his audience). You would think that the right’s attack on CRT in schools across the U.S. would give Bill some pause to think that, given how scared the right seems to be of it, that there might be something to it.
Bill’s big issue underlying this is his decrying of “wokeness.” But wokeness is not the extreme minority views Bill always highlights. CRT has very sensible points and advocates. Thinking about the Palestinian-Israeli situation, contrary to Bill’s view, issues of apartheid, racism, and CRT can be seen as very relevant. Bill, there are many guests you could have who would explain this. Thinking about free vs. “politically correct” speech, which Bill has harped on forever, there is a sensible perspective – not composed of “snowflakes” – that there are sensible positions that talk about the need to circumscribe some speech in some settings. Shouting fire falsely in a crowded theater or directly inciting violence is not the only exception as libel laws and restrictions on hate speech in other liberal democracies like Germany evidence. It should give you pause that even the ACLU, a staunch defender of free speech, recognizes this as you said on Friday’s show. It should also give Bill pause that the right is going on and on about wokeness, perhaps there is something to it.
Bill, you need to find guests on the left who challenge your view – too many of your guests, when not conservatives, are idiosyncratic oddballs – who agree with you on the critique of wokeness and the left. Bernie Sanders, The Squad, and other progressives are not the problem with today’s Democratic party, despite your quoting James Carville on this. We need a left, progressive view much more strongly if our society, the U.S., the world is to survive, let alone thrive! Read my book, The Conscience of a Progressive!
Yes! He’s really pissing me off lately! And why harp on the progress we’ve made when black men especially continue to be murdered? There’s so much more that needs to be done, don’t sit back and congratulate yourself. Racism still exists everywhere, because you still notice color.
So true! Last night on this app called “clubhouse”, I came across people debating if being “woke” is the new pandemic?”. The term “woke” is now being used as a stick by the far right to beat anyone who does not seem to agree with them. I read it somewhere that the term “woke” is actively being weaponised by the far right in the current socio-political climate to silence issues of social justice.
That was a particularly bad Maher show. He is very much a cherry-picker, who goes for the low hanging fruit, and has a number of pet topics. We all know he is against religion, but then he is very pro Israel, which is almost contradictory. I tend to be lazy and pragmatic, but hypocrisy and ignorance and inability to reason still irritate me, and too often Maher displays all three with little or no acknowledgement of his own arrogance and self-importance. keep up the good work, Steve, I don’t know where you get the energy.
People – especially working people – aren’t angry at ‘wokeness’ for protesting injustice. They are angry at it for taking up the whole conversation. The largest predictor, by a wide margin, for whether you hold ‘woke’ views of the US and Europe (i.e. systematically racist, etc) is not race, but whether you have a college degree or not. So this is not primarily a racial issue. It is a class issue masquerading as the former.
The reason I don’t much care for wokeness is the same reason I don’t much care for Marxism. The insights and analysis are valuable and frequently true. The conclusions and strategies, however, leave a good deal to be desired, at least in my opinion. With regards to race, it has been used as a weapon for pretty much all of the history of the present-day nations of the Americas. I think it still is today, whether it’s SJWs or bigots using it. I don’t trust people to use it responsibly. Strong anti-racist norms are very important to a society. But they can’t be used to destroy ideas like merit, qualification, et cetera. These matter, too. No one seems to think it is racist that the NBA and NFL are vastly disproportionate in their employment of US-born black people, or that the math and science olympiads in that country are dominated by first-generation Asian immigrant children. There’s a good reason for that – it’s not.
I appreciate your reading my blog and commenting. I think merit and qualification are really complicated issues, much moreso than with the examples of the NBA, NFL, or any form of olympics. Plus, even with those examples, there are major issues around how much you should be rewarded for such “merit.”