#MeToo’s most notorious alleged sexual predators, Harvey Weinstein and Eric Schneiderman, were also prominent liberals. From New York Magazine‘s pre-scandal profile of Schneiderman:
He has the soul of an activist–he sees himself as a movement
progressive. And halfway through his term as A.G., Schneiderman, 58, has
become New York’s definitive liberal, using the national prominence his
predecessors brought to the office to try to yank an increasingly
centrist Democratic Party back toward its progressive roots. He’s become
a gatekeeper for the left.
Even if both of these figures miraculously turned out to be innocent, there must be plenty of vocally left-wing perpetrators of sexual violence. My question: What do liberal abusers really think? What’s actually going on inside their heads? Consider some possibilities:
1. Global insincerity. If you enjoy acts of sexual violence, vocal liberalism seems like a useful way to distract attention from your crimes. In their hearts, people like Weinstein and Schneiderman are apolitical. They don’t care about the issues they claim to care about, and don’t loathe the political “enemies” they claim to loathe.
2. Local insincerity. Another possibility is that liberal abusers are, by and large, sincere left-wing ideologues. But they covertly doubt liberal views (indeed, mainstream views) on sexual violence. So while they think it’s OK to, say, beat their girlfriends, they earnestly yearn for a $15 minimum wage.
3. Reactionary-in-liberal clothing. Perhaps liberal abusers are secret but sincere proponents of reactionary patriarchy. They think women are their born slaves, so they have every right to engage in unrestrained sexual violence.
4. The political is not personal. Some utilitarians think that utilitarianism is an ethic for governance, not personal behavior. Perhaps some liberals picture liberalism the same way: Society should adhere to leftist norms, but individual liberals are free to pursue their self-interest as they think best.
5. Self-control problems. Saint Paul famously said, “For
the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I
do.” Perhaps liberal abusers face the same demons. They deeply love
liberal ideals – including ideals about proper sexual behavior. But
when they interact with actual women, they’re overcome by their own lust
and anger.
6. Self-conscious evil. Rather than suffering from self-control problems, perhaps liberal abusers just don’t feel like doing what they think is right. While they’re perfectly able to control their impulses, and concede that their impulses are immoral, they choose evil anyway because it’s more fun for them.
Conservatives probably gravitate to explanation #1, while liberals will more likely favor #5. To me, mix of #2 and #6 is most psychologically plausible. It’s hard to believe that liberal abusers are globally apolitical; that’s taking method acting to an inhuman level. Still, liberal abusers have an especially strong motive to exaggerate their commitment to feminism. That said, their behavior probably falls far short of whatever looser norms they do accept. Furthermore, since abusers are almost always repeat offenders, I don’t buy “self-control” excuses. After all, a multitude of commitment strategies are available to any latter-day Paul who “just can’t help himself” – starting with “never spend time alone with non-relatives of the opposite sex.”
What your favorite story here – and why? Please show your work.
READER COMMENTS
Andrew_FL
May 22 2018 at 10:03am
I would suggest another possibility:
7. The subscribe to left wing politics because they know from personal experience that people are bad-they know deep down they are bad people, and they figure most other people, especially conservatives, must be so much the worse-so they figure “We really need a government that can reign in the impulses of people like me, people worse than me even”
James Miller
May 22 2018 at 10:11am
If you don’t morally separate omission/commission then most people in rich countries are morally similar to these figures. If you can save the life of an African child for $10,000, but instead spend this money on a vacation how can you morally justify whatever beliefs you have?
George
May 22 2018 at 10:17am
They’re thinking that they have more relative bargaining power than their victims so they act.
This can be due to their senior position in an organization or it could be because the male population is smaller on campus relative to women. Thus, young men can set the rules of engagement on the battlefield of love. Is it really surprising if sexual norms become looser on campus if men are setting the rules?
What’s the liberal connection? I don’t think there really is one except that these environments are coincidentally liberal strong holds. Perhaps and surely this is a stretch the “sexual revolution” set the seeds by attracting liberal men & women who are well fast and loose with sex norms.
I don’t really think that’s the case though. Politics is a team sport. In the West sex, dating, flirting, & romance are much more of a personal matter.
Rory
May 22 2018 at 10:18am
A combination of 5 and cognitive dissonance.
They lack self-control and they dillude themselves into thinking that the other party in the encounter is actually into it.
Rojellio
May 22 2018 at 10:22am
Here is another: Although rules in general are good. If you can cheat and get away with it you are a fool not to. But rules in general are good, especially for the shmucks who follow them. Note this has nothing to do with politics.
Another possibility is that some of these men believed they were engaging in exchange. Sex for roles in movies or whatever. It is possible this applies to at least some of the women too. Obviously this is not appropriate for most.
Robert EV
May 22 2018 at 10:27am
8. Gloria Steinem’s “When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie,’ â€
And a good dose of #1, 6, and smatterings of the rest.
What’s psychologically plausible depends on the underlying personality of the individual.
I don’t know Schneiderman’s personality, but Weinstein’s doesn’t seem anything like his from a cursory read of your link. To highlight a personality similar to Weinstein’s, look at Trump. Trump was long seen as a kind of liberal, but he’s really a mix of self-interest, nepotism, praise seeking, with a soft-spot for children and the otherwise innocent-seeming. And who sees actresses as innocent? They should know what they’re getting into, and they sell their selves every day of the week. (Last two sentences not my belief)
Denver
May 22 2018 at 10:28am
I agree with Bryan on #2 and I think they would also latch onto #4 if their hypocrisy is blatantly pointed out. However, while I think Bryan is right to hold people to the standards of #6, I think it’s important to remember that leftists tend to score higher on neuroticism in the big 5 personality traits. So I think there is a role for #5 here, as it’s much easier to delude yourself into hypocritical behavior when you don’t have a tight leash on your emotions.
Arnold Kling
May 22 2018 at 10:34am
I’ll take “extreme compartmentalization” for $100, Alex.
That is, your model is of a single, unified brain. My model is that these guys have separate selves. The self that takes moral stands (call this the “normal self” or the “preferred self”) simply does not acknowledge that the self that abuses women exists. It as is if the abuser is some alien personna that occasionally inhabit’s the same body as the preferred self. The preferred self can only function by pretending that the abuser isn’t really there at all, or isn’t really abusing.
In any case, I think it is profound question about morality and psychology, and I don’t know how well my answer fits the literature.
Shane L
May 22 2018 at 10:40am
Steven Pinker notes in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) that the youth culture emerging in the 1960s tended to valorise wildness, romantic impulsivity, even violence. He mentions that Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s boast that “Rape was an insurrectionary act” did not trouble left-leaning literary critics, who hailed his memoir as “Brilliant and revealing” (NYT) or “An intelligent and turbulent and passionate and eloquent man” (The Atlantic).
I wonder if some of these predatory men grew up in this period of wildness, with old visions of sexual propriety seen as prudery and replaced by uninhibited indulgence, with or without consent. They perhaps saw no contradiction between personally coercive behaviour and publicly progressive advocacy. The conservative norms that had once afforded women some minimal protection from male sexual violence had become unpopular. Sexual behaviour was free and frequently associated with intoxication. It had become normal for people to attend pubs and clubs, become drunk or drugged, and hope to end up with a stranger, similarly intoxicated. Pinker writes:
“In the interval between the onset of the sexual revolution of the early 1960s and the rise of feminism in the 1970s, the control of women’s sexuality was seen as a perquisite of sophisticated men.”
I have heard that 1970s feminism developed in the face of this hip left-leaning abuse of women. Feminists reacted to violence among their own side. Perhaps some of these men are relics of that past of wildness and hip sexual violence.
This may be too easy on them, though. Culture has changed and it seems pretty obvious that by the 2000s their behaviour was broadly seen as detestable and criminal. Perhaps there is some kind of psychological explanation; they may be narcissists who generally fail to take responsibility for their actions and put blame instead on others.
Dan Carroll
May 22 2018 at 10:44am
Narcissism.
Narcissist personalities are attracted to power and fame, and have the psychological profile to achieve it more readily than others. While they have moral convictions, such convictions are really a means to an end. They tend to think the rules don’t apply to them and are incapable of understanding the needs of others beyond an abstract conceptual level.
They are perfectly suited for political office, given the need to be a professional liar and pursue high profile overly simplistic dogmatism, which when successful leads to public accolades and more power. Even controversy becomes a drug for these types, because it means attention. They are also well suited for positions of power in business and entertainment.
Trump is the extreme example of a narcissist, but both parties are littered with them. Though not all politicians fit the description.
These folks are a profound mystery to rule-following, OCD, truth-telling, socially awkward Asperger types that typically populate universities.
Ray Sun
May 22 2018 at 10:45am
Weinstein is probably best explained by Bryan’s combination of 2 and 6. In Schneiderman’s case, some amount of 5 seems more plausible; it seems like he is a severe alcoholic, and I don’t read the women’s accounts as saying that his drunk, violent attacks on them manifested a conscious choice to indulge in a behavior that he found fun.
Ray Sun
May 22 2018 at 10:58am
I recall that Bryan subscribes to the Szaszian view of mental illness. If that view extends to addiction and alcoholism (that is, if he thinks alcoholism is just a preference), then the involvement of alcohol would not be a good reason to favor 5 over 6 as an explanation in Schneiderman’s case. Bryan might say that Schneiderman should, in the exercise of reasonable diligence, have foreseen a substantial likelihood that he would violently assault women after drinking, and he chose to drink anyway. Viewed through a Szaszian lens, that choice fits 6 better than 5. If you think, as I do, that addiction compromises decisionmaking in a way that sunders behavior from preferences, 5 might be a better fit.
T Boyle
May 22 2018 at 11:05am
Psychological projection would seem to cover a fair bit of it. We see and hate in others what we hate – but refuse to acknowledge – in ourselves.
Basically, Andrew_FL’s #7.
That said, I personally know someone who openly espouses #4, saying that “most people get into trouble if they run their own lives; they need someone to make rules for them, to keep them safe. But, for people who are able to stay out of trouble, obviously they don’t need to stick to the rules.” Not quite the same as advocating violence, but definitely an example of #4.
A
May 22 2018 at 11:12am
5 is unlikely given the systematic nature of the allegations. Weinstein showed a repeated process from victim selection to media management.
Hazel Meade
May 22 2018 at 11:13am
It is mostly 5. They have self-control problems, believe that therefore most other people also have self-control problems, and therefore believe (perhaps not wrongly) that the threat of force is needed to keep people from doing the things that they can’t help themselves from doing.
Same issue with, for example, smoking, and sugary drinks. I.e. “I can’t stop myself from drinking sodas without a law disincentivizing it. Therefore I support a soda tax.”
Or food desserts and fast food. “I can’t stop myself from eating hamburgers because it’s too easy to just to McDonalds or get a bag of chips from a convenience store instead of walking a mile to the supermarket. So we need a law to make sure that it’s easier for me to get fresh fruit than a burger and fries, because otherwise I’m not going to do it. ”
Likewise, with respect to sexual desire: “I can’t help being overly aggressive towards sexually attractive women without stronger punishments for doing so. It’s just how my biology works. ”
Hazel Meade
May 22 2018 at 11:32am
It’s true that #5 (and/or Andrew_FL’s #7) may involve a certain amount of willful self-delusion.
Can you really, really, not stop yourself, or are you just telling yourself you can’t stop yourself, so you don’t have to take responsibility for your actions? The truth is probably hovering somewhere indeterminately between 5 and 6.
Dave Smith
May 22 2018 at 12:46pm
I like Andrew’s #7.
And I don’t like the underlying notion that Conservatives somehow think sexual violence is OK.
My wife has had several male bosses. And how vocally liberal they were was highly correlated with how awful they were.
Adam
May 22 2018 at 2:06pm
“4. The political is not personal.”
There’s a case for #4. Weinstein-types always seems to live a contradiction. They complain about climate change, but prefer gas-guzzling limos and private jets:
(https://etcanada.com/news/35515/leonardo-dicaprio-and-harvey-weinstein-talk-their-on-set-experience-with-climate-change/
They support confiscatory tax rates but favor deductions and loopholes for their enterprises:
http://variety.com/2014/biz/news/harvey-weinstein-at-ucla-1201128308/
Weinstein went down without repellence or humility, bent on crushing his opponents:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/weinstein-lawyer-david-boies-defends-hardball-tactics-email-staff-1056058
Possible motivations for the “personal is not political”: global insincerity (#1), an evil personage (#6) or ‘politics as peer group identity’.
Floccina
May 22 2018 at 2:15pm
Reminds of the fact the many socialists do not believe in giving to charity. They will not do it until everyone is forced to contribute. On the sex stuff, they might think, I’m not going to let others have all the fun, until we all stop the behavior, I will not.
Doug
May 22 2018 at 2:20pm
8. The abusers mostly rely on ad-hoc justification about why their particular situation is uniquely different. Of course, spouse beaters and rapists are almost all bad men. But in this particular case the woman is unusually evil, or asking for it, or abused their kind-hearted generosity, or just would not stop humiliating them.
In this *particular*, it was a heroic case of an oppressed underdog standing up for justice and defending himself. Harvey Weinstein felt like he had bent over backwards to help out this young starlet. She used his generous good-nature and lied by feigning interest. (Of course she never said anything to this effect, but Harvey would say her body language clearly indicated it.)
There was a psychology study (can’t find it now) that basically interviewed convicted rapists and murderors. Almost all of them saw themselves as the good guy in their personal narrative about the event. Humans are very very good at rationalizing their own bad behavior, such that we don’t even realize when it’s happening.
That’s why Christ’s ethos of turning to the other cheek, even towards your worst enemies, is so powerful. Many, many times, even when we think we’re the heroic good guys fighting against evil, we’re just plain wrong. At best, it’s just two jerks in a petty squabble, at worst we’re the baddies. The solution is just don’t hurt people, even if we really truly believe they’re bad people who deserve it.
Roger Sweeny
May 22 2018 at 2:31pm
9. “I know what I am doing is wrong but I make up for it by opposing it publicly, preaching against it and getting the approval of good people. If you add everything up, I am actually a good, even a very good, person.”
I suspect this is how sexually hypocritical preachers feel.
Floccina
May 22 2018 at 2:35pm
Another one: perhaps they just see feminists as allies on the issue of abortion, and so publicly support feminists out of self interest because they want to avoid paternity suits and it’s not socially desirable to be for abortion because you don’t want to pay, so they need the feminists.
Kyouma
May 22 2018 at 2:52pm
10) They don’t think they’re committing sexual assault at all. “She knew what she was doing when she came to my house” / “She told me yes by the clothes she wore” / “She never said ‘no’ or ‘stop.'”
Never underestimate people’s ability to convince themselves that their self-interests and their morals coincide.
Alan Goldhammer
May 22 2018 at 2:52pm
What’s the difference between a liberal abuser and a conservative one? IMO, nothing as they both should be consigned to Dante’s ninth circle of hell.
Maximum Liberty
May 22 2018 at 4:55pm
How about the idea that they genuinely buy into the post-modern idea that all relationships are fundamentally power relationships, so it is all a difference of degree, not kind. If all sexual relationships are oppressive by nature, where do you draw the line? Lines that are difficult to draw in the first place are the hardest to police in the field. (Contrast the libertarian approach, where the line is drawn at force or threat; or a conservative approach built on some specific religious doctrine of appropriate and inappropriate or sanctified and unsanctified relationships.)
Miguel Madeira
May 22 2018 at 7:18pm
I think #7 does not makes much sense – in these case, they should be also pro-“law and order”, pro-“strong in defense”, etc, position that don’t are much coherent with “liberalism”.
Of course, a variant could be “people in the top of an hierarchical organization are bad to the people below them” – in these case, all the “liberal” package makes sense (including distrust of police, preference for multilateralism over unilateralism in foreign relations, etc.)
I suspect that is more a combination of #5 and #10; first, they commit some sexual assault by low self-control; then, they convince themselves that they did nothing wrong, making more easy to repeat the acts.
In the case of Weinstein, there is probably a question of changing and diffuse moral rules – the frontier between “if you don’t have sex with me, you will not get the role” (oppressive powerful male in action) and “we are having very good sex; hey, perhaps there is a role for you in one of my movies” (little more than some small nepotism, and not much different than the producers and directors than give roles to relatives, friends or official girlfriends/boyfriends) could be very thin.
Mark Bahner
May 22 2018 at 7:19pm
I don’t think I want to spend the time reading and thinking enough to offer an informed opinion of Harvey Weinstein’s motives.
But here are some statements that have been ascribed to Weinstein:
New Yorker article by Ronan Farrow
David
May 22 2018 at 8:22pm
What about “Does Doing Good Give You License to Be Bad?”, the topic of the latest Freakonomics podcast? I think that fits with #9.
Thomas Sewell
May 22 2018 at 8:29pm
How does this fit into the idea that people have a subconscious budget for willpower and doing good/bad?
I suspect a combination of factors, mostly involving rationalization and compensation. I’d also suspect that the causation flows from their personal experience (Men in my industry/social circle and me act this way) to their politics (we need laws/regulations/lawsuits to control this common behavior). I think that last also applies to women, in the sense that left-wing women’s experiences in Hollywood, academia, etc… likely color their views on the subject because they project similar circumstances onto other industries/groups where they may not actually be nearly as common.
Steve Sailer
May 22 2018 at 8:50pm
Larry David had a relevant observation about the demographic tendency of #MeToo guys in his SNL monolog last fall.
Mark Z
May 22 2018 at 8:52pm
In a lot of cases, progressive or feminist men who commit sexual misconduct likely don’t see a contradiction between their ideology and their behavior because they don’t think of themselves as one of ‘those guys’, who does that sort of thing.
I don’t think it occurs to the average male activist for ‘affirmative consent’ laws, or male “metoo” supporter, that much of his own behavior (flirting or asking women out in a professional context, trying to kiss a woman before asking permission, etc.) is regarded as the very sexual harassment or assault they think they oppose in the abstract.
Many men I think have also been convinced by the sexual revolution that women actually want to be ‘unshackled’ from restrictive sexual norms, including taboos about sexual behavior in the workplace. Note that most of the accusations these days seem to be harassment or misconduct due to professional circumstances, not actually physically coercive behavior; so many of these men likely thought they were simply really ‘sex positive’, perhaps not being aware that ‘free love’ has fallen out of favor on the left.
Weir
May 22 2018 at 10:13pm
Whatever you really think is what you do. That’s how you find out what you think.
If you say that the minimum wage should be $15 but you pay your interns nothing, then that’s it. That’s the real answer. Or maybe you say you’re against segregated schools. But that can’t be what you really think, because you went to the meetings and you campaigned to keep the black kids from one side of the street being zoned with the white kids on the other side of the street. “It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children.” But it’s only complicated in a really simple, clear-cut way.
You’ll pay a lot for real estate in Portland. It doesn’t cost you a thing to call it a sanctuary city. You’re a hypocrite, but “intellectual integrity” is a lot cheaper than social ostracism. Racist policies are cheap, but an explicitly racist rationale for those policies would be expensive, so you buy the policy but not the rationale.
A hundred years ago it was cheap to be a racist Progressive. It was free, so the Progressives in that era were outwardly racist. A hundred years later it doesn’t cost a thing for a student at Yale to denounce himself for his white privilege. He’s eager to talk about race but not about class. Class, however, is a touchy subject. And that’s the rule. When people think the cost is too high, they don’t pay. That’s why there’s no such thing as an “involuntary celibate.” If you can pay for an X-Box, you can pay for sex. Have you seen what they charge for comic books now? But identity politics is something that our species has invented in its endless creativity, and victimhood is a prized condition, so people opt for mauvaise foi, and the pretense of helplessness.
You believe on the margin. Your thoughts have a price. If someone else pays the entire bill, then you can believe in a lot of expensive ideas. But you start to find out what you actually believe when it’s your own money on the line. You believe in what benefits you until a certain point, and then the cost is prohibitive.
If you make an exception for yourself, then you’ve made your choice. If you think that spying ceases to be illegal when it’s against your opposition, then you don’t actually have any objection to the crime itself. If you’re never going to give up your armed bodyguards, then that’s what you actually think about gun control. Thoughts don’t exist in some separate realm. The idea that you can think one thing and do something else is one of those illusions that come packaged up with free will.
Other species can lie, but they can’t deceive themselves. A chimpanzee can play a trick on another chimpanzee, but he can’t play a trick on himself. The illusion of consciousness makes us better liars, but our thoughts aren’t therefore real things with an existence of their own. Our brains generate dreams too, but dreams have no more reality than the excuses we come up with for whatever actions and policies we’re carrying out.
Our species dreams up a lot of ideologies and moral claims. We talk a lot of talk. But what we really think is what we do, and the rest of it is how we jockey for advantage and position ourselves. There are all these stories we tell, but our real moral values are the ones we’re willing to pay for and to put into practice.
Mark Bahner
May 22 2018 at 11:07pm
Hi,
I sent in a comment that basically consisted of (alleged) Harvey Weinstein quotes, to try to explore what he might be thinking. The comment was held in moderation…I think because it included a link to the New Yorker article from which the (alleged) quotes came.
Mark
Sean Rutledge
May 23 2018 at 12:42am
I’d add #11 – Narcissism.
Narcissists have no empathy, they don’t experience other people’s emotions. They see the emotions of others and project their feelings onto it.
Being liberal makes them look and feel good, so they call themselves liberals. It’s easy to do and say all the right things, and they are so distant from having to live with the consequences of those actions, that they project all sorts of goodness onto themselves.
They truly think they are perfect and wonder why other people are so stupid. They are The Annoited Ones and should be in charge of telling other people what to do.
They truly believe that people who disagree with them are stupid, evil, deplorable….
AND when these men are with women. They don’t sense the other’s real emotion, they genuinely believe the women are asking for it, because that’s what the women want.
Think about Trump Derangement Syndrome. These people just cannot believe that someone could disagree with them – because they are filled with goodness and light. So there must be something very wrong with them.
Narcissism is on a spectrum with malignant sociopathy at the far end. It’s far more than just being selfish.
Some signs of Narcissism from Dr. Ramani Durvasula, author of “Should I Stay, or Should I Go? Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist
1. They act entitled.
2. You feel like you’re not being heard.
3. They’re rude to workers in the service industry.
4. They’re obsessed with their online image.
5. They want you all to themselves.
6. They won’t stop talking about themselves.
7. They lie.
8. They seem superficial.
You may be able to tell, but I’ve had a recent, bad encounter with a narcissist, and seem to have been surrounded by them all my life.
Stella
May 23 2018 at 2:19pm
Someone above mentioned cognitive dissonance wherein they delude themselves into thinking the other person is into it, but I think it’s broader than that, boiling down to:
7. This specific case is different because [reasons]
Clay
May 23 2018 at 8:21pm
Well . . . Three different takes on sin . . .
Paul, Augustine and Rousseau.
Paul – “Therefore, do not let sin continue to rule as king in your mortal bodies so that you should obey their desires. Neither go on presenting your bodies to sin as weapons of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, also your bodies to God as weapons of righteousness. For sin must not be master over you, seeing that you are not under law but under undeserved kindness.’’
All sin, not all submit.
Augustine – “Give me chastity . . . but not yetâ€
Accepts the law from god.
Rousseau – “Man everywhere born free (from sin) and now everywhere in chains.â€
Rejects binding law from god, society or anywhere.
Which one influences today?
Julien Couvreur
Jun 3 2018 at 12:50am
I thought Bryan subscribed to the view that “Politics isn’t about policy”, which would also resolve the apparent dissonance.
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