What Douglas Murray’s Book Does Well (And Where It Falters)

“I will begin with the pros of Murray’s book before outlining my disagreements. First, it is well-written and well-organized. His prose crackles with wit and salt, with pointed examples often blending seamlessly with political commentary.”

Introduction

The anti-Social Justice Warrior (SJW) monograph written by an up-and-coming conservative commentator is practically a genre of literature at this point. Many of these books are the progeny of William F. Buckley’s classic (and comparably heady) 1951 book God and Man at Yale, which was perhaps the first polemic directed against campus activism and academic progressivism. Since then, everyone from Ann Coulter to Ben Shapiro has written about the dangers posed by “social justice” approaches to gender, race, and identity. It seems to almost be a rite of passage. Some of these works—like Peter Lawler’s American Heresies and Higher Education—are thoughtful and interesting, even for those of us who disagree with the main arguments. Others are just rivers of partisan vitriol assembled into disjointed chapters, which barely hang together as a concept—let alone a book. Douglas Murray’s new book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity falls somewhere in the middle of the pack. While I disagree with most of it, there are segments where Murray does make a compelling and well-articulated argument for his positions. But there are other portions where he stumbles into one sidedness and partisanship. Murray’s book is also let down by its tendency to lean on exposition and anecdote rather than explanation. He does marshal plenty of examples where progressive activists behaved aggressively or went too far. But there is little deep explanation of the cultural and historical conditions engendering social disharmony: an account of where the “madness” of the title comes from—and how this differs from earlier epochs. This makes the book more a chronicle of events, rather than a sustained analysis.

In the Interest of Fairness

I will begin with the pros of Murray’s book before outlining my disagreements. First, it is well-written and well-organized. His prose crackles with wit and salt, with pointed examples often blending seamlessly with political commentary. It is also written in a less polemical style than one might have expected, given Murray’s association with websites such as PragerU. In the introduction, Murray concedes points that many progressives would find appealing. For instance, he recognizes that there are serious problems with neoliberal capitalism (which came to the fore in 2008), that social justice activism can produce good results, and he acknowledges why many millennials and Gen Zers might be dissatisfied with the status quo:

“Although the foundations had been laid for several decades, it is only since the financial crash of 2008 that there has been a march into the mainstream of ideas that were previously known solely on the obscurest fringes of academia. The attractions of this new set of beliefs are obvious enough. It is not clear why a generation which can’t accumulate capital should have any great love of capitalism. And it isn’t hard to work out why a generation who believe they may never own a home could be attracted to an ideological world view which promises to sort out every interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’….To date ‘social justice’ has run the furthest because it sounds—and in some versions is—attractive.”