Politics on ben's notes

Letter to the Editor: On “Pluralism”

Sat, 10 May 2025 08:34:49 -0700

I’ve been a reader of The New Yorker since I was a wee lad. Admittedly I mostly looked at the cartoons, and only infrequently found my attention captured by the three-column format they were enfolded in, but as I grew older I found more and more of the articles of interest. The descriptions of shows I could never see, the restaurants that received that vaunted “Table for Two” treatment, and the profiles of interesting people talking about interesting topics all caught my eye. I’ve only rarely found myself disagreeing fundamentally with the articles I read, and more rarely still felt a need to write a response, but in the face of a piece I considered to be fundamentally intellectually dishonest I had to write a response. When I read “The Pluralism Pivot”¹, after I got done shouting at my empty kitchen, I sat down with pen in hand. My actual letter to the editor is presented at the end of this post, but I felt like there was much more to say than could fit in any column inches I could hope to be given.

When conservative pundits like Charlie Kirk and Chris Rufo started shouting about “indoctrination” happening on college campuses, I dismissed it. In fact, Critical Race Theory―the field they set out to demonize―is a long-established field with a well-reasoned body of work behind it. It provides both a theoretic framework for understanding power imbalances and media portrayal of different communities, and a lens through which legal and political actions can be analyzed―and often, hidden motivations discovered. Reactionaries on the far right hate this because it’s an effective way of dismissing many of their wilder claims, and clearly shows how long-term, systemic racism has shaped our society. CRT informed the development of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion frameworks, so of course that had to be undermined as well. I believe that this new concept of “pluralism” was created, using a name otherwise applied to existing fields of research and conversation, to refer to some invention of the Right that they could hold up as a rival theoretic framework―but it has no substance to it.

As far as I can tell, the root of the framework of “pluralism” is, “I have to be taken seriously and you have to admit that you were excluding me.” In any conversation worth having on difficult topics, every party should be outside their comfort zone in some crucial way. The best such environments are where all parties are experiencing similar, but different, levels of discomfort. We grow through adversity. Let’s consider this passage, then:

Pluralism demands that conservative evangelicals who don’t believe in same-sex marriage be welcomed to campus alongside gay students and that political conservatives who oppose affirmative action have fruitful discussions with people of color.

What are the actual imbalances here? All of these students are told, “you need to be tolerant of these people, and listen to them”, but what’s the actual opposing group in each case? For the conservatives, you have gay students (who they believe should be denied rights) and students of color (who they believe didn’t get to their positions by skill and merit). For the students of color, they are being asked to treat (supposedly white, though it’s actually never said) students who believe that they fundamentally do not belong there with respect, but little is given in return. For the queer students, you’re being told that the position that you do not deserve protections, rights, or privileges under law that are granted to others, is on equal footing to your demand for the simple respect of being left alone, to live as you will. In both of these cases, one side is being told to tolerate that another person exists, and the other is being told to tolerate that a person wants to exclude you―from the academy, or from society. This is not the same.

Throughout the article, there’s a significant emphasis on the importance of the feelings of conservative students and conservatives in broader society. Be they LDS (don’t say Mormon) or from other faiths; or just white, rich, and socially isolated; we’re told of how hard it’s been to feel so attacked in recent years. I can understand, really. It’s hard to see constantly demeaning remarks about your community coming from people in relatively high positions in society, be they politicians, university presidents, the media. I know this personally: in 1993, President Bill Clinton enacted Department of Defense Directive 1304.26, establishing the policy called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”―you could be gay and in the military, you just could never admit to it, and if they decided you were, you would be dishonorably discharged. Watching any sort of media from the 1990s is a reminder of exactly what society thought of gay people; Friends has several notably bad arcs around homosexuality and gender dysphoria. Churches and other religious institutions reject the queer community―the Salvation Army does not provide support to homeless gay men, for instance. (They now claim that’s changed, as of 2019.²) What I’m saying here is, after a span of maybe a decade of real, actual progress on equality and discussions of historic harms, conservatives are now pitching an absolute fit that they’re not being catered to and have to actually confront the realities of the world their ideology and their predecessors helped shape.

It’s also worth remarking that this new “pluralism” is being pushed at a time when these conservative forces feel that they are most ascendant; not only are they in control of the branches of the federal government, they seem to dominate the media landscape as well. Clearly, the far right felt like they had to have an academic movement to counteract their dreaded Critical Race Theory, something they could use to carve out a rhetorical space for themselves. After all, if you have no argument to stand on, academia will cut you down. It’s just disappointing that they landed on a misunderstanding of viewpoint diversity as their means to their end. In discussions about embracing viewpoint diversity, proponents always include recognizing one’s own potential for fault, that your assumptions can be wrong. To the conservatives, apparently, this means that other people must recognize their potential for fault; somehow this requirement does not also hold true for them as well. At no point is the conservative evangelical to be challenged to ask, “is my opposition to gay rights wrong?” just as the political conservative is not to be challenged about the actual purpose and background of diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are merely asked to tolerate the people they disdain.

Now, I keep putting “pluralism” in quotes here. After reading Green’s New Yorker article, I wanted to know more about that “pluralism” and … well, starting with Wikipedia I found a bunch of different schools of thought in various fields, none of which seemed quite right:

Pluralism, the political theory: Power is distributed between the government and various non-governmental organizations, which all engage in the political process. We see a form of this play out in the US as the interaction of our political parties, trade unions, and other civil organizations.

Pluralism, the political philosophy: A lasting peace is possible between communities of different backgrounds and experiences in a larger culture by celebrating unique aspects of each culture, while retaining their sub-cultural distinct communities versus dissolving those communities as in multiculturalism or assimilation.

Value pluralism: This one’s the closest in meaning, I think. This theory claims that there can exist multiple competing ethical (value) systems which are each internally consistent, but are externally inconsistent between each other, while all still remaining coherent or morally sound in a society.

This “pluralism” we’re discussing, that competing beliefs and expectations should be given equal weight and courtesy, comes closest to value pluralism―but where it fails is that the value systems in conflict in value pluralism are where individuals’ own value systems seem to be contradictory, but are each consonant with an overall societal value. Instead, this “pluralism” seems to derive more from agonism, a theory where conflict drives progress―but since the far right are whiny babies, their positions must be protected from analysis or deconstruction, while they are themselves allowed to cast aspersions on others’. My desire for rights is, according to their rules, an object suitable for debate, but their desire to deny me rights is, instead, a position that may not be assailed. I remain unamused.

In doing my investigation to write this letter, I realized that Dr. Allen was talking about a very different form of pluralism from the vague assemblage of poorly-thought-out ideas that Green presented as a coherent political or social theory; intrigued, I ordered a copy of her book Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. Unsurprisingly, I found a far more persuasive and coherent argument for pluralism in the political philosophy sense: a single polity formed of multiple distinct cultures in a structure of mutual respect. She writes of the sacrifices each community makes as a part of forming a more coherent overall society; in Green’s writing, on the other hand, one community is expected to tolerate the presence of people who they want to deny rights and privileges, and the other is expected to tolerate being told―and not being allowed to challenge―the assertion that they do not deserve rights, or do not deserve their achievements. I was struck by how little some of this has changed since the photograph of Elizabeth Eckford being turned away from Little Rock Central High School, as Hazel Bryan screams at her; these are many of the same arguments, even some of the same people.

All of this to say, a softball article intended to promote the importance of outreach to conservatives while downplaying their positions’ issues wasn’t really what I wanted to read in a normally incisive and erudite magazine like the New Yorker, and I’m disappointed that such a weakly researched article advancing lazy arguments made it through to print. Possibly the worst part is, most of the people interviewed are discussing real problems: we do have issues around tribalism and an inability to communicate across boundaries, we do have siloing, and we do have a need to provide accommodations for people with different lifestyles, especially on college campuses. However, when those accommodations are being demanded for people who are otherwise used to comfort, and who as a bloc have acted to enforce harms on other communities, there’s something truly off-kilter. The expectation of one’s own comfort should not come at the expense of recognizing that other members of the community either deserve basic rights, or deserve to be at an institution to begin with; until we can agree on that, I see no point in attempting to make my spaces more comfortable for people who want to harm me and mine.

The letter

Sent to The New Yorker by me, and presumably not selected for publication as it’s been several weeks.

After reading “The Pluralism Pivot” (April 21, 2025), I was left to wonder about the critical framework and body of research behind this new “pluralism”—but when I investigated, there wasn’t much. The report by Dr. Allen³ that’s briefly mentioned discusses viewpoint diversity, but doesn’t seem to establish a field on par with, say, Critical Race Theory. That was an established field with significant bodies of work behind it before the conservative pundits descended; instead, this seems to be a wholecloth invention lacking in theoretical framework or substance.

The best discussions come from all participants being pushed to the limits of their comfort, assuming they’re able to remain civil. However, there was an unacknowledged imbalance throughout the article that became more and more evident the further I read. The examples given of pluralistic integration, conservative students opposing gay marriage and affirmative action meeting gay students and/or students of color in cordial discussion, do not engage with the power imbalance or nature of the distinction at all. The conservative student is asked to tolerate the Other, while students of color are expected to be cordial with someone who believes they didn’t earn their place, or who believes that gay students don’t deserve equal rights.

Lastly, since it cropped up here too: the idea that conservatives are against gay marriage, and that’s all, is a fabrication in of itself. It was never just about marriage; in his concurrence on Dobbs, Clarence Thomas specifically cited Obergefell and Lawrence as cases he felt the court “should reconsider”⁴—reopening the idea that sodomy laws should be enforceable, and directly attacking the safety of the LGBTQ+ community from the bench.

Viewpoint diversity requires that all parties be willing to accept that they might be wrong. I do not see such humility in the people demanding it now.

Green, Emma. “What Comes After D.E.I.?” (Published title, “The Pluralism Pivot”) The New Yorker. (2025/4/21) ↩︎
Baume, Matt. Salvation Army Says It’s No Longer Homophobic Out Magazine. (2019/11/18) ↩︎
Danielle Allen & Justin Pottle. Democratic Knowledge and the Problem of Faction The Knight Foundation. (2018) ↩︎
Beauchamp, Zack. Could Clarence Thomas’s Dobbs concurrence signal a future attack on LGBTQ rights? Vox. (2022/6/24) ↩︎

Open letter to my state legislators, re: PSE & the storm

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 20:21:51 -0800

In the wake of the cyclone last week I wrote a letter to my legislators, following the shameful performance of PSE’s grid in the wake of the storm. Four days after, I met with friends who live in Bellevue for lunch, and they were still without power! While I’m aware that there are neighborhoods of Seattle that have been slowly recovering power, by the time I’m writing this blog post (that is, Sunday, the 24th of November) Seattle has nine outages affecting 11 total customers. PSE, meanwhile, has 16,738 affected customers, and SnoPUD has 2,112. I wouldn’t be surprised if very remote areas take significant time to recover, in both PSE’s and SnoPUD’s territory—but the fact that PSE has consistently been behind in every metric of recovery even by any reasonable measure of scale applied cannot be ignored.

The truly exceptional part of this is, a week before Thanksgiving, some five hundred thousand odd customers had to throw out the contents of their fridges! How much additional downstream waste did this failure create, anyways?

Briefly, I believe that PSE has shirked their basic responsibilities as a public utility, preferring instead to send more money to their investors, and betting on being able to pull yet more funds from ratepayers to cover the costs of their malfeasance. Investment firms expect in the modern era to be able to continually extract wealth from the businesses they own, without really putting paid to the first word of the name… “investment” is a continual arrangement, where you offer funds to support a venture, and profit in a commensurate way when the business does profit. That doesn’t mean that you always profit, even if the leaders (who you have supported the selection of) make choices that result in negative impacts.

This has some of the same feeling as Centerpoint Energy after that 2021 cold wave shut down gas facilities in Texas. Customers are bearing the burden of costs that wouldn’t have needed to be imposed if facilities were appropriately managed in the first case. In Washington, we shouldn’t either. If you were impacted by the storm, you should submit a complaint to the UTC.

Letter to my legislators

As I draft this letter on the 23rd of November, I am sitting in heated, well-lit comfort in Seattle. My friends, colleagues and neighbors across Lake Washington are still without power since the windstorm on Tuesday, November 19th. The latest notice we’ve received is that some locations should expect power back by Monday, November 25th, six days after the storm.

While I’m aware that PSE’s territory includes difficult terrain, I also note that Snohomish County is similarly rural or exurban & their Public Utility District already is back up to 99% coverage at time of writing this. Notably, from PSE’s quick facts, they have 1.2 million electric customers, to SnoPUD’s 377k — but as of time of writing, while SnoPUD has around 6k customers still without power, PSE has over 70k still without power. If it were simply a matter of scale, I could understand a ratio of 4, not ten. Instead, in their reports PSE is describing having to make significant repairs to most of their substations—an issue faced by no other local utility, as far as I can tell.

I believe that PSE’s leadership should be required to explain why this recovery has gone so poorly, why they were insufficiently prepared, and what their emergency planning response will be for future significant weather events. If it has indeed been a matter of these executives enriching shareholders at the expense of ratepayers’ service level, as seems to be the case, then an appropriate response should be explored by the attorney general’s office.

The worst aspect of coming out of the storm just fine is realizing that depending on the accident of where you ended up during the storm, your outcome is drastically different. That alone is an indication of the disparity in service level, but if the argument is that a private company like PSE is supposed to provide a superior experience to a publicly owned utility, well, see whose lights are on.

Response from my rep

I sent that email on Saturday. I didn’t expect a reply until Monday, so… imagine my surprise when I looked at my email midmorning on Sunday, and there was already a reply!

Dear Mr. Lewis:

Thank you for contacting me to express your concerns about the disparity in how Puget Sound Energy served its customers in the aftermath of the bombogenesis cyclone that hit the Puget Sound last week compared to the outcomes of a local public utility district. I think you raise several good and important points, so I am hoping you will share your thoughts with the state agency that regulates this industry, the Washington State Utilities and Transportation Commission. I am pasting herein a link that will redirect you to the UTC Consumer Complaint page, though you may wish to explore other sections of the agency website. I will also note that the UTC, as does every state agency, receives public comment on specific rate change requests and at its regularly scheduled meetings. If you wish to offer your comments to the UTC at a future meeting, please refer to this link.

Thank you, again, for reaching out to share your concerns about the management of essential utility services by Puget Sound Energy.

I was in fact already planning on sending the same note, with an addendum, to the UTC. I was still glad to hear back that my rep understood.

Contacting the UTC

Now, I felt like for the utilities commission, I should provide some more context as to why this would matter, especially as I’m not a customer of PSE’s for electricity. Here was my preface to them:

The following is the letter I sent my state legislators; I’m including its text in full in this complaint, with some added remarks. While my home electricity is supplied by SCL, my workplace is in PSE territory and was offline for four days; if I were not able to work from home during the outage, my ability to work at all would have been heavily impacted—and if I were hourly, I wouldn’t be making any money this last week. While PSE has remarked repeatedly that they’re working across an enormous range, I would still note that they are the only utility to have experienced any widespread, lasting outages. Given that the UTC’s mandate & vision is to ensure that investor-owned utilities provide the same outcomes to their customers as public utilities, it’s clear that PSE is failing to do so, and catastrophically so.

If PSE’s leadership were more willing to invest in long term maintenance projects, and in routine maintenance of way clearing around their power lines, I’m reasonably sure they would have seen a lesser impact from this storm than these catastrophic, service-area-wide outages.

If you live or work in PSE’s service area and you were impacted by the storm, you should also file a complaint with the UTC. I’ll update this post if I get a reply from them. I may also revise these remarks further and make a public comment at some point.

Sine die update: jockstraps and all

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Now that the state House and Senate have adjourned sine die for the session, we can take a breather and talk about what all went down. I tried to stay current on Mastodon, but it’s been moving fairly quickly in the past few weeks and I didn’t have time to blog about it. As it is, the end result has been excellent, so I’m not even particularly frustrated about it!

Okay, so what happened here?

Data science, yes please

The LCB’s research arm is assembling a dataset on lewd conduct enforcement over the history of the rule. (I know, it’s the prohibited conduct rule, but … I like this term better.) They’ve noted this is taking some time, due to the numerous different archives they have to integrate–and a desire to make sure that it’s defensible. A focus on data quality is admirable and I appreciate that the agency’s researchers are getting the opportunity.

Meanwhile, rulemaking has been opened and they’re actually planning to address the petitions to repeal the WAC next week. In all, the agency’s following through, and I’m quite impressed.

We really meant it

The original version of SB 6105 didn’t address alcohol at all, really; the substitute bill added rules for allowing alcohol sales but had this funny phrasing so as to keep the lewd conduct rule. However, that was on the 29th–as the community response to the raids was just ramping up. By Wednesday, the LCB was readying a response as the community put forward an extremely large and loud statement. By the time the bill reached the House, we’d gotten an amendment instructing the LCB to strike the rule in its entirety.

Well, after a rewrite via striker amendment, and some additional language-smithing, we’ve got a final bill that established some of the firmest language it could protecting vulnerable workers at strip clubs, and which refines the LCB’s charter to explicitly remove regulating attire or behavior from its remit. This is fantastic; in the end, it seems the LCB’s actions are going to land first, but it’s comforting to see corresponding pressure on the board from the Legislature.

None of this work in the legislature would have happened without the engagement of Strippers Are Workers–Madison Zack-Wu and many other dancers presented excellent testimony, and the group has done the work to gather evidence and supporting data. This bill is, without a doubt, the result of their dedicated effort, and I just wanted to thank them for it.

Now what?

For now? I’m enjoying the attitude that we get from not having that rule looming over us. I love the freedom that we’re getting to see, and I’m having fun on nights out. I intend to keep doing that, especially since there’s a political aspect to them now.

So let’s dance.

An open letter to the WSLCB

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 18:19:33 -0800

In light of the active rulemaking on the Prohibited Conduct rule (WSR 24-05-037/“The CR 101”), and based on some of my remarks in my last post, here’s the message I wrote to the rules coordinator.

I’ve seen a lot of anger from people all around me, and a lot of strong passions. What I will encourage everyone who’s looking to comment on this is, there is a clear disconnect between the behavior and actions of the commission and the enforcement division. The commissioners, in every public meeting, have made it clear that they are willing to consider repeal without replacement. In fact, Vollendroff has advocated for repeal at every meeting I’ve observed. With that in mind, I’m willing to have a more conciliatory tone–I think we’ll get what we want best without being too aggressive, just firm.

To the WSLCB Rules Coordinator,

I’m writing as a Seattle-area resident and member of the queer community to encourage the LCB to fully repeal WAC 314-11-050, and remove this outdated stain from the state codes. This is particularly important given the events of the weekend of January 26th, and their continuing fallout.

This code originated out of a desire to control “appropriate” expression by minority communities (and block the sale of alcohol at strip clubs), and today it evidently has continued to be used for that purpose. The best way to prevent future abuse is to remove the mechanism that enables it; if this rule, or something substantially similar remains in effect, we have no guarantees that we will not once again see overzealous enforcement of that rule at some point in the future, long after the current commissioners have moved on.

The main concern of the LCB should be the proper handling of alcohol; the behavior and attire of patrons is fundamentally outside of that mission. Communities can and will have differing standards of conduct in their social spaces; this is fine! There’s a vastly different expectation of behavior in a gay bar or other queer social space, especially during a theme night or party, than there is at a straight bar. The problem arises when a separate culture’s expectations are enforced on that other group–which is what WAC 314-11-050 does–and any substantially similar rule would have the same effect.

At the Jan 31st LCB meeting, Chairman Postman remarked that he doesn’t believe the Board should be in the business of mandating morality. In fact, he noted that the board approves of SB6105 and wants to establish a means for strip clubs to sell alcohol! In light of this, I would encourage the commissioners to act on their initial intuition, and repeal the rule.

I hope that the commissioners of the WSLCB will make the right choice for communities across the state, and repeal this outdated and punitive rule.

I’ll post another update when rulemaking concludes. If you live in Washington, care about the freedom of the queer community to define their own expectations about their social spaces, and you’re reading this before March 22, 2024, I would encourage you to submit your own comment to the WSLCB. Be sure to mention the rule in question (and probably the WSR, I’ve not done this before but I assume that doesn’t hurt.)