The now famous Boston Globe story about the “covid-conscious” Last Ditch bar and the backlash it triggered after relaxing its mask mandate for one night a week proved compellingly relatable to many liberals, who’ve tolerated, endured, and enabled this growing madness in their own lives and social circles.
The Globe story doesn’t punch down on a fringe group of Portlandia sketch characters. Instead, it shines a searing light on rhetoric and sentiments that consume school boards and arts organizations. I’ve previously likened this to religious fundamentalism or even a cult — the owner of the Last Ditch went bankrupt and is now homeless, all in service of a “community” that turned on the owner without mercy. The owner’s chief tormentor declared, “I’m not going to give grace” to someone “spreading rhetoric that can and will get people hurt.” Nonetheless, after the Globe story ran, the Last Ditch owner made an online appeal for financial aid, specifically for her chief tormentor. This is pathetic yet consistent with someone terrified of banishment from their cult. (The owner is white and the chief tormentor is Black, as frequently mentioned, as if that alone ascribes some moral virtue.)
In a Globe op-ed last week, Rebecca Spiess wrote, “I’ve watched several friends navigate run-ins with people like the Last Ditch critics. They have mastered an ability to leverage identity politics into cudgels to smash people with, be it gender identity, physical disability, or economic background. In these groups, social status is not tied to the usual conventions of wealth or beauty but, rather, one’s ability to claim the experience of suffering or oppression.”
Spiess continues, “While any movement contains bullies, progressive groups with a genuine appreciation for inclusion have a unique inability to fight back. What’s tragic is that the values that inspired Last Ditch are, at their core, reasonable: a third space for like-minded people to build community in a way that they choose.”
I question how “reasonable” those values actually were, as they utterly failed in reality, where things actually matter. Many of the Last Ditch patrons didn’t pay the cover or for drinks when they entered or buy much of anything, which is not how businesses work, even if you think they should exist on some “revolutionary praxis.” Ironically, the Last Ditch critics didn’t think the bar’s owner deserved a “living wage” and indeed felt entitled to their labor and resources for free. Like a Scientologist who hasn’t yet realized this scam religion isn’t working out for them, the owner has humiliated and debased themselves to their freeloading patrons, but as Spiess wrote, “no amount of humility, groveling, or mediated dialogue” could satisfy those who seemed to thrive off it. During a Soviet-style mediation, where the owner was supposed to sit and silently absorb how much they suck, the chief tormentor complained that the owner cried too much and went over their allotted time. The much-maligned “white tears” are after all a form of aggression.
In It’s A Wonderful Life, George Bailey has dedicated his life, at great personal cost, to helping others in his community. When it seems as if all his efforts have failed, his community comes to his rescue. The film begins with the community praying on George’s behalf, which likely saves his life. The Last Ditch owner’s “community” has zero empathy for someone at their lowest point. They aren’t praying for help. They would probably agree that the world is better of if the Last Ditch owner was never born. A true “community” doesn’t turn its members into enemies so quickly.
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Helen Lewis at The Atlantic identified the core of the problem as “sadism masked as activism.” Nietzsche described this as a philosophy of “ressentiment,” a reactionary and pervasive sense of hostility and rage directed at those perceived as more powerful and successful. This seemingly justifies lack of empathy and outright cruelty. When you believe everything wrong in your life is effectively someone else’s fault, you sacrifice true freedom for moral superiority.
The hyperbole from the Last Ditch critics is also familiar. They describe a single night of the week when the bar does not have a mask mandate as a “mass disabling event” that would kill its patrons, who were obviously not obligated to attend. (Many of the loudest critics have been to the bar only a handful of times.) Despite still offering a mask-mandated service six nights of the week, which is more than one mask optional night, the Last Ditch owner, who started living in a car, is “no better than a fascist.” It might seem absurd to broaden the political coalition of actual fascists like Stephen Miller, but an impossible to maintain moral purity offers a much savored exclusivity.
Helen Lewis described her own experience organizing a feminist event in 2013 when she realized to her horror “that social media had empowered drive-by whinings by sociopaths, and that progressive politics had allowed them to cloak themselves in righteousness. What might once have been recognized as narcissism, jealousy, the result of a personality disorder—or just plain boredom—was now transfigured into ‘calling out’ those who had erred. The people pointing fingers usually did nothing themselves, apart from complaining, which had the happy side effect that they could never be accused of committing an impure act.”
Jeremiah Johnson at The Argument wrote about the backlash when singer Phoebe Bridgers banned phones from her concerts. She was accused of classism, ableism, and probably phone-ism. However, she rightly stood her ground, rejecting the “tyranny of the edge case.” Bridgers is free to choose what she believes is best for her shows, and anyone who can’t accept that choice are free not to attend. Unfortunately, too often the “progressive” response is to demonize any choice that isn’t their preferred one. You don’t simply have a different opinion or perspective. You are a fundamentally bad person. That’s not a mentally healthy or constructive way to live.
This is why the Last Ditch Boston Globe story has served as a political epiphany for so many liberals who’ve had enough. In a classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, Captain Picard was threatened with excruciating physical torture if he dared say there were four lights instead of a non-existent five. Well-meaning liberals have lived under a similar threat, but it wasn’t simply physical. Instead, it threatened the core of their identity. Say there are four lights and risk being “called out” as everything you believe you’re not. Well-meaning liberals who crave external validation, particularly from the “out” groups to which they don’t belong, willingly submit out of fear. That’s not progressivism. It’s authoritarianism under a different name. A better and more moral way of living is to feel secure enough in your own sense of right and wrong that you can defiantly say “there are four lights!”
Captain Picard later admits that when he was close to breaking, he didn’t just want to say there were five lights to end his torment, he almost believed he could see them. The owner of the Last Ditch passed that breaking point long ago. While raising money in support of the person trying to ruin their business and mocking their misery, the Last Ditch owner genuinely saw five lights. It’s sad, but it’s not too late for everyone else.
great piece, Stephen, I was staying away from details on this story, but the owner's tragic surrender to her tormenters is awful. I only experienced the very fringes of this dynamic in really minor skirmishes online during the 2016 campaign, when a couple times someone I didn't know hopped on a comment of mine and 30 more chimed in with "gfy" and other epithets. and that was pre-Elon Twitter. but the whole "you must submit to correction from the community" following a personal confession of wrongness drove me off real fast. I've always been fascinated by the McCarthy era and the peculiarities of demanding confession and betrayal of friends, and many years ago read Navasky's great book Naming Names, and learned that all the naming was a ritual required to be readmitted to the community—the Committee already had full lists of all Community Party members. but it's so chilling that no level of self-debasement satisfies the jackals; they dehumanize their targets so any level of abuse is not only allowed but somehow heroic in their addled minds. I hate that these jerks are as rotten as their counterparts on the right, and that they give credence, at least in this case, to yet more both-sidesism.
That is a really, really sad story. And unfortunately this kind of fanaticism also leaves one susceptible to people who engage in bad faith.