Who was talking about capital letters?

“Diversity is a good; it just isn’t the only one. When competence isn’t the first criterion for appointments, everybody loses—including those women and people of color whose credentials are questioned because everyone knows those credentials were not the decisive factor in appointing them. This remains true even when Trump’s competence-free administration is so glaring that it seems to confirm the woke charge that references to competence were always an excuse to keep white men (and an occasional blond woman) in power. Yet sometimes competence really is sacrificed to representation. You’re unlikely to say it in public, but anyone reading these lines can think of examples. 15 Since January 20, 2025, the tribe being represented has changed, and disregard for quality has assumed staggering proportions. 

That group has historically held more power than any other. The claim that they should make room for others is one that many have come to accept. But when the focus on ethnic identity is elevated to first principle, champions of white supremacy will come out of the woodwork to claim it’s their turn for adequate representation. Once justice is constructed as taking power for your tribe, what’s left of politics but cold civil war? 

Prioritizing representation over competence is closely connected to preferring subjectivity to truth. This is not a generational difference. I’ve heard distinguished older scholars give powerful arguments against lies and legends, only to recoil from the word truth. Sometimes they quote Kuhn or Rorty and proclaim “I don’t believe in truth with a capital T.” Who was talking about capital letters? The question is not about metaphysical foundations but about our ability to recognize lies. After years of hearing the woke praise people for “speaking their truth,” why should we be surprised that Facebook did away with fact-checking? Inadequate as it was, at least it preserved a concept of fact. 

Only the French philosopher of science Bruno Latour was self-reflective enough to offer a public mea culpa for his own contributions to public distrust of matters of fact. At a time when Republicans use scientific uncertainties to oppose measures addressing the climate crisis or the production of vaccines, he wondered if he’d been wrong to help invent the field known as science studies, which problematized the distinction between subject and object, and emphasized the political and social dimensions of science. 

“What’s the real difference,” Latour wrote in 2004, between conspiracists and a popularized, that is a teachable version inspired by a too quick reading of, let’s say, a sociologist as eminent as Pierre Bourdieu? In both cases you have to learn to become suspicious of everything people say. . . . Of course conspiracy theories are an absurd defamation of our own arguments but, like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, these are our weapons nonetheless. 16”

— Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era by Susan Neiman
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