David Schraub: LII

"You really can't predict exactly where The Debate Link will come down on all issues. It's not chanting anyone's mantra." — The Moderate Voice, in a blurb Schraub has kept on his masthead for two decades

"Do these not fully fit together? Then they don't fully fit together. As I said, I'm torn. I don't claim to fully fit together on this." — Schraub, closing an essay

"In a time where it sometimes seems as if force of political will alone can convert gibberish legal arguments into binding precedent, it is nice to watch brute insistence crash against actual legal reality." — on "Sovereign Citizens", showing valued Ti, unvalued Se, and the intertness of both

I rarely type living people, but sometimes I do, especially when they reveal something about socionical typology. David Schraub, law professor and expert on discrimination and antisemitism and writer of the twenty-year-old and going strong The Debate Link, has put forth a living exhibit of LII in its native state. It’s worth typing him because nothing about him needs explanation by way of biography.

As the initial quote says, readers who locate writers by camp cannot forecast him, since he criticizes antisemitism on the left and the right with the same instrument, and defends the liberal center against both flanks without being a "radical centrist." But readers who locate him by principle will be able to predict him better since he holds the same standard for everybody in the best LII standard. His signature move is the symmetry test: take the standard his interlocutor applies to case A and run it through case B. Would you distrust a government "Islamophobia monitor" deployed to campuses, fearing chilled speech and bureaucratic abuse? "Congratulations! You've identified the exact reasons why such a program is inadvisable for antisemitism as well." What looks like unpredictability is a structural consistency that refuses the loyalty-discounts every tribal camp expects.

The "dissident minorities" work is the best exhibit of his cognitive method. The problem it addresses are contradictory tendencies in anti-discrimination thought. The group itself, according to this standard, defines the group's interests and oppression (the deference principle: "listen to X voices"), but every group contains internal dissenters, some quite passionate, from the dominant view (the Jewish anti-Zionist, the Black conservative, etc), with both the majority and the outsiders using them ("see, even some of them agree with us"), while the group's mainstream is tempted to ignore them at best, repress them at worst. Both are unacceptable to the frameworks' own commitments: silencing dissidents betrays the individual, letting outsiders launder their positions through token dissenters betrays the group. 

In such cases, standard literature just oscillates or picks a side. Schraub's move is to rebuild the categories at a higher level of articulation so that both theses keep what is true in them — a theoretical account of what dissident minorities are, what epistemic standing they do and don't carry, when citation of them is legitimate engagement and when it's laundering, and what their only obligation is: to refuse representing the whole group, by substitution, even when offered. His participation in the Nexus definition of antisemitism is along the same lines: the IHRA definition on one side (adopted broadly, criticized as chilling Israel criticism), the Jerusalem Declaration on the other (drafted largely in reaction), each functioning in practice as a camp's banner. The Nexus document — Schraub among its task force — is the characteristic LII intervention in such a war: refuse both banners, and instead draw the distinction-set finer. 

A mind led by its intuition is centrifugal — restless across domains, bored by its own last framework, forever elsewhere (this blog's von Neumanns and Tals). Schraub found his territory early and has spent two decades building a single, ever-more-refined analytical position within it, applying it each morning to whatever the news drags in, similar to the accumulating case law of one court.

His register is the type in its sunniest public configuration. Bertrand Russell, also quite a canonical LII, was likewise a prolific, witty, engaged public polemicist, and Schraub works in a recognizably Russellian key: the light self-irony ("sometimes lawyer, sometimes law professor, all the time awesome"; the running gag "I'm a professor! Why won't anyone listen to me?"), the deadpan (announcing a "break" from the fraught topic of antisemitism to write about something "placid and uncontroversial": campus protest regulation). An essay wrestling with Jews' place in anti-racist coalitions shows the LII's most honorable trait, the precise statement of his own uncertainty. It ends with: "Do these not fully fit together? Then they don't fully fit together... I'm torn. I don't claim to fully fit together on this." 

However, when a fashionable law-review provocation recently toyed with dislodging US birthright citizenship, Schraub's register changed entirely: "as earnest scholarship, this is all transparent bullshit." It's the referee's cold anger at those who abuse the rules of the game he has spent his life keeping — the same principled floor on which Russell went to prison. For his general character, it's also telling that he lacks an attraction to the "lovable(?) selfish incompetent" media archetype — other people can be attracted to them because they frequently represent the forbidden fruit of their own desires, but to a highly "rational" LII like Schraub, this archetype, essentially a comedic representation of an incompetent SEE, geniunely lacks any attraction.