Universities are by their very nature progressive institutions. They encourage students and faculty to study the existing order and try to come up with something better. They broaden students’ minds and encourage curiosity about different people and ways of living. The ranks of nearly all progressive institutions are full of the top students from our top universities.
But something started going wrong on many campuses in the early 2010s. The combination of more polarizing social media, an intensifying culture war, and a changing Republican party drove an intense new kind of activism among a subset of progressive students that — whatever its noble motives — is damaging what is most precious about university life: the ability to have open and wide-ranging conversations. Students and faculty across the political spectrum now say that they are “walking on eggshells,” afraid that one slip could bring about terrible social consequences. As they learn to avoid making verbal “mistakes” in an unforgiving environment, students are being trained in habits of mind and heart that are antithetical to their own mental health, their own success in life, and the success of their political activism.
This is why many leading progressives have been warning, since 2015, that the new university culture is harmful to the country overall and to the Democratic party in particular . . .
Danish lawyer Jacob Mchangama is set to publish his brilliant debut next week, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. In it, the human-rights advocate chronicles “elite panics” of the past, which, he points out on Twitter, hold relevance for the current moment.
Elite panics involve an outbreak of angst among the wealthy and powerful — and they’ve been happening for millennia. And, while such outbursts can reflect real concerns, Mchangama writes in his book, “it is notable that they tend to erupt whenever the public sphere is expanded.” He goes on to explain: “Upon the introduction of new technology that gives access to those previously unheard, the traditional gatekeepers of public opinion fear that the newcomers will manipulate the masses through dangerous ideas, and propaganda, threatening the established social and political order.”
These conflicts, Mchangama notes, represent a clash between egalitarian and elitist conceptions of free speech. One sees free speech as a right for all; the other would have it be a privilege for those enlightened enough to use it properly.
A recent episode of Glenn Lourie's podcast occurred in the NY comedy club, The Cellar. The conversation was started by academics and thinkers including Glenn Loury, Roland Fryer and Coleman Hughes. Once under way, the comedians entered the conversation and many interesting things were spoken. Oh, and many of those interesting (and serious) things were hilarious. The comedians included Andrew Schulz, Judy Gold, Shane Gillis, T.J., Rick Crom, Nikki Jax and Sam Jay. Definitely worth an hour and a half of your time. I love hearing comedians talking shop and that is a lot of the conversation. There is another main theme, however. Can the comedians save us from cancel culture and wokeness?
I have enjoyed watching Jon Stewart over the years and looked forward to this conversation involving Jon Stewart and Andrew Sullivan. It was not what I expected. It was not a conversation at all. On these issues of race, Stewarts exhibits absolutely no sense of nuance, no curiosity regarding the statistical evidence pertaining to the issues and no interest in tamping down the shrill racist declarations of a second guest, a woman named Lisa Bond. I'd recommend that you watch two videos before reading further. The first is Stewart's introductory "comedy skit" regarding racism. The second involves the "conversation" with Andrew Sullivan.
Jon Stewart’s insistence that Americans had never robustly debated race before 2020 is also, well, deranged. Americans have been loudly debating it for centuries. There was something called a Civil War over it. His claim that white America has never done anything in defense of black Americans (until BLM showed up, of course) requires him to ignore more than 300,000 white men who gave their lives to defeat the slaveholding Confederacy. It requires Stewart to ignore the countless whites (often Jewish) who risked and gave their lives in the Civil Rights Movement. It requires him to erase the greatest president in American history. This glib dismissal of all white Americans throughout history, even those who risked everything to expand equality, is, when you come to think about it, obscene.
Stewart’s claim that whites never tried to ameliorate black suffering until now requires him to dismiss over $19 trillion of public funds spent in the long War on Poverty, focused especially on black Americans. That’s the equivalent of more than 140 Marshall Plans. As Samuel Kronen has shown, it requires the erasure from history of “the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the Social Security Amendments of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Social Security Amendments of 1962, and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and on and on.” To prove his point, Stewart has to pretend LBJ never existed. That’s how utterly lost he now is.
Stewart then used crude metrics of inequality to argue, Kendi-style, without any evidence, that the only thing that can possibly explain racial inequality today in America is still “white supremacy.” Other factors — concentrated poverty, insanely high rates of crime and violence, acute family breakdown, a teen culture that equates success with whiteness, lack of affordable childcare — went either unmentioned or openly mocked as self-evident expressions of bigotry. He then equated formal legal segregation with voluntary residential segregation, as if Jim Crow were still in force. And he straw-manned the countering argument thus: white America believes that African-Americans are “solely responsible for their community’s struggles.”
I don’t know anyone who believes that. I sure don’t. It’s much more complex than that. And it’s that complexity that some of us are insisting on — and that Stewart wants to dismiss out of hand in favor of his own Manichean moral preening. His final peroration ended thus: “America has always prioritized white comfort over black survival.” Note: always. There has been no real progress; white people have never actually listened to a black person; America is irredeemably racist. Those fucking white men, Lincoln and LBJ, never gave a shit.
What is stunningly obvious about Stewart's rant (and all Woke rants) is the lack of ideas for how to fix the problems they point to (and many of them are legitimate concerns). It's all theatrical virtue-signaling that refuses look at actually problems and solutions. For instance, what are some real-life changes we could implement that would actually result in inner-city minorities getting better math and reading skills? There is also a consistent refusal by these Woke performers to look at relevant data. Look what happened to Roland Fryer when he looked at real numbers and urged real solutions. Look at what happened to Steven Pinker.
For excellent analysis of Stewart's rant, see the [upcoming for non-subscribers] episode of The Fifth Column podcast "The Problem with Jon Stewart." Analysis begins about minute 23 and runs for an entire hour.
[Added April 3, 2022]
There are many Woke-inspired "conversations" like this and most of them are deficient and misleading in the same way. They talk a lot about average, as though every "black"* person is the average person, when that is wildly false. The "average" encompasses a wide distribution of people, many of whom are quite successful along with those who are struggling. In fact, 60% of "black" people are middle class or above. Why don't they discuss the many successful "black" people? And why don't they ask what the successful "black" people are doing that unsuccessful "black" people are not doing? And why don't they discuss what unsuccessful "black people are doing that unsuccessful "white" people are also doing? Such discussions simply don't help their narrative, which is that every "black" person in modern American is constantly victimized by racism perpetuated by every "white" person.
*I am no longer going to use the terms "white" and "black" to refer to groups of people. The willingness to categorize people by "color" is the first step onto the slippery slope of racism. There is definitely racism in the U.S., but there is no such thing as "race." We can tamp down the former if we stop categorizing people (of any "color") in this crude, baseless and dangerous way. For more on my refusal to categorize people as colors, see this article on Dr. Sheena Mason and see this article holding that "race" has no more validity than astrology. When people ask for my astrological sign, I tell them that the are engaged in a nonsensical thinking. Same thing whenever people categorize each other by color or "race." Mason adheres to a theory of gracelessness, which she backs up with her own theory of gracelessness, which is a methodological and pedagogical interpretive and teaching framework for "how to analyze race and racism across time and place." She discusses her threory at length in the video below, starting at Min 14:
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