Trump and the risk of war
SO, Twumpy is imminent...he comes in at a tme when the WokeyJokey lefty loonies have provided him with a number of difficult situations.
No way will he end the Terrorist invasion of Ukraine in a day. At a time when Israel has a number of conflicts to deal with.Georgia...Taliban/Pakistan...Taiwan(?).,,,Syria might be over for the short term?
Much more challenging that his first ride on the big horse.His domestic issues complicate his term.Will be an interesting 4 years if he survives.
So the count down pretty much starts from today*
Twenty or so more days and Trump will be president again
*Yes I know USA is a bit behind out time 16 hrs difference
indo-dreaming wrote:So the count down pretty much starts from today*
Twenty or so more days and Trump will be president again
*Yes I know USA is a bit behind out time 16 hrs difference
they are even behind those Sheep's over the ditch!
This year will be very interesting, it will determine if 30% of 15 million can be that stupid again???
Supafreak wrote:
Sorry but it didn't go like that in the USA, pretty much the whole country shifted right, one of Trumps most successful advert campaigns was the They/Them advert and promise to be tough on border control/immigration.
Even in Australia all the more left wing issues Labor focussed on last election have become a failure, the Voice and promises of renewables bringing down energy prices by hundreds of dollars.
Labor are just lucky this is their first term, i think Australia will give them another term as dont like swapping government too fast, but they would be gone if it was their second term.
Like in Canada another too left wing government that will be gone come next election, same happened in NZ, its more dangerous for a government to go too left wing than right wing, because when you go left wing you are pandering to minorities at the expense of the majority.
You forgot to mention LNP are #bettermoneymanagers.
Birds of a feather . https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/us-politics/scott-morrison-s... It comes as Mr Morrison made the permanent move in May last year to the US after joining the board of directors at Washington-based security and defence think tank, Center for a New American Security.
Id love Labor to shift more left it would be the death of them but its not going to happen, even once they got in they changed their tune on things like gas very quickly, i think they will shift right slightly in their narrative's next election.
For instance they can no longer come in being all we are going to save the world with renewables, gas is bad, they are now going to have to be more realistic and be like, we aim to shift to renewable's but gas will play a part in the transition.
And i cant see any token social type issues playing a part in things like the voice, it will be more a focussed on real issue's that affect all Australian's like cost of living.
#Noneedtopointouttheobvious
Good to see Scomo mingling would have much preferred Krudd "ambassador of Australia to the United States" turn up though...wkkwkkk
And the beat goes on
indo-dreaming wrote:Id love Labor to shift more left it would be the death of them but its not going to happen, even once they got in they changed their tune on things like gas very quickly, i think they will shift right slightly in their narrative's next election.
For instance they can no longer come in being all we are going to save the world with renewables, gas is bad, they are now going to have to be more realistic and be like, we aim to shift to renewable's but gas will play a part in the transition.
And i cant see any token social type issues playing a part in things like the voice, it will be more a focussed on real issue's that affect all Australian's like cost of living.
#Noneedtopointouttheobvious
Good to see Scomo mingling would have much preferred Krudd "ambassador of Australia to the United States" turn up though...wkkwkkk
A couple of things, Labor has tried to address low wages and conditions you may have missed this.
The Voice was actually an important step for Aboriginals unfortunately it was against Jacinta's / Warrens rich white sponsor's system of beliefs (they don't like Aboriginals)
Right now, that's here and now renewables is actually the only option that can be built in time before the coal fired power stations die. Say that again there is no other sort time option.
A couple of problems about this is the Coalition are running a anything but renewable campaign and the greens are opposing many project (hyro) so its all fu(ked anyway there wont be enough storage.
Yes gas is the interim answer unfortunately there isn't enough for the east coast you export the lot total cluster fuck.
indo-dreaming wrote:Supafreak wrote:Sorry but it didn't go like that in the USA, pretty much the whole country shifted right, one of Trumps most successful advert campaigns was the They/Them advert and promise to be tough on border control/immigration.
Even in Australia all the more left wing issues Labor focussed on last election have become a failure, the Voice and promises of renewables bringing down energy prices by hundreds of dollars.
Labor are just lucky this is their first term, i think Australia will give them another term as dont like swapping government too fast, but they would be gone if it was their second term.
Like in Canada another too left wing government that will be gone come next election, same happened in NZ, its more dangerous for a government to go too left wing than right wing, because when you go left wing you are pandering to minorities at the expense of the majority.
Actually the USA as a voting block did move to the left in 2016, there was a groundswell of support for Bernie Sanders
The Democrats stole the primary and put in Hillary and the voting block reacted to the shitfuckery. So if you look at what most of the voting block wants, it is actually a shift to the traditional values of the left. The option is just not available or able to be heard.
So you can think people want a more right wing government but I think you’re wrong and what you’re are calling the left in the US, the Democrat Party, is not very left, not even centre left anymore.
Ask most Australians, they will want good public health care, well funded schools, affordable university degrees, cut out of corruption, etc. All kind of traditional 'left' issues, not the woke nonsense that grabs the culture wars headlines.
Cannot see LNP delivering on any of these issues.
Won't even start on the mineral extraction scam.....
indo-dreaming wrote:Supafreak wrote:Sorry but it didn't go like that in the USA, pretty much the whole country shifted right, one of Trumps most successful advert campaigns was the They/Them advert and promise to be tough on border control/immigration.
Even in Australia all the more left wing issues Labor focussed on last election have become a failure, the Voice and promises of renewables bringing down energy prices by hundreds of dollars.
Labor are just lucky this is their first term, i think Australia will give them another term as dont like swapping government too fast, but they would be gone if it was their second term.
Like in Canada another too left wing government that will be gone come next election, same happened in NZ, its more dangerous for a government to go too left wing than right wing, because when you go left wing you are pandering to minorities at the expense of the majority.
The Voice was not a "left wing issue". It had broad bipartisan support until someone told the LNP to walk away from all their work and call it "Labor's Racist Voice". Typical LNP, they can't commit to a genuine cause, and if by some accident they do, they will then find a way out.
On energy prices, imagine if Labor had not carried out any reform. Prices would have likely risen even higher than they have, so there is a strong argument Labor's reforms have saved consumers some cold hard cash. Personally, I have reappraised the way we use energy in our household and have reduced our costs by much more than $275 pa.
I have a friend in NZ. He moved there from the USA about 8 years ago. He commented recently, since the election of the Conservatives, things have really gone to shit.
andy-mac wrote:Ask most Australians, they will want good public health care, well funded schools, affordable university degrees, cut out of corruption, etc. All kind of traditional 'left' issues, not the woke nonsense that grabs the culture wars headlines.
Cannot see LNP delivering on any of these issues.
Won't even start on the mineral extraction scam.....
Hi andy-mac,
You got it correct there!!!
All major reforms since WW2 were initiated by the ALP, and the Liberals have done their best to destroy them.
The “Right” particularly in Australia, cannot exist without an enemy. The Communists were the prime target for many years, then the Socialists. The rise of the Environmentalists saw them take the #1 position for many years, but the Right desperately needed a new enemy, so now we have their latest creation, “The Wokes”: whoever or whatever they may be.
But while the Right are busy waging war against the WEF, IPCC, UN, Commies, Greens and the “Wokes”, they just haven’t the time to develop meaningful and constructive policies for the betterment of the Australian population. A situation with which, they appear quite content.
Donald Horne, commenting on his book, “The Lucky Country”, stated “Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck”. The book was written in 1964, after 15 years of Liberal Government. The LNP are still maintaining that standard.
Salty dog wrote “ The Voice was not a "left wing issue". It had broad bipartisan support until someone told the LNP to walk away from all their work and call it "Labor's Racist Voice". Typical LNP, they can't commit to a genuine cause, and if by some accident they do, they will then find a way out. “ …. Who would have told them to change direction on the voice ? If I was a betting man , then the big G would be a short priced favourite .
I reckon this should be named ‘ dance of the wild monkey ‘ maybe Biden can do a ‘ dance of the wild donkey ‘ when he leaves office .
Supafreak wrote:Salty dog wrote “ The Voice was not a "left wing issue". It had broad bipartisan support until someone told the LNP to walk away from all their work and call it "Labor's Racist Voice". Typical LNP, they can't commit to a genuine cause, and if by some accident they do, they will then find a way out. “ …. Who would have told them to change direction on the voice ? If I was a betting man , then the big G would be a short priced favourite .
Hi SF
Unbackable odds, as they say at the neddys.
soggydog wrote:indo-dreaming wrote:Supafreak wrote:Sorry but it didn't go like that in the USA, pretty much the whole country shifted right, one of Trumps most successful advert campaigns was the They/Them advert and promise to be tough on border control/immigration.
Even in Australia all the more left wing issues Labor focussed on last election have become a failure, the Voice and promises of renewables bringing down energy prices by hundreds of dollars.
Labor are just lucky this is their first term, i think Australia will give them another term as dont like swapping government too fast, but they would be gone if it was their second term.
Like in Canada another too left wing government that will be gone come next election, same happened in NZ, its more dangerous for a government to go too left wing than right wing, because when you go left wing you are pandering to minorities at the expense of the majority.
Actually the USA as a voting block did move to the left in 2016, there was a groundswell of support for Bernie Sanders
The Democrats stole the primary and put in Hillary and the voting block reacted to the shitfuckery. So if you look at what most of the voting block wants, it is actually a shift to the traditional values of the left. The option is just not available or able to be heard.
So you can think people want a more right wing government but I think you’re wrong and what you’re are calling the left in the US, the Democrat Party, is not very left, not even centre left anymore.
yep
and then trump stole bernie's talking points / policies
after 30 odd years a neglect from the democrats...
they were ripe for the stealing
if MAGA are dumb... (as we're constantly informed) ...who's the real dumb cunts?
they handed it to MAGA on a golden platter...
twice!!
(three times actually...)
andy-mac wrote:Ask most Australians, they will want good public health care, well funded schools, affordable university degrees, cut out of corruption, etc. All kind of traditional 'left' issues, not the woke nonsense that grabs the culture wars headlines.
Cannot see LNP delivering on any of these issues.
Won't even start on the mineral extraction scam.....
and yep
and the conclusion to all that is...
what the hell does left and right even mean anymore?
unfortunately, it now means woke bullshit versus... well I'm not sure really...
the problem is, there's now literally generations that have no experience of the traditional left...
the left that put workers, equal education, equal medical access, and on and on .. first...
also no union loyalty whatsoever - and by extension, any appreciation of what unions have achieved...
it hasn't happened by accident
it was a conscious re-branding
and now post trump election 11, the brains and big wigs behind the contemporary left are saying...
"our brand is toxic"
it is...
probably much more so than they even realise
the question is, how does 'the left' turn that around?
is it possible?
do they even want to?
I personally think the damage is so deep it'll be a decade long turn around
that's if they acted now! ...yesterday!
it's a formidable task
bottom line is, 'left' has a very strange meaning and connotation for millenials, gen z, and whatever...
and, for the old school, it largely means being sold out and deserted...
no matter what 'the left' does now... it's a long hard road ahead...
trust is an underated commodity
and branding...
well, it sticks!
There's no left and right anymore, it's just a banner that's used for the masses
The dominant distinction in contemporary politics is now between conservative and progressive. The left-right dichotomy, especially when it comes to economic policy, has lost much of its relevance. We're now navigating through a landscape where cultural, social, ethnic, gender and identity issues overshadow traditional political and economic debates.
In other words, the more substantive issues have taken a back seat to what are generally ego-driven performances.
Reading a few books on the civil rights movement and the rise of democratically elected communist governments post World War Two and there has been a long persistent nefarious and bloody campaign against the left by the security state on behalf of the capital class.
Identity politics is the final tool of the right to delegitimise the core goals of left leaning politics. Indo is the classic example of a right winger falling into identity politics because the policy politics of the right only work for a small percentage of people. Right wingers will attack any minority groups with such pejoratives as woke because the right of politics besides the threat of the security state and a captured press, really has nothing for the common people.
That’s just what I think
Reading a book atm called the Jakarta Method, by Vincent Bevins . It covers the covert operations to turn populations against each where communism was on the rise post WW2 and the resultant bloody massacres that followed. The security state has never defended anything but the ability of the west, mainly the US, to exercise its economic colonialism.
Exactly AndyM, although I wouldn't have used "ego-driven performances" but I understand your intent. Send me a TS friendship bracelet. Equality for all except for the person who's selling you that bracelet haha
soggydog wrote:Reading a few books on the civil rights movement and the rise of democratically elected communist governments post World War Two and there has been a long persistent nefarious and bloody campaign against the left by the security state on behalf of the capital class.
Identity politics is the final tool of the right to delegitimise the core goals of left leaning politics. Indo is the classic example of a right winger falling into identity politics because the policy politics of the right only work for a small percentage of people. Right wingers will attack any minority groups with such pejoratives as woke because the right of politics besides the threat of the security state and a captured press, really has nothing for the common people.That’s just what I think
OMFG really?
The left created identity politics it's a post modern movement created in universities dividing society up into all these groups, they even turned men and women into literally hundreds of genders, because men and women just wasn't enough.
Everything on the left is about needing to find an oppressor and oppressed, if somebody or some group is not successful it's because they are oppressed by those that are successful, if you white your guilty of being a coloniser, if you black you're a victim, instead of being judged on being an individual or achievement's etc
Todays left are quite literally an enemy to their own selfs, countries like China & Russia just sit back going okay, we will let the west destroy themselves.
And we will, we are destroying ourselves from the inside, instead of being one and having common goals, we have become more divided than ever, we have people like you siding with Jihadist, people thinking men can have babies, movements calling to defund the police and rioting on the streets destroying their own cities, thinking open borders are realistic, the list goes on and on. (you even see being proud of your country as a negative)
BTW. Its important to make a distinction between traditional left and today's left, people like you are from todays left, people like Sypkan or Blowin or your Joe Rogans are traditional left, these people have become either politically homeless or slowly move to the right, or are pushed there, as you people destroy the traditional left with all your nonsense and self hate, hence why 90% of the USA states moved right last election some enough to swing whole states and it's a similar trend seen elsewhere only major exception is UK, but they had a conservative government for 14 years and it might be a little early to shift back in Australia even though the betting odds heavily favour LNP and its because your niche issues dont matter to most voters, even the Dems focus on abortion was a flop, the things that matter are the things the right focusses on like the economy and border control.
soggydog wrote:Reading a few books on the civil rights movement and the rise of democratically elected communist governments post World War Two and there has been a long persistent nefarious and bloody campaign against the left by the security state on behalf of the capital class.
Identity politics is the final tool of the right to delegitimise the core goals of left leaning politics. Indo is the classic example of a right winger falling into identity politics because the policy politics of the right only work for a small percentage of people. Right wingers will attack any minority groups with such pejoratives as woke because the right of politics besides the threat of the security state and a captured press, really has nothing for the common people.That’s just what I think
Reading a book atm called the Jakarta Method, by Vincent Bevins . It covers the covert operations to turn populations against each where communism was on the rise post WW2 and the resultant bloody massacres that followed. The security state has never defended anything but the ability of the west, mainly the US, to exercise its economic colonialism.
That's a great read SG....
Studied a lot of what happened in 65 in Indonesia at uni and this hits the mark.
Very sober reading and dispels the myth that the West are the good guys...
There are no good guys in the geo political great game, but the most powerful tend to do the most damage ie the USA.
Professor Jeffery Sachs has made some recent musings on this as well.
With what is unfolding around the world today from Ukraine, Europe Taiwan/ China to the ME you can see the how it has been set in motion by the very same actors as outlined in The Jakarta Method.
Scary that we could be led to nuclear annihilation due to the USA unwilling to give up its global hegemony.
Amazing regarding the left/right that now some of the biggest critics of USA imperialism or pro peace movement is coming from the right....
Interesting times.....
Never thought would be posting something from Tucker... world really has turned upside down... :)
https://m.
&pp=ygUcdHVja2VyIGNhcmxzb24gc2FjaHMgamVmZnJleQ%3D%3D Richard Cheese is awake…he took the red pill….
“A time is coming when men will go mad…
…and when they see someone who is not mad..
They will attack him saying ..
..‘ you are mad....you are not like us’
…St Anthony the great.
that happened already @Opti, roughly the reconquista period 800CE - 1500CE, with the likes of Pope Innocent III at the epicenter.
my god, intelligence, science and knowledge took a beating.
For this period, sensible people, as in those that trusted their senses - friends, neighbors that didn't toe the dogma, and didn't heed the jabbering of the wokky.. ruined, killed and forsaken. We've been trying to blink away that horror-sleep ever since, desperately trying to find a system that doesn't have self-interested snake-oilers controlling the lions share of the resources, but keep getting dragged back down by them.
(What an interesting time it must have been in Late Antiquity, between the fall of Rome 400CE, and the establishment of monotheist control, only a few hundred years later; the art, writing and cultural remnants of central european cultures from this window, the Gotisch, Franks, Burgundians, Vandals and Celts, tells us humans prospered and diversity of thought flourished).
If we can't shake off the dusty superstitions and mythologies of 'our' culture, how can we expect others to?
I think identity politics originated in academia - by progressive or "liberal" academics - not in politics.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/academes-divorce-from-reality
HARRY CAMPBELL FOR THE CHRONICLE
Academe’s Divorce From Reality
Americans are fed up, and not just people who voted for Trump.
The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.
Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.
We’ve seen comparable results in recent years. In 2020, California rejected affirmative action by 57-43. In 2021, Seattle elected a Republican city attorney over a police abolitionist, New York City elected Mayor Eric Adams — despite his manifest deficiencies — on a law-and-order platform, and Buffalo, N.Y., reelected its mayor as a write-in candidate by 19 points over the socialist to whom he had lost in the Democratic primary. In 2022, San Francisco recalled three progressive members of its Board of Education by lopsided margins, then recalled its progressive DA.
Survey findings tell the same broad story. A Marist poll this year revealed that 57 percent of Latinos surveyed are in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. A Pew poll showed that 75 percent of Black respondents and 85 percent of Latinos are in favor of voter ID laws. After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, Gallup found that 52 percent of Black and 68 percent of Latino adults supported the decision. Another Pew poll, consistent with earlier findings, showed that only 4 percent of Latinos use “Latinx,” and that of those who have heard of the term, the vast majority reject it. And then there are perhaps the most important data points of all. Donald Trump increased his support among Black, Latino, and Asian voters from 2016 to 2020, then increased it again from 2020 to 2024 (he also got a majority of the Native American vote). The light was blinking. Now it’s solid red.
Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.
It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.
People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. A few days after the election, I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio, which was broadcasting one of those endless postmortems that the media has been conducting, when another listener called in. She identified herself as Black, a Berkeley grad, “super liberal,” and a resident of Brownsville, a largely Black neighborhood. Referring to the burden that the influx of asylum-seekers has placed on the city’s resources and therefore on people’s lives (“I’m talking about Black people here, at the lower end of the economic spectrum”), and how you weren’t supposed to talk about it, how if you did talk about it you were accused of being racist, how you weren’t even supposed to notice it, how people were being asked “to engage in a cognitive dissonance that is literally not possible,” she finally said, with beautiful succinctness, “When did liberalism mean no common sense?” It’s clear that many Democrats have been wondering the same thing.
How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.
Those fields have another thing in common: They are intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”
The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.
So how are academics going to respond to their political repudiation? One alternative — the likeliest one — will be to stay the course. The people have spoken, but the people are wrong. They’ve been misinformed and disinformed. They are victims of false consciousness, too benighted to understand their own interests. They are racist, sexist, xenophobic, yearning for a strongman. The attitude reminds me of the few American Communists who were still around when I was young — scientifically certain of everything as they headed ineluctably toward political extinction.
But academics have another option. They can entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things and for a long time. They can consider that the notion that Harris lost because of racism and sexism is belied by the fact that we have already elected a Black president; that Harris received a larger share of the white vote than Joe Biden; that a female presidential candidate has already won the popular vote; that the nation, far from distrusting women with executive office, has elected 44 female governors in 31 states; that 16 of those governors have been Republicans, which means that most Republicans supported them; that those states include not only blue or purple ones but Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota; that Kansas and Texas have actually elected Democratic women governors; and that while there are surely people in this country who wouldn’t vote for a woman or nonwhite presidential candidate, they also surely wouldn’t vote for any Democrat. That Harris lost for other reasons altogether.
They might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.
Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.
Ten years ago, I published a book, Excellent Sheep, that argued that the meritocratic elite, which includes the professoriate as well as the academy’s administrative class, had become self-serving, self-perpetuating, and, as leaders of our most important institutions, incompetent. It had lost its authority. It had lost its legitimacy. The time had come for it to step aside in favor of a new, more democratic dispensation. Nine months after the book came out, the rough beast glided down his gilded escalator. A few months after that, a wild-haired septuagenarian socialist almost single-handedly destroyed the Clinton-Obama establishment. One would think the message would’ve been received by now. The message is you failed. Sit down, be humble, and listen and learn.
from chelsea's quote...
"...People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. A few days after the election, I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio, which was broadcasting one of those endless postmortems that the media has been conducting, when another listener called in. She identified herself as Black, a Berkeley grad, “super liberal,” and a resident of Brownsville, a largely Black neighborhood. Referring to the burden that the influx of asylum-seekers has placed on the city’s resources and therefore on people’s lives (“I’m talking about Black people here, at the lower end of the economic spectrum”), and how you weren’t supposed to talk about it, how if you did talk about it you were accused of being racist, how you weren’t even supposed to notice it, how people were being asked “to engage in a cognitive dissonance that is literally not possible,” she finally said, with beautiful succinctness, “When did liberalism mean no common sense?” It’s clear that many Democrats have been wondering the same thing..."
the post modern cultist 'reality', just now requires too much ignoring of reality...
an interesting outcome of the trump election, was the safe seats that didn't go to trump, but still saw huge percentage swings away from the democrats... like new york...
in fact, this was so profound, AOC ran a survey on it...
asking why so many people that voted for her at a local level, voted trump at the national level
that's some down ticket shenanigans
votes for trump and AOC, coming from the same people
politics really is all over the shop...
ah yes...
the good old condescending and wrong...
they do it so well
".. They might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.
Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them..."
Chelsea L wrote:I think identity politics originated in academia - by progressive or "liberal" academics - not in politics.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/academes-divorce-from-reality
HARRY CAMPBELL FOR THE CHRONICLE
Academe’s Divorce From Reality
Americans are fed up, and not just people who voted for Trump.The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.
Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.
We’ve seen comparable results in recent years. In 2020, California rejected affirmative action by 57-43. In 2021, Seattle elected a Republican city attorney over a police abolitionist, New York City elected Mayor Eric Adams — despite his manifest deficiencies — on a law-and-order platform, and Buffalo, N.Y., reelected its mayor as a write-in candidate by 19 points over the socialist to whom he had lost in the Democratic primary. In 2022, San Francisco recalled three progressive members of its Board of Education by lopsided margins, then recalled its progressive DA.
Survey findings tell the same broad story. A Marist poll this year revealed that 57 percent of Latinos surveyed are in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. A Pew poll showed that 75 percent of Black respondents and 85 percent of Latinos are in favor of voter ID laws. After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, Gallup found that 52 percent of Black and 68 percent of Latino adults supported the decision. Another Pew poll, consistent with earlier findings, showed that only 4 percent of Latinos use “Latinx,” and that of those who have heard of the term, the vast majority reject it. And then there are perhaps the most important data points of all. Donald Trump increased his support among Black, Latino, and Asian voters from 2016 to 2020, then increased it again from 2020 to 2024 (he also got a majority of the Native American vote). The light was blinking. Now it’s solid red.
Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.
It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.
People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. A few days after the election, I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio, which was broadcasting one of those endless postmortems that the media has been conducting, when another listener called in. She identified herself as Black, a Berkeley grad, “super liberal,” and a resident of Brownsville, a largely Black neighborhood. Referring to the burden that the influx of asylum-seekers has placed on the city’s resources and therefore on people’s lives (“I’m talking about Black people here, at the lower end of the economic spectrum”), and how you weren’t supposed to talk about it, how if you did talk about it you were accused of being racist, how you weren’t even supposed to notice it, how people were being asked “to engage in a cognitive dissonance that is literally not possible,” she finally said, with beautiful succinctness, “When did liberalism mean no common sense?” It’s clear that many Democrats have been wondering the same thing.
How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.
Those fields have another thing in common: They are intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”
The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.
So how are academics going to respond to their political repudiation? One alternative — the likeliest one — will be to stay the course. The people have spoken, but the people are wrong. They’ve been misinformed and disinformed. They are victims of false consciousness, too benighted to understand their own interests. They are racist, sexist, xenophobic, yearning for a strongman. The attitude reminds me of the few American Communists who were still around when I was young — scientifically certain of everything as they headed ineluctably toward political extinction.
But academics have another option. They can entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things and for a long time. They can consider that the notion that Harris lost because of racism and sexism is belied by the fact that we have already elected a Black president; that Harris received a larger share of the white vote than Joe Biden; that a female presidential candidate has already won the popular vote; that the nation, far from distrusting women with executive office, has elected 44 female governors in 31 states; that 16 of those governors have been Republicans, which means that most Republicans supported them; that those states include not only blue or purple ones but Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota; that Kansas and Texas have actually elected Democratic women governors; and that while there are surely people in this country who wouldn’t vote for a woman or nonwhite presidential candidate, they also surely wouldn’t vote for any Democrat. That Harris lost for other reasons altogether.
They might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.
Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.
Ten years ago, I published a book, Excellent Sheep, that argued that the meritocratic elite, which includes the professoriate as well as the academy’s administrative class, had become self-serving, self-perpetuating, and, as leaders of our most important institutions, incompetent. It had lost its authority. It had lost its legitimacy. The time had come for it to step aside in favor of a new, more democratic dispensation. Nine months after the book came out, the rough beast glided down his gilded escalator. A few months after that, a wild-haired septuagenarian socialist almost single-handedly destroyed the Clinton-Obama establishment. One would think the message would’ve been received by now. The message is you failed. Sit down, be humble, and listen and learn.
When i first saw this post, i thought argh too long to bother reading on my lunch break, but it was well worth it, and basically said what i said only 100 times better.
Yep, great article, well worth a read in full.
sypkan wrote:andy-mac wrote:Ask most Australians, they will want good public health care, well funded schools, affordable university degrees, cut out of corruption, etc. All kind of traditional 'left' issues, not the woke nonsense that grabs the culture wars headlines.
Cannot see LNP delivering on any of these issues.
Won't even start on the mineral extraction scam.....and yep
And yep also…with a proviso. The ALP won’t be delivered on any of these issues either.
Also the ALP seem to have a greater acceptance of corruption than the LNP. currently.
Chelsea L wrote:I think identity politics originated in academia - by progressive or "liberal" academics - not in politics.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/academes-divorce-from-reality
HARRY CAMPBELL FOR THE CHRONICLE
Academe’s Divorce From Reality
Americans are fed up, and not just people who voted for Trump.The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.
Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.
We’ve seen comparable results in recent years. In 2020, California rejected affirmative action by 57-43. In 2021, Seattle elected a Republican city attorney over a police abolitionist, New York City elected Mayor Eric Adams — despite his manifest deficiencies — on a law-and-order platform, and Buffalo, N.Y., reelected its mayor as a write-in candidate by 19 points over the socialist to whom he had lost in the Democratic primary. In 2022, San Francisco recalled three progressive members of its Board of Education by lopsided margins, then recalled its progressive DA.
Survey findings tell the same broad story. A Marist poll this year revealed that 57 percent of Latinos surveyed are in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. A Pew poll showed that 75 percent of Black respondents and 85 percent of Latinos are in favor of voter ID laws. After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, Gallup found that 52 percent of Black and 68 percent of Latino adults supported the decision. Another Pew poll, consistent with earlier findings, showed that only 4 percent of Latinos use “Latinx,” and that of those who have heard of the term, the vast majority reject it. And then there are perhaps the most important data points of all. Donald Trump increased his support among Black, Latino, and Asian voters from 2016 to 2020, then increased it again from 2020 to 2024 (he also got a majority of the Native American vote). The light was blinking. Now it’s solid red.
Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.
It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.
People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. A few days after the election, I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio, which was broadcasting one of those endless postmortems that the media has been conducting, when another listener called in. She identified herself as Black, a Berkeley grad, “super liberal,” and a resident of Brownsville, a largely Black neighborhood. Referring to the burden that the influx of asylum-seekers has placed on the city’s resources and therefore on people’s lives (“I’m talking about Black people here, at the lower end of the economic spectrum”), and how you weren’t supposed to talk about it, how if you did talk about it you were accused of being racist, how you weren’t even supposed to notice it, how people were being asked “to engage in a cognitive dissonance that is literally not possible,” she finally said, with beautiful succinctness, “When did liberalism mean no common sense?” It’s clear that many Democrats have been wondering the same thing.
How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.
Those fields have another thing in common: They are intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”
The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.
So how are academics going to respond to their political repudiation? One alternative — the likeliest one — will be to stay the course. The people have spoken, but the people are wrong. They’ve been misinformed and disinformed. They are victims of false consciousness, too benighted to understand their own interests. They are racist, sexist, xenophobic, yearning for a strongman. The attitude reminds me of the few American Communists who were still around when I was young — scientifically certain of everything as they headed ineluctably toward political extinction.
But academics have another option. They can entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things and for a long time. They can consider that the notion that Harris lost because of racism and sexism is belied by the fact that we have already elected a Black president; that Harris received a larger share of the white vote than Joe Biden; that a female presidential candidate has already won the popular vote; that the nation, far from distrusting women with executive office, has elected 44 female governors in 31 states; that 16 of those governors have been Republicans, which means that most Republicans supported them; that those states include not only blue or purple ones but Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota; that Kansas and Texas have actually elected Democratic women governors; and that while there are surely people in this country who wouldn’t vote for a woman or nonwhite presidential candidate, they also surely wouldn’t vote for any Democrat. That Harris lost for other reasons altogether.
They might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.
Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.
Ten years ago, I published a book, Excellent Sheep, that argued that the meritocratic elite, which includes the professoriate as well as the academy’s administrative class, had become self-serving, self-perpetuating, and, as leaders of our most important institutions, incompetent. It had lost its authority. It had lost its legitimacy. The time had come for it to step aside in favor of a new, more democratic dispensation. Nine months after the book came out, the rough beast glided down his gilded escalator. A few months after that, a wild-haired septuagenarian socialist almost single-handedly destroyed the Clinton-Obama establishment. One would think the message would’ve been received by now. The message is you failed. Sit down, be humble, and listen and learn.
Whilst the 'left' and 'right' argue over woke issues, transgender, etc as pointed out in the article, we have seen the biggest transfer of wealth in history over the last decade to the billionaire class as they rev up for WW3....
It's all a distraction...
Over 60 people slaughtered in Gaza today and it doesn't even rate a mention in legacy media.
And by the comments here it is working.....
andy-mac wrote:Chelsea L wrote:I think identity politics originated in academia - by progressive or "liberal" academics - not in politics.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/academes-divorce-from-reality
HARRY CAMPBELL FOR THE CHRONICLE
Academe’s Divorce From Reality
Americans are fed up, and not just people who voted for Trump.The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.
Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.
We’ve seen comparable results in recent years. In 2020, California rejected affirmative action by 57-43. In 2021, Seattle elected a Republican city attorney over a police abolitionist, New York City elected Mayor Eric Adams — despite his manifest deficiencies — on a law-and-order platform, and Buffalo, N.Y., reelected its mayor as a write-in candidate by 19 points over the socialist to whom he had lost in the Democratic primary. In 2022, San Francisco recalled three progressive members of its Board of Education by lopsided margins, then recalled its progressive DA.
Survey findings tell the same broad story. A Marist poll this year revealed that 57 percent of Latinos surveyed are in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. A Pew poll showed that 75 percent of Black respondents and 85 percent of Latinos are in favor of voter ID laws. After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, Gallup found that 52 percent of Black and 68 percent of Latino adults supported the decision. Another Pew poll, consistent with earlier findings, showed that only 4 percent of Latinos use “Latinx,” and that of those who have heard of the term, the vast majority reject it. And then there are perhaps the most important data points of all. Donald Trump increased his support among Black, Latino, and Asian voters from 2016 to 2020, then increased it again from 2020 to 2024 (he also got a majority of the Native American vote). The light was blinking. Now it’s solid red.
Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.
It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.
People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. A few days after the election, I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio, which was broadcasting one of those endless postmortems that the media has been conducting, when another listener called in. She identified herself as Black, a Berkeley grad, “super liberal,” and a resident of Brownsville, a largely Black neighborhood. Referring to the burden that the influx of asylum-seekers has placed on the city’s resources and therefore on people’s lives (“I’m talking about Black people here, at the lower end of the economic spectrum”), and how you weren’t supposed to talk about it, how if you did talk about it you were accused of being racist, how you weren’t even supposed to notice it, how people were being asked “to engage in a cognitive dissonance that is literally not possible,” she finally said, with beautiful succinctness, “When did liberalism mean no common sense?” It’s clear that many Democrats have been wondering the same thing.
How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.
Those fields have another thing in common: They are intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”
The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.
So how are academics going to respond to their political repudiation? One alternative — the likeliest one — will be to stay the course. The people have spoken, but the people are wrong. They’ve been misinformed and disinformed. They are victims of false consciousness, too benighted to understand their own interests. They are racist, sexist, xenophobic, yearning for a strongman. The attitude reminds me of the few American Communists who were still around when I was young — scientifically certain of everything as they headed ineluctably toward political extinction.
But academics have another option. They can entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things and for a long time. They can consider that the notion that Harris lost because of racism and sexism is belied by the fact that we have already elected a Black president; that Harris received a larger share of the white vote than Joe Biden; that a female presidential candidate has already won the popular vote; that the nation, far from distrusting women with executive office, has elected 44 female governors in 31 states; that 16 of those governors have been Republicans, which means that most Republicans supported them; that those states include not only blue or purple ones but Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota; that Kansas and Texas have actually elected Democratic women governors; and that while there are surely people in this country who wouldn’t vote for a woman or nonwhite presidential candidate, they also surely wouldn’t vote for any Democrat. That Harris lost for other reasons altogether.
They might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.
Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.
Ten years ago, I published a book, Excellent Sheep, that argued that the meritocratic elite, which includes the professoriate as well as the academy’s administrative class, had become self-serving, self-perpetuating, and, as leaders of our most important institutions, incompetent. It had lost its authority. It had lost its legitimacy. The time had come for it to step aside in favor of a new, more democratic dispensation. Nine months after the book came out, the rough beast glided down his gilded escalator. A few months after that, a wild-haired septuagenarian socialist almost single-handedly destroyed the Clinton-Obama establishment. One would think the message would’ve been received by now. The message is you failed. Sit down, be humble, and listen and learn.
Whilst the 'left' and 'right' argue over woke issues, transgender, etc as pointed out in the article, we have seen the biggest transfer of wealth in history over the last decade to the billionaire class as they rev up for WW3....
It's all a distraction...
Over 60 people slaughtered in Gaza today and it doesn't even rate a mention in legacy media.
And by the comments here it is working.....
How many of the 60 were terrorists and how many were innocent civilians? You can’t just throw a number around without giving a breakdown.
burleigh wrote:andy-mac wrote:Chelsea L wrote:I think identity politics originated in academia - by progressive or "liberal" academics - not in politics.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/academes-divorce-from-reality
HARRY CAMPBELL FOR THE CHRONICLE
Academe’s Divorce From Reality
Americans are fed up, and not just people who voted for Trump.The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.
Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.
We’ve seen comparable results in recent years. In 2020, California rejected affirmative action by 57-43. In 2021, Seattle elected a Republican city attorney over a police abolitionist, New York City elected Mayor Eric Adams — despite his manifest deficiencies — on a law-and-order platform, and Buffalo, N.Y., reelected its mayor as a write-in candidate by 19 points over the socialist to whom he had lost in the Democratic primary. In 2022, San Francisco recalled three progressive members of its Board of Education by lopsided margins, then recalled its progressive DA.
Survey findings tell the same broad story. A Marist poll this year revealed that 57 percent of Latinos surveyed are in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. A Pew poll showed that 75 percent of Black respondents and 85 percent of Latinos are in favor of voter ID laws. After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, Gallup found that 52 percent of Black and 68 percent of Latino adults supported the decision. Another Pew poll, consistent with earlier findings, showed that only 4 percent of Latinos use “Latinx,” and that of those who have heard of the term, the vast majority reject it. And then there are perhaps the most important data points of all. Donald Trump increased his support among Black, Latino, and Asian voters from 2016 to 2020, then increased it again from 2020 to 2024 (he also got a majority of the Native American vote). The light was blinking. Now it’s solid red.
Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.
It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.
People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. A few days after the election, I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio, which was broadcasting one of those endless postmortems that the media has been conducting, when another listener called in. She identified herself as Black, a Berkeley grad, “super liberal,” and a resident of Brownsville, a largely Black neighborhood. Referring to the burden that the influx of asylum-seekers has placed on the city’s resources and therefore on people’s lives (“I’m talking about Black people here, at the lower end of the economic spectrum”), and how you weren’t supposed to talk about it, how if you did talk about it you were accused of being racist, how you weren’t even supposed to notice it, how people were being asked “to engage in a cognitive dissonance that is literally not possible,” she finally said, with beautiful succinctness, “When did liberalism mean no common sense?” It’s clear that many Democrats have been wondering the same thing.
How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.
Those fields have another thing in common: They are intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”
The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.
So how are academics going to respond to their political repudiation? One alternative — the likeliest one — will be to stay the course. The people have spoken, but the people are wrong. They’ve been misinformed and disinformed. They are victims of false consciousness, too benighted to understand their own interests. They are racist, sexist, xenophobic, yearning for a strongman. The attitude reminds me of the few American Communists who were still around when I was young — scientifically certain of everything as they headed ineluctably toward political extinction.
But academics have another option. They can entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things and for a long time. They can consider that the notion that Harris lost because of racism and sexism is belied by the fact that we have already elected a Black president; that Harris received a larger share of the white vote than Joe Biden; that a female presidential candidate has already won the popular vote; that the nation, far from distrusting women with executive office, has elected 44 female governors in 31 states; that 16 of those governors have been Republicans, which means that most Republicans supported them; that those states include not only blue or purple ones but Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota; that Kansas and Texas have actually elected Democratic women governors; and that while there are surely people in this country who wouldn’t vote for a woman or nonwhite presidential candidate, they also surely wouldn’t vote for any Democrat. That Harris lost for other reasons altogether.
They might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.
Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.
Ten years ago, I published a book, Excellent Sheep, that argued that the meritocratic elite, which includes the professoriate as well as the academy’s administrative class, had become self-serving, self-perpetuating, and, as leaders of our most important institutions, incompetent. It had lost its authority. It had lost its legitimacy. The time had come for it to step aside in favor of a new, more democratic dispensation. Nine months after the book came out, the rough beast glided down his gilded escalator. A few months after that, a wild-haired septuagenarian socialist almost single-handedly destroyed the Clinton-Obama establishment. One would think the message would’ve been received by now. The message is you failed. Sit down, be humble, and listen and learn.
Whilst the 'left' and 'right' argue over woke issues, transgender, etc as pointed out in the article, we have seen the biggest transfer of wealth in history over the last decade to the billionaire class as they rev up for WW3....
It's all a distraction...
Over 60 people slaughtered in Gaza today and it doesn't even rate a mention in legacy media.
And by the comments here it is working.....How many of the 60 were terrorists and how many were innocent civilians? You can’t just throw a number around without giving a breakdown.
They are all terrorists mate.
Especially the kids killed...
Chelsea L wrote:I think identity politics originated in academia - by progressive or "liberal" academics - not in politics.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/academes-divorce-from-reality
HARRY CAMPBELL FOR THE CHRONICLE
Academe’s Divorce From Reality
Americans are fed up, and not just people who voted for Trump.The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.
Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.
We’ve seen comparable results in recent years. In 2020, California rejected affirmative action by 57-43. In 2021, Seattle elected a Republican city attorney over a police abolitionist, New York City elected Mayor Eric Adams — despite his manifest deficiencies — on a law-and-order platform, and Buffalo, N.Y., reelected its mayor as a write-in candidate by 19 points over the socialist to whom he had lost in the Democratic primary. In 2022, San Francisco recalled three progressive members of its Board of Education by lopsided margins, then recalled its progressive DA.
Survey findings tell the same broad story. A Marist poll this year revealed that 57 percent of Latinos surveyed are in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. A Pew poll showed that 75 percent of Black respondents and 85 percent of Latinos are in favor of voter ID laws. After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, Gallup found that 52 percent of Black and 68 percent of Latino adults supported the decision. Another Pew poll, consistent with earlier findings, showed that only 4 percent of Latinos use “Latinx,” and that of those who have heard of the term, the vast majority reject it. And then there are perhaps the most important data points of all. Donald Trump increased his support among Black, Latino, and Asian voters from 2016 to 2020, then increased it again from 2020 to 2024 (he also got a majority of the Native American vote). The light was blinking. Now it’s solid red.
Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.
It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.
People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. A few days after the election, I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio, which was broadcasting one of those endless postmortems that the media has been conducting, when another listener called in. She identified herself as Black, a Berkeley grad, “super liberal,” and a resident of Brownsville, a largely Black neighborhood. Referring to the burden that the influx of asylum-seekers has placed on the city’s resources and therefore on people’s lives (“I’m talking about Black people here, at the lower end of the economic spectrum”), and how you weren’t supposed to talk about it, how if you did talk about it you were accused of being racist, how you weren’t even supposed to notice it, how people were being asked “to engage in a cognitive dissonance that is literally not possible,” she finally said, with beautiful succinctness, “When did liberalism mean no common sense?” It’s clear that many Democrats have been wondering the same thing.
How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.
Those fields have another thing in common: They are intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”
The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.
So how are academics going to respond to their political repudiation? One alternative — the likeliest one — will be to stay the course. The people have spoken, but the people are wrong. They’ve been misinformed and disinformed. They are victims of false consciousness, too benighted to understand their own interests. They are racist, sexist, xenophobic, yearning for a strongman. The attitude reminds me of the few American Communists who were still around when I was young — scientifically certain of everything as they headed ineluctably toward political extinction.
But academics have another option. They can entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things and for a long time. They can consider that the notion that Harris lost because of racism and sexism is belied by the fact that we have already elected a Black president; that Harris received a larger share of the white vote than Joe Biden; that a female presidential candidate has already won the popular vote; that the nation, far from distrusting women with executive office, has elected 44 female governors in 31 states; that 16 of those governors have been Republicans, which means that most Republicans supported them; that those states include not only blue or purple ones but Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota; that Kansas and Texas have actually elected Democratic women governors; and that while there are surely people in this country who wouldn’t vote for a woman or nonwhite presidential candidate, they also surely wouldn’t vote for any Democrat. That Harris lost for other reasons altogether.
They might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.
Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.
Ten years ago, I published a book, Excellent Sheep, that argued that the meritocratic elite, which includes the professoriate as well as the academy’s administrative class, had become self-serving, self-perpetuating, and, as leaders of our most important institutions, incompetent. It had lost its authority. It had lost its legitimacy. The time had come for it to step aside in favor of a new, more democratic dispensation. Nine months after the book came out, the rough beast glided down his gilded escalator. A few months after that, a wild-haired septuagenarian socialist almost single-handedly destroyed the Clinton-Obama establishment. One would think the message would’ve been received by now. The message is you failed. Sit down, be humble, and listen and learn.
Class war should be should be being waged decisively and urgently all over the world, but here's this putz shitting out, and Chelsea L copy/pasting on swellnet, 2727 words about why people might not like a bit of woke (ffs) in their lives. You know who benefits from keeping the general public as conservative as possible? The one percent. The money hungry, win at all costs turbo-capitalists and the ruling class. Keep drinking the anti-trans etc kool-aid, whydontcha, while the mega wealthy get even mega-wealthier, the middle class become effectively peasants, and a few thousand people head off to live on Mars cos we have to seperate our recycling while they keep the boot of disposable product on our necks.
Free Palestine.
Thank you for the kind comment zenagain (another witty name!).
But I must admit, I'm somewhat taken aback by andy-mac's and Hiccups' responses. How do you make the leap from an article about the academic roots and evident failure of woke identity politics, to discussing wealth inequality, conspiracy theories about conservative politics, the threat of World War 3, space travel to Mars, and the October 7 terrorist attacks and Israel's response?
Are you implying that every article on the internet, no matter its central theme, is obligated to touch on these issues to be considered credible or relevant? Are you suggesting that we're forbidden from talking about any other topics?
nice to see you actually mention class hiccups...
but the dismissive nature of your post assumes several things;
1) that the billions of dollars spent yearly on ' 'woke stuff' over the last few decades was a good investment...
ie. academic departments and research, departments within government and corporations, re-writing the rules of governance and associated policing resources, etc etc.
2) that that money couldn't have been better focussed... on class perhaps? ...where migrants and minorities would be overwhelming beneficiaries... and possibly wouldn't feel so left behind...
3) that cultural matters don't matter... for the native population - regardless of colour...
(I find this one particularly ironic - that in the zeal to facilitate 'multiculturalism' - the endemic or native culture has been dismissed, diminished, and even demonised to the point of atomisation... all under the empirical argument of the importance of culture... errrr... ok...)
4) that the left didn't throw class arguments to the wolves for about 3 decades, to prioritise... well... identity politics...
some data, and results...
the outcome?
https://x.com/TheRabbitHole84/status/1873046701042549149
do you really think race relations are better after our little experiment in indulgence?
(of white 'liberal' academic fetish that is...)
If you want to talk about things that dont get attention in the news etc, Gaza and dead terrorist sure aint on that list the media are obsessed with the topic.
But yes there is a shit load of major issue's that get fuck all media attention.
Here's an example from a week ago.
"'Tears of joy' - Sudan capital gets first aid convoy since war began"
A convoy carrying food aid has arrived in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, for the first time since civil war erupted in April 2023.
The country is currently experiencing the "world's worst hunger crisis", according to the United Nations, as a result of fighting between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
When trucks loaded with aid rolled into south Khartoum on Thursday, there were "tears of laughter and joy", humanitarian worker Duaa Tariq told the BBC."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz0re4vm7mvo?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEA...
BTW. over 60,000 dead in that war since 2023 and according to the UN (yeah not a great source) from Oct
"Sudan’s ‘living nightmare’ continues as 11 million flee war, mass killings"
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/10/1156266
#Nojewsnonews
Excellent posts Chelsea and Syp.
Awaiting rebuttals.
"Whilst the 'left' and 'right' argue over woke issues, transgender, etc as pointed out in the article, we have seen the biggest transfer of wealth in history over the last decade to the billionaire class as they rev up for WW3....
It's all a distraction...
Over 60 people slaughtered in Gaza today and it doesn't even rate a mention in legacy media.
And by the comments here it is working....."
yep
the transfer of wealthy part...
(that only exaccerbated through corona - another argument in itself, that would require a good hard look at the WEF, WHO, UN, the blackrock's, klaus schwabb's, and bill gate's of the world... and what t they were saying... and doing... throughout the pandemic)
I digress... the transfer of wealth is obscene ... and once again... not really by accident...
and once again, the great leftist masters of the universe, don't have a credible leg to stand on...
look at the wealth accumulated by the pelosi's, biden's, and clinton's... all whilst being on a supposedly 'modest' public service salary...
then there's the donors...
billionaires...
and the machine delivering - the lip service only - mantra of... 'we're going to tax the billionaires!'
does anyone - but the faithful-est of the low info party faithful - actually believe this crap?
and even if they did follow through on it...
anyone with any brains knows, the billionaires will simply just 'restructure', and the game simply starts again... do not pass go, do collect $200 (million) dollars...
it's hilarious watching the left lose their shit over elon musk...
seems they more deranged than their original derangement... with him now getting more ire than the big don...
meanwhile... not a single word (dare) be mentioned about the 'other' billionaires...
https://x.com/Humannoyed_b/status/1870165496236257381
it is so bloody laughable it hurts
not even a single pinky toe of credibility to stand on amongst the lot of em...
sypkan wrote:nice to see you actually mention class hiccups...
but the dismissive nature of your post assumes several things;
1) that the billions of dollars spent yearly on ' 'woke stuff' over the last few decades was a good investment...
ie. academic departments and research, departments within government and corporations, re-writing the rules of governance and associated policing resources, etc etc.
2) that that money couldn't have been better focussed... on class perhaps? ...where migrants and minorities would be overwhelming beneficiaries... and possibly wouldn't feel so left behind...
3) that cultural matters don't matter... for the native population - regardless of colour...
(I find this one particularly ironic - that in the zeal to facilitate 'multiculturalism' - the endemic or native culture has been dismissed, diminished, and even demonised to the point of atomisation... all under the empirical argument of the importance of culture... errrr... ok...)
4) that the left didn't throw class arguments to the wolves for about 3 decades, to prioritise... well... identity politics...
some data, and results...
the outcome?
https://x.com/TheRabbitHole84/status/1873046701042549149
do you really think race relations are better after our little experiment in indulgence?
(of white 'liberal' academic fetish that is...)
You really gonna post a tweet by some tit what uses the phrase "woke mind virus" without irony and expect it to reinforce that your opinion is on point? You, fella, spend a LOT more time on here pontificating about the problems of the "fake left", while continuously ignoring going in to bat for the views of... I dunno... the old left, maybe? The common man/woman/they/them? You're often not wrong about the "fake left", cos "liberals", not leftists, are as a whole, virtue signalling cunts. But, you, as a person that pretends to call out hypocrisy no matter what political persuasion almost inevitably does, time and time again give the right at best a slight scolding, and at worst, your annoyingly formatted blessing. Yeah, by the way, why do you type like that? Do you actually think that your every sentence is so important that it needs space to breathe so people really appreciate its gravity?
I'd love to know.
Mind explaining why you do that?
Please?
Well, sypkan, it seems I was writing while your were posting and proving my point
I type like that because I'd love the likes of you to pick up on (pick on?) any single point...
make a case...
an actual argument...
but you never do
just more cancel bullshit
sypkan wrote:I type like that because I'd love the likes of you to pick up on (pick on?) any single point...
make a case...
an actual argument...
but you never do
just more cancel bullshit
Cancel? Woke mind virus? Any more buzzwords that literally mean zip?
Part One.