A former dean of the Yale Law School sounds a warning.
Anyone who has followed the news from college campuses over the past few years knows they are experiencing forms of unrest unseen since the late 1960s.
Now, as then, campuses have become an arena for political combat. Now, as then, race is a central issue. Now, as then, students rail against an unpopular president and an ostensibly rigged system. Now, as then, liberal professors are being bullied, denounced, demoted, threatened, sued and sometimes even assaulted by radical students.
But there are some important differences, too. None of today’s students risk being drafted into an unpopular, distant war. Unlike the campus rebels of the ’60s, today’s student activists don’t want more freedom to act, speak, and think as they please. Usually they want less.
Most strange: Today’s students are not chafing under some bow-tied patriarchal WASP dispensation. Instead, they are the beneficiaries of a system put in place by professors and administrators whose political views are almost uniformly left-wing and whose campus policies indulge nearly every progressive orthodoxy.
So why all the rage?
The answer lies in the title of Anthony Kronman’s necessary, humane and brave new book: “The Assault on American Excellence.” Kronman’s academic credentials are impeccable — he has taught at Yale for 40 years and spent a decade as dean of its law school — and his politics, so far as I can tell, are to the left of mine.
But Yale has been ground zero for recent campus unrest, including a Maoist-style struggle session against a distinguished professor, fights about “cultural appropriation,” the renaming of Calhoun (as in, John C.) College, and the decision to drop the term “master” because, to some, it carried “a painful and unwelcome connotation.”
It’s this last decision that seems to have triggered Kronman’s alarm. The word “master” may remind some students of slavery. What it really means is a person who embodies achievement, refinement, distinction — masterliness — and whose spirit is fundamentally aristocratic. Great universities are meant to nurture that spirit, not only for its own sake, but also as an essential counterweight to the leveling and conformist tendencies of democratic politics that Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosed as the most insidious threats to American civilization.
What’s happening on campuses today isn’t a reaction to Trump or some alleged systemic injustice, at least not really. Fundamentally, Kronman argues, it’s a reaction against this aristocratic spirit — of being, as H.L. Mencken wrote, “beyond responsibility to the general masses of men, and hence superior to both their degraded longings and their no less degraded aversions.” It’s a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few. And it is being undertaken for the sake of a radical egalitarianism in which all are included, all are equal, all are special.
“In endless pronouncements of tiresome sweetness, the faculty and administrators of America’s colleges and universities today insist on the overriding importance of creating a culture of inclusion on campus,” Kronman writes.
This is a bracing, even brutal, assessment. But it’s true. And it explains why every successive capitulation by universities to the shibboleths of diversity and inclusion has not had the desired effect of mollifying campus radicals. On the contrary, it has tended to generate new grievances while debasing the quality of intellectual engagement.
Hence the new campus mores. Before an idea can be evaluated on its intrinsic merits, it must first be considered in light of its political ramifications. Before a speaker can be invited to campus for the potential interest of what he might have to say, he must first pass the test of inoffensiveness. Before a student can think and talk for himself, he must first announce and represent his purported identity. Before a historical figure can be judged by the standards of his time, he must first be judged by the standards of our time.
All this is meant to make students “safe.” In fact, it leaves them fatally exposed. It emboldens offense-takers, promotes doublethink, coddles ignorance. It gets in the way of the muscular exchange of honest views in the service of seeking truth. Above all, it deprives the young of the training for independent mindedness that schools like Yale are supposed to provide.
I said earlier that Kronman’s book is brave, but in that respect I may be giving him too much credit. Much of his illustrious career is now safely behind him; he can write as he pleases. Would an untenured professor have the guts to say what he does? The answer to the question underscores the urgency of his warning.
Trump Is the Worst Kind of Socialist
His policies coddle fellow oligarchs while leaving ordinary people at the mercy of the free market.
“America will never be a socialist country,” President Trump said as he launched his bid for re-election last week.
That declaration was an effort to frighten Americans and undermine growing support for expanding Medicare and Social Security—two popular programs that have long been derided as “socialist.” Mr. Trump’s declaration hypocritically ignores that he and his Republican colleagues are the nation’s leading purveyors of an insidious form of corporate socialism, which uses government power and taxpayer resources to enrich Mr. Trump and his billionaire friends.
When we defeat Mr. Trump in this election, we are going to end his corporate socialism and use those resources to create a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights that benefits all people.
Consider the corporate socialism we’ve seen on Wall Street, where the high priests of unfettered capitalism reign. As you will recall, Wall Street’s deification of “free markets” went out the window in 2008 as they watched the financial crisis caused by their own greed and illegal behavior threaten the existence of some of the largest financial institutions in the country. Suddenly, Wall Street became strong supporters of big-government socialism.
They begged the federal government for unprecedented taxpayer assistance, and Congress provided them with the largest bailout in history. The major banks received some $700 billion from the Treasury and trillions in low-interest loans from the Federal Reserve.
Meanwhile, working people all across the country lost their jobs, their homes and their life savings. The most vulnerable were hit the hardest, with the African-American community losing half its wealth.
That was not an aberration. The norm across the corporate world is what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “socialism for the rich, and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor.”
If you are a fossil-fuel company, whose carbon emissions are destroying the planet, Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans offer billions in government subsidies, including special tax breaks, royalty relief and funding for research and development. But if you are struggling to pay your utility bill, you get the free market—higher and higher electric bills.
If you are a pharmaceutical company, you make huge profits on patent rights for medicines that were developed with taxpayer-funded research. But if you are a taxpayer, you get the free market and pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs—and in some cases you die because you cannot afford the medication you need.
If you are a monopoly like Amazon, owned by the wealthiest person in the U.S., you get hundreds of millions of dollars in economic incentives from taxpayers to build warehouses, yet you end up paying not one penny in federal income taxes. But if you are a small business that falls behind on your store’s rent, you get the free market—which means you get an eviction notice.
If you are the billionaire Walton family, state and local governments grant you free land and subsidies and build infrastructure for your stores, even as Walmart ’s tax-avoidance schemes drain local towns of public revenues. But if you are a Walmart worker, you get the free market—which means starvation wages.
If you are the Trump family, you got $885 million worth of tax breaks and subsidies for your family’s housing empire, which was built on racial discrimination. But if you are a homeowner struggling to pay your mortgage, you get the free market—which means foreclosure.
The time is long overdue for the U.S. to end corporate socialism for Mr. Trump and the rest of the billionaire class. Instead, those resources should be put to work to ensure shared prosperity by enhancing Social Security and Medicare and investing in roads and bridges, public schools, clean water and clean air.
Mr. Trump believes in corporate socialism to protect the wealth and power of the rich. I believe the U.S. must end corporate socialism and instead fulfill President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vision of enshrining basic economic rights for all Americans. These include the rights to health care, a living wage, a decent job, a quality education, a secure retirement, affordable housing and a clean environment. We can make this 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights a reality with initiatives like Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, a Green New Deal, student-debt cancellation and legislation to expand Social Security.
I recognize that this agenda will face enormous opposition from corporate America and the 1%. They have a vested interest in protecting the corporate socialism that has enriched and empowered them. The wealthiest three families now own more wealth than the bottom half of the country, and they will do everything they can to block our agenda.
But more Americans are noticing the contradiction between coddled socialism for the rich and the destruction of opportunity for everyone else. I am confident that we will be able to build a grass-roots movement that will not only defeat Donald Trump in this election but finally create a government that works for all people, not just the billionaire class.
Mr. Sanders, an independent, is a U.S. senator from Vermont and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The Coddling of the American Mind moderated by Malcolm Gladwell
Civil discourse is in decline, with potentially dire results for American democracy.
People born after 1995, especially the coasts and Chicago feel anxiety and fear.
Kids on milk cartons
We deprived kids to develop their normal risk taking abilities
Social media spreads to kids who are 11, 12, 13, and this stresses kids
- imagine the absolute worst of Jr High School, 24-hours a day forever
- Social media develops an echo chamber which gives you a dopamine rush
(30 min) Some people are looking to interpreting things in the worst possible light and Call-Out things.
There is no trust.
There are more conservatives and more liberals and less moderates.
(34 min) Upper class liberals are reporting their lower class minority people for being insensitive.
3 Great Untruths:
- What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
- Always trust your feelings.
- Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
Many of the people most passionate about aggressive speech police belong to high class liberal elites.
Donald Trump and His Work Wives
Mr. Trump’s penchant for hiring women into often vaguely defined but closely held roles.
.. “Women, according to Trump, were simply more loyal and trustworthy than men,” Mr. Wolff writes. “Men might be more forceful and competent, but they were also more likely to have their own agendas. Women, by their nature, or Trump’s version of their nature, were more likely to focus their purpose on a man. A man like Trump.” Mr. Trump, the author continued, “needed special — extra-special — handling. Women, he explained to one friend with something like self-awareness, generally got this more precisely than men. In particular, women who self-selected themselves as tolerant of or oblivious to or amused by or steeled against his casual misogyny and constant sexual subtext — which was somehow, incongruously and often jarringly, matched with paternal regard — got this.”
The term “emotional labor” gets vastly overused, but this is a textbook example. The women who work for Mr. Trump aren’t just required to perform their professional tasks; they also have to coddle and care for a volatile patriarch.
Donald Trump doesn’t just have a woman problem; he has a work wife problem.
.. the terms “work wife” and “work husband” sneaked into the lexicon, describing what are typically benign workplace intimacies: a close co-worker with whom you share not only tasks but also complaints and office gossip.
.. as women who work know, egalitarianism is not always the norm, and many of us have found ourselves serving as the caretaking “work wife” to the emotionally needier male co-worker or superior. This is common dynamic, if a seldom-addressed one (it certainly went unmentioned by the “Women Who Work” author, Ivanka Trump, who occupies this very role in her father’s professional world).
.. What Mr. Trump demands of his female subordinates, though, is something greater than your still-sexist but wholly run-of-the-mill concerns about gendered expectations in the workplace. Women like Ivanka Trump, Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway don’t just counsel the president and liaise with the press and public; they offer a feminine salve, simultaneously sanctioning Mr. Trump’s sexist commentary and buttressing his ego by situating themselves as little girls in need of direction from Big Daddy (literally, in Ivanka’s case).
.. Benevolent sexism is more insidious. In the view of the benevolent sexist, women and men should occupy fundamentally different roles, with the men as patriarchs and women, with our naturally maternal and gentle dispositions, as helpmates and caretakers. In some conservative, religious or simply strongly male-dominated communities, you see this dressed up as a form of feminism — the idea being that women can find respect and purpose by tapping into our intrinsic maternal nature.
.. When Mr. Trump’s defenders use the fact that the president has employed and encouraged a handful of women — to, as we now know, also serve as his uncompensated therapists — as a shield against accusations of sexism, they are deploying a similarly mendacious argument.
.. So what if the requirements for being treated as “special” involve playacting hyperfemininity, stroking a man’s ego and carefully managing his feelings? That’s just how men are, and that’s what men want.
.. Assumptions that women will monitor and manage men’s emotions span industries and political persuasions. It’s not that subtly sexist men refuse wholesale to hire women; it’s that they often hire a small number of us, with the unspoken but swiftly understood expectation that we will be the uncompensated “chief feelings officer.” Then they often lose respect for us because we play this very role.
.. But when faced with bosses or colleagues who require this hybrid of good-daughter devotion and quasi-maternal coddling from their “work wives,” women have two choices: Expend the unpaid effort and lose valuable time and energy, all while knowing you’ll never be as respected as a man who doesn’t have to handhold and head-pat his employer; or refuse to do it, and risk losing the job altogether. It’s not just the craven Kellyannes and Hopes and Ivankas of the world who opt for the former.