Category Archives: Politics

On college administrators and schools of education

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Musa al-Gharbi argues that the progressive left has successfully conquered university administration and schools of education.

As Sam Abrams’ research has shown, college administrators hail predominantly from the arts, humanities and social sciences. Graduates of these fields often have a distressingly limited understanding of how, concretely, many social institutions operate – and how, specifically, these institutions might be leveraged to achieve particular ends. However, those who gravitate towards administration often do understand, or come to understand, how to ‘work the (higher ed) system.’ And one of the key things they have done with this institutional knowledge is expand the size and influence of the administrative class itself.

…Perhaps the most genius aspect this approach (targeting ed schools) is the indirectness. This strategy was implemented in a very deliberate, systematic, forward-thinking way by a constellation of activists, scholars and practitioners (who were very explicit about the political goals of their pedagogical approach!). Nonetheless, when their efforts began to come to fruition, it appeared as though it was a spontaneous, organic, student-driven movement. Young people reached (elite) universities, and increasingly the workplace (in particular industries), attempting to mold these institutions in accordance with the logics that have been inculcated into them since primary school — by teachers executing the curricula designed by these activists, practitioners and scholars. Yet rather than taking up their disagreement with the people who had designed said curricula, who had laid out these modes of thought and engagement, critics were instead forced to contend with the students themselves — by then, true believers. The optics of this were not great (for the critics, that is, who came off as reactionary, out of touch, overly-judgmental, etc. for their apparent denigration of the students and their views).

Some random notes of my own.

1. I suspect that a lot of the growth in college administration serves to provide an employment safety-valve for people earning degrees, especially Ph.D’s, that are not very marketable.

2. My high school experience definitely preceded the leftist take-over of schools of education. My freshman year, the principal brought in Up With People to perform for us. They struck me as an attempt to promote social conformity, so that we wouldn’t become hippies or Vietnam War resisters. I told those around me that this was a right-wing propaganda exercise. The experience stuck with me, primarily because when I voiced my suspicions a very attractive classmate sneered at me, “Arnold, you have no soul.”

3. I don’t think that those of us on the right should try to make an issue of the political orientation of college administrators or at schools of education. Instead, I think that we should push for intellectual rigor in college courses and in education research and policy. I would rather make my stand on the cause of intellectual rigor than on the cause of political balance.

4. My father was a college administrator in the 1970s, as Dean of Arts and Sciences and later Provost at Washington University. The environment was different in those days. Continue reading →

Non-tribalism

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Karen Tamerius writes,

Through tribalism, Trump has created a self-reinforcing system. The more he lashes out at others, the more they strike back at him and his followers. And the more people strike back at Trump and his followers, the more he and they feel persecuted. The escalating sense of persecution binds his followers to him ever more tightly.

Her advice to progressives for handling Trump supporters:

1. Don’t attack
2. Keep personal relationships alive
3. Hear them out
4. Agree where appropriate
5. Gently nudge them toward progressivism
6. Invite them into the fold

I found this essay quite refreshing. It goes against 99 percent of the essays that progressives write. Conservatives and libertarians would be advised to follow these six maxims, also (substituting their own ideology in #5).

On black progress

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Coleman Hughes writes,

The evidence against racial progress tends to compare black-white gaps today to black-white gaps in the past. Here, white metrics are used as benchmarks against which to measure black progress. By contrast, the evidence in favor of progress tends to compare black metrics today against black metrics in the past. White metrics do not enter the equation. Crucially, the same data can often be made to look like either progress or regress depending on which framework is chosen.

A striking example that he cites is that the rate of incarceration for black men dropped 72 percent between 2001 an 2017, but the ratio of black to white incarceration still increased.

Some insights from Rene Girard

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In an essay on Peter Thiel by David Perell.

Girard wrote that social differences and rigid hierarchies maintain peace. When those differences collapse, the infectious spread of violence accelerates. The fiercest rivalries emerge not between people who are different, but people who are the same. The more two people share the same desires, the greater the risk of Mimetic competition.

I arrived at this essay following a thread from a link posted by Tyler Cowen. You can tell that Tyler absorbed this idea long ago, because he has often argued that people in the middle of the income distribution are more fiercely jealous of their neighbors than they are of the very rich, who are remote.

Now, think of us in the past two decades being brought closer together by the Internet. What chaos might result?

James Flynn censored by his publisher

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He writes,

Discussing why free speech should extend to questions of race and gender necessarily involves presenting views (such as those of Jensen, Murray, and Lynn), if only for purposes of rebuttal, which upset those who believe that racial and sexual equality is self-evident. If upsetting students or staff or the public is a reason for banning speech, all such discussion is at an end. I end the book by quoting from George Orwell’s original preface to Animal Farm, which was itself rejected by Faber and Faber for being too critical of Stalin: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

His publisher decided not to publish his book on free speech. Read the whole essay. Note that this is the Flynn of “the Flynn effect,” which is the most prominent scientific argument against DNA determinism.

A new political taxonomy

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Created by Richard Tafel, using data from Pew Research. He uses two dimensions: left/right; and traditional/modern/postmodern

The group that is least understood in American politics is the Postmodern Right. While postmodernism on the Left focuses on the failure of modernity to address social justice in term of identity politics, the Postmodern Right questions the fundamental economic worldview of the Modern Right. In Pew’s survey, they show up as a new category named “Market Skeptic Republicans.”

These are the folks trying to throw Republican-leaning libertarians under the bus. They were well represented at the National Conservatism conference. They are only 10 percent of “engaged voters,” but as I see it they are punching above their weight in the Trump era.

For “traditional” I read “Christian believers.” On the left, they include African-American Christians whose ethnicity ties them to Democrats, even if their views on social issues do not.

The Modern Left and the Modern Right are those of us who still like capitalism and freedom. But the Modern Left is down to just 13 percent of all engaged voters, compared with 36 percent for the Postmodern left, which now dominates the Democratic Party. The Modern Right is 29 percent of all engaged voters, which means that they dominate the right overall, which is only 45 percent of engaged voters.

This is an interesting taxonomy to work with.

1. I think that if we had a proportional representation system, it is quite possible that parties would emerge along these lines.

2. I think that the rapid decline of the Modern Left and the corresponding rise of the Postmodern Left is the most significant and for me the most frightening development of the past decade or so.

3. My current thinking is that Elizabeth Warren will win the Democratic nomination, and possibly the election. For Biden to win, the Postmodern Left has to fail to unite behind a candidate. But Warren has a strong base among college-educated women, who are a significant Democratic constituency. I expect that in the early primaries/caucuses she will pull away from Sanders and the rest, so that by Super Tuesday it will be a two-person race. In that game, Biden is playing a losing hand.

4. Under a Parliamentary system, the various parties would have to form coalitions. As it is, we are effectively in a world of minority governments. President Trump has no support anywhere on the left and has disaffected part of the Modern Right. If Senator Warren wins the Presidency, then the Postmodern Left will attempt to govern with almost 2/3 of the country in disagreement with them. But part of the Postmodern Left philosophy is not to compromise with anyone.

Have a nice day.

Affective polarization

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This is a relatively new term, to be distinguished from issue polarization. Affective polarization is loving your side for being your side and hating the other side. Recall that Lilliana Mason’s work shows affective polarization having gone up much more than issue polarization. Now we have a survey paper by Shanto Iyengar and others

What, if anything, can be done to ameliorate affective polarization? While efforts here are at best nascent, several approaches have shown promise. All of them work to reduce the biases generated by partisanship’s division of the world into an in group and an out group. Hence, some work has focused on making partisan identities less salient or making other identities more salient.

(I am quoting from the published version, forwarded by a reader. The link above goes to an ungated version, which may differ.)

A libertarian would say that in a libertarian world, with less at stake in politics, affective polarization could be reduced.

Negative partisanship

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Jonathan Rauch writes,

“negative partisanship.” It’s not so much that we like our own party as that we detest the other. In fact, Eric Groenendyk, of the University of Memphis, finds evidence that people hate the other party partially because they are disappointed in their own party. “[T]hey appear to be rationalizing continued identification with their party in the face of this ambivalence by reporting even more negative feelings toward the other party,” he writes. “In other words, they seem to be engaging in the ‘lesser of two evils’ identity defense.” By protecting their sense of belonging, intense partisan animosity performs what Groenendyk has called emotional rescue. The fevered view of President Obama proffered by people like Dinesh D’Souza may have been absurd, but it did serve the purpose of making every Republican leader look better by comparison. If Donald Trump is the devil incarnate, then you had better support whatever mediocre Democrat is on offer.

In any case, an implication of negative partisanship is that partisans are not so much rallying for a cause or party they believe in as banding together to fight a collective enemy — psychologically and politically a very different kind of proposition, as we see when we look at the literature on what tribalism does to the brain.

He does get around to citing Lilliana Mason. He doesn’t mention my book, but his themes are very similar. Highly recommended.

And try to attend, either in person or by viewing on the web, my conversation with Russ Roberts on these topics tomorrow at noon eastern time.