Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

Like, God says so, end of discussion. The only way to attack that stance is to break their faith.

A Schelling point for coordinated actions by large groups of people, organized around ethnic, cultural, and/or linguistic grounds?

Everything is a social construct if we live in a society. The alternative would be to leave in an animalic state.

These arguments that "such-and-such is a social construct" are akin to "water is wet." Just a statement of fact with no obvious implications.

What would the alternative be?

You might be confusing 'nation' with 'nation-state'; not all states are nation-states.

What mainstream economists believe all immigration policies are illegitimate and harmful? Not being snarky.

That would be considered a fairly ideological stance in most other fields. I've never heard that expressed in political science (some overlap with economics) from anyone but people on HN and Reddit.

This combination of ideas is not at all what is being espoused in liberal universities. They are pushing for both open borders (or at least amnesty and much less restrictive immigration laws) and guaranteed social services for immigrants.

Libertarians certainly don't view nations as "completely artificial illegitimate social construct" and I seriously doubt most college professors are teaching from that ideology's point of view. Libertarians are often as demonized as Republicans at universities.

However there are obviously large cultural, economic, security and other logistical issues that would be caused by completely opening up national borders -- we're certainly no longer in the era before WWI when nobody needed a passport. The classroom certainly sounds like a legitimate place to bring up these rather mainstream viewpoints.

Did some research and it does seem like there are both student- and teacher-led protests that are crossing the line into unreasonableness (from my perspective), e.g. protests against a humanities class for being too Eurocentric [1], or student demands for a Jewish professor to be fired because he publicly disagrees with a 'Day of Absence' event that asks for white students and faculty to stay off campus [2].

Then there's the promulgation of microaggression theory on campuses, which seems perfectly tailored to encourage all students to view every statement in the least charitable light[3] and to search for possible racism, sexism, or other possible -isms.

The fact that some people on the left are acting in a way where any disagreement with some interpretation of 'progressive' ideals automatically leads to accusations of racism is alarming, and is exactly the sort of prejudice (in the literal definition of the word) that I think fellow liberals should rally against.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/11/reed-college-...

[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/30/escalating-de... -

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-ris...

Edit: they were in place during Johnson's administration

The Republican Party is clearly moving further right over a long time scale; the Democratic Party is also moving further left. Whether those things are true of the “American right” and “American left” is a little more complex question (from where I sit, it seems that the American Right is moving to the right more clearly and across the board, while the American left is moving left on social issues but not so much on economic issues, but that the economic left is starting to regain power in the Democratic Party, which if you mistake the Democratic Party for the American left looks like the left moving farther left on economic issues.)

> Take for example this speech by Bill Clinton in 1995

Bill Clinton is not, and never was, part of the American left. He is a moderate economic and social conservative—all the prominent liberal figures in the Democratic Party took a pass on the 1992 primary expecting Bush to be unbeatable. Paul Tsongas was probably the closest thing to a left candidate in a major party primary in 1992 (he was at least a solid social liberal), but his campaign was hampered by health concerns regarding his cancer (which turned out to be not entirely misplaced.)

> To think that this was a speech by a Democrat president about 20 years ago is unfathomable to the left today.

Not any more than it was at the time; the left disliked Clinton during the primary in 1992, mostly saw him as the lesser of three evils in the general (though Perot’s anti-NAFTA stand got him some support from the left even though he was not in any way a left candidate), and attacked him mercilessly from 1993 on when it came to policy as most of his gestures toward the left in the campaign turned out to be hollow, and his health care reform foundered on exactly the grounds the left challenged it earlier: it was overly complex in pursuit of buy-in that wouldn't come anyway from corporate interests, when there was a strong public majority support for simple single-payer.

I've always thought this was a clever strategy, but apparently enough people live in their own social bubbles that many progressive types don't realise how unprogressive a lot of older, rural voters are (and you could argue they've been misled by their news providers into positions that are contrary to their own values and desires) and can't understand why compromise is necessasary to actually win elections.

Some have argued that this is bad because you need to inspire people, like Obama did, but Obama is another triangulator, so I'm not sure how that makes sense.

Democrats in the late 60s wanted a national gun registry and ban handguns for anyone who can't demonstrate a need, with household self-protection not considered sufficient need. Any existing guns that didn't qualify would be confiscated. Republicans only wanted to ban things like assault weapons, ownership by felons, and carrying loaded weapons in public. Now, Democrats struggle to ban assault weapons, and Republicans oppose almost all forms of gun control.

FDR enacted a top marginal income tax rate of 94%. Republicans wanted taxes reduced, after the war, to a level that would pay for postwar government spending. Now, the top marginal income tax rate is 39.6%, with Democrats proposing little tweaks like increasing it a bit or increasing the payroll tax cap, and Republicans wanting to slash tax rates (I saw one the other day saying that we should aim for 1-2%) and not caring in the least about the increased deficits this would bring.

Seems to me that the American left is moving sharply right, to the point where the Democratic Party would be considered centrist or mildly right-wing by most standards, while the American right is also moving sharply right and is teetering on the precipice of going all-in on racist nationalism.

This, extremely low, bar "elitist" as it may be is necessary to provide at least the bare minimum of protection against bad actors. People unwilling to change their view poison the space for all participants. The pursuit of an unmoderated ideal is a false one.

Things like 3 million illegal aliens voted in California, or Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or John Podesta running a sex ring in the basement of a pizza parlor, are better examples of ideas fully divorced from objective reality.

Collusion by Trump campaign with the Russian government is not an issue brought up by the left specifically (if anything, it's catnip for centrists; the left have bigger fish to fry), and that you're framing it as such makes me think you're using it as an excuse to ignore it.

This claim has no basis in objective reality.

Or perhaps it's simpler than that: a large swath of Americans unimpressed Hillary Clinton's largely uninteresting business-as-usual policies matching her husband's mildde-of-the-road governance with no real winners or interesting nuggets, up against the usual conservative base that will vote for just about anybody who claims loyalty with the Elephant (even if they don't really fit the profile, as Trump certainly did not).

How about everybody just stop coming up with hot takes on the election for five seconds. Your nitpick about the liberals in your life or sensationalized in the newspaper really did not matter. Sorry.