The Miseducation of Americas Elites
bariweiss.substack.com
bariweiss.substack.com
A giant corporation is happy to add one non-man and one BIPOC (ideally as a two-for-one) if that allows the power of the rest of the board to be preserved. They'll put all their employees through sensitivity training, celebrate every holiday and tweet anything you want if it has even a chance of keeping the minimum wage from getting increased. Prep schools for the elite will teach radical ideology if it keeps a target off their backs during education reform.
For people trying to move America towards a more liberal and just society: these institutions are not your allies. Do not be fooled by their language, their tokenism, the sincere people they hire as mascots. They're taking half your message and saying it back to you twice as loud to drown you out.
This resonates with me as I've worked at companies where the ranks are filled with young people talking about diversity, who were raised in economically privileged environments. And they seem oblivious to how there are almost no people there from lower class backgrounds (or older people). I have a hard time bringing up my poor background in these contexts because the focus is on my skin color and gender.
I call it Woke Calvinism.
I wonder if that still happens even when that working class kid is Latino?
Among US Latino adults, 76% say they have never heard of "Latinx", 26% have heard of it but do not use it, and only 3% use it [1].
Among 18-29 year old US Latinos, that rises to 42% have heard of it and 7% use it. It's got 14% usage among 18-29 year old women.
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
The amount of fear they are living under is quite sad.
The difference is that by late 1980s there were few true believers. Those who held the power and dictated the indoctrination standards were mostly tired pragmaticists who were in power to be in power and little else. There were some people brainwashed enough to believe in theory of Communism, but (unlike in the early 1950s, when Communism intrigued a lot of young intellectuals), they were mostly the stupid ones.
It is horribly fascinating for me to see this replayed in America of all places, but with a distributed, socially enforced political policing instead of a powerful secret police like StB and Stasi. Some people seem to have a powerful authoritarian impulse in them. And obviously they have found a way to crush dissent even without a large governmental oppressive apparatus.
The trouble is that things have changed. If you dissented in Communism or doubted its value, the Western world was an obvious, freer and richer alternative. Where will current and future American dissenters find an alternative to a toxic feed of critical race theory being elevated to a state creed?
The main opposing power is (shudder) China. This really feels like a choice between Sauron and Saruman. I am not sure if Europe can escape from the roof of Isengard, like Gandalf once did. At least plenty of us see the reality for what it is - an ugly attempt to build a racialized dystopia on a base of post-BLM moral panic.
Edit: now sitting at -2 without even an attempt at a rebuttal.
This was one of the striking things about the collapse of the USSR, former KGB, the supposed final bastion of defence of the Soviet system, became hyper-capitalist oligarchs overnight seemingly without skipping a beat. We see the same thing happening where the one-time stronghold of enlightenment and liberalism doesn't believe in it either.
What's also strange is that there are many people in the US with lived experience of the Soviet system, and they are sounding the alarm that what's happening now leads to some very dark places, and their voices are being completely ignored or even shouted down.
We the former Eastern Europeans feel like Cassandras these days.
I didn't grow up in Yugoslavia, so please elaborate a bit how that worked, because I don't understand.
Again, anti-racism has nothing to do with it, and I am appaled at how you have tried to mark me as a racist.
Unlike Yugoslavia, Poland was ethnically homogeneous at that time and did not disintegrate in an orgy of violence, but the living standards were nothing short of appalling.
It didn't start off that way. They never do. They start off, almost always, as "fighting for the underdog or oppressed".
After time, that goes "viral" and gets lots of broad support from the people as it is very reasonable and eventually becomes the main, acceptable, opinion of society (this is where we are getting now with various "wokenesses" and "hatenesses").
After that, other opinions and points of view are added to the original positions. Then, dissidents to any of those points of view are ostracized, and eventually it becomes illegal or quasi-illegal to hold different opinions or say certain things or act certain ways. In fact, people that do are considered "enemies of the state" or just "enemies". And it goes downhill from there.
This is how you can go from a worker's support group, or a minority protection group, and eventually turn into people getting their heads cut off for political reasons, put in to work camps, or straight up tortured or burned to death in the streets.
It really doesn't make any sense how it goes from something so reasonable to something so unreasonable, but it has happened over, and over again in nearly every part of the world. South America, Europe, Africa, Asia. And it almost always happens the same way.
And there are signs of it are happening here.
That is what they are eluding to. And the worst part is that once it gets going, it doesn't take long.
It started off as pro-equality and for the people. Then, any evidence that you are outperforming others in a "capitalist" way became evidence that you are anti-equality and therefore against the people. This quickly devolved into merit not being determined by a willingness to pay (the cornerstone of economics) to merit being determined by virtue-signaling and connections (the cornerstone of politics). As many other posters have mentioned, this is a poor way to judge merit and soon beliefs come up against reality. When this happens reality always wins and things that become dependent on higher-productivity (in modern society, this is almost all things) collapse.
I see a lot of parallels. For the left, the structures of capitalism and racism are intertwined. In this article, the author gives examples of how being a white male and doing well is itself evidence of soft-racism. These parents are noticing that in corporate boards, medical schools, law schools, elite colleges across the country, merit is determined not by accomplishments but by virtue-signaling (note: this is not the same as Affirmative Action; one is boosting entrance rates for Blacks, American Indians, and Latinos/Latinas, the other is saying "only this type of White person who has acknowledged that racism/capitalism is inherent to their accomplishments is allowed").
Assuming these beliefs come to dominate American power structures in the next 20 years (more than in the past 20), I am quite worried. Some structural anti-racism might be a net good. Heck, America has a lot of room to move to the left and a bit more equality may also be a net good -- McCarthyism was much more extreme in the other direction, after all. But historically, this cult-like faith-based groupthink where dissension and alternate beliefs are seen as evil has not turned out well; reality always wins over beliefs.
- The forcing of ideals in Yugoslavia was done 'top-down', by people with power, not bottoms-up.
- Citizens have no authority over others.
- The United States is a democracy, with separation of political powers.
I hope you understand that this makes the comparison to Yugoslavia nonsensical.
Or a softer version: do you think McCarthy in the U.S. was potentially dangerous, or will our democracy inherently protect us against being too extreme for all time?
Didnt a bunch of woke high school students get a decades long NY Times writer fired recently?
The experience of the world behind the Iron Curtain says that you must really be wary of whom you trust. The greatest force helping tyrants stay and grow is an unassuming balding man next door who collects all your shortcomings and informs on you regularly. Without a million people like him, every oppressive apparatus would be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work needed to control an entire nation.
Whatever happens on Twitter each day really resembles the struggle sessions and witch hunts of yesteryear. At the end of the day, authoritarianism is carried on by will of a certain subset of the people, not just by authorities.
Is all this in reaction to - or in conjunction with - the growing authoritarianism coming from the right? I don't know. I am in all in favor of examining how America has failed Blacks, Native Americans, the working class left in the dust by uber-capitalism (aka Ronald Reagan and all that BS) etc, but what is going on now is becoming problematic aka a mindless ideology.
If you pair this with [0], then it seems the Elites [motivated by power, social dominance, etc] have figured out how to leverage entirely valid ways of looking at the world, but not the only ways created by the Gentry into mechanisms / an ideology with which to control society and those in lower social classes. Sounds much like China's Cultural Revolution... Having the Elites of a society be in thrall to any sort of ideology is a bad idea and so having all these students of elite super-upper class schools on the way to the Ivy League being turned into mindless robots will end up badly.
Of course, America is the Greatest Country in History (tm) and so having some sort of American fascism hit at the same time as some sort of Cultural Revolution is to be expected </s>. The 2020s are going be a mess.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210225030540/https://www.indie...
Ah poor criticized you. The reason why you're getting downvoted (and the reason why nobody bothers to write a reply), is because the analogy you try to pull is obviously wrong, and it makes you come across as a troll.
Society has always ostracized people that do morally egregious stuff. The concept of 'Cancel Culture' has always existed in the form of social stigmatization, laws, religious rules (10 commandments, etc), etc. The only difference is that now racism is seen on the same level as something like being a rapist.
Also why would anybody be against anti-racist sentiment? Do you think anti-racism will come at some cost? I really would like an answer to this.
> The main opposing power is (shudder) China. This really feels like a choice between Sauron and Saruman.
So you actually think China and US are about the same on level of oppressiveness? Really?
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/nat...
Why is this? Because, as the concentration of wealth in the top (and almost entirely white) ranks of the U.S. causes people in that group to know, perhaps subconsciously, that a violent backlash is coming, and they want to get out of the way of it. Without, you know, actually losing their privileged spot.
You don’t like that the school is teaching that capitalism is wrong? Do the capitalist thing and vote with your wallet, send your kids somewhere else. If you don’t like that the school is teaching that racism is a problem, then find a school where that isn’t an emphasis. I strongly suspect (based on me knowing how these articles get written and how parents groups misinterpret everything) that the racism curriculum is exaggerated in this article anyway. But regardless, if you don’t like the elite curriculum in California and New York, there are 48 other states you could move to and find a good school. I’m sure some states have fine institutions of learning without all that progressive nonsense, if you could be bothered to disgrace yourself and move there.
Edit, rather than making another comment: and maybe it’s a good thing the school is indirectly teaching kids to shut their mouths and not share a viewpoint that they know is unpopular. I share my opinion freely on the internet but at work I have to pick and choose what I say about our projects. This is good education.
The question is what happens to the entire country if its elite adopts critical race theory as The Truth. It could tear itself apart in a way not too dissimilar from 1861-5. Systems in which your skin color is the most important attribute have little space for meritocracy and movement among classes, and create an explosive reservoir of resentment.
In the article one parent talks about a rumor that the school has three picks for Duke and if you spoke out that you would risk your shot. My graduating class from a public high school in Kansas (less than 100 people) had more than three people offered scholarships to Duke (only one went there because the other two had even better options). Maybe if those are the opportunities the elite school offers they should just find a school that makes their kids competitive instead of pedigreed.
Additionally, the idea that critical race theory is going to take over instead of just being a talking point to gain votes from minorities is nonsense. White elites won’t actually practice what they preach. This irony is even mentioned in the article about how this exclusive school is preaching inclusion. It’s not sustainable behavior. But more to the point, there are vast swaths of this country where CRT isn’t the prevailing viewpoint and is unlikely to gain a foothold. Who did the Democrats elect to heal the wounds of the country after an old white man hurt our reputation? Another old white man. The elites in the country won’t actually lean in to the idea because it would cost them. The only real risk is that people in LA and NYC overplay their hands, become further out of touch with the rest America, and lose some of their cultural dominance. There may be violence on the horizon for America, but CRT isn’t the wedge being driven.
That is not new. Iranian ayatollahs are notoriously corrupt and ungodly. Communist apparatchiks lived an elevated lifestyle propped up by valuable Western commodities unavailable to normal folks. One of the reason why Protestantism took off was the famously corrupt Papal system.
A tyranny can be sustained perfectly well for some time even if the top brass consists of cynical power brokers and manipulators. You do not really need to top ones to practice what they preach.
It is probably not sustainable in the long run, yes. But what comes afterwards? If you look at post-Communist states, the ones that thrive now only gained some balance back because of intense contact with nearby free and rich countries. Russia or Moldova are likely ruined for generations.
Lol. Maybe we are seeing an explosive reservoir of resentment because of exactly that?
John McWhorter argues that wokeness is simply an ersatz religion, filling up empty spiritual space left by previous creeds. And freshly minted religions tend to be strident and punishing.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/john-mcwhorter-the-neorac...
The beginning of his article does not lead me to believe he’s capable of offering a balanced and nuanced view.
His poorly constructed arguments based on his own “Third Wave Antiracist tenets” are a pretty run of the mill strawmans restating the position of those he disagrees with in an absurd way that clearly misses the point intentionally.
I tried to read their works; I cannot see the reason for their popularity. They fail at writing and reasoning at the same time. Perhaps people just bought their books as a kind of moral atonement, not for reading.
These two are social Lysenkos of the 2020s. I will stick with McWhorter and his straightforward logic.
Sound logic would be based off of arguments actually made, but that’s not what McWhorter does.
This sounds pretty familiar
That is one part i would think is not exaggerated. It is disturbing how many articles mentioning race are in "business" papers like bloomberg and regular news papers of course, lets not mention advertisement and social media. It is not stop bombardment today.
Yes you can still be a capitalist and think that there are issues with extreme concentrations of wealth, monopolies, cartels, etc. Or think that maybe some problems are better dealt with (on average) by a buying consortium instead of individually.
(Of course capitalism is more criticized, it survived. XX century communism crashed and burned)
Same with some gender/sexuality conceptions and together with the "demonization" of those with different opinions (on both sides) - baring actual hate/bigotry naturally. Dividing and conquer ad infinitum
I would not be surprised if the school hires professional photographers and takes kids on school excursions to protests to take photo shoots. In the future all politicians will have photos of them at the Friday climate school strike and the BLM protests.
The whole situation is analogous to the chivalry code of conducts that knights had.
And btw the teachers are in on the whole thing. They aren't stupid either. They know what role they are playing in this game.