Sociologist and Skeptic Research Center chief researcher Kevin McCaffree reviews the latest survey findings from Freedom for Individual Rights and Expression
Good analysis. When I decided to pursue a military history MA, I asked a professor for a reading list on primitive warfare. He gave me a list but added that he no longer teaches the biological origins of conflict because certain unhappy young things get very upset when you explain that female bodies are not optimized for war. They have spent their entire lives being lied to by video game character generation screens and combat-wombat Mary Sue women in film. This episode does not appear on any survey. My andecdote will not be used to measure the freedom-level on that professor's campus.
We need to stop calling these people "liberals". Neo-liberal or post-liberal might provide recognition that they no longer hold liberal ideas. Fascist is not quite right, and easy to deflect (though these true-believers do support a type of nationalism as well as all kinds of state control of commerce and the economy). Woke has become too common, and Post-modernist too abstract. How about cultural Marxists?
Mounk: I think Freddie deBoer said, “Look, just tell me what on earth you want me to call this ideology that is reshaping our social reality. And I'll call it that. I don't really care. But we need to have a term that allows us to talk and debate about it.”
Why the “identity synthesis?” Well, first of all, because these ideas are fundamentally about forms of group identity (race, gender, and sexual orientation). The claim is: “These are the most important categories through which to understand and think about the world. They should be what political activism is based on and, in many ways, what our social institutions and policies should revolve around.”
And then I think that, in its current form, this ideology is a surprising synthesis of three different intellectual traditions: postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory. And if you actually go through each of those traditions and their main thinkers and concerns, the six or seven themes that dominate progressive circles in the United States in 2023 really emerge.
Hughes: The synthesis as you describe includes, basically, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Derrick Bell, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. It’s roughly those five?
Mounk: Yeah, and of course you can always add other figures in that tradition. I read very, very broadly, in order to write this book. I'm trained as an intellectual historian, originally, but I think these are the ones who most meaningfully contributed to this tradition.
Hughes: Let's begin with Foucault. Stripped down to as few ideas as possible, what is Foucault all about and how does he contribute to this synthesis?
Mounk: There's a little bit of a subtext here. A lot of the right says this is just “Cultural Marxism”; that's what somebody like Chris Rufo argues. I think that’s a fundamental misunderstanding, and it makes it very hard to see how influential Foucault—who himself rejected Marxism—was on the entire tradition.
Foucault was a member of the French Communist Party, which basically listening to Moscow's political directives, from 1950 to 1953. But he hated the party and, to his honor, he left in 1953. Indeed, he rejected “grand narratives,” these big attempts to structure our understanding of the world, to think that it has some kind of directive purpose. One of those grand narratives was Marxism, with its predictions about how the proletariat was going to stage a revolution to bring about socialism, and so on. Another grand narrative was liberalism, the idea that if we live up to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (or, in the French context, the values of the French Revolution), that is going to create a better and more humane world. So, from the beginning, Foucault has a very deep skepticism about any claim to neutral or universal truth, and about any political values that claim to be superior to others.
That deep skepticism about objective truth is the first big contribution he makes. The second big contribution is that he changes how we think about political power. Now, you know, you ask a smart high schooler what political power is, they'll say something like, “Well, there are laws and a bureaucracy and a police force, and they exercise power over the society (and perhaps, in some complicated way, that power derives from us through elections).” It's a pretty top-down model of power. Foucault says, “No, that's not the most important form of political power; the most important form of political power comes from discourses; from the way we think about and conceptualize the world. What's truly important is how we have this conversation on this podcast, and how that constrains the kind of possible moves that people can make in thinking about the world.” So power is much more diffuse. It's omnipresent. And that made Foucault quite skeptical about the possibility of bringing about improvements, because you might fight against one kind of oppressive discourse and that might give you a second of freedom. But then the discourse is going to reconstitute itself and the new discourse is probably going to be just as oppressive as the one that came before.
I like Mounk, but his distinction here doesn't make a difference. Marxism, boiled down, is the desire to dichotomize social life into a landscape of oppressor vs. oppressed. Yes, Foucault WASN'T a "Marxist" in some highly technical orthodox sense because he doubted the probability of a true proletariat revolution, but Foucault WAS a Marxist in the sense that actually matters: he believed social life is nothing but a landscape of power where the oppressed are dominated by the oppressor. The details of Marx's theory are irrelevant; what is relevant is the unbelievably wrongheaded and unhelpful attempt to dichotomize social life.
It’s because of how I KNOW (not feel) students, professors, and admins have responded to my open approach to discussion that I eventually self-censored. From 8yrs of experiences…in multiple professional university settings…I learned that conformity not critical thinking is valued in higher Ed and English degrees.
There are good observations here about the pressures of conformity in higher education. I find it as. true later in life at almost every age.
One pattern I was skeptical of is the author's assessment that confidentiality would not be sufficient to get honest answers. I saw no evidence presented to support that view. I think the privacy of a survey would offer a college student considerable encouragement for honest answers. The possible risks given seemed remote in revealing their true identity.
I would argue that when police are arresting college students for protesting against israel, with harris’ husband - a known zionist and the wife of a zionist - is put on the antisemitism task force like a wolf put in charge of sheep i cant really take your insinuation that “those evil woke colleges wont let me argue that dead kills are fucking awesome” when for past year mainstream liberals have been calling them russian assets, demanding their expulsion and firing of their teachers as well as banning an entire social media platform for housing undoctored footage of Israel’s butchery. Im sorry i really cant take the “free speech is under threat in colleges” talking point when it’s said by the crowd who is currently arguing for the free speech of its students to be stifled in favor of US government-backed narratives
I’m not terribly convinced you have any clue who FIRE is. The majority of their activism recently has literally been defending pro-Palestinian student protestors.
And Doug Emhoff is a “Zionist” (god, what a pointlessly broad and ahistorical use of the term) in that he doesn’t want Israel, and inevitably Israelis, wiped off the face of the earth. Is this supposed to be a mark against him?
(I also suspect your concern is less about “dead kids” in general so much as which particular kids end up dead. There certainly weren’t a lot of tears on campus on October 8th.)
He very specifically wants Universities to crack down on protests, under the guise of “stopping anti-semitism” of which the US government has expanded to “anti-Zionism, not spreading Israeli propaganda and not liking hummus”
But ofc. there’s that tired line of “he just wants Jewish people to exist maaaaan!” I dont know what kind of person would want what’s best for Jewish people and support an apartheid state that makes them look like bloodthirsty zealouts
And dont come at me with “campus people werent crying on Oct. 8th, which makes them evil” BS. Hit a rock and youll find a college kid disgusted by the actions of Hamas, because war is bad and terrorism is bad. Hence why I find it more disgusting that Israeli has killed 30,000 people, two thirds of which are women or children, than it is that some hypothetical woke college leftist pissed in your cornflakes with pronouns and protests
You throw a bunch of links at me from radically left media sites and expect me to take that as evidence validating your anti-Semitic, neoMarxist, Orwellian world view? Give me a break. Your intellectual and moral bankruptcy would make the Soviets proud.
As spectacularly deranged as your comment is, maybe youre doing a satire and a damn good job of it, The Guardian and Rolling Stone are hardly The Deprogram or the Gray Zone. Also if you wanted right wing sites you couldve just asked, because these thing objectively happened. News sites choose what to report on and what spin, they dont need to fabricate EVERYTHING they do
Thank you SO much for adding further weight of evidence in support of my observations and analyses. I know this is a HUGE ask of you, but could you please learn how to write intelligible and somewhat proper English? You and your ignorant, neoMarxist, anti-Semitic, racist hate belongs in the trash along with all the other dead vermin.
Intrigued -- and delighted -- that you would cross post something from the Skeptic at LGB United. Nice for a gay guy to see an LGB Substack repost something from a Substack I follow.
All part of the growing "Coalition of the Enlightened" (as I call it).
Good analysis. When I decided to pursue a military history MA, I asked a professor for a reading list on primitive warfare. He gave me a list but added that he no longer teaches the biological origins of conflict because certain unhappy young things get very upset when you explain that female bodies are not optimized for war. They have spent their entire lives being lied to by video game character generation screens and combat-wombat Mary Sue women in film. This episode does not appear on any survey. My andecdote will not be used to measure the freedom-level on that professor's campus.
We need to stop calling these people "liberals". Neo-liberal or post-liberal might provide recognition that they no longer hold liberal ideas. Fascist is not quite right, and easy to deflect (though these true-believers do support a type of nationalism as well as all kinds of state control of commerce and the economy). Woke has become too common, and Post-modernist too abstract. How about cultural Marxists?
In his book "The Identity Trap," Yascha Mounk discounts the influence of cultural Marxism in producing the culture of wokeness.
Here's how Mounk explained his thinking in his interview with Coleman Hughes on the podcast "Persuasion."
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Mounk: I think Freddie deBoer said, “Look, just tell me what on earth you want me to call this ideology that is reshaping our social reality. And I'll call it that. I don't really care. But we need to have a term that allows us to talk and debate about it.”
Why the “identity synthesis?” Well, first of all, because these ideas are fundamentally about forms of group identity (race, gender, and sexual orientation). The claim is: “These are the most important categories through which to understand and think about the world. They should be what political activism is based on and, in many ways, what our social institutions and policies should revolve around.”
And then I think that, in its current form, this ideology is a surprising synthesis of three different intellectual traditions: postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory. And if you actually go through each of those traditions and their main thinkers and concerns, the six or seven themes that dominate progressive circles in the United States in 2023 really emerge.
Hughes: The synthesis as you describe includes, basically, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Derrick Bell, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. It’s roughly those five?
Mounk: Yeah, and of course you can always add other figures in that tradition. I read very, very broadly, in order to write this book. I'm trained as an intellectual historian, originally, but I think these are the ones who most meaningfully contributed to this tradition.
Hughes: Let's begin with Foucault. Stripped down to as few ideas as possible, what is Foucault all about and how does he contribute to this synthesis?
Mounk: There's a little bit of a subtext here. A lot of the right says this is just “Cultural Marxism”; that's what somebody like Chris Rufo argues. I think that’s a fundamental misunderstanding, and it makes it very hard to see how influential Foucault—who himself rejected Marxism—was on the entire tradition.
Foucault was a member of the French Communist Party, which basically listening to Moscow's political directives, from 1950 to 1953. But he hated the party and, to his honor, he left in 1953. Indeed, he rejected “grand narratives,” these big attempts to structure our understanding of the world, to think that it has some kind of directive purpose. One of those grand narratives was Marxism, with its predictions about how the proletariat was going to stage a revolution to bring about socialism, and so on. Another grand narrative was liberalism, the idea that if we live up to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (or, in the French context, the values of the French Revolution), that is going to create a better and more humane world. So, from the beginning, Foucault has a very deep skepticism about any claim to neutral or universal truth, and about any political values that claim to be superior to others.
That deep skepticism about objective truth is the first big contribution he makes. The second big contribution is that he changes how we think about political power. Now, you know, you ask a smart high schooler what political power is, they'll say something like, “Well, there are laws and a bureaucracy and a police force, and they exercise power over the society (and perhaps, in some complicated way, that power derives from us through elections).” It's a pretty top-down model of power. Foucault says, “No, that's not the most important form of political power; the most important form of political power comes from discourses; from the way we think about and conceptualize the world. What's truly important is how we have this conversation on this podcast, and how that constrains the kind of possible moves that people can make in thinking about the world.” So power is much more diffuse. It's omnipresent. And that made Foucault quite skeptical about the possibility of bringing about improvements, because you might fight against one kind of oppressive discourse and that might give you a second of freedom. But then the discourse is going to reconstitute itself and the new discourse is probably going to be just as oppressive as the one that came before.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/mounk2
I like Mounk, but his distinction here doesn't make a difference. Marxism, boiled down, is the desire to dichotomize social life into a landscape of oppressor vs. oppressed. Yes, Foucault WASN'T a "Marxist" in some highly technical orthodox sense because he doubted the probability of a true proletariat revolution, but Foucault WAS a Marxist in the sense that actually matters: he believed social life is nothing but a landscape of power where the oppressed are dominated by the oppressor. The details of Marx's theory are irrelevant; what is relevant is the unbelievably wrongheaded and unhelpful attempt to dichotomize social life.
I call them Regressives or the Regressive Left.
Yeah im sure using a term invented by the nazis will go down really well
It’s because of how I KNOW (not feel) students, professors, and admins have responded to my open approach to discussion that I eventually self-censored. From 8yrs of experiences…in multiple professional university settings…I learned that conformity not critical thinking is valued in higher Ed and English degrees.
There are good observations here about the pressures of conformity in higher education. I find it as. true later in life at almost every age.
One pattern I was skeptical of is the author's assessment that confidentiality would not be sufficient to get honest answers. I saw no evidence presented to support that view. I think the privacy of a survey would offer a college student considerable encouragement for honest answers. The possible risks given seemed remote in revealing their true identity.
I would argue that when police are arresting college students for protesting against israel, with harris’ husband - a known zionist and the wife of a zionist - is put on the antisemitism task force like a wolf put in charge of sheep i cant really take your insinuation that “those evil woke colleges wont let me argue that dead kills are fucking awesome” when for past year mainstream liberals have been calling them russian assets, demanding their expulsion and firing of their teachers as well as banning an entire social media platform for housing undoctored footage of Israel’s butchery. Im sorry i really cant take the “free speech is under threat in colleges” talking point when it’s said by the crowd who is currently arguing for the free speech of its students to be stifled in favor of US government-backed narratives
I’m not terribly convinced you have any clue who FIRE is. The majority of their activism recently has literally been defending pro-Palestinian student protestors.
And Doug Emhoff is a “Zionist” (god, what a pointlessly broad and ahistorical use of the term) in that he doesn’t want Israel, and inevitably Israelis, wiped off the face of the earth. Is this supposed to be a mark against him?
(I also suspect your concern is less about “dead kids” in general so much as which particular kids end up dead. There certainly weren’t a lot of tears on campus on October 8th.)
My problem isnt with FIRE, my problem is with Shermer’s framing of FIRE as too soft on colleges
Also here’s just a quick google: https://www.thedailybeast.com/doug-emhoff-quietly-called-columbia-university-jewish-leaders
He very specifically wants Universities to crack down on protests, under the guise of “stopping anti-semitism” of which the US government has expanded to “anti-Zionism, not spreading Israeli propaganda and not liking hummus”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/12/05/house-passes-resolution-declaring-anti-zionism-a-form-of-antisemitism-some-democrats-are-critical/
But ofc. there’s that tired line of “he just wants Jewish people to exist maaaaan!” I dont know what kind of person would want what’s best for Jewish people and support an apartheid state that makes them look like bloodthirsty zealouts
And dont come at me with “campus people werent crying on Oct. 8th, which makes them evil” BS. Hit a rock and youll find a college kid disgusted by the actions of Hamas, because war is bad and terrorism is bad. Hence why I find it more disgusting that Israeli has killed 30,000 people, two thirds of which are women or children, than it is that some hypothetical woke college leftist pissed in your cornflakes with pronouns and protests
WTF kind of distorted reality are you living in?
https://theintercept.com/2024/09/05/columbia-students-arrested-palestine-protests/ https://theintercept.com/2024/05/16/university-college-professors-israel-palestine-firing/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/pro-palestinian-college-protests-encampments.html https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lawmakers-tiktok-ban-pro-palestinian-content-1235016101/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/07/israel-al-jazeera-us-tiktok-ban
You throw a bunch of links at me from radically left media sites and expect me to take that as evidence validating your anti-Semitic, neoMarxist, Orwellian world view? Give me a break. Your intellectual and moral bankruptcy would make the Soviets proud.
As spectacularly deranged as your comment is, maybe youre doing a satire and a damn good job of it, The Guardian and Rolling Stone are hardly The Deprogram or the Gray Zone. Also if you wanted right wing sites you couldve just asked, because these thing objectively happened. News sites choose what to report on and what spin, they dont need to fabricate EVERYTHING they do
Thank you SO much for adding further weight of evidence in support of my observations and analyses. I know this is a HUGE ask of you, but could you please learn how to write intelligible and somewhat proper English? You and your ignorant, neoMarxist, anti-Semitic, racist hate belongs in the trash along with all the other dead vermin.
I dont know what any of those words mean, i just dont want to kill kids honey
Sorry, *husband
And *kids, sorry for my awful spelling im on mobile
Intrigued -- and delighted -- that you would cross post something from the Skeptic at LGB United. Nice for a gay guy to see an LGB Substack repost something from a Substack I follow.
All part of the growing "Coalition of the Enlightened" (as I call it).