In Tikvah Honor of the Trump Criminal Referrals (2): Who is Russell Jacoby, and Why Should We Care About Him?
David Shasha
A Tikvah Tablet Neo-Con Deep Dive: Who is Russell Jacoby, and Why Should We Care About Him?
We have seen how some ex-“Liberals” have adopted and adapted to Neo-Conservatism in the Trump era.
It can be tracked in the Tikvah Tablet Trumpscum Jew echo-chamber.
There is the late Todd Gitlin:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/5hAaPh1qz28/m/AGyH6hdzAgAJ
“Brain-dead Trumpscum” David Mamet:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/5Dnx77-dYY4/m/4PWuBEc1CgAJ
And, of course, former Black Panther Stalinist David Horowitz, too radical Trumpscum for even his closest (former) allies, and for The Tikvah Fund:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/791kMyKv9Aw/m/wwQo3PP_AAAJ
So, in honor of the final 1/6 Commission hearing on Monday, the Whore of Trump gave us one more, Russell Jacoby:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/takeover-russell-jacoby
The complete article follows this note.
Indeed, it is always good to have “Liberals” testify to the “truth” of the Trumpscum DEATH SENTENCE Cancel Culture obsession.
It was a strategy used by the HUAC Red Scare Anti-Communists, who pulled out many “guilt-ridden” Fellow Travellers to call out their former allies.
Sam Tenenhaus detailed how this movement helped shape modern American Conservatism:
Russell Jacoby was not someone I had heard of before, so, once again, my hat is off to Alana Newhouse and her crack Trumpscum staff for educating me in their nefarious Straussian ways.
I discovered that Jacoby published representative “Liberal” articles at The Chronicle for Higher Education:
https://www.chronicle.com/author/russell-jacoby
Here is one that dismisses the usual Neo-Con hysteria over Liberals in the academy:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/academe-is-overrun-by-liberals-so-what/
Here is another that caused a big stir in Right Wing circles:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/dreaming-of-a-world-with-no-intellectuals/
The American Conservative responded to the article immediately:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/jacobys-anti-intellectual-anti-conservatism/
But since Trump, apparently, things have changed for Jacoby:
https://www.cieo.org.uk/reviews/on-diversity-the-eclipse-of-the-individual-in-a-global-era/
All the articles follow this note.
The CIEO author is Bari Weiss’ twin:
We can thus see that, even when he was a “normal” “Liberal” academic, Jacoby was closely attuned to the Neo-Cons in a way that has now bloomed into a full Tikvah identification in a form of religious “conversion.”
It is the McCarthyite way.
Jacoby’s Tikvah Tablet article contains full-throated Rufo-style defenses of Trumpscum Senator Tom Cotton and pro-Imperialist Islamophobe Ayaan Hirsi Ali, both of whom have their own Tikvah Intersectionality:
https://www.jewishleadershipconference.org/session/the-iran-threat-what-is-americas-strategy/
Glatt Kosher!
We will recall that it was the Trumpscum Cotton article which led to the drama-queen Bari Weiss resignation from The New York Times:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Vg1uJhdbjl0/m/RVvLqXdSCQAJ
A very chastened Jacoby is now all in with the Free Speech Grift.
After recounting his prior disdain for Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Dinesh D’Souza’s Reagan-era Culture War books, he makes a determined Lysol volte-face.
I recently addressed some of these Culture War issues in a post on Saul Bellow and his own Straussian fanaticism:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/iZqctbU3xvA
The vile Bellow was The Tikvah Fund before The Tikvah Fund!
Jacoby then gives us a stale litany of attacks on the Old Left and the current crop of neo-Marxist professors in the academy, tied to a militant disdain for Post-Modernism, which is fully in line with the current Right Wing orthodoxy.
Again, it is all about using a Neo-Con WOKE Cancel Culture to attack WOKE Cancel Culture!
It is the exodus from the universities that explains what is happening in the larger culture. The leftists who would have vanished as assistant professors in conferences on narratology and gender fluidity or disappeared as law professors with unreadable essays on misogynist hegemony and intersectionality have been pushed out into the larger culture. They staff the ballooning diversity and inclusion commissariats that assault us with vapid statements and inane programs couched in the language they learned in school. We are witnessing the invasion of the public square by the campus, an intrusion of academic terms and sensibilities that has leaped the ivy-covered walls aided by social media. The buzz words of the campus—diversity, inclusion, microaggression, power differential, white privilege, group safety—have become the buzz words in public life. Already confusing on campus, they become noxious off campus. “The slovenliness of our language,” declared Orwell in his classic 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” makes it “easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
The attack on “Progressives” is classic Zalman Bernstein propaganda, using Bari Weiss Elon Musk Trumpist language, though it is only George Orwell’s name that actually appears:
But today, unlike in 1946, political language of Western progressives does not so much as defend the indefensible as defend the defendable. This renders the issue trickier than when Orwell broached it. Apologies for criminal deeds of the state denounce themselves. Justifications for liberal desiderata, however, almost immunize themselves to objections. If you question diversity mania, you support Western imperialism. Wonder about the significance of microaggression? You are a microaggressor. Have doubts about an eternal, all-inclusive white supremacy? You benefit from white privilege. Skeptical about new pronouns? You abet the suicide of fragile adolescents.
He naturally gets to attacking CRT in the Free Speech Grift:
The new free speech restricters balloon the category of injury and replace individual harm with group harm. “We have not listened to the real victims,” declares Charles R. Lawrence III, one of the principals in critical race theory. We have shown “little empathy or understanding for their injury.” For Lawrence “insulting words” are “experienced by all members of a racial group who are forced to hear or see these words.”
The article is yet another novel attempt to co-opt the Old Left into the New Trumpist Neo-Conservatism.
Its attack on Diversity is consistent with the hermetic Tikvah echo-chamber, which forbids Sephardim from speaking, as we continue to see with the SY Self-Hater Rabbi Richard Hidary, and his passionate embrace of the White Jewish Supremacy against Diversity:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/FWRQg_Z59r8
Silencing your enemies is the way to go!
Cancel all the way.
At the very moment that we are witnessing an unprecedented crisis in American democracy, with an attendant rise in racist violence and Anti-Semitism, The Tikvah Fund and its representatives are intent on allying themselves with the New Fascism, as they continue to demonize and distort the desperate attempt to turn back the Trumpscum hordes.
David Shasha
The Takeover
By: Russell Jacoby
In 1987 I published The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe which elicited heated responses. Only now do I see I got something wrong—as did my critics. Some had objected to a term I introduced, “public intellectual,” as redundant and misleading. Others rejected the main argument. I proposed a generational account of American intellectuals. For earlier American intellectuals, the university remained peripheral because it was small, underfunded, and distant from cultural life. The Edmund Wilsons and Lewis Mumfords earlier in the 20th century to the Jane Jacobs and Betty Friedans later saw themselves as writers and journalists, not professors. But I missed something, the dawning takeover of the public sphere by campus denizens and lingo.
What I called a transitional generation, the largely Jewish New York intellectuals, ended up later in their careers as professors, but usually they lacked graduate training. When Daniel Bell was appointed to the faculty of Columbia University in 1960, officials discovered that he did not have a Ph.D.—and bestowed it on him for his collection of essays (The End of Ideology). This incident indicates something of the commitment of these men—and they were men; they wrote essays for a public, not monographs or research papers for colleagues. This orientation was as true for a confrere of Bell, like Irving Howe, who also ended up as a professor without graduate training. He observed that like himself Bell did not want to write long-winded treatises; nor did they want to specialize or get pigeonholed. Or as Bell phrased it for all of them, “I specialize in generalizations.”
But the story changes for the next generation—my ’60s generation. In pose we were much more radical than previous American intellectuals.We were the leftists, Maoists, Marxists, Third Worldists, anarchists, and protesters who regularly shut down the university in the name of the war in Vietnam or free speech or racial equality. Yet for all our university bashing, unlike earlier intellectuals, we never exited the campus. We settled in. We became graduate students, assistant professors and finally—a few of us—leading figures in academic disciplines.
To be sure, this was not simply a series of individual choices. The conditions that funneled the transitional generation onto campuses were hard to resist. The life of the freelance intellectual, always precarious, had become virtually impossible. Living in cities turned increasingly expensive as writing outlets diminished. When Edmund Wilson wrote for The New Republic in the 1920s the proceeds of one article could foot the bill for room and board for several months. Sixty years later the payment could fund a few meals. At the same moment, in the 1950s and ’60s, students poured into campuses and faculties enlarged. For young intellectuals, the signs all pointed in one direction: an academic career. Earlier American intellectuals imagined moving to New York or Chicago or San Francisco to join an urban bohemia; my generation imagined moving to college towns like Ann Arbor or Berkeley or Austin to join the conference-going set.
Within 30 years, the timber and tone of faculties were refashioned. In the 1950s the number of public leftists teaching in American universities could be counted on two hands. By the 1980s, they filled airplanes and hotel conference rooms. In the 1980s a three-volume survey of the new Marxist scholarship appeared (The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, vol. 1-3). Endless new journals, each with their own followings, popped up, such as Studies on the Left, Radical Teacher, Radical America, Insurgent Sociologist, Radical Economists. In the coming years leaders of the main scholarly organizations like the Modern Language Association or American Sociological Association elected self-professed leftists.
Herein the story gets tangled. In a series of bestselling books—Tenured Radicals, Illiberal Education, The Closing of the American Mind—conservatives raised the alarm: Radicals were taking over the university and destroying America, if not Western civilization. In The Last Intellectuals I differed. The new radical scholars were proving to be obliging colleagues and professionals. The proof? They penned unreadable articles and books for colleagues. They were less subversive than submissive. Earlier American intellectuals wrote for a public; the new radical ones did not. They were not public intellectuals, but narrow academics.
The “famous” Marxist literary professsor was famous only to graduate students in literature. From Homi K. Bhabha at Harvard to Gayatri Spivak at Columbia, Fredric Jameson at Duke and Judith Butler at Berkeley, the leftist politics of these scholars could not be doubted, but what was their impact inasmuch as they could not write? A half serious, bad-writing contest awarded a prize to professor Butler for this sentence:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
I argued that the conservatives should awake from their nightmare of radical scholars destroying America and relax; academic revolutionaries preoccupied themselves with their careers and perks. If they made waves, they were confined to the campus pool. In my more paranoid moments, I wondered if a cunning plan had been enacted: Conservatives pretended to be outraged at radicals on campus, but faced with a generation of subversive students, they judged it would be better to keep them locked up in the university, which would limit the damage. The secret appendix to The Conservative Strategy for the Twentieth First Century declared, “Let us give the radicals English and Comparative Literature, gender studies, sociology, history, anthropology and whatever other departments and cockamamie centers they want on campuses, while we take over the rest of America.” The plan largely worked. I wrote at the time, if given the chance it would be worth trading every damn left-wing English department for one Supreme Court. It would still be worth it.
My critics charged that I suffered from nostalgia for some old white dudes. Intellectual life had markedly improved and diversified. Moreover, I overgeneralized; they presented names of a half-dozen stalwart freelancers or well-known professors. This argument continues.
But my critics and I both missed something that might not have been obvious 30 years ago. By the late 1990s the rapid expansion of the universities came to a halt, especially in the humanities. Faculty openings slowed or stopped in many fields. Graduate enrollment cratered. In my own department in 10 years we went from accepting over a hundred students for graduate study to under 20 for a simple reason. We could not place our students. The hordes who took courses in critical pedagogy, insurgent sociology, gender studies, radical anthropology, Marxist cinema theory, and postmodernism could no longer hope for university careers.
What became of them? No single answer is possible. They joined the work force. Some became baristas, tech supporters, Amazon staffers and real estate agents. Others with intellectual ambitions found positions with the remaining newspapers and online periodicals, but most often they landed jobs as writers or researchers with liberal government agencies, foundations, or NGOs. In all these capacities they brought along the sensibilities and jargon they learned on campus.
It is the exodus from the universities that explains what is happening in the larger culture. The leftists who would have vanished as assistant professors in conferences on narratology and gender fluidity or disappeared as law professors with unreadable essays on misogynist hegemony and intersectionality have been pushed out into the larger culture. They staff the ballooning diversity and inclusion commissariats that assault us with vapid statements and inane programs couched in the language they learned in school. We are witnessing the invasion of the public square by the campus, an intrusion of academic terms and sensibilities that has leaped the ivy-covered walls aided by social media. The buzz words of the campus—diversity, inclusion, microaggression, power differential, white privilege, group safety—have become the buzz words in public life. Already confusing on campus, they become noxious off campus. “The slovenliness of our language,” declared Orwell in his classic 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” makes it “easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
Orwell targeted language that defended “the indefensible” such as the British rule of India, Soviet purges and the bombing of Hiroshima. He offered examples of corrupt language. “The Soviet press is the freest in the world.” The use of euphemisms or lies to defend the indefensible has hardly disappeared: Putin called the invasion of Ukraine “a special military operation,” and anyone calling it a “war” or “invasion” has been arrested.
But today, unlike in 1946, political language of Western progressives does not so much as defend the indefensible as defend the defendable. This renders the issue trickier than when Orwell broached it. Apologies for criminal deeds of the state denounce themselves. Justifications for liberal desiderata, however, almost immunize themselves to objections. If you question diversity mania, you support Western imperialism. Wonder about the significance of microaggression? You are a microaggressor. Have doubts about an eternal, all-inclusive white supremacy? You benefit from white privilege. Skeptical about new pronouns? You abet the suicide of fragile adolescents.
“Diversity” is exhibit A in the campus invasion of the public square.
Everyone loves diversity. Why not? As a human quality it is better than the reverse, homogeneity. Yet diversity exemplifies the murky lingo that defends the defensible. What does diversity entail? More representation of every group? Fair enough, but is this diversity if every individual must incarnate the group, a notion which is almost the antithesis of individual diversity? Moreover, diversity focuses on visible group markers—gender, race, ethnicity—which sidelines diversity of ideas, politics and religion as well as economic class, which are less easy to track. If all agree, but partake of different groups, where is diversity?
Does diversity mean that every sector of society must demographically mirror the composition of the country as a whole? Apparently so, but does this make for a more diverse world? A new study of diversity in Hollywood run by UCLA, and sponsored by blue-chip corporations, uses demographics of gender, race and ethnicity as the self-evident standard to measure diversity. The Hollywood study reports that “People of color accounted for 38.9 percent of the leads in top films for 2021 … At 42.7 percent of the U.S. population in 2021, people of color were again just short of proportionate representation among film leads.” The gap of 3.8 percentage points troubles the diversity mavens. Work to be done, comrades!
But where does diversity defined as proportionate representation lead or stop? Indian Americans are overrepresented among motel owners. What to do? Vietnamese Americans largely staff nail salons. A problem! Too many Jewish lawyers—and too few Jewish NBA basketball players. None, in fact! Has the NBA addressed its diversity crisis? Moreover, diversity-as-proportional-representation historically has worked to discriminate—for instance at a Harvard frightened by too many Jewish applicants. The rising number of Jewish students alarmed Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell. Jews with 3% of the population inched above 20% of the Harvard student body by the 1920s. Yikes! Lowell in correspondence with his peers at Princeton and Yale, worked to cap the numbers of Jews on campus at 5%. Did antisemitic quotas bolster diversity at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale?
Compared to diversity, the other campus exports are small potatoes, but their importance it growing. Take free speech. The new arguments that question free speech stem from robed academic leftists, an irony that is sometimes noticed. The Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley virtually inaugurated the ’60s student protest. Historically on and off the campus leftists fought censorship and defended free speech. No longer.
Now law professors, who often call themselves anti-pornography feminists and critical race theorists, advance ideas to curtail free speech. In their tortuous writings, one finds all the terms that they picked up from the postmodern Marxists or the post-Marxists—hegemony, discourse, power, invention. To this they add misogyny, white supremacy, and a dash of paranoia. For all their sophistication, these learned professors are continuously gobsmacked by the most elementary facts of society. Society is hierarchal! The rich have more clout than the poor! The powerful dominate the weak! They repeat these observations endlessly, as if they just discovered them. Apparently, they just did.
The first sentence of an article by Catharine A. MacKinnon, a chaired professor at the University of Michigan and Harvard Law schools, who is the leading anti-pornography feminist, runs: “The First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful.” She specifies: “A First Amendment appeal is often used to support dominant status and power, backing white supremacy and masculinist misogynistic attacks.” It is a means for “dominant groups to impose and exploit their hegemony.” Note all the buzz words: dominant power, white supremacy, hegemony. The position marks a sharp shift from the traditional civil libertarians, who prized free speech as protection for dissenters. These civil libertarians are now dismissed as misguided First Amendment absolutists or worse, right-wingers, even Fox viewers.
A problem emerges from the half-baked Marxism of the law professors and their students, who toil and tweet in NGO land. Marx did declare that the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas, but qualified that both cleavages exist in the ruling class and that a new revolutionary class challenges the dominant ideas. Perhaps he was wrong, but at least he posited movement and conflict. It could also be noted that the term “hegemony,” a favorite of campus leftists, derives from the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. For all his subtlety and inconsistencies, the imprisoned Gramsci saw social antagonisms as ever-present. As one commentator has put it, “Gramsci’s concept of hegemony” provides the basis for an intellectual elite to engage in a “war of position” that will prepare the way “to overthrow the existing order.”
War of position? Nothing could be further from the minds of these professors, who portray power as omnipresent and static. That the First Amendment is a tool of the powerful, professor MacKinnon’s pathbreaking insight, comes right out of hackneyed Marxism; it could be said with equal truth about any sector of society. “Housing is a weapon of the powerful.” “The media is a weapon of the powerful.” “Education is a weapon of the powerful.” For that matter professor MacKinnon, who teaches to the most privileged at the most elite schools, is a weapon of the powerful.
In the classic American case of 1919 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. set out the criterion of “a clear and present danger” to the state as reason to curb free speech. Holmes wrote the opinion in which two socialists, who had distributed leaflets that encouraged peaceful resistance to the draft, were arrested. The leaflets proposed among other things that draftees “Assert Your Rights.” In 1919 such talk constituted “a clear and present danger” to the government. They were convicted and jailed.
Holmes in subsequent cases, retreated from that standard as too lax or dangerous; that is, it gives the government too much latitude to censor. In general, civil libertarians have always argued that restrictions on free speech should be few and far between, confined to direct threats to institutions or people. We find this already in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. “An opinion that corn dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn dealer.”
The new free speech restricters balloon the category of injury and replace individual harm with group harm. “We have not listened to the real victims,” declares Charles R. Lawrence III, one of the principals in critical race theory. We have shown “little empathy or understanding for their injury.” For Lawrence “insulting words” are “experienced by all members of a racial group who are forced to hear or see these words.”
Laura Kipnis, a film professor at Northwestern University, has written about her ordeal when she upset campus tranquility. Her offense? She penned an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that questioned what she called the sexual paranoia on campuses. Repeat: An article in a trade newspaper upset students, who felt threatened and unsafe by her piece. The students marched through the campus, lugging a mattress. “We, the undersigned, are therefore calling for a swift, official condemnation of the sentiments expressed by Professor Kipnis in her inflammatory article.” One of the principals complained the article “harmed” students. The university readily opened an investigation that dragged on for months.
The New York Times published an opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton that called for the national guard to stem looting in the wake of the George Floyd riots. Employees of the Times protested and charged that the piece put Black staffers “in danger.” Again, this was an article in the editorial section of the paper, page 14. In the American adaption of Stalinist show trials, the editor of the opinion section confessed. He regretted “the pain” he caused. He resigned.
A stalwart progressive magazine, The Nation, apologized for a short poem it published. A white poet assumed the voice of a Black homeless woman. The magazine now appends to the poem an apology—longer than the poem—which regrets that the poem contains “disparaging and ableist language that has given offense and caused harm to members of several communities.” The poetry editors are “sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem.” The poet apologized “for the pain I have caused.” He was sent to a reeducation camp.
In early 2015, two French Muslims forced themselves into the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo, which published caricatures of Muhammad. They shot 12 people point blank—writers, cartoonists, and others. In the spring of that year the American branch of PEN, the international association of writers, wanted to bestow on the magazine its “freedom of expression award.” It would seem cut and dry: writers and cartoonists killed in cold blood for their satirical work. But no. Some of America’s most celebrated writers protested the award to Charlie Hebdo. They did not exactly support the murders. “An expression of views, however disagreeable, is certainly not to be answered by violence or murder,” they opined. The “certainly” is a nice touch, as if doubt arises. But “power” exists and the “inequities” between those who write and those written about “cannot, and must not, be ignored.”
The writers, who were killed, had power. The killers, not so much. “To the section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population shaped by the legacy of France’s various colonial enterprises, and that contain a large percentage of devout Muslims, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering,” the PEN letter lectured. Several hundred very righteous writers, including Teju Cole, Deborah Eisenberg, Michael Ondaatje, Joyce Carol Oates, and Francine Prose fixed their signatures. To the extent that writers possess power, compared to nonwriters (or noncartoonists)—as indicated in the PEN protest letter—the inequalities might block all writing, except about oneself, a temptation many writers already find irresistible.
With marginality as the limit for free speech, how might have the new arbiters viewed Voltaire and his brethren of 18th-century France. The philosophes were an elite who attacked the benighted Catholics, who probably felt injured and disrespected. The power of the church was fast crumbling—it would soon be disestablished in the French Revolution—and the good Catholics were often rural and poor. Weren’t they marginalized?
In 2004 Theodoor van Gogh, a Dutch actor and film producer, was murdered in the streets of Amsterdam—on his bicycle—by a Muslim extremist. He had made a 10-minute provocative film with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the feminist born to a Muslim Somali family, that denounced the treatment of women in Islamic societies. The assassin pinned a note with a knife to van Gogh’s body that threatened Hirsi Ali. In his book Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma considers the events and its principals, but like today’s free speech skeptics observes that Hirsi Ali attacked a marginalized community, “a minority within an embattled minority.” In that sense, he comments, Hirsi Ali is no Voltaire.
Yet the same issue emerges. What makes a marginalized community, which constrains free speech? The 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie ordered Muslims anywhere to execute the author, with a fat reward bankrolled by Iran for this pious deed, and it encompassed not only Rushdie but his publishers and translators. There are well over 1 billion Muslims. Rushdie himself noted that over the decades support for him has ebbed. People who once defended me, he observed, would now “accuse me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority.”
The situation of the estimable Voltaire could not be more different than the current critics of Islam; he lived at the border of France and Switzerland, so he could quickly flee if French authorities sought to arrest him. Along with other philosophes he never dreamed he could be killed either by the state or angry Catholics anywhere. Detained, censored or exiled, yes. Murdered, no. Voltaire had no security detail—unlike Rushdie and Hirsi Ali. For critics of religious dogmatism in 18th-century France, the possibility of getting killed was zero. For critics of Islam in the 21st-century world, the possibility of injury or death is real—as the critics know. The comment by Buruma, which is seconded by others, could be more justly reversed: Voltaire was no Hirsi Ali.
When employees protest that they feel unsafe because their company is publishing an offensive article or book, we know what university courses they have taken. When the ACLU drops any mention of the First Amendment from its annual reports; when one of its directors declares, “First Amendment protections are disproportionately enjoyed by people of power and privilege”; and when its counsels its own lawyers to balance free speech and “offense to marginalized groups,” we know they studied critical race theory. When women are dropped from Planned Parenthood literature with the explanation, “It’s time to retire the terms ‘women’s health care’ and ‘a woman’s right to choose’ … these phrases erase the trans and non-binary people who have abortions.” Or when the NARL (National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) announces it is replacing the phrase pregnant women with “birthing people” and declares, “We use gender neutral language when talking about pregnancy, because it is not just cis-gender women who get pregnant”; we know those who authored these changes majored in gender studies and critical blather.
We know this, but we have to suffer the consequences. The self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous students who filter into the public square. The former prospered in their campus enclaves by plumping each other’s brilliance, but they left the rest of us alone. The latter, their students, however, constitute an unmitigated disaster, intellectually and politically, as they enter the workforce. They might be the American version of the old Soviet apparatchiks, functionaries who carry out party policies. Intellectually, they fetishize buzz words (diversity, marginality, power differential, white privilege, group safety, hegemony, gender fluidity and the rest) that they plaster over everything.
Politically, they mark a self-immolation of progressives; they flaunt their exquisite sensibilities and openness, and display exquisite narcissism and insularity. Once upon a time leftists sought to enlarge their constituency by reaching out to the uninitiated. This characterized a left during its most salient phase of popular front politics. No longer. With a credo of group safety the newest generation of leftists does not reach out but reaches in. It operates more like a club for members only than a politics for everyone.
From Tablet magazine, December 19, 2022
Academe Is Overrun by Liberals. So What?
By: Russell Jacoby
Everybody loves diversity. It means decency and openness and we can’t get enough of it. Nowadays politicians, CEOs, and police chiefs call for diversity. In the universities, projects and programs pile up. We have diversity initiatives, statements, requirements, training, and courses — even diversity officers. Opposing diversity is like announcing membership in the Ku Klux Klan. You might as well climb on a desk and yell, “I am a racist and a bigot!” The diversity beast has grown so vast it is difficult to know where it starts and where it ends.
One thing is clear: Our obsession with diversity is fairly new. One marker might be the 1930s editions of the classic Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, whose contributors included many of the leading lights in sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science. Its 15 volumes have no entry for “diversity.” Its comprehensive 150-page index has no reference to it. Now encyclopedias and handbooks exclusively devoted to diversity tumble off the presses. The editor of the new Routledge International Handbook of Diversity Studies celebrates the “outpouring of academic work surrounding diversity.” The handbook has 41 contributors writing on subjects like “The Diversity of Milieu in Diversity Studies” and “Religious Differentiation and Diversity in Discourse and Practice.”
Whence comes this beast? No one seems to know. Peter Wood, in his Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter, 2003), writes that before the 1978 Supreme Court decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, diversity was a “marginal idea.” In Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell, writing the controlling opinion, suggested that universities have a legitimate interest in seeking diversity, which might include race. In making this argument, Powell leaned heavily on a two-page Harvard admissions document, which declared that “diversity adds an essential ingredient to the educational process.” However, that diversity program had resulted in “very few ethnic or racial minorities” on the Harvard quad. “In recent years Harvard College has expanded the concept of diversity to include students from disadvantaged economic, racial, and ethnic groups.” The formulation was brilliant. It avoided all red flags about racial quotas. It allowed admissions committees to discount scores and grades so as to admit someone in the name of diversity. It offered a broad idea of diversity that few could contest. It would have a fantastic run, which continues to this day.
No article, indeed no book, can hope even to outline the issues that the cult of diversity raises. For starters, what is not a sign of diversity? Are race, poverty, and Asian-Americanhood equally diverse? What about language spoken, religion, age, sexual orientation, income, and appearance? A danger exists that diversity loses all meaning as it balloons; the term becomes so lax that everything and anything signifies diversity.
The proposition that a university population — or a corporate work force — should be more diverse can be argued on the simple basis of justice: Doors should be open to groups that have historically been excluded. However, an assumption that a university should reflect the diversity of the larger population already gets tricky. Should all quarters of society demographically reflect all other quarters? Why? Should there be more pacifists in the military? Fewer Indian motel owners? As aggrieved critics of affirmative action have charged, at least when it comes to university admissions, more of one group means fewer of another; say, Asian-Americans or Jews, who are proportionately “overrepresented” at many elite universities.
A linkage between demographic and intellectual diversity lies at the heart of the argument that diversity is good for education, that student and faculty diversity abets the learning process. For that argument to make sense, people have to function as representatives of their group; otherwise, prioritizing group identity in the name of diversity is pointless — or no more convincing than a United Colors of Benetton ad, lovely but meaningless. Inasmuch as academic leftists champion diversity, a certain irony must be signaled. For decades they have poured scorn on “essentialism” and posited that all identity is “constructed.” After years of postmodern guff, the arguers reverse themselves: You are your group identity, essentialism pure and simple.
A linkage between demographic and intellectual diversity lies at the heart of the argument that diversity is good for education.
Conservatives have long criticized this group approach as shortchanging the individual and promoting “group think.” But in a shift, conservatives are jumping aboard the diversity train. They have turned diversity back on the diversifiers. To do this they have expanded the diversity categories by one more box. Diversity should now take measure of politics. Among the disadvantaged groups are conservatives themselves. Tactically this is brilliant but also a worrisome move.
Conservatives say they are underrepresented among college professors. (Oddly they, or the researchers who support their argument, do not target student populations for disparities, where the issue first arose. Might too many liberal students be admitted?) To show the faculty imbalance, scholars have matched names against voter-registration lists or sent out surveys to members of professional associations.
Recently some professors have gathered in a new organization, Heterodox Academy, to hammer away at this issue. The golden word appears in its founding statement. “Our mission is to increase viewpoint diversity in the academy.” This means adding more conservatives. The outfit claims that its members cover the political spectrum, but they all object to a professoriate now “almost entirely on the left.” For the Heterodox supporters, left-wing unanimity distorts research and teaching.
Heterodoxians and their sympathizers cite various surveys showing political lopsidedness on American college faculties. One small study, more than 10 years ago, found that while Left and Right in the general population are “roughly equal,” on social studies and humanities faculties, Democrats outnumber Republicans roughly seven to one, which the authors describe as a striking “lack of ideological diversity.” In the fields of sociology and anthropology, the ratios are even more skewed. In philosophy, in which few responded, the survey found only four Republicans. What’s next? A study showing English professors prefer shopping at Whole Foods to Walmart?
The assumption of all these studies is that political variations require correctives. But why should political proportions be constant across society?
The relationship between political diversity and intellectual diversity is, at best, tenuous. Presumably, the former abets the latter; that is, a balance of conservative and liberal professors would lead to better teaching and research. Conversely, having fewer conservatives on campus damages the educational enterprise. But is there evidence for that belief? Virtually none.
Implicit in this body of research is that Democrats and Republicans teach or do research differently. A course on Chaucer or Rome taught by a Democrat supposedly diverges from that taught by a Republican. But the bigger issue is this: Much of the discussion about political diversity in academe turns “politics” into a feature of group identity like race or ethnicity. But “politics” is not a fixed attribute. People’s politics can and do shift. Politics are not like national origins. “Men can change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religion, their philosophies,” wrote Horace Kallen a century ago, but “they cannot change their grandfathers.”
L ast year a team study appeared in Behavioral and Brain Sciences about “political diversity” in social psychology that has attracted much comment. All six of its authors belong to the Heterodox Academy. Their findings have provoked many of the big guns in social psychology to respond. Steven Pinker dubbed the article “one of the most important papers in the recent history of the social sciences.” What did the study show? Put on your seat belts.
The study proclaimed the news that many more liberals than conservatives populate social psychology. The findings delighted conservatives, who found additional confirmation that they belonged to a disadvantaged group in the university. In an op-ed for The New York Times, Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, declared that “a team of scholars from six universities” demonstrated the “shocking” lack of campus political diversity. “The authors show that for every politically conservative social psychologist in academia there are about 14 liberal psychologists.”
That social psychologists tend to be liberal cannot be surprising. Virtually all the founders or key figures of American social psychology — Carl Murchison, Gordon Allport, Kurt Lewin — belonged on the left. Murchison, who edited one of the first handbooks of social psychology in 1935, has been called “a radical in outlook” by a historian of the field. His Social Psychology: The Psychology of Political Domination (1929) wanted a committed political psychology, not one focused on “mere verbal definitions.” He feared for the future of narrow social psychology, which had escaped a death notice, he added, “chiefly because no one has called in the coroner.” Allport, who wrote about prejudice, including fascism, saw himself as a liberal activist and recruited for a union, the American Federation of Teachers, at Harvard. Lewin had links to the leftist Frankfurt School and collaborated with Karl Korsch, a leading 20th-century Marxist.
Another question must be asked: Why do devotees of political diversity in academe focus on the humanities and social sciences? Why not the medical sciences? Earth sciences? Aerospace engineering? After all, those fields — nowadays identified as STEM — possess the clout, money, and prestige. If one were interested in how politics influences academic life, why not tackle the big players? Why not consider the politics of drug research, with its real money and consequences?
One reason is obvious: Liberals do not outnumber conservatives in many of those disciplines. The “team of scholars from six universities” — José L. Duarte, Jarret T. Crawford, Charlotta Stern, Jonathan Haidt, Lee Jussim, Philip E. Tetlock — admit that “there are many fields” where “self-identified conservatives” are “about as numerous as self-identified liberals: typically business, computer science, engineering, health sciences, and technical/vocational fields.” (Two members of this team teach in business schools.) That covers a lot of turf — indeed, most of the university — and it’s expanding.
It is hardly a secret that dwindling funds and students beset the humanities across the land. “The overall picture of Humanities concentrator numbers over the last 60 years is one of slow to deep decline,” summarizes a recent report of the situation at Harvard. Instead of considering this crisis, the diversity enthusiasts want to check the political allegiances of a shrinking staff, a version of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. In response to a critic who also wondered why they did not monitor political diversity where it might count, such as in the military, Duarte et al. declared, “The main reason is that we are social psychologists, not members of the armed forces.” This advances insularity as a research program: Social psychology studies social psychologists. The crucial political categories in this study remain unexamined at best, provincial and ideological at worst. “The political party and ideological sympathies of academic psychologists have shifted leftward over time” runs the descriptor under the first graph of their findings. It charts the ratio of Democrats to Republicans or Liberals to Conservatives. In the 1920s it was close to 1:1, and through the 1950s only 2:1, but in the ’90s the ratios change dramatically, and by 2010 the graph shows Democrats to Republicans 14:1. This might seem impressive, but it leaves out one thing: reality.
How can this shift be considered apart from larger political shifts? Perhaps psychologists have not changed, but the political landscape has.
There is some evidence that conservatives in the social sciences feel beleaguered — but probably so do leftists in business schools.
Since the 1950s, and especially since the ’90s, the Republicans have moved sharply to the right. This is hardly news. The party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, which shepherded through the National Defense Education Act in 1958, became the party of Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and Marco Rubio, all of whom denounce higher education, science, and the Department of Education. That there are many serious and responsible conservative thinkers cannot be doubted, but an anti-science, anti-evolution, and anti-climate-change ethos increasingly characterizes the Republican Party. Any study of the “shifting” political allegiances of the professoriate that ignores these larger shifts cannot be taken seriously.
Duarte et al. briefly allude to political reality at the end of their study, referring to the increasing conservative distrust of science and how that has played out in efforts to cut federal support for the social sciences, specifically the Coburn Amendment, which sought to stop the National Science Foundation from funding political science that did not promote American security. “We aspire to prevent social psychology, or psychology from being next,” Duarte et al. write. Their memories are short. They have already been next.
In 1996, a Republican congressman from Arkansas, Jay Dickey, with strong backing from the National Rifle Association, added an amendment to a spending bill that effectively blocked federal support for research into gun violence and prevention. The American Psychological Association issued a statement of protest. Since then federal funding for such research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has fallen 96 percent. (Twenty years later, in the wake of endless mass shootings, Dickey, no longer in Congress, takes it back. “I wish we had started the proper research and kept it going all this time. I have regrets.”)
How do Duarte et al. respond to Republican efforts to defund research? They blame the victim. “If the academy is becoming steadily more liberal … is it a wonder that some conservative Republican politicians want to cut funding for some social sciences?” Such congressional actions are provoked by “social science’s ideological lopsidedness.” In other words, the academy should beef up its intellectual and political diversity. Following this reasoning, biology departments might add a few creationists; earth science some climate-change deniers; astronomy a few New Age astrologists.
On the contrary, if the research is good, defend it. That’s what the APA did in 1996. It didn’t call for balancing out research into gun violence with NRA-backed scholars.
Of course, if the research is bad, then, say that, too. Duarte et al. do not come up with much on this score, mainly that studies of prejudice and intolerance show a liberal bias. Their examples would persuade only social scientists who prefer pretty bell curves to unattractive reality. Liberal researchers, we are told, have missed that “prejudice is potent on both the left and right.” Apparently some social scientists have found that while conservatives might be prejudiced against “Left-leaning targets (e.g. African-Americans),” liberals might be prejudiced against “Right-leaning targets (e.g. religious Christians).” OK, but those are not symmetrical “prejudices;” one designates a racial group, the other a group of believers.
There is bad social science out there and enough anecdotal evidence to confirm that conservatives in the social sciences feel beleaguered — but probably so do leftists in business schools. How much of the bad social science is driven by leftist politics? Critics have found little. Politics evidently drives reactions to research on everything from the origins of World War I to the parenting abilities of gay parents, but reaction is not research.
A scanning of journal articles in the social sciences confirms Carl Murchison’s old plaint. “It is with something akin to despair,” he wrote in 1935, “that one contemplates the piffling, trivial, superficial, damnably unimportant topics that some social scientists investigate with agony and sweat.” In 2010, Lawrence Mead charted articles in the American Political Science Review and found what he called a new “scholasticism,” a rising tide of insular studies marked by hyperspecialization and mathematics. This seems more apposite than a supposed lack of political diversity in the social sciences.
The recommendation by Duarte et al. for more political self-awareness by social scientists cannot be harmful and might be beneficial. But Duarte et al. abet a diversity obsession that is already troubling. They also recommend — besides the suggestion to eliminate political joking on campus — that departments should “expand” diversity statements to “include politics”; they want conservatives promoted in the same way as other “underrepresented groups.” Gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, income, and now politics — and hired and unhired on the basis of it. They are not alone in proposing that in the name of diversity, conservatives go to the head of the line. A new book on the conservative professoriate by Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr., Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University (Oxford University Press), carefully supports the idea. “The problem with the academy is that it lacks one significant kind of intellectual diversity” — conservatism. Shields and Dunn argue that valid and consistent diversity programs must address this shortage. “The Bakke rationale obliges its defenders to support affirmative action for conservatives.” All aboard! The diversity train waits for no one.
W e have come a long way since Justice Powell’s 1978 decision in the Bakke case laid the groundwork for our present-day cult of diversity. By the 1970s, the student population of American universities was changing, and in the course of the 20th century the political composition of the faculty altered as well. The labor economist John R. Commons recalls in his autobiography, Myself (1934), the years before World War I, when the faculty of the University of Wisconsin was “perhaps nine-tenths on the conservative or reactionary side.” Even then, he remarks, the myth of a “radical” university circulated widely.
The real marker of change might not be Powell’s legal opinion, but one of its sources. Powell drew upon and quoted a 1957 Supreme Court opinion by Justice Felix Frankfurter. This was a case from the McCarthy era in which a vigilant State of New Hampshire prosecuted a university lecturer, Paul Sweezy, one of a very few openly Marxist intellectuals in the United States. Frankfurter wrote a rousing defense of the university to conduct its own activities “as unfettered as possible.”
In his concurrence, Frankfurter quoted the forceful and eloquent statement of the open universities of South Africa. In 1957 those universities protested government efforts to force apartheid upon them. “Diversity” surfaced in their statement. The open universities demanded the right to admit students on the basis of merit, not categories. They declared, “If some are excluded for nonacademic reasons — whether it be religion, sex, race or color … the discovery of truth is hampered,” and the community suffers.
The shoe now is on the other foot. The demand is not to stop exclusion, but to require inclusion — with politics added to the mix. The danger, however, is the same.
Russell Jacoby is a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles.
From The Journal of Higher Education, April 1, 2016
Dreaming of a World With No Intellectuals
By: Russell Jacoby
Are conservative intellectuals anti-intellectual? The short answer must be no. Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Harvey Mansfield, Wilfred M. McClay—conservative thinkers have championed scholarship, learning, and history. The long answer, however, is more ambiguous. Confronted by social upheavals, conservative intellectuals tend to blame other intellectuals—socialist, liberal, secular—as the cause. They perceive political unrest as rooted in fallacious ideas advanced by misguided thinkers and indict the educational system for inculcating subversion. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke denounced lawyers and writers—whom he called “these professors of the rights of man"—for their dangerous ideas.
A new book, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats) (Encounter), by David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, affords an occasion to revisit the issue: Do contemporary American conservatives scapegoat intellectuals and teachers? If so, they can claim an all-American pedigree.
William F. Buckley Jr. began his career in 1951 with God and Man at Yale, which lambasted his professors for their godlessness and socialism. Past and present American intellectuals on the right generally disdain economic or social analyses of political dislocations. They attribute socialism’s appeal, for example, not to the condition of society but to the influence of nefarious professors and subversive writers.
Or consider feminism. Have women entered the work force and—as some conservatives say—abandoned the family? Does that have to do with the realities of war, say, in which men leave their jobs and women replace them? Or with the imperative of supporting a family when one paycheck no longer suffices? “A superficial explanation through economic changes is to be avoided,” wrote Richard M. Weaver in one of the ur-texts of American conservatism. “The economic cause is a cause that has a cause,” he declared in his 1948 book, Ideas Have Consequences. “The ultimate reason lies in the world picture, for once woman has been degraded in that picture—and putting her on a level with the male is more truly a degradation than an elevation—she is more at the mercy of economic circumstances.”
To their suspicion of economic analyses of social issues, American conservatives add a suspicion of intellectuals as elitists. The aristocratic Buckley famously remarked that he would prefer to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. To Buckley, a random collection of Bostonians would prove wiser than liberal, overeducated professors. This position drew upon several features of an American ethos that prizes equality, no-nonsense religion, business, practicality, and self-help, all of which Richard Hofstadter analyzed in his classic work, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963).
Buckley was hardly alone in deriding intellectuals as out-of-touch elitists, an attitude that can easily slide into a wholesale denunciation of knowledge and education itself. What does schooling bring aside from an undermining of Christian truths?
That mind-set came to a head in the 1925 Scopes trial, in which a Tennessee high-school teacher was charged with teaching evolution. William Jennings Bryan, the special prosecutor, saw the issue as religion versus the intellectuals, whom he dubbed a “scientific soviet.” The “little irresponsible oligarchy of self-styled ‘intellectuals,’” he said, forces science and rationalism on solid Christian folk. “Parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes, skeptical, infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.”
For Hofstadter, the Scopes trial “greatly quickened the pulse of anti-intellectualism. For the first time in the 20th century, intellectuals and experts were denounced as enemies.” Hofstadter also noted—remember, he was writing in the early 1960s—that for many today, the evolution controversy is “as remote as the Homeric era.”
No longer. Tennessee just passed a law protecting teachers who want to challenge evolution—and global warming. As one of the bill’s supporters stated, the teaching of evolution was “extremely unbalanced.” In other words, it was taught as true. The old battles are not over; indeed, the situation seems to be getting worse. For conservatives, conventional morality and religion are waning. Sexuality no longer seems contained or constrained. Men are marrying men. What’s next? Interspecies marriage?
If the ills of modernity are intensifying, conservatives know why. They rarely mention hyperconsumerism or advertising or a rigidifying class structure—the byproducts of advanced capitalism. Rather, they dwell on the presumably corrosive ideas of the educated, especially the professoriate.
Correspondingly, many conservative politicians flaunt their unworldliness as proof of their virtuousness. Often their provincialism requires no flaunting. Anti-intellectualism flourishes in contemporary America. To the applause of conservatives, George W. Bush took pride in his C average at Yale University. Mitt Romney has sought to burnish his anti-intellectual credentials by complaining that the Harvard-educated Obama “spent too much time at Harvard.” Romney, who has spent more time at Harvard than Obama, and has sent three of his sons there, explained that little can be learned from “just reading” or hanging out “at the faculty lounge.”
Rick Santorum has also attacked Obama, this time as a “snob” for wanting everyone to go to college. Santorum, who has three advanced degrees and whose father was a clinical psychologist with a Ph.D., said he knows why Obama wants everyone to get higher education: so that students will be “indoctrinated” by their liberal professors.
How did liberals take command of higher education and derail America? The standard conservative interpretation is straightforward: America progressed smoothly from Presidents George Washington through Dwight D. Eisenhower, but went to hell in the 1960s and has yet to recover. Radicals have taken over the universities and spread their poison. That is the gist of David Gelernter’s book.
Patriotism and families once flourished, Gelernter argues, and then patriotism disintegrated into bitterness, and the nuclear family crumbled. The proportion of children born to unmarried women began to rise in the 60s from 5 percent and has not stopped since, reaching 41 percent today. That is bad news for children, who suffer in every way from single parenthood. What accounts for these two phenomena—the fall of old-style patriotism and the traditional family? Easy. Intellectuals. “Patriotism has been beaten bloody and the family is on the ropes. It has been a great epoch for American intellectuals,” Gelernter writes. How do intellectuals engender the rise of single parenthood? Again, easy—so easy that he does not explain, and never returns to the subject.
What he does try to explain is how intellectuals gave “an explosive left hook” to the old elite universities. There was a time when those elite schools were run by a benign establishment, generally white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who saw their role as civilizing and uplifting. But the WASP’s were knocked out by what Gelernter calls PORGI’s, “post-religious, globalist intellectuals,” who took over and indoctrinated the students. Armed with empty leftist theories, the PORGI’s transformed students into PORGI Airheads. The Airheads follow orders “as faithfully and thoughtfully as a bucket carries water.”
Gelernter highlights the role of American Jews as “carbon 14,” a way to trace the enormous cultural change and its consequences in higher education. Up through the 60s, the WASP establishment excluded Jews from elite universities. But by 1970, Jews had pushed their way into student bodies, faculties, and administrations. The consequences? Again, easy. Jews are both leftist and aggressive. “Naturally, we would expect that an increasing Jewish presence at top colleges” would imprint the schools with those qualities. “And this is just what happened.” Colleges and universities became more leftist as well as more “thrusting” and “belligerent.”
Gelernter is Jewish, and it is not likely that a non-Jew would airily argue that obnoxious leftist Jews have taken over elite higher education. But Gelernter does so with enthusiasm untempered by facts. Aside from quoting Jewish neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz as sources, Gelernter does not offer a single example of what he is writing about. Who are these belligerent leftist Jewish professors? Anthony Grafton? Steven Pinker? Richard Posner? Martha Nussbaum? Perhaps Alan Dershowitz?
Moreover, the entire formulation remains vague. What does it mean that colleges have acquired “a more thrusting, belligerent tone”? The whole college? The administration? The students? One might imagine that Brandeis University, founded in 1948 by Jews, would be a perfect example to verify Gelernter’s argument. Is it loud and leftist? Gelernter does not mention it.
He has other fish to fry. In the 1950s, “America was properly proud of itself, and the economy was booming.” Then the Jews and leftists took over—the PORGI’s. Does the civil-rights or antiwar movement figure into Gelernter’s account? No—or only to the extent that they were invented by the PORGI’s. “Intellectuals and elite college students had conjured up the peace movement.” They “captured the establishment,” wrote the history books, and taught the college courses. By the 1990s, leftist intellectuals commanded the educational posts and produced a generation of leftist Airheads who elected an Airhead president, Barack Obama.
In his usual language, Gelernter opines:
“The nation is filling inexorably with Airheads, nominally educated yet ignorant; trained and groomed like prize puppies to be good liberals. ... Old-time conviction conservatives are also being supplanted—by puppy-liberal Airheads. Politicized schools are one-way streets; they all go left. American schools are a bizarre echo of the old Soviet schools, which used to teach that, whatever the issue, the USA was always wrong. Now American schools teach that, whatever the issue, the USA is always wrong.”
Of course, Gelernter provides no information about this familiar charge by conservatives. He has none—or nothing that is new. It also seems strikingly off the mark. The humanities in general have been declining, and business and business-related majors increasing. In my experience, most students pay little attention to the pronouncements of graying leftist professors. Most students want jobs. A recent report in The New Yorker on the entrepreneurial spirit dominating Stanford University—titled “Get Rich U."—seems a more accurate reading of elite universities than Gelernter’s belief that they are churning out Young Pioneers. Even the president of Stanford bemoans the fact that too many students are majoring in business, too focused on getting wealthy.
Gelernter’s favorite subject is Obama, whom he detests. He recycles charges from his well-thumbed copy of “The Crimes of the Liberal Media, Tea Party Edition.” He lambastes the “unctuous reverence” of the media for Obama, and cites specifically “the media’s indifference to the anti-American hate speech of Jeremiah Wright, and to the nature and meaning of Obama’s relations with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist.” Those less partisan might consider those subjects aired ad nauseam. Needless to say, Gelernter says nothing about the media’s relation to President George W. Bush or its support of the Iraq war.
For Gelernter, Obama “is not an ideologue; he does not reach that level. ... The president is an Airhead liberal who speaks out of ignorance and bases his opinions on nothing.” Gelernter takes up Obama’s declaration to close the Guantánamo Bay prison. Drawing on his usual conservative sources, Gelernter declares that Guantánamo is a well-run and humane prison with lovely accommodations. Those are “the plain facts, meticulously documented.” But Obama (at least initially) sought to close the prison despite the facts. “The creeping suspicion began to grow, like the gathering shudder in a well-made horror film, that Obama had actually believed what he said during the campaign. He actually believed that Guantánamo was some sort of cruel, stinking hellhole.” Obama based his ideas on the leftist “theory” that America is always wrong; he acted out of ignorance.
The suspicion begins to grow, like a gathering shudder, that Gelernter actually believes what he writes; that the learned scholar does not understand the central issue about Guantánamo. It is not how well the prisoners are treated—of course Gelernter does not breathe a word about torture—but the ethical and legal justification for holding prisoners without charging them, in a war on terror that has no end. The suspicion begins to grow that Gelernter lives in a Manichaean world in which liberals are evil and conservatives blessed. Although he writes with his usual fairness, “There is an Airhead left but no matching Airhead right,” the suspicion grows that Gelernter is the real McCoy, an Airhead Conservative.
It should be noted that Gelernter was almost killed in 1993 by a mail bomb sent by a lunatic, the so-called Unabomber, who claimed some leftist credentials. For that reason, his animus toward the left is understandable. As a statement of contemporary conservatism, however, America-Lite is woeful—and revealing.
The “lite” in the title seems to refer to the book itself. For Tea Partyers the book might be red meat, but for anyone else it is packing material. It partakes of common conservative thought in its scapegoating of intellectuals: Leftist intellectuals are “the root cause” of all the ills of America. A trumped-up war in Iraq, unemployment, dead-end jobs, lopsided compensation, expensive higher education, unaffordable medical insurance, hyperconsumerism: None of that is relevant. Left-leaning thinkers are the sole source of America’s problems—and they have even managed to increase the number of single-parent families.
Does Gelernter exemplify the contemporary conservative intellectual? He may well. On one hand, the popular political tide in America runs conservative. On the other, conservative intellectuals who embrace it seem strident and empty. Who or where are the conservatives who can speak with range, thoughtfulness, and openness? Fair-minded academics such as Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, and Jeffrey Goldfarb, a sociologist at the New School, have asked that question without finding a convincing answer. A course on “The Conservative Intellectual Tradition in America” at the Citadel, a public military college in South Carolina, features Newt Gingrich, Donald Rumsfeld, Phyllis Schlafly, and the heads of the National Rifle Association and the Ayn Rand Institute. Are they the best that contemporary conservatism has to offer?
Take a snapshot of second-generation New York intellectuals—the actual offspring of the first—to gauge the soundness of conservative and liberal intellectuals. Compare William Kristol and John Podhoretz on the right to David Bell, Michael Kazin, and Sean Wilentz on the left. Kristol played a key role in making Sarah Palin the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008. He sang the praises of “Joe the Plumber” and opined that most “recent mistakes” of American policy derived from “highly educated and sophisticated elites.” Podhoretz wrote a book subtitled “How George W. Bush Became the First Great Leader of the 21st Century,” in which he enthused that Bush’s “innovative” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “will serve as the blueprint for martial conflict for the foreseeable future.” (New copies of Podhoretz’s book are available through Amazon for one cent.) Bell, Kazin, and Wilentz, on the other hand, are all productive historians who have written significant books on French and American politics.
In brief, the former are ideologues; the latter serious writers and thinkers.
What’s happened to intellectual life on the right? Conservatives may be succumbing to their default position. Most of the candidates for this year’s Republican presidential nomination denied the veracity of evolution; and, according to various polls, Republicans increasingly distrust science. As the world becomes more threatening, many people seek simple answers, and many Americans conclude that an elite—from which they are excluded—must be the source of the ills. They turn on intellectuals, professors, and presumably the specialized knowledge those experts trade in. Instead of resisting that tendency, conservative intellectuals such as Gelernter encourage it. In their flight from elitism, they end up in a populist swamp peopled by autodidacts and fundamentalists. They become cheerleaders for a world without intellectuals, hastening a future in which they themselves will be irrelevant.
Russell Jacoby is a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles.
From The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 16, 2012
Russell Jacoby's Anti-Intellectual Anti-Conservatism
By: Daniel McCarthy
I find Russell Jacoby’s “Dreaming of a World With No Intellectuals” — which laments right-wing anti-intellectualism — revealingly narrow-minded in its own right. His litany of conservative thinkers, the kind he’d like to see more of, is almost exclusively neoconservative and Straussian: Gertrude Himmelfarb, Harvey Mansfield, Wilfred McClay, and Strauss himself, with only old Edmund Burke seeming out of place. All of them are worth reading; none should be written off for ideologically sectarian reasons. But where’s Eric Voegelin or Michael Oakeshott — or in our time, Patrick Deneen, Claes Ryn, and Paul Gottfried? Jacoby may not be familiar with them, but that’s a sign of his own species of anti-intellectualism.
Jacoby takes a few shots at Richard Weaver, whose Platonism is a superficially easy target: Ideas Have Consequences is a book that holds up much better, if at all, as a whole than as a series of assertions excerpted from the main argument. (Weaver, for example, sounds like quite the fuddy-duddy when he’s condemning jazz. His chapter on the “Great Stereopticon,” by contrast, does stand up on its own as quite ahead of its time on the “virtualization” of reality.) Jacoby finds Weaver insufficiently attentive to economic causes. But that’s not really the right yardstick: it’s like trashing Hegel for failing to measure up to the standards of logical positivism. If you want a “conservatism” that’s identical to ideologically left or liberal frames of understanding the world, but that simply inverts their values, you will usually be disappointed. Conservatism has to be understood on its own terms. The common criticism that conservative intellectuals before the advent of neoconservatism were too literary or philosophical misses the point — traditional conservatism is in large part a rebellion against the attempt to ideologize, rationalize, and scientifically administer the sociopolitical world.
That’s not to say there was any shortage of down-to-earth conservative minds in the early postwar period. James Burnham (an ex-Trotskyite), Willmoore Kendall (the Yale professor from whom Bill Buckley derived much of his “anti-intellectualism”), and the sociologist Robert Nisbet offered straightforward analyses of political and social change, though again analyses that did not share Marxist assumptions about the primacy of economics.
It’s true that few Americans who think of themselves as conservatives have today heard of any of these figures, but that’s a tale of how partisan marketing in a mass democracy can always trump high ideas. People like Jacoby share the blame for this, as rather than taking conservatism seriously on its own terms, they chose to look to right-wing social democrats — neoconservatives and many Straussians — as intellectual sparring partners. Fault the magazines and think tanks on the right for failing to teach successive generations about intellectual conservatism (those institutions sold out 30 years ago to the GOP and their own accounting departments), but also fault academics like Jacoby for failing to take intellectual conservatism seriously. To judge from his essay, Jacoby is unfamiliar with even the basic sources.
Jacoby may be dismayed to see that a (neo)conservative movement once associated with New York public intellectuals is now characterized by aggressive stupidity — Commentary has lately been sending around a piece of direct mail whose envelope touts the magazine as “the bold, influential voice of conservative opinion for conservatives like you who watch Fox News, listen to Rush Limbaugh, and read The Weekly Standard.” (Yes, that’s verbatim.) But even as neoconservatives have lobotomized themselves in service to Rupert Murdoch and Karl Rove, those more literary, philosophical, humanistic conservatives who have long been disdained by academia have been enjoying a renaissance. Just look at what you can find online: Front Porch Republic, the University Bookman, the Imaginative Conservative. These are popular outlets rather than theoretical journals, but if you pay attention to the authors who publish there, you will indeed find new, academically rigorous conservative intellectuals coming into flower. There’s a long, long way to go, but it’s a development that deserves more attention than it’s getting from Russell Jacoby and others who don’t want to read too deeply in search of fresh conservative thinking.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review, and Editor-at-Large of The American Conservative. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, The Spectator, The National Interest, Reason, and many other publications. Outside of journalism he has worked as internet communications coordinator for the Ron Paul 2008 presidential campaign and as senior editor of ISI Books. He is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied classics. Follow him on Twitter.
From The American Conservative, July 20, 2012
On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era by Russell Jacoby
By: Joanna Williams
Diversity is the buzzword of our age. It is everywhere: celebrated in corporate mission statements; taught in staff training days and to school and university students; on display in advertisements, art galleries and theatres; and promoted in books and articles. Indeed, as Russell Jacoby argues in his latest book, ‘In recent decades the cult of diversity has swept the land.’ ‘We are all diverse all the time,’ he claims, or at least, he continues, ‘this is the message we hear incessantly.’
More than merely our lived reality, diversity is rhetoric: a prayer to be intoned in the name of moral purity and protection. It is not hard to understand why. ‘Diversity spells decency and openness,’ Jacoby explains, while at the same time: ‘To criticize diversity is to invite ostracism; you might as well climb on a desk and yell, “I am a racist and a fanatic!”’ Kudos, then, to Jacoby. In On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era he challenges this secular orthodoxy.
A vacuous concept
Jacoby strikes his first blow by exposing the vacuousness at the heart of our diversity obsession. The more the word is bandied around, he points out, the less it actually means, until ‘everything and anything signifies diversity.’ The ubiquity of the word shows that, ‘Our understanding of diversity is shallow. Literally skin deep.’ His point is clear: the diversity hucksters see little beyond skin colour and, perhaps, gender. They ‘want diversity on the cheap’ which means that ‘diversity talk today is group talk.’
This brings us to Jacoby’s second blow: the ballooning of the rhetoric parallels a decline in real diversity. The monolithic focus on a tiny number of group characteristics comes at the expense of valuing other attributes that differentiate us. Why, he asks, do the diversity obsessives have so little interest in languages? Or, for that matter, wealth? Poverty is rarely deemed worthy of inclusion in checklists: it ‘does not spell diversity, but exclusion.’ The bottom line, Jacoby concludes, is that, ‘a world of people who are different from us looks a lot more appealing than a world of people who are poorer than us.’ The diversity game really is that shallow.
As Jacoby notes, before diversity there was class and the working class, ‘represented not inequality or poverty, but a different political system.’ ‘I do not raise this in the name of lost causes,’ he points out, ‘but simply to get a sense of the narrow political diversity of the world we now live in.’ Indeed, as Jacoby’s title suggests, his focus is not the fate of the working class at all, but the fate of the individual. His concern is that the more diversity has come to be understood as group representation, the less we celebrate – or even have – difference between individuals. Groups and diversity are now conflated, Jacoby explains, ‘it is assumed that if you have the first, you have the second.’ Worse, it is assumed that once you ‘tabulate the group and the frame’, you ‘know everything worth knowing about a person’. Taxonomy is reborn as intersectionality.
The end of individuality
His emphasis on the individual makes clear that Jacoby’s criticisms are levelled at today’s diversity rhetoric, not the concept of diversity itself. He is right to point out that beyond the modern day mantras and rituals, diversity is just a fact of life: opposing diversity would be like objecting to oxygen. Instead, Jacoby criticises diversity jargon – and the ideology to which the fashionable phrases allude. Jacoby wants better diversity: more reality and less ideology, more focus on individuals and less emphasis on group membership. He sees diversity as a project in need of realisation, not one to be abandoned.
Jacoby sees evidence for the shrinking of diversity everywhere. His overarching concern is that, divided into ever fewer groups, ‘individuals are becoming not less, but more alike’. ‘The real trend today,’ Jacoby claims, is not diversity but globalization, ‘even American-style homogenization.’ Despite acknowledging that diversity is a reality, when Jacoby sees people he confronts an undifferentiated mass who ‘increasingly act, think, and consume like everyone else’. He cites the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig who worries that the distinctive traits of different nationalities are vanishing: ‘The characteristic habits of individual peoples are being worn away, native dress giving way to uniforms, customs becoming international.’
Concern that individuality is being eroded and people are becoming more homogenous has a long history. Jacoby points to 19th-century thinkers, including Constant, Tocqueville and Mill, who ‘were neither conservatives nor socialists’ but who ‘moved in the same direction’: ‘the weakening of diversity and individuality struck them.’ They worried that ‘uniformity had become the watchword of the age.’ But if, for two hundred years, people have morphed into gradual uniformity – then surely this project must have neared completion by now? The fact that individuals – and individuality – still exist suggests concern about the homogenisation of the human race might represent a perennial moral panic. Yet like many intellectuals who came before him, Jacoby finds ample evidence to support his fear of the emergence of mass man.
Fashionable panic?
Jacoby finds evidence for our growing lack of individuality in our wardrobes. Men and women, young and old, rich and poor are more likely to wear similar clothes than in the past. Jeans, trainers, t-shirts and hoodies provide a uniform for us all, regardless of age, sex or nationality. As Jacoby notes, ‘the homogeneity of fashion masks the heterogeneity of lives.’ But what are we to make of this? Jacoby nods to Erving Goffman’s notion that how we present ourselves reflects our choices and desires. We are meant to conclude that our dressing the same represents the growing uniformity of our common choices and desires.
But, as Jacoby acknowledges, things are not so straightforward. He points to photos of Gandhi from the early 20th century; in the first, ‘Gandhi is wearing Western dress with a dark suit, collared shirt, and shoes. In the latter he is wearing a white, loose, draped khadi.’ Political progress meant, for Gandhi, rejecting, not adopting, western clothing. More recently, as well as jeans and hoodies having crossed borders, so too has an ‘ethnic chic’ that, having been rejected by the poor, has been adopted by the wealthy. Costume may no longer be a reliable guide to nationality but it can still serve as a subtle marker of wealth. And while the poor aspire to signifiers of prosperity, the wealthy desire markers of authenticity. Perhaps all we can conclude is that even when we try hard to be different, we find we are different in the same way as everyone else.
A desire for comfort and convenience in both the manufacturing and wearing of clothes may have produced an international uniform promoted through global media empires. But so what? There is something positive in wanting to erode visual markers of class and race. And, just as Mark Zuckerberg allegedly carves out more time to run Facebook by avoiding the tyranny of having to choose what to wear each day, it may be the case that the homogeneity of fashion masks the true individuality of our minds. In any case, despite limited shops and shared cultural influences, what’s remarkable is how rarely we encounter two people dressed identically. But Jacoby argues that our focus on small differences only emphasises our essential similarity.
Jacoby points to the decline in the number of languages spoken as further evidence of the decline of diversity and the end of individuality. But, just as with clothes, trends are surely more complex. Aspirant families might push children to speak English rather than local dialects but a state-funded professional class channels money into the preservation of minority languages. Homogenization between countries and regions may spell an increase, rather than a decline, in individuality.
The death of childhood
If languages and clothes illustrate our growing homogeneity, they do not explain it. For this, Jacoby looks to childhood. ‘The universe of childhood is where diversity gets exercise,’ he tells us before concluding sadly: ‘childhood is under siege’. He argues that it is during independent play that children learn tolerance and, without it, they lose the ability to negotiate disagreements, ‘an aptitude indispensable for civil interchanges.’ The upshot is that, ‘a “coarsening” of everyday life takes place.’ Just as with his discussion of clothes, there is truth in Jacoby’s comments. He points out that, ‘play in the outdoors dwindles as children hurry home to computers or organized activities,’ a trend identified and confirmed by sociologists. But the idea of ruddy-cheeked children playing outside from dawn to dusk was perhaps only ever an historical blip – and a middle class, western blip at that. Many children are not herded from one activity to another and grown-ups are often surprised to discover that lots of today’s most popular computer games are played in (virtual) teams and require considerable co-operation and negotiation.
Jacoby’s concern is with the impact of entertainment designed by adults on the imagination of the young. He might be falling prey to yet another perennial moral panic but his real worry is that the decline of unstructured play and the homogenisation of childhood experiences leads to the erosion of individuality. ‘Individual diversity necessitates living diversity,’ he argues, and, ‘with no variety, the free development of individuals suffers.’ Here, Jacoby makes an important point that is lost on far too many of today’s diversity bureaucrats: freedom and diversity are not contradictory but complement one another.
The problem with homogenisation
Jacoby spies in today’s promotion of diversity and simultaneous erosion of individuality a reflection of the past. He points to enlightenment thinkers who promoted uniformity and standardisation in money, weights, measurements and even time and languages. Uniformity, Jacoby tells us, ‘became not simply a program, but a cause’ with ‘commitments to human equality, longitudinal precision, and linguistic standardization’ often overlapping. The result was mass man and a dangerous mass politics that, Jacoby suggests, led the world into war. He points to the sociologist Emil Lederer who, in 1915, situated World War One within a context of ‘depersonalization and mechanization’ that meant that ‘national differences of social and economic structure have become irrelevant,’ leading to an ‘historical mass homogenization of people.’ In other words, the eclipse of individuality opened the way for a dangerous mass politics.
As John Carey notes in The Intellectuals and the Masses, in the decades either side of 1900 it was common for the cultural elite to look upon ‘the masses’ as vulgar, stupid and indistinguishable. Their revulsion and sense of superiority over mass man led to interest in eugenics and, ultimately, for some, fascism. The shock of World War Two made such sentiments unsayable. But fear of the masses, of the indistinguishable mob, was never truly vanquished.
Jacoby’s concern that individuality is being eroded – albeit in the name of woke diversity initiatives – risks tapping into this prejudice against the public. His argument that when individuality is diminished, people lose the capacity to think for themselves leaving democracy imperiled, has reverberated since the 2016 vote for Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US. ‘In no way am I drawing a direct line between a decline of diversity and a rise of populism or the re-emergence of the masses,’ Jacoby is at pains to point out, but what he is indicating is ‘a subterranean relationship.’ ‘Uniformity weakens the individual, which in turn weakens democracy. If individuals lose their singularity, they form a susceptible electorate,’ he explains, no doubt leaving some readers struggling to distinguish a ‘direct line’ from a ‘subterranean relationship’. And when Jacoby tells us that ‘today – again – we see the fragility of democracy, the ease with which it could slide into authoritarian populism,’ I begin to see direct lines everywhere.
Jacoby’s argument is that despite the ubiquity of diversity rhetoric today, we are experiencing the eclipse of the individual and this is bad for democracy. He aligns himself with the 19th-century critics of diversity who ‘recognized that the forces of uniformity threatened the individual and democracy’ and sympathises with Tocqueville and Mill’s questioning of the capacity of individuals to stand up against the majority. Jacoby’s fear is of the tyranny of the majority; he cites approvingly Tocqueville’s assertion that, ‘It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.’
Cancel culture
This fear of ‘a nation of servants’, created under the aegis of diversity initiatives, is misplaced. The pressure on individuals to look, dress and even speak in-line with prescribed views does threaten the capacity for critical thought – the true hallmark of individuality. But this pressure does not derive from ‘the masses’. It is not a ‘bottom up’ demand but a ‘top down’ elite project begun, as Jacoby recognises, within academia. The working class are not running diversity projects out of universities, casting advertisements or compiling corporate mission statements. It is those au fait with the language of cultural appropriation, hate speech, inclusivity, gender fluidity and white privilege who instil group think. All this Jacoby gets. But when he sees democracy as having exposed the tyrannical prejudices of the easily manipulated and uncritical masses, Jacoby reveals his misunderstanding of populism. Rather than servile voters acting as a homogenised mass, many individuals make rational calculations about what would be in their own best interests and the best interests of their families, community, class and nation. Jacoby risks confusing solidarity with homogenisation.
Jacoby’s political prejudices mean his excellent critique of diversity and defence of the individual end up becoming an attack on the people. He laments the fact that the left wing now ‘compounds its worldwide defeats with self-delusion. Splintered, it promotes diversity as subversion, narcissism as rebellion.’ He’d prefer a strong and credible left – voted for by strong individuals – who all just happen to agree with him. He fails to see that populist votes may be a way for working class people to push back against an overarching cultural elite and a system that offers them few opportunities – in the only way available to them: the ballot box. Rather than seeing voters determined to have their voices heard, Jacoby sees a manipulated, undifferentiated mass. He blames the elite -and the left – for creating this situation but this is little consolation to those rubbished as homogenous.
If individuality is to mean more than just small differences in how we dress and speak but substantial differences in how we think then it is not a tyranny of the majority we need to worry about but a tyranny of the cultural elite who control academia, the media, the civil service and politics. In order to challenge the rule of this powerful minority, we need to defend – not attack – the majority.
Joanna Williams is director of Cieo. Her forthcoming book, How Woke Won, can be pre-ordered here.
From CIEO, February 4, 2022