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Yascha Mounk

@Yascha_Mounk

Oct 31, 2023

Universities must protect free speech. This means they can’t punish students for saying stupid things, however offensive.

But part of protecting free speech is to punish students who violate the rules that make free speech possible for everyone else. This includes punishing those who violently disrupt talks—and it also includes punishing those who tear down fliers depicting children kidnapped by Hamas.

The answer to this moment isn’t to give up on a culture of free speech on campus. It’s to enforce the rules that sustain it in an impartial manner—something most campuses have woefully failed to do.

The current reality on many campuses is:

Someone anonymously accuses you of a sexist or racist microaggression? You’ll be subjected to an intimidating interview with our “bias response team”.

You violently disrupt a lecture or tear down posters put up by other students in the name of some activist cause? Nothing happens to you.

This selective application of rules and laws is not just inconsistent; through the strategic use of partial enforcement, it effectively sets up an institutionally sanctioned set of views which are sacrosanct, and an institutionally proscribed set of views that are off limits.

In short, they are a clear and outrageous violation of free speech and academic freedom.

(To be clear, violently disrupting a lecture is a worse attack on free speech than tearing down a poster. The punishment for the latter should therefore be less severe.

But both are forbidden, and need to be punished, for the same reason: Rather than being an expression of speech, they consist in the suppression of the speech of others.)

Read 4 tweets

Yascha Mounk

@Yascha_Mounk

Oct 10, 2023

It’s not only @Harvard.

I have reviewed the Twitter and Instagram accounts of @Yale, @Princeton, @Columbia, @Stanford, @Dartmouth and @JohnsHopkins.

Not a single one of them has issued a statement about the atrocities committed by Hamas.

I actually think universities should not be in the business of issuing these kinds of statements.

But since they do issue statements about all kinds of events all of the time, it sends a very clear message if they then happen to fall silent when the victims are Jews.

(It is possible that I have overlooked a public statement from one of these universities; if I have, please let me know and I’ll correct the tweet.)

Read 5 tweets

Yascha Mounk

@Yascha_Mounk

Oct 4, 2023

In key respects, one metric now predicts more about the lives that Americans will live than gender or even race: education.

Whether or not you have a BA now not only determines how you will live; it even determines when you will die.

🧵

Democracy and education have always been intertwined. But the importance of education has vastly increased. In the past decades:
* The wage premium has exploded
* Americans without BA-degrees have become more likely to be in pain, to be socially isolated, or to get divorced.

The most striking story, as Angus Deaton and Anne Case show in new research, is about mortality.

Here's a puzzle for you. Why are Americans now living so much less long than the residents of any other affluent country?

(Scotland also does badly.)

Read 10 tweets

Yascha Mounk

@Yascha_Mounk

Oct 2, 2023

I really wish Musk did basic research before mouthing off.

No, people don't primarily attack the AfD because it has cozied up to Putin. (Though it certainly has.)

They do so because it is a racist party, one that's far more extreme even than right-wing leaders like Le Pen.

🧵

You can have legitimate disagreements about how Europe should deal with migration.

Smart analysts like @rumeliobserver worry about providing an incentive to migrants to risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean. This stuff is hard.

Recognizing that the AfD is terrible isn't.

Here's a few quotes:

"Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
- Alexander Gauland, longtime AfD leader

"We need a 180-degree turn in how we remember German history"
- Björn Höcke, perhaps its most powerful member

Read 8 tweets

Yascha Mounk

@Yascha_Mounk

Sep 29, 2023

Have we passed “peak woke”?

This is a question I keep getting. And there are some good reasons to think that it might be.

But I think the answer is no.

Here’s why.

🧵

There was a moment when the “identity synthesis” ruled basically unchallenged.

This was never going to last. Today, it feels much less scary to argue against it. More people are speaking out. Sometimes even in places like Brown or Stanford.

Great! But…

…it would be naïve to think that the ship has righted itself.

This week:
* Ted censored @coldxman.
* The American Anthropology Association canceled a talk on biological sex.
* A survey showed most US students are deeply skeptical about free speech.

Read 7 tweets

Yascha Mounk

@Yascha_Mounk

Sep 26, 2023

Much of my academic training is in intellectual history.

So to understand the ideas about group identity that have become powerful so quickly, I did a TON of reading.

Here's the true story of the origins of "woke"—and how it explains many themes of today's left.

A loooong 🧵.

The new ideas about race, gender, and sexual orientation constitute a novel ideology, which radically departs from the traditional left.

They are inspired by three main traditions: postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory. And they focus on the role that groups do—and should—play in society.

That's why I call them the "identity synthesis."

If you have mainly encountered the themes of the identity synthesis in op-eds or on social media, you may think it's just silly.

But while I do believe that this novel ideology is a trap, its main themes are rooted in the work of serious thinkers whose ideas are worth taking seriously. They are:

* A deep skepticism about objective truth taken from Michel Foucault.
* The use of “discourse analysis” for explicitly political ends inspired by Edward Said.
* A doubling-down on identity rooted in the concept of “strategic essentialism” coined by Gayatri Spivak.
* A preference for public policies that explicitly tie the treatment a person receives to their group identity, as advocated by Derrick Bell.
* And a profound skepticism about the idea that you and I will be able to understand each other if we stand at different intersections of identities, loosely based on the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Let me explain.

Read 15 tweets

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