Thread by @bansisharma

1. George Packer, A Liberal Mugged by Reality

Irving Kristol once quipped, "A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality."

A few excerpts from Matthew Continetti's (@continetti) excellent overview/summary of George Packer's poignant piece in the Atlantic.

@continetti 2. "TO BE A PARENT IS TO BE COMPROMISED"

That is the haunting opening line from a piece by George Packer in The Atlantic Daily titled, "When the Culture War Comes for the Kids."

@continetti 3. Few journalists are as respected by, and respectable to, liberals as George Packer. The author of The Assassin’s Gate and The Unwinding, Packer has written for bastions of liberal thought from the NY Times Magazine to The New Yorker in a distinguished, decades-long career.

@continetti 4. George Packer's latest piece for The Atlantic, “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids,” is essential reading.
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

@continetti 5. Why? Because it relates, in Packer’s haunted and sympathetic style, the experience of having a child enrolled in a New York City school system corrupted by politics.

@continetti 6. For anyone who believes in individualism, the freedoms of speech and conscience, and the equal dignity of human beings, the experience sounds like a nightmare.

@continetti 7. The summer before kindergarten, an official informed Packer that his son had made it off the wait list at their preferred public school. Packer writes. “It was a liberal white family’s dream.” He, his wife, and his son became invested in the institution.

@continetti 8. “The school’s approach caught his imagination, while the mix of races and classes gave him something even more precious: an unselfconscious belief that no one was better than anyone else, that he was everyone’s equal and everyone was his," writes Packer.

@continetti 9. Then, Packer says, “Things began to change.”

No kidding. A new sort of left-wing cultural politics developed toward the close of the Obama presidency.

@continetti 10. “At the heart of the new progressivism was indignation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice against groups of Americans who had always been relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity.”

@continetti 11. Theories of intersectionality and of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” seeped into business, politics, media, and education.

@continetti 12. “Its biggest influence came in realms more inchoate than policy: the private spaces where we think and imagine and talk and write, and the public spaces where institutions shape the contours of our culture and guard its perimeter.”

@continetti 13. The new progressivism, Packer observes, was “a limited, elite phenomenon.” Its avatars held postgraduate degrees, had lots of disposable income, and resided in fashionable neighborhoods.

@continetti 14. “It was as a father, at our son’s school, that I first understood the meaning of the new progressivism, and what I disliked about it,” Packer writes.

@continetti 15. Parents opted their children out of standardized tests, which they deemed “structurally biased, even racist, because nonwhite students had the lowest scores.” Without tests, there was no way to measure the progress of the student body.

@continetti 16. The school, without telling parents, changed all of its bathrooms, “from kindergarten to fifth grade,” from single-sex to gender-neutral.

@continetti 17. Packer’s family was distraught by Donald Trump’s election. He found, however, that the school had deprived his son of a vocabulary to understand and oppose Trump on the basis of liberal principles.

@continetti 18. “By age 10 he had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic.”

@continetti 19. Packer notes that Richard Carranza, the far-left chancellor of NY City schools, mandated anti-bias instruction for school employees that categorized “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity,” and “worship of the written word” as hallmarks of “white supremacy culture.”

@continetti 20. Packer’s article vividly describes the “progress” critical race theory has made as it percolates through American public education. He is a man of the left disturbed by a rising generation of left-wing ideology and activism.

@continetti 21. Packer is too liberal, and too careful, to say whether he is willing to press charges against the corruption of American public education by radicals intent on social transformation.

@continetti 22. Time and again, radicals have displaced liberals only because the liberals, wracked with guilt, lack the will to stop them.

@continetti 23. “Watching your children grow up gives you a startlingly vivid image of the world you’re going to leave them,” Packer writes. “I can’t say I’m sanguine. Some days the image fills me with dread.”

@continetti 24. "That pragmatic genius for which Americans used to be known and admired, which included a talent for educating our young—how did it desert us? Now we’re stewing in anxiety and anger, feverish with bad ideas, too absorbed in our own failures to spare our children."

@continetti 25. "But one day the fever will break, and by then they’ll be grown, and they will have to discover for themselves how to live together in a country that gives every child an equal chance."

And that is the optimistic scenario.

The End