Kaufmann seems either not to know or not to care that throughout most of history, and in most of the world today, the thing academics fought for freedom *from* was government interference in their lives and thinking of exactly this kind.
Universities in autocracies commonly are obliged to recruit people based on their political beliefs, for example. This is not generally thought of by those involved as "protecting academic freedom" (though no doubt imaginative apparatchiks try to sell it as such)
Bill Hicks meant "You are free to do what we tell you" as satire.
For Kaufmann, its a policy recommentation.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
This is an issue we discuss a lot in Brexitland with regards the British context too. One difficult feature of identity conflicts is that they are battles over values and social norms - and people find it hard to compromise with/engage those they perceive as norm violators.
This is perfectly understandable - values and (for example) anti-racism norms are central to many people's political identities and priorities. But it poses significant electoral probs if a party needs support from voters who do not share such norms in same form in order to win
In Britain, as in the US, "political correctness gone mad" is very much the battle cry on both sides of this argument. Used by identity conservatives to articulate what alienates them. Used dismissively, by identity liberals to denigrate what they regard as an imagined complaint
Kind of inevitable Farage would return. Be interesting to see whether he is once again able to mobilise distrust and discontent when his two winning issues - immigration and Europe - are no longer at the top of the agenda.
The problem for Farage is that opposing lockdown is a libertarian stance, while the kind of voters he ha traditionally appealed to are older authoritarian types who are generally very keen on lockdowns.
As for government reform that’s not an issue to send anyone to the barricades unless it can be married to populist or nationalist resentments. Still, the Scottish elections next year may soon give him a target for such resentments in England
*Sigh*. Disappointing to see that Guardian, like many media orgs, continues to focus exclusively on the "numbers game" Q, which is a poor way to measure imm attitudes. 1/2
2/2 In the article, authors acknowledge "people had generally moved away from the belief that the costs of immigration outweigh the benefits". That is a *better* measure of views to imm, but is dismissed because it doesn't fit alarmist framing of authors
We observe in survey data repeatedly that people default to saying they want "a little less" immigration *regardless* of immigration levels. It is just a default response pattern. It is informative in that it highlights that many ppl default to seeing imm as a negative thing
Brexitland is out today! To celebrate the release of our new book I'm going to put up a graph a day here highlighting some of the big themes we discuss.
Graph 1: share of graduates and school leavers in the population 1986-2016
Educational expansion has reshaped our nation over past few decades. In the Thatcher years, nearly half of voters had no educational qualifications at all, and fewer than 10% had a university degree.
School leavers outnumbers graduates 2:1 when Blair was first elected in 1997
By the time of the EU referendum, graduates were one quarter of the electorate, and voters with no qualifications had fallen to 20%.
The shift is still ongoing - the share of graduates rises about 0.7 points a year, the share with GCSEs or less declines over a point a year
This claim re: trust in the BBC bothered me a bit - the decline seemed implausibly large and, to the extent there has been a decline in trust, this seemed unlikely to be a BBC story.
So I did a little bit of digging around. Here's the latest MORI polling (2020) which shows when asked to choose a single most trusted news source, 62% said the BBC, far ahead of any other source: ipsos.com/sites/default/…
Here is some recent polling from YouGov which, again, shows that trust in the BBC is higher than in any other outlet: yougov.co.uk/topics/media/a…
I'm unsure whether the rolling back of lockdown restrictions is going too quickly, but I *am* sure that the level of doom-mongering about it from some, all sharing the same pictures of that one Soho street, is overblown theguardian.com/world/2020/jul…
In a country of 65M plus people, basically *every* weekend there will be some pocket of bad behaviour. This gets amplified out of all proportion every single time because people nervous about lockdown or angry at the Conservatives share it like crazy
Until we get a vaccine, this country and others are going to have to engage in a constant v difficult balancing act in terms of social behaviour. People freaking out & flooding social media with angry rangs about one street or one beach every damn weekend isn't going to help that