Thread by @jholbo1

Good thread. I don't have a Bloomberg subscription but, as @JeffreyASachs says, the drumbeat is familiar. One weakness of Sachs' push-back is that a 'self-selection' explanation, in many other contexts, is not regarded as exculpatory - possibly the opposite. 1/

https://twitter.com/JeffreyASachs/status/1042814243949764608

But those are cases in which we are talking about, say, an ethnic group that can be identified stably, independently of ideas/attitudes. If what is keeping conservatives out of academia are, broadly, their ideas and attitudes 2/

then it's an open question whether the situation is fine; or, if it should be changed, whether it should be the job of academe to shift to accommodate conservative ideas, or instead conservatism bears the burden of becoming more agreeable with academic ideas and attitudes. 3/

Conservatives will scoff if you point to the skew and say, 'see, conservatives have turned their backs on a dedicated life of the mind, characterized by free exchange of ideas, there are hardly any of them here.' Putting it that way makes it sound like a cruel joke. 4/

But expressed more reasonably, the point is perfectly valid. It is easy to imagine a version of academe that is more conservative - an arm of an official church, say. It is easy to imagine a version of conservatism much more academically-inclined. Both things have been. 5/

But given the kind of academy we've got and the kind of conservatism we've got, it isn't surprising that the two don't more readily mix. Think about @willwilkinson on the urban-rural divide. 6/ niskanencenter.org/explaining-the…

Let me put it sharply. If all you knew were demographic facts about the urban-ruran divide, you would predict the partisan skew within academe. You would predict even the physics department votes heavily Dem. It's demographics. 7/ niskanencenter.org/the-density-di…

So one could stand in a cornfield and yell there oughta be more Democrats around here. Or go stand in Times Square and yell there oughta be more Republicans. It's not obvious fretting about dearth of cons in academe is less like pushing string. What is the force of 'oughta'? 8/

If you want to combat the urban-rural split, and associated forms of polarization, you need to think about why it IS. It makes little sense to think of the liberal-conservative skew in academia as something 'coming from' academia distinctively. It's part of something bigger. 9/

That isn't to say one couldn't fight it locally, in the academy. You could have two reasons to do so, broadly: 1) this skew is unjust to individuals. 2) it's socially unjust - or at least broadly culturally/politically unhealthy. Let's think briefly about both. 10/

The difficulty with the justice claim is that it effectively reduces to the claim that the urban-rural divide, and its knock-on effects, unjustly burdens individual cons. But it's a little hard to make how and why that would be true. 11/

First we note that it's more than academia. We should toss into the pot all the centers of 'elite', 'urban' culture - Hollywood, media Big Tech, urban professionalism - that conservatives feel alienated from, excluded from. 12/

It is not the case that this divide is something that has been 'done to' conservatives. It's a thing that has evolved. If anything, it is a thing that conservatives have done to the country, politically. Culture is politically downstream from Republican electoral strategy. 13/

Let me say that again: culture is politically downstream from Republican electoral strategy. This isn't to say that "L'il Nas X" wouldn't be making videos that offend Rod Dreher if R's hadn't doubled down on winning by winning rural. Rather: 14/

If R's hadn't doubled-down on winning by winning rural, the fact that Dreher is offended by "L'il Nas X" would be less strikingly correlated with Dreher-types not ending up in academia. Cons wouldn't be a partisan un-'urban' bloc due to being normatively anti-"L'il Nas". 15/

The R party has worked out a way to win this way, because the skew favors the rural party in the Senate and EC, hence SC. The R party has evolved into an engine for rural-based dominance. Conservatism has evolved, alongside, into an ethos/attitude that suits this strategy. 16/

But a side-effect is conservatism has become an ethos/attitude that doesn't fit so well anymore in urban, elite, professional settings. The upside for R's is they dominate politics without most people liking them. The downside is they don't fit in, culturally, in academe. 17/

Is that unjust against cons? It could as well be unjust against liberals. They have a grievance about how the urban-rural skew hurts them in politics. Cons might even have a grievance against the R party for how it keeps them on the 'rural' plantation, as it were. 18/

The R party is a cartel for electing R's. Maybe there is some possible world in which universities are bipartisan utopias, where liberals and cons chat together, collegially. Glory be! But if heading towards that costs Mitch McConnell a Senate seat, he'd rather not, surely. 19/

Why would it cost him? Because, for this to happen, conservatism would have to evolve to be less a tool of R party discipline, less a tool for enforcing identity politics, that is. (Certainly it is very easy to imagine. But it ain't what we've got.) 20/

So let's shift to the question of whether the partisan skew in academe is unhealthy - a thing to be combated from within academe - even if it is not an injustice perpetrated against cons by academe, per se. 21/

It seems to me there is an argument on both sides. On the one hand, you might say academe should do its part to foster comity, across the urban-rural cultural divide. It should, in effect, lean over backwards to be 'diplomatic' to the rural 'Other'. We have to get along. 22/

But the opposite thought would be this: current politics in the US is unhealthy because of the rural-urban divide. The divide advantages R's, politically. But it is not cost-free for R's. It chafes them that being culturally based as they are leaves them weak on some fronts. 23/

If you instituted affirmative-action for cons in academe, let's say, that would lessen the cost, to cons, of the R minority governance strategy. That would hardly incentivize them to abandon the strategy. The 'diplomatic' outreach would simply be a freebie they would pocket. 24/

We see something of the sort in R attempts to make 'religious liberty' a sort of 'most favored nation status'. You could do something similar for 'conservatism' as a whole. But I say that would be bad. But enough for one long thread. 25/ verdict.justia.com/2021/04/30/exp…