I have a new essay for @WCrowdsLive on public education, critical race theory, and whether children are a red line in the woke wars. To what extent does "culture" really matter? 1/x
Some of the passages in @michaelbd's brilliant book struck me. Here he is on how enveloping culture can be:
"Its judgments become so familiar that it exists like a voice in your head. And yet it is impossible to explain exactly how this happens" 2/x amazon.com/My-Father-Left…
In some contexts, particularly would-be democracies, public education becomes a main *political* battlefield. Before they wanted to win elections, Islamist parties were preoccupied with curricula development. No else cared. They cared. 3/x
The paradox is that the left has won the culture wars while simultaneously dismissing the power of the very culture they have come to dominate so thoroughly. 4/x
If you think culture matters, then it becomes easier to understand why Republicans, despite having political power, acted as if they were in the opposition during the Trump years. This is what populists do. But it's also true that the GOP was culturally weak. 5/x
So you had an odd situation: Republicans had political power but longed for cultural power. Democrats had cultural power but longed for political power, even as they were ambivalent about it. Now Democrats have both. 6/x
If you ignored Twitter, the New York Times, the country's most powerful corporations, pretty much all major academic institutions, and film, music, and art, then did wokeness really affect your life in any real, tangible way? Probably not. 7/x
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For the rest of the week, @dmarusic & I are lifting the paywall on some of our Friday Essays at @WCrowdsLive. We've each selected three of our favorites, which you can now read in full.
If you missed it, I wrote a review of Obama's memoir for @WCrowdsLive. Why did I read it, you ask? I had a duty and duty called. The passages on the Arab Spring are especially interesting but not in the way you might expect. 1/x wisdomofcrowds.live/oh-the-audacit…
The first thing I noticed was the self-regard masked as self-awareness, a clever trick that apparently went down well with most mainstream reviewers who, when they did offer gentle criticism, did so with sufficient reverence. 2/x
To Obama's credit (or discredit), he basically sounds like me sometimes. For example, he seems to understand that autocracy, by definition, isn't permanent. Yet despite this knowledge, he spends the next several years acting against his own counsel. 3/x
If you missed it, this is a brilliant essay from @dmarusic for @WCrowdsLive. As usual, Damir cuts through the noise on American exceptionalism, Biden's foreign policy, and the question of hypocrisy. 1/x
I haven't seen the argument made in quite this way before. @dmarusic argues that moral perfectionism has always been paralyzing, but that its benefits once may have outweighed the costs. Now, it is mostly a liability. 3/x
I have a new @WCrowdsLive essay on the idea of the "arc of history." Martin Luther King was discussing racism and civil rights at home. Obama repurposed it more broadly to include America's global role. But did the arc exist beyond our own borders? 1/x
As an aside, there is an interesting question of how the notion of progress is eschatologically problematic for Islam and to some extent Christianity. For many Muslims, progress exists, it just runs counter to historical time. 2/x
MLK spoke of the "arc of the moral universe." Obama adapted this and came up with the "arc of history." Meanwhile, "the right side of history" wasn't new. Clinton used it 20 times. What was new was Obama's emphasis on the *wrong side* of history. 3/x
Doing Foucault and critical theory in college was helpful. You realized power relations were vital to understanding policy outcomes; no institutional arrangements were "neutral"; everything was basically a social construction; and objectivity was an illusion
If you missed it, our two-part conversation with @DouthatNYT on @WCrowdsLive is out. A deep dive into decadence, wokeness, interplanetary colonialism, anti-supernaturalism, and the perils of meritocracy
In Part 2, I ask @douthatnyt whether Christianity, in contrast to Islam, struggles with "rationalist" elites because it doesn't present itself as an explicitly rationalistic faith.
The question of why educated elites don't seem to find Christianity compelling despite an obvious and often intense desire for meaning and structure is something of a puzzle. @douthatnyt has been excellent on this: nytimes.com/2021/04/10/opi…