The fruits of MC at Evergreen
Occasionally, some pundit will chastise the Democratic Party for not focusing on its future after some elements of its base (especially the white working class in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan) decamped to Trump in 2016. Sadly, this apparently “rational” project (see HRC at Wellesley) is devoid of recent history.
Like the failed candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, the New Left youngsters from the 1960s and 1970s are now aging, and they are predictably taking their place as professors or as leading editors and politicos/personalities in the mass media. Don’t we remember how the Viet Nam war shaped their lives, making them primarily “anti-imperialists,” and to a lesser extent, warriors on behalf of the working class as were their parents in the 1930s?
And since the New Deal/progressive movement co-opted and defanged what is now termed “the extreme Left” (or “the hard Left”), their liberal professors (e.g., at the prestigious colleges where student strikes/protests took place: UC Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard), coddled their antiwar, civil rights oriented students, reproducing themselves as good social democrats, sympathetic to Eurocommunism, thus technically still “liberal,” even as their calls for “diversity” re-segregated groups that the New Left kids had struggled to integrate.
To the amazement of some in the real Left, the demands of the (tamed) radicals for “inclusion” signified a renewed commitment to segregation by race and gender. The manner by which “liberals” included repressed groups through the cultural term “multiculturalism” did not prompt reflection on key events since the Russian revolution of October 1917. Only a few of the sophisticated radicals were more interested in social movements since that earthquake (the Soviet coup) shook the globe, and they were not easily duped. But they too had their sponsors in academe and in the press, so a few of them are now on the commanding heights of “culture.”
Ever since the Popular Front took over https://clarespark.com/2012/07/19/communist-ideas-go-mainstream/, it has been hard to tell the difference between factions of the so-called “Left.” And so it seems that one of the “very progressive” pack is Bret Weinstein, the biology professor at Evergreen State College, who has been charged with “white supremacy” by some black and brown students (probably cultural nationalists, surely not internationalist communists). https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/05/26/students-demand-firing-of-college-professor-who-objected-to-event-that-kicks-white-people-off-campus/.
Bret Weinstein in playful mood
Professor Weinstein, were he a true Leftist (hence had been instructed in the history of dissent, not just nomenclature in evolutionary biology), would have seen this coming. http://inference-review.com/article/on-being-a-fish.
The Clare Spark Blog 
Had an interesting discussion about the use of kente stoles in academic regalia. While it might seem innocuous, academic regalia has always been limited to an acknowledgment of achievement. Membership in an identity political group apparently now has become an academic achievement. Along with racially segregated graduation ceremonies, this trend, born of the progressive left, appears to me to move against our cultural interest. I’m savvy enough to ride along without negative comment, but considering what has been done to Prof. Weinstein for simply questioning being forcibly excluded from campus by radical student leftists on the basis of having the “wrong” skin color, I’m not sure how long I can last. Or would want to.
Comment by Terbreugghen — May 27, 2017 @ 7:56 pm |