Wednesday August 10, 2022; 9:58 PM EDT
- Near the end of a very long NY Times Magazine piece on Claremont, it is suggested that conservative "think tanks" and other groups that seed right wing activism tend not to be very hard on each other--not to press back if something said by one of the other similar groups is wrong-headed or destructive. They have each other's backs, in a sense.#
- But the paragraph goes on to say that center-left academics give them a pass too, because these academics think of political action as beneath them. They usually leave the playing field to the right wingers, no matter what kinds of discourse those folks are advancing.#
- That's a kind of elitism on the part of those academics--"My job here in the Ivory Tower is much more important . . . " As a result, the in give-and-take, push-and-pull system of politics, the right wing tends to work without a fully functioning opposition to keep them honest. And safe within the Tower, academics of a certain temperament don't have to look very hard at their own elitism, nor engage the concerns and discourses of others. #
- Do that sort of thing enough and you get someone like candidate Clinton talking about people as "deplorables" -- which was surely a deplorable thing for her to do.#
- As the right wing plays more and more extreme games, it creates its own climate of discourse unchallenged to some large degree by academics. They create their own weather, and the society has to respond endlessly to their storms. Trump was a master of this game. He kept America from paying attention to many things for several years. We have not fully emerged from that chaotic front and there's no telling how long it will take to do so, if we ever do.#