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Eric73's avatar

I don't think anyone has ever claimed that this represented a majority of the students on any campus. Remember that the More In Common survey found that the "progressive activist" left is only about 8% of the country – but they clearly have an outsized voice in our public discourse. The same thing is true on campuses. Surveys repeatedly show that majorities of students on college campuses feel that they can't freely speak their minds these days.

Nobody is saying a college education is bad, but there is clearly a problem with the environment being fostered at some of our "elite" universities by academic admistrators who push toxic, divisive ideas dressed up as DEI and "anti-racism". We hear story after story of administrators deferring to ludicrous demands by students in the name of some twisted version of progress, often referencing their own privilege as a shield against criticism that they should exercise better judgement. We hear accounts from anonymous professors who say they fear for their jobs if they push back against some of the things they're seeing.

I'm clearly going beyond the original point of anti-Semitism now, but this is part and parcel with an ascendant, racial-essentialist vision of progressivism where every issue can be adjudicated by virtue of the identity categories of the parties involved, and where they rank on the power and oppression scale. If you want to say that this isn't a problem, then what's to account for what's happening in various progressive institutions around the country, who are having difficulty functioning and doing their actual work because their workplace cultures have been overtaken by young employees demanding to dismantle internal hierarchies and inequitable power structures within the organizations themselves?

Understand that I'm not a conservative. I'm saying this as a progressive who is extremely concerned with the ideas getting taken seriously on the American left these days. And it feels like every time I turn around I see some pathetic individual with a podcast or some other kind of platform who claims that they've always been a Democrat but now they're starting to sympathaize with the Trumpist right because of what they've been seeing on the far left. I have little respect for those people, but they have a voice and influence, and if the rest of the left doesn't start to push back and demonstrate clear separation from the toxic elements of our side of the cultural divide, we may find one day that Democrats will be the ones trying to figure out how to govern from the minority.

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MillennialExistential's avatar

I'd float a suggest that the rise of racial essentialism is nearly entirely due to failure of socialism to gain traction in the US and the complete dominance of capital.

When we can't view inequality as an inherently class based phenomenon, we turn to the next best proxy, which in this country is race.

If we could break through the stranglehold of capital, work to relieve economic inequality, and empower workers, a lot of the racial anxiety would go away.

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