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Javier E

Richard Rorty's 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-election-2016-was-coming.html

election 2016 leftist Democratic party working class redistribution globalization justice rorty

shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book
  • It’s worth rereading those tweeted paragraphs:[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. … One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
  • His basic contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting.
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  • But during the 1960s, shame — over Vietnam, over the serial humiliation of African-Americans — transformed a good portion of the left, at least the academic left, into a disaffected gang of spectators, rather than agitators for change
  • . A formalized despair became its philosophy. The system was beyond reform. The best one could do was focus on its victims.
  • The result was disastrous. The alliance between the unions and intellectuals, so vital to passing legislation in the Progressive Era, broke down. In universities, cultural and identity politics replaced the politics of change and economic justice.
  • at the very moment “socially accepted sadism” — good phrase, that — was diminishing, economic instability and inequality were increasing, thanks to globalization.
  • “This world economy will soon be owned by a cosmopolitan upper class which has no more sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American capitalists of the year 1900.”
  • People are furiously arguing about what played a key role in this election — whether it was white working-class despair, a racist backlash or terror about the pace of cultural change. It seems reasonable to think that all three played a part.
  • Which left the white working-class guy and gal up for grabs — open to right-wing populists, maybe even strongmen.
  • “Outside the academy,” he wrote, “Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place.”
  • “Why could not the left,” he asked, “channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?”
  • Right through the ’90s and into the 2000s, we had left-of-center politicians singing the praises of hope, rather than the hopelessness that Mr. Rorty decries. Bill Clinton explicitly campaigned as the “man from Hope,” and Barack Obama would later campaign on a platform of “hope” and “change.” In passing health care reform, Mr. Obama genuinely did something for the immiserated underclass, and both men, in their ways, rejected identity politics.
  • But it wasn’t enough, obviously. “Under Presidents Carter and Clinton,” Mr. Rorty wrote, “the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from the unions and from any mention of redistribution.” Mr. Clinton was particularly guilty of this charge, passing Nafta, appointing Robert Rubin as his Treasury secretary and enthusiastically embracing financial deregulation. Mr. Obama pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And he was one of those fancy elites.
  • This group included intellectuals, by the way, who, he wrote, are “ourselves quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization.”
  • What’s so striking about “Achieving Our Country” is that it blends these theories into a common argument: The left, both cultural and political, eventually abandoned economic justice in favor of identity politics, leaving too many people feeling freaked out or ignored.
  • “It is as if the American Left could not handle more than one initiative at a time,” Mr. Rorty wrote. “As if it either had to ignore stigma in order to concentrate on money, or vice versa.”
Javier E

Where the Left Went Wrong-and How It Can Win Again - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...531054

leftist progressive politics history victimization power backlash

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • The full book contains criticism for the political left as earnestly constructive and thoughtfully formulated as any I have encountered
  • Rorty argued that an ascendant strain of postmodern Leftism with its roots in the academy has tended “to give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.”
  • This Left is more likely to participate in a public shaming than to lobby for a new law; it is more likely to mobilize to occupy a park or shut down a freeway than to register voters. It “exaggerates the importance of philosophy for politics, and wastes its energy on sophisticated theoretical analyses of the significance of current events.”
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  • Rorty sympathizes with the reasons that an ascendant Leftist faction lost faith in American institutions. He is as horrified as they are by the historic treatment of indigenous people and African Americans, and by America’s behavior in the Vietnam War.
  • But like John Dewey, he rejects self-loathing as “a luxury which agents––either individuals or nations––cannot afford,” and finds other aspects of American history and national character to celebrate.
  • Today’s Left would more effectively advance social justice if its adherents possessed a historical memory that extended farther back than the 1960s, he argued, to a movement more than a century old “that has served human liberty well.” It would help, for example, “if students became as familiar with the Pullman Strike, the Great Coalfield War, and the passage of the Wagner Act as with the march from Selma, Berkeley free-speech demonstrations, and Stonewall.”
  • If more Leftists saw themselves as part of that history, with all its achievements, they might continue to lament that “America is not a morally pure country,” but might better understand that “no country ever has been or ever will be,” and that no country will ever have “a morally pure, homogeneous Left” to bring about social justice.
  • he criticizes the identity politics of the left for developing a politics “more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed,” because many of the dispossessed are thereby ignored.
  • Surveying academia, for example, he observes that “nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not the ‘other’ in the relative sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness.”
  • For Rorty, a Left that neglects victims of economic selfishness will not only fail; its neglect of class will trigger a terrible backlash that ultimately ill-serve the very groups that Leftist identity politics are intended to help. “The gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will very likely be wiped out,” he worried. “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”
  • To avoid that future, to compete in national politics, Rorty believed that the Left would have to find a way to better address the consequences of globalization, and that it could only do so by “opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions.
  • What’s more, the Left “would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma.” In service of that transition, he advised the Left to “put a moratorium on theory … to kick its philosophy habit” and  to “try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans.”
  • The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique…
  • it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy.
  • disengagement from practical politics “produces theoretical hallucinations,” he added. “The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called ‘power.’” This obsession with power elicited scathing words:
  • in committing itself to what it calls “theory,” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.
  • The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-sate is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.
  • This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for “the system” and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions
  • Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place … Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms.
  • Instead, “the cultural Left has a preference for talking about ‘the system’ rather than specific social practices and specific changes. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic.
  • its abandonment of the melting-pot approach to racial justice, its substitution of multiculturalism, has destroyed the solidarity needed to advance justice in any manner
  • The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us—black, white, and brown—are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such. This strategy gave rise to the “platoon” movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side.
  • the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than to ignore it… If the Cultural left insists on continuing its present strategy––on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noting those differences––then it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.
  • The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites.
  • These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it. I think that the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy.
  • This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century.
  • Our national character is still in the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour week, Women’s Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement. Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even greater moral progress.
Javier E

» The End of Higher Education's Golden Age Clay Shirky - 0 views

www.shirky.com/...g-adults-the-way-were-doing-it

highered economics history crisis university

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.
  • Decades of rising revenue meant we could simultaneously become the research arm of government and industry, the training ground for a rapidly professionalizing workforce, and the preservers of the liberal arts tradition. Even better, we could do all of this while increasing faculty ranks and reducing the time senior professors spent in the classroom. This was the Golden Age of American academia.
  • Rising costs and falling subsidies have driven average tuition up over 1000% since the 1970s.
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  • For 30 wonderful years, we had been unusually flush, and we got used to it, re-designing our institutions to assume unending increases in subsidized demand. This did not happen. The year it started not happening was 1975. Every year since, we tweaked our finances, hiking tuition a bit, taking in a few more students, making large lectures a little larger, hiring a few more adjuncts.
  • Over the decades, though, we’ve behaved like an embezzler who starts by taking only what he means to replace, but ends up extracting so much that embezzlement becomes the system. There is no longer enough income to support a full-time faculty and provide students a reasonably priced education of acceptable quality at most colleges or universities in this country.
  • Of the twenty million or so students in the US, only about one in ten lives on a campus. The remaining eighteen million—the ones who don’t have the grades for Swarthmore, or tens of thousands of dollars in free cash flow, or four years free of adult responsibility—are relying on education after high school not as a voyage of self-discovery but as a way to acquire training and a certificate of hireability.
  • Though the landscape of higher education in the U.S., spread across forty-six hundred institutions, hosts considerable variation, a few commonalities emerge: the bulk of students today are in their mid-20s or older, enrolled at a community or commuter school, and working towards a degree they will take too long to complete. One in three won’t complete, ever. Of the rest, two in three will leave in debt. The median member of this new student majority is just keeping her head above water financially. The bottom quintile is drowning.
  • One obvious way to improve life for the new student majority is to raise the quality of the education without raising the price. This is clearly the ideal, whose principal obstacle is not conceptual but practical: no one knows how. The value of our core product—the Bachelor’s degree—has fallen in every year since 2000, while tuition continues to increase faster than inflation.
  • The metaphor my colleagues often use invokes religion. In Wannabe U, the author describes the process of trying to turn UConn into a nationally competitive school as the faculty being ‘dechurched’. In this metaphor, we are a separate estate of society that has putative access to its resources, as well as the right to reject democratic oversight, managerial imperatives, and market discipline. We answer to no one but ourselves.
  • When the economic support from the Golden Age began to crack, we tenured faculty couldn’t be forced to share much of the pain. Our jobs were secure, so rather than forgo raises or return to our old teaching loads, we either allowed or encouraged those short-term fixes—rising tuition, larger student bodies, huge introductory lectures.
  • All that was minor, though, compared to our willingness to rely on contingent hires, including our own graduate students, ideal cheap labor. The proportion of part-time and non-tenure track teachers went from less than half of total faculty, before 1975, to over two-thirds now
  • In the same period, the proportion of jobs that might someday lead to tenure collapsed, from one in five to one in ten. The result is the bifurcation we have today: People who have tenure can’t lose it. People who don’t mostly can’t get it.
  • If we can’t keep raising costs for students (we can’t) and if no one is coming to save us (they aren’t), then the only remaining way to help these students is to make a cheaper version of higher education for the new student majority.
  • The number of high-school graduates underserved or unserved by higher education today dwarfs the number of people for whom that system works well. The reason to bet on the spread of large-scale low-cost education isn’t the increased supply of new technologies. It’s the massive demand for education, which our existing institutions are increasingly unable to handle. That demand will go somewhere.
  • why is not part of the answer a secondary education certification scheme that is serious and ideally nation-wide. The British GCSE/A-levels is something that seems to work. Herding the cats that would be necessary to implement something like that is, I grant, a monstrous task, but perhaps no more difficult than revising the university system. As things stand now, the lack of standards in most high schools means wasted opportunities of academic development for a very large part of our reasonably gifted teenage population. A revised university system would still leave in place the distinctly inadequate high school system we have now.
  • The other way to help these students would be to dramatically reduce the price or time required to get an education of acceptable quality (and for acceptable read “enabling the student to get a better job”, their commonest goal.) This is a worse option in every respect except one, which is that it may be possible.
  • The metaphor I have come to prefer (influenced especially by Richard Rorty) is that we in the academy are workers, and our work is to make people smarter — ourselves, our peers, our students, which is a goal that has to be constantly negotiated among various constituencies.
  • When the military rationale for both the GI Bill and the Soviet struggle ended, so did overall American interest in the kind of funding that drove the Golden Age. There is not now and has never been a broad commitment to higher education as a social good in this country
  • ow you can say — and many of my colleagues do — that this is all just a matter of getting state governments to take on different concerns or convictions, or getting a more nationalized educational system. That was the song my parents, both educators, sang, and the song I grew up singing. But the period when the states really drove funding up lasted just 15 years — 1960 to 1975 — and has been in decline for 40 years since.
  • I can — barely — imagine some states increasing some subsidies to some campuses at a rate faster than inflation. Some of the schools in California, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Michigan are candidates for this. I cannot, however, imagine my tenured colleagues tolerating the situation that makes higher education broadly affordable in social democracies, which would require us earning less while teaching more.
  • I am done, in other words, thinking of myself and my peers on faculty as blameless, and I am done imagining that 40 years of evidence from the behavior of democratically elected legislatures is some sort of readily reversible blip. I do not believe that the caste system that has established itself at elite institutions can be funded at the rate which we insist we need, and I do not believe that we will willingly see any of our own benefits reduced to help our junior colleagues or our students.
  • Students feel compelled to acquire credentialing as a means of improving their economic positions. Unfortunately, along the way, “professional” training has taken precedence over education. The two have become conflated in the public mind.
  • Today it is not only that the PhD:s are abundant but also that in many areas peak knowledge is short lived. You might be competent when you graduate but five years later that competence is of yesteryear and the ones with the newest knowledge kick you out just like you kicked someone else out five years ago. We need a base to stand on but then we need to go in and out of education during our whole lives to keep up with development. This puts a strain on each end everyone of us as individuals but it also calls for a whole new role for academia
  • Change the game and lower the transaction costs: Instead of treating students as backseat passengers in a higher educational vehicle that’s geared towards the transmission of self-contained content, i.e., content produced by professors for the self-serving purpose of publication–put steering wheels in the hands of students, take them out on road trips, negotiate real problems–and they will become self-educating
  • Note that having a college degree only retains value right now because there isn’t a better (more predictive, and trusted) credential to be had for people who are seeking jobs.
  • the online versions of education have reduced the college experience down to what’s easy to implement and easy to measure: receiving lectures, and activities of the quiz-and-test variety. It’s not clear that the value of the traditional old-school college experience (and it’s accompanying degree) were the result of those particular aspects of the experience. Granting degrees based only on coursework runs the risk of diluting the perceived value of the degree.
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