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The media coverage of the affirmative action ruling has really highlighted in a unique way the degree to which journalists fundamentally are not representative of the US. Despite only a third of Americans approving of the use of race in admissions, the media overwhelmingly cover this like it's a moral wrong. I buy that most credible news outlets do try and be objective, but trying to be objective isn't enough. Bias isn't just a conscious thing. If you perceive something to be objectively wrong, you're going to cover it as such. But the trouble is what is often considered to be objectively wrong, at least at this point, is largely a function of your viewpoint, in this case meaning political orientation. The problem is fundamentally that there is no plurality of thought at credible news organizations. They are all perceiving things through the same intellectual framework.
The same thing is largely evident in the coverage of republican states restricting the use of gender affirming care in youth. The credible scholarship overwhelmingly appears to demonstrate that the impacts of allowing it are either adverse or there simply isn't enough research to be sure that it's a good thing. But the media overwhelmingly characterize it as a moral wrong and as basically being rights that are stripped from an oppressed group.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/06/08/more-americans-disapprove-than-approve-of-colleges-considering-race-ethnicity-in-admissions-decisions/
I think there's something really puzzling and interesting going on with American (left-of-center dominated) institutions broadly right now, and I think the phenomenon is captured nicely by this example of the press, the public, and the unpopularity of affirmative action.
As someone who grew up religious and in the South, most of my life, the main feature that distinguished American high-status liberalism from my home cultures was that American liberalism was absolutely masterful in wielding soft power.
My home cultures were much more prone to highly unappealing sanctimony, and authoritarian preening, and scolding, and the telling of musty old just so stories, and dumb Rush Limbaugh-tier propaganda, and attempts to trot out "hello fellow kids" unappealing Christian "rock", and clearly out-of-touch and ignorant fearful conspiracy theories about everything, and simplistic moralizing, and deep discomfort with acknowledging or facing the darker and messier parts of life, and a wariness about asking hard or culturally threatening questions, and prissy Thomas Kincaid-tier "art", and... On and on it went. (And a lot of that remains true to varying degrees for those subcultures to do this day, of course)
And meanwhile, the combination and intersections of art from Hollywood and TV and the popular music industry and popular fiction, and seductive and unrelenting Madison Avenue advertising, and the draw of unfettered consumerism, and the clearly high standards and high status of America's university system, and the seeming rigor and high standards and skepticism and confident nuance of America's great news sources... It was (or seemed to be) a culture of sophistication, and of subtlety and nuance, and very high standards, and of worldliness, and of individual freedom and liberation (especially sexually, of course). It came across as a culture where people were trusted to follow their own bliss, and where the culture was confident enough that people could ask hard questions and follow those questions where ever those questions led them. These different institutions (or at least their portrayal) all came together to create an unrelenting, highly appealing outside cultural force that my home cultures ultimately proved defenseless in the face of and was ultimately entirely undermined by, especially given the weight of outside money and technology pushing it. When I look at the dynamic I experienced, the things that stick out the most are the profound confidence of that outside culture, and the incredible deftness with which it wielded its soft power. It was a culture that understood, in a deep way, that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. It had mastered the art of both leading you to the water without you seeing them do it, and also making you want desperately to drink.
That's how it all felt, anyway.
Subjectively, everything I just described above feels like it might as well have taken place on a different planet. Everything that made my home cultures unappealing and weak 40 years now feels like its seeped into Hollywood and Madison Avenue and American universities and ostensibly reputable left-of-center news. And instead of deftly steering masses of people without them even seeing that they're being led, we keep getting this ritual of well-bred, well-credentialed people, who've inherited these fantastic organs of soft power, pulling back the curtain, doing the equivalent of getting up on their rickety soapboxes in very public ways, and loudly berating and scolding the people they once would have masterfully exercised soft power over, undermining their own organs of soft-power in the process and generating all sorts of highly predictable attention and resistance.
It's all very fascinating and puzzling to experience.
It's increasingly seemed to me that progressivism is uniquely unmoored from any guiding set of principles. At the risk of sounding like a cliche, it seems unambiguously true to me that racism is bad unless it's against white people, sexism is bad unless it's against men, prejudice is bad unless it's against a group you don't like. I mean there is a strong correlation between someone identifying themselves as an ardent opponent of prejudice and racism with those who use the term 'white' as an insult to describe something they don't like. I just moved to new york, and am also from the south, and I'm astonished at the degree to which the most progressive people will talk about the south and southerners as if they're inherently inferior and will demonstrate an oddly aggressive and blatant prejudice against them, even if they've never been there. And what's crazy is it's so damn overt and explicit that you don't even need to really peel back layers of thought to identify the prejudice; they're not entirely against outright claiming that they're prejudiced against those from the south as if it's a badge of honor and will absolutely shit on it despite having never been there. And the hypocrisy is never really acknowledged. I say this not necessarily as an insult but as an observation: but progressivism genuinely does not appear to be guided by any sort of principle and intellectually the mechanics of it seem to be extremely sloppy, despite the fact that they have insinuated them into the foundations of collective thought to a unique degree.
I find progressivism, in academia in particular, to have become so consumed by ideology laid upon layers of other ideology for so long that there is such a profound and massive removal from the practical realities of things. They are so far removed from simply observing and assessing what is happening at a real level that it seems like for any discussion of any observation, the conversation must address everything except what's evidently going on. If the understanding isn't rooted in this conception of highly intellectualized frameworks and systemic structures it's considered to be invalid. There is such a consumption with systems-level thinking. The mechanism by which they seem to maintain this influence seems to be the reference of these vague and intellectualized approaches that, by their abstract nature, can't really be decisively refuted (meaning you can't really prove that a given structural characteristic doesn't exist because you can't really prove that it does exist either) and to disagree with them is to convey that you are not enlightened and missed that day in school when we learned of the these structures and frameworks with a clarity and obviousness that can only be matched by learning of the laws of physics.
I certainly don't want to spare the republican party any very well deserved condemnation, but I don't find that criticism to be particularly lacking right now, nor do I think they have the norm-setting capabilities to be as relevant to me.
The topic of casual, vitriolic, comically uninformed bigotry about southerners in other parts of the country is actually a really fascinating topic in its own right, and something I might wade into here some day when I'm less strapped for time, because it actually touches on some really interesting and fascinating challenges America will face soon, as the South continues to grow in economic and population strength relative to the North East and the West Coast.
To be fair, I have been at dinner tables full of transplants in SF & Seattle, where we were all lamenting the how dysfunctional the city government is, the crime, etc.
And the racism.Fair. Urban snobbishness is a problem across societies around the world, and it gets on people's nerves real fast.
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