Hello and welcome to FarmVlog , and today I'm here with Freddie D'Bour and we're talking about his new book .
Speaker 2How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement . Yes .
Speaker 1How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement . Thank you , because I'm like the title's actually long .
Speaker 2The working title was no Justice , no Peace , no Progress , but Simon Schuster didn't like it , so they came up with a new one .
Speaker 1Which is a sentence . All right , okay . So what's interesting is ? I guess there is you're actually the second book on this topic in some ways , because there's a lead captured by Taiwo .
Speaker 2Oh , Lafemi Taiwo .
Speaker 1Lafemi Taiwo , yeah , but that book has a kind of more limited scope than yours when I was reading yours . So why do I mean ? Elites being attracted to social justice movement is actually nothing new , and I think it's been kind of observed since probably the mid-70s . This was a trend , but it does seem like this last round was recuperated more quickly than normal . What do you think attracts fairly elite people to social justice movements ?
Speaker 2Sure . So one of the things that I don't say in the book and have not said in my long history of making this kind of complaint is this is not a problem of a lack of sincerity . In other words , I think the kind of people that I'm describing , which the book spells out very specifically in different domains , the kind of people I'm talking about , but in general I would say that it's like the sort of hypereducated managerial class of the United States that has gone through the meritocratic apparatus and has emerged with credentials , like in terms of actual diplomas , but also is enculturated to a certain set of sort of like cultural attitudes and linguistic signifiers et cetera . That sort of signal them as a person who comes from the strata . They tend to be overwhelmingly urbanites , People who live in major city centers and they tend to be found in jobs that sort of are in this sort of like discursive slash , managerial slash , administrative sort of position . I think that those people in general actually do care a great deal about fighting racism or reaching gender equality or advancing the interests of LGBTQ people . So the most sort of like sympathetic part of this is just , I do think that they are authentically motivated by a desire to sort of contribute to these causes .
Speaker 2The problem is that that same process of getting absorbed into the meritocratic machine creates a kind of path dependency where they become unable to see any means through which change can occur .
Speaker 2That is not itself an expression of this great American sort of sorting system of like that is again proceduralist , that views success in terms of getting individuals into sort of enviable positions within society , that is very heavily slanted towards issues that are linguistic and symbolic , et cetera .
Speaker 2I think that they've come through that apparatus and it trains them to see all social problems in that sort of domain , Whereas it's just really hard to be the kind of and they're mostly all white , they're not all white , they're mostly all white To be kind of like you know well-meaning white kid from a affluent suburb in Maryland who goes to Duke and then gets their law degree and ends up working for a nonprofit in Manhattan that is vaguely sort of aligned with social justice . It's hard for that person to just sort of say you know , unions are what we need to do , we need to return to the labor movement . So I think there's a sort of a sort of sympathetic side of which they actually care about these issues . But there's also a sense in which the way that we mint this kind of person in this country , the way that we churn out our little meritocrats , creates a path dependency where they can't see any other venues than the ones that sort of brought them to where they are , if that makes sense .
Speaker 1When I was reading your book I was reminded of Michael Sandel's work on meritocracy . Actually , it does make a lot of sense to me that there is a bias in a kind of semi-downwardly , mobile , actually educated elite . I don't know how you feel about Peter Tertran's work , nor do I accept all of his arguments , but I do think there is some truth to us as a society actually being pushed into a massive credentialization from both ends , both in the stable middle-class homes maintaining their status , but also in a lot of people like me who were basically told that if we didn't play that game early on , that we had no future too , because the kind of blue collar jobs that our parents had just weren't going to exist anymore and we were going to be like service sector people . And so you had that tension and what I think is interesting and your book doesn't talk about it super a lot but I wanted to ask you why you think this is .
Speaker 1The left , broadly conceived and I'm not going to play the games about who's on it right now , because that's tiresome doesn't really have a whole lot of the upwardly mobile former working class people . I mean , they exist , it's not unheard of , but we do not seem to be , in general , the people who are attracted to this iteration of either the progressive or , honestly , the far left , unless it comes through labor unions . And I've always wondered about that because theoretically we intermingled in the same institutions and have some of the same values , just because we got through these institutions , although I expect our experience of these meritocratic institutions are very different .
Let's touch on church in real quick . So I think the difficulty with elite overproduction thesis is in 2023 , what is the elite status to which people are aspiring for which there are an insufficient number of slots , right ? So when Pershing describes a formal , aristocratic excuse me society , you know a England , right , the actual formal , like hereditary aristocracy of England . When there was overproduction of elites within that class , there was literally like a certain number of titles that could be handed out and they were breeding more kids than there could be to have those titles . Those titles carried with them . Actual land , right , Like they were the landed gentry and that was what was being handed down as well as sort of influence and government .
Speaker 2I myself have written pieces where I sort of applied Peter Church's sort of lead over production's thesis to the moment right now . But it's difficult to say precisely , okay , what is the thing that ambitious sort of young , striving types are striving for ? That has a sort of zero sum nature to it . You know I've said in the past that I do like creative occupations , right . So these people tend to be set up to have sort of enviable sort of socioeconomic class status in terms of being able to become lawyers or doctors or engineers or bureaucrats of various kinds at colleges or nonprofits or whatever . But you know , that's not sort of sexy and cool and so that maybe what they're sort of striving for is recognition as sort of like an artist , which is , like you know , one of the only ways in which we still sort of grant people the status of being like an enviable human being , because we spent the past you know , 60 plus years ironizing right , the idea that professional success is in and of itself something that's enviable . You know , sometimes it's conveniently sort of lays itself out , like as in with the lawyer glut of the early 2010s , where we were just training too many lawyers and there were insufficient number of sort of positions for them , and that was creating a class of people who had taken on a lot of student loan debt and done a lot of work and couldn't get those jobs now , producing exactly the kind of resentment that churching describes . But that was a very sort of self-contained thing and it corrected itself because enough people heard about that that they stopped applying to law school , right ?
Speaker 2I do think that it's the case that you can't really have the sort of 2010 experience , particularly like as sort of emblemized in Occupy , which is , you know , ultimately , as I say in the book , a very minor thing Occupy was , but it was a sort of prophetic about what was going to come in the rest of the decade . You couldn't really have that without this period where a lot of people who had trained to be meritocratic elites emerged into the world of the post-financial crisis economy and found themselves unable to get the jobs that they thought they wanted . I remember the Journal of the New Inquiry . One of the biggest themes of their early issues , when they first started coming out , was people , you know , had worked really hard and gone to NYU and were now not getting the internships that they thought that they deserved . Right , and you can be cynical about that , but that sort of thing is necessary in order to sort of coalesce a sort of intellectual movement for progressive change .
Speaker 2As far as the question of , you know , why are there not ? Why are there more sort of downwardly mobile , like educated elites who don't have the actual , like you know , enviable position in the economy ? Why are there more of those in the Left Coalition than there are of like sort of striving , sort of lower to upper class , sort of , you know , bootstrapers who are moving themselves up ? I don't have a great answer for you . There aren't a lot of these people in general . We just know that it is a pretty , you know , extreme lack of income mobility in the United States . But I would just remind that if you have done that , if you have moved from low to high and you've done so sort of , within the system as it's currently written , it's tempting to sort of just defend the system right and to say , no , actually meritocracy works . I'm proof . You know I deserve my current status . I worked hard for it . I came from nothing and you can too .
Speaker 1I think that I was probably inclined that way until about 2010 , when I realized that , having worked my way up , I still was only going to do as well as my parents , right , that you know , the best I might do is own a small house that would cost me way more money , even relatively , than my parents , and that everything that they had acquired in the 70s and 80s was going to take me moving up almost two whole social classes to be able to do so it , which was radicalizing for me . But I agree with you , actually , that part of it's the Vibrers bias . When you're working your way up , it's like , oh well , you know , of course I deserve this because I got here and I come from nothing , right , right , but it's not stupid to me to kind of be a sincere problem as a check against the kind of things that you're writing about in your book , because in some ways , I do smell that bullshit on people immediately and I , like you , I don't think it's insincere . I don't think these people are just power grubbing or using NGOs as , like , a way to control society consciously or anything like that . I'm not , that's not what I mean , but there is a certain like you know . My question is always when people ask me that , can you take an unpaid internship and can you go home and live comfortably with your parents for more than two months ? Because if you can , then you and I are still not from the same background , like , and that really does seem to affect the way they think about a lot of the social issues . Like it really is kind of blinkered in those terms .
Speaker 1And then , adding to that and I think your book conveys this pretty well actually , but it's , it's something that I first Glombed on to , I guess , a book that's 20 years old , down called the discipline line , by Jeff Smith , that talks about how Academia does train you to view certain social problems in certain ways , including ways about , like being seen as a victim is actually good because it gets you accommodations in the meritocratic structure , which is , like not something that would have occurred to my parents , like no one wanted to be seen , as you know , as Someone who could not support themselves , etc . Like that would . There's no benefit to that , really . And so these cultural movements it just changes the whole framework because the one thing I can say you know you talked about occupies a small thing . I'll talk about even smaller thing , but it has tons of left , like , basically , mythology , is my visit when I was a young gutter punk to Seattle , which was my first time leaving the southeast outside of , you know , living with my dad in Canada for a little bit , but , um , and my first encounter with leftist , you know , not in a zine form and I became a reaction for five years , like it was .
It was just my first encounter with that . It was utterly unattractive to me , right , and even though they were fighting about things I very much cared about , which was like the gutting a whole area , as in my case it was the gutting of the urban southeast , but they weren't the . The culture that was particularly , I mean , in the late 90s , is probably even worse , but the culture that , in the way they spoke , was totally alienating to someone who was not college educated and I wasn't , yet I was 19 years old .
Speaker 1So , um , and what I find interesting and I guess what surprised me , uh , and this is a small thing , but the amount of like language changes that I used to know from academia , when I was coming up in academia , in the early arts , like that , we had this particular way of speaking but no one else spoke that way .
Speaker 1Um , it's different than now , but you know , I remember talking about heteronormativity with that and the other um , and One of the things when I was abroad , I mean , uh , I was outside of the united states , actually when most of these movements that you were writing about were happening , and I just remember being shocked how the academic language of activists moved into media Significantly faster than I'd ever seen before .
Speaker 1Um , so , for example , uh , latinx , which you know , I , I , I do non-gen , I do non-gender it , but I don't use it because I , it doesn't sound natural in English or Spanish , or I just say Latin , but , um , it never made sense to me to indicate something by making by , by , uh , creating a word that doesn't work in either language , when you can just say the word in English and it's non-gendered , um , but uh , nonetheless , I saw that change move into media , like in three to five years from when it was being Kind of adopted in academia .
Speaker 1Another one I saw was BIPOC , which happened incredibly fast , um , one I first saw in academia in the mid-autines and then , like by 2020 , it's being used in common parlance in in the broader media , and that indicated to me something had changed , both around strategy and around like cultural Uh , saturation , that this that like left you know left academic ways of speaking were being adopted in a media Super fast but they weren't being adopted in like the regular world . Um that it was becoming like a cultural indicator Even more than it had been in the past , not a cultural indication of just education , but a cultural indicator of like Politics as an identity , um . So it did seem to me for that to happen . It also meant that like these activist changes were happening at fairly elite institutions and getting into like editorial boards and whatnot , significantly faster than they had had then they had not really done in the 90s and early odds .
Speaker 2So I mean the . The way that I would put it is um , the , the , the advantage of staying abreast of the correct terminology , the correct signaling , the correct sort of cultural positioning on these things . That advantage is a veblin good right , so like for , for those watching at home . A veblin good is , uh , it's something that has the , the unusual circumstance where the higher the price goes , the higher the demand goes . Right , um , and what I mean by that is that the more Difficult it becomes to stay abreast of and express the correct vocabulary and to know by pop rather than poc , and to know latinx , um rather than latino , latino , who you know , be able to identify bell hooks , quote , or to be able to um Discuss , you know who gloria anzaldua is right . Um , the the higher the bar gets for Maintaining that kind of knowledge , the more attractive it is to the people who pursue that standpoint . Right , because it becomes more exclusionary . Right like the , the , the laurel of having that position Increases as the difficulty in maintaining that position increases as well . And you can sort of connect this back to what you were saying earlier about not being able to afford a house , right ? We have this whole sort of discourse of the economically screwed millennial , um , the degree to which that is or is not true is sort of challenged by some people . Certainly , it's true that the ability to buy your own home is dramatically harder than it was for some prior generations , um , because of a chronic under supply problem and now , high interest rates as well as high prices .
Speaker 2Um , if you are someone who finds yourself in the position of being highly educated , uh , and also living in a situation in which the cost of housing has never been higher in relative or absolute terms , the cost of medical care has never been higher in relative or absolute terms , the cost of education and child child care has never been higher in absolute or relative terms , um , then you might say what kind of Virtues , therefore , can I pursue ? Right , like ? What kind of goods can I pursue ? What is , what is the thing that I can go after if I just don't believe all every I'm ever going to have the house with the garage in the car and the picket fence , I think it becomes more attractive to uh sort of want to cover yourself in virtue , uh , through the means of your adherence to a particular sort of worldview of . Well , you know what it means to be a good person and it's worth saying .
You know , as we speak , it appears that , uh , ibram kendi's anti-racist center at BU is in the process of disintegrating , right , um , but the existence of that of a uh , you know specifically anti-racist center , funded to the point of like 43 million dollars , I think , since it started in 2020 , um , that should be a clue to us that , you know , this stuff became the language of institutions , right ? I mean , I think that you know , a lot of people sort of want to push back at me on this , but I think it is just genuinely the case that , um , the language of institutions is the language of social justice .
Speaker 1Absolutely .
Speaker 2Yeah , and it's not just , it's not just the usual suspects , right , like the defense department , if you read their press releases now , right , they do . The stations of the cross for , uh , social justice Defense manufacturers use this language . Uh , investment banks use this language . Private prison companies use this language . Right , um , the , as you said , the takeover of from academia to media , but then also from media to everywhere else , was just stunningly rapid .
Speaker 2And the interesting thing about it is you almost can't find anyone who defends the sincerity of any of this . Like , I know . No one who says like , oh , yeah , I know , it's , it's really great that rathion Uh , has a , you know , a pride float in the pride parade . Now , no one says that . Like , it's great that goldman sacks , uh , you know , has anti-racist language in their employee handbook . No one , no one trusts it . Everyone sees it as bullshit . And yet it still exists . Right , there is still this , this internal pressure to sort of make those sort of signals happen . Um , and in many ways , you know , as much as I'm critical , I , I I can only admire the incredible memetic power of this discourse . Right , like the , the ability of this meme . Right , because all this , all this social justice talk , you can see it like as a meme , the . The speed and rapidity , uh and comprehensiveness of with which it spread is really remarkable .
Speaker 1To speak to your point , I was taking a um .
Speaker 1I teach a class on um , on college readiness to students who , uh , who , opt to take it , but mostly students from low social economic Are quote racially disadvantaged background , and again already speaks to what you're talking about .
Speaker 1But we'd expect that that's a state institution . We went to a bunch of the universities and I went to BYU and BYU probably , you know , is about as conservative as you're going to get , unless you're going to like Liberty University or something , um , and even at that school , where they were bragging about praying before every class , they were also pointing out that they had a Diversity , inclusion and belonging . They didn't say equity but belonging program and it just . I was like , if even BYU , which represents the most conservative faction of , like the LDS , is using this language , it actually means it's permeated culture so significantly that we can't even say that it's even particularly strongly associated with the left , our wokeism , our whatever . Because even BYU , which openly touts as conservative values , so much so that it's risk accreditation for certain programs , still fills the need to use this language to appeal to I'm not even quite sure who .
Speaker 2But it's BYU still , a school where unmarried students are forbidden from having conceptual sex with each other .
Speaker 1Absolutely . And as is drinking , even if you're over 21 . So , yes , as is having a beard , but it's a very conservative school and I was thinking about that . I was thinking about how there are certain kinds of cultural signifiers we don't do here in Utah , a lot of the ones around gender inclusivity , but even there we just it's not even like in Florida , it's just systemically . We don't talk about it one way or the other and we do talk about diversity and inclusion constantly . It's like a prime value , despite the political context , despite mom's for liberty , despite everything else which does indicate to me that there is some capital to that , and I think you're right that it has to do with the fact that , like other meritocratic goods , no longer seem possible , even to fairly elite people .
Speaker 2So what do you ?
Speaker 1have . I think that it seems bizarre to me that people push back on you , that this has become an institutional value , right ? Because it's like I was actually asking why do you think people push back on you in that ? Because if anything , yes , it might have been loosened a little bit . I mean , we have seen private corporations , dei programs are being wound down because a lot of them , they are expensive but they don't seem to be affected even by their stated goals . So there does seem to be a slight move away from that . But in general it seems to permeate a whole lot of elite and mid-brow culture to an extent that You're right other kinds of cultural movements on the left . Maybe , if we go back to the I'm not sure if Neeluff stuff actually changed language in the same way that this stuff did , but that's the only other time I could think about this None of the Ginex stuff were able to do this , for example .
Speaker 2Right . So the analogy that I would make is to like optimism . So optimism is a philosophy of sort of music criticism that holds that traditionally , pop music has been systematically undervalued by critics who prefer rock music and that , in particular , critics tend to associate the conventions of various kinds of rock music with seriousness and sort of . The official line of optimism is just to say that pop music deserves to be taken as seriously as any other kind and shouldn't be systematically devalued in pop music criticism which , of course , that's perfectly inoffensive Well , optimism actually functions as an actual lived practice , is just like the desire for a hegemonic sort of pop dominance over everything .
Speaker 2And if you actually look at like what I mean the sort of original generation of Pop-Temists , theorists like Khalif Asena would say , oh , the point of optimism is not that pop is better than other kinds of music . But if you actually look at the people who invoke optimism in 2023 , it's people who very much believe that pop is better than other kinds of music . So my analogy here is because pop-tems must become the dominant sort of mode in music criticism . Publications like Pitchfork are just , I mean , it is almost .
Speaker 1I thought they were insufferable back in the day when they were indie rock elitists , but I actually find them way more insufferable now .
Speaker 2Yeah , but also and it's not just Pitchfork , I mean what were once considered the temples of rockism so-called like Rolling Stone and Spin have gone very hard in the direction of popism in order to demonstrate we're not this thing , okay . So what's my point ? My point is that people who sort of associate themselves with pop-tomism want to pretend that this is not true . They still talk about pop-tomism as though it's like a rebel child who is fighting against the man . They describe a world that's now sort of decades out of date in terms of what is actually happening at sort of major music publications . But I would challenge any of your listeners to just find any negative reviews of K-pop . Just find any . Find any negative reviews of K-pop in major publications . But the people who push pop-tomism insist that it's still 2004 , right that . Insist that nothing has changed , insist that pop is still disrespected .
Speaker 2And we're in a world in which there are multiple universities that have Taylor Swift classes . There's a Taylor Swift academic conference . Nyu made one of its essay questions for its application about Taylor Swift , right . But that position of being the sort of the reviled underdog is very comfortable for people . It's emotionally sort of soothing . They like to be in the position of sort of like saying the whole world is against me and I'm on my own . It's very much the same way with a lot of the sort of social justice sort of nomenclature and vocabulary and orientation where , you know , I was in a humanities PhD program in the middle of the 2010s where obviously social justice politics were just the dominant , I mean just hegemonic .
Speaker 1Yeah , you can question it . My friends in composition and English programs literally , and a lot of them are leftist even , but if they question certain things they were pretty much chased out of the program .
Speaker 2That was the scenario . But you would then go to conferences in the field and people would say and the keynote speech would be all about how you know , social justice politics are forbidden . Rebel discourse in the academy . That's why people sort of you know maintain the fiction that this is not the language of institutions , because they'd rather sort of lose no belief and win right and they would rather pretend that they're still , like they sort of be legal underdogs , in part because they can then claim that their ideas have never been tried in order to see their failure .
Speaker 1To me , though , that's not . I mean , I think you're correct . It's just that part of this is not new . I remember , like Juno Diaz , I mean before he got canceled talking about you know how we still complaining about I believe it was Alice Monroe winning some prize and talking about how , you know , no one read Tony Morrison in college and I was like I had two whole classes devoted to Tony Morrison in 2002 . What ?
Speaker 2For a long for a long period . Beloved was the single most assigned book in American colleges and universities .
Speaker 1So you know it's . And it often leads and I think there also has often leads some very superficial literary comparisons , like people who compare Alice Walker , maya Angelou and Tony Morrison as if they're the same kind of writer , and I'm like the only thing they share is that black women like those are radically different writers and , frankly , radically different qualities of writers to . So it's it is . It seems wild to me that that would be , that people would pretend that I read a whole lot of Alice Monroe in college and not a whole lot of Alice Walker , even in where I was educated in the fairly deep self . So it was it . I just rolled my eyes at that and that was . That was like 1213 years ago , and it seems like that rhetoric has only intensified and it is the one thing I say has changes .
Speaker 2I used to associate that primarily with like fairly elite discourse patterns , but I think you see it in like nerd culture ubiquitously to of course you know so you know the ultimate underdog , star Wars , you know the most powerful entertainment franchise in history , or whatever , but but you know someone made fun of someone's lunchbox 20 years ago , so that therefore , it is permanently underdog .
Speaker 1Yeah , even like the pretending that we still live in a , in a world where the only best selling like sci fi or fantasy authors are white men , and I'm like that hasn't really been the case in about at least a decade . I mean , it did happen later in literary fiction , but like it or you know , oh , it's only like old white dudes who play D&D . That's just dramatically not true anymore . I mean , it's these cultural discourses interest me because it does seem like the denial of hegemony seems to be a part of the project , and I guess , to bring it back to something you were talking about in the beginning , but I guess I do want your thoughts on this . I assume that a lot of these people are sincere on one hand , but there is a kind of cultural capital mongering involved in this on the other , and those two impulses do seem hard to square because one of these is cynical and one of these is not . I think they're both true , but how do you square that ?
Speaker 2Yeah , I just , I just think that we're very self the deceiving beings , right , like I mean , I think that you know it's also we . We sort of lived and it's it's hard to know what anyone sort of sincerely thought , because we've lived in for a decade or more in a rhetorical environment which the price for stepping out of line was potentially like personal destruction , right , like
so . So Rob Amari , who is the editor of Compact Magazine and wrote a book called Tierney Inc , came out recently . He said that you can , you know , you can date the dawn of the social justice age to the day in 2013 when Justine Sacco was was canceled . So for everybody out there , justine Sacco was a completely random PR expert PR person , I think who was going on a trip to South Africa and at the airport she tweeted I'm off to South Africa , hope I don't get AIDS . Haha , just kidding , I'm white and , as was sort of a lot of people sort of admitted after , the fact , like that was just a very sort of clumsy attempt at an anti-racist joke , like the idea being that , like you know , she had access to privileges that poor African people didn't . But it really didn't land , but she was in the air . I think it's like a 10-hour flight to Johannesburg or whatever . And so she was in the air and while that happened she faced the most sort of vicious sort of cancellation that's ever happened in the history of men , and Twitter just went insane . I believe she was fired literally before her plane touchdown by her firm because of the , the bad press , which must have been a hell of a thing to discover when you turn your phone back on when you get to the airport . But you know , that sort of has been the sort of rhetorical environment that we've been in for a long time , right Like it's just it's hard to have a normal politics or to have a sense of who's sincere and who's not , or who's playing politics or who's not , who's really on the team and who's not , when people you know most people just sort of fear sort of the axe swinging against them in getting fired , like David Shore did , or getting mobbed , like Lee Fong did , or etc . Etc .
Speaker 2There was a woman who trying to think of what the university was , but she had . There was a protest and a trucker had parked his truck in order to prevent the protesters from getting hit by cars because they are obstructing the roadway , and this white college student thanked the trucker and said , if it weren't for you , for you , these , all these people would be speed bumps . And then a black student heard that and said that she was saying , oh , all these people would make good speed bumps . In other words , inverting sort of the intent of what she had to say , and she faced enormous backlash on campus and became a pariah . That's just not like normal and we're not really built to be operating in sort of places and sort of discursive environments like that . It just it distorts everything so much and makes the incentive so fucked up that it's hard to say who's sincere about what I mean .
Speaker 2You know people assume that , like , going to you know a , you know being in an English department and a PhD program in you know the mid 2010s , as I was , I mean I was in sort of like a assessment and more stat sea sort of stuff , so I guess it's a little different . But you know people assume that everybody has like was like super overbearingly woke and it was like well , officially they were right , but almost everyone you know was pretty clear about the fact that they were doing it out of sort of self-defense of purposes , right , like I mean , look , they were liberal Democrats and they believed in a lot of the stuff we were reading and talking about , but you just never knew , because everybody was operating . But from behind this layer of armor , saying I'm trying to get a job in the humanities as a professor in the 2010s , I have to be 100% Teflon when it comes to the shit that I say politically and I'm just not going to hang myself out there , and so that's where we've been for a long time .
Speaker 1Well , I think one of the problems of academia is there's a whole lot of predicated on modeling , a kind of coercive theory of mind , even before wokeness . I mean like just picking the wrong advisor as you know in your career , and there's no way for you to know that unless you're hyper socially aware when you're in a program . But I totally see how that culture plus this is , plus Twitter . I mean , one of the things I was shocked by that happened in the 2010s was was the number of academics who were willing to do things that I was always told you never did on Twitter , seemingly to some kind of competitive advantage to prove their politics , and that that was sort of shocking to me , because you know , I guess I came when I was coming through school and you and I were about the same age .
Speaker 1I dropped out of a PhD program before I really got into it , so but I have a terminal degree , I get my MFA and I just remember being told don't blog like ever , like that you will regret it until you have tenure . And I have seen stuff since then that has been frankly shocking in the way people will go after other academics on Twitter in ways that betray both a fast out politics , but also that it does seem to be a way to like do interdepartmental fights in a way you couldn't before , because now it's out in the public . And I also basically heard from you know , my more liberal psychological friends that this was actually a good thing , and I'm like why do you think it's a good thing ? You're just encouraging people to hide their positions and and totally engage in double think . And now you really don't know . You're like , as a signaling apparatus is no longer works .
Speaker 1You know like if everybody signals some level of this , except for the most reprobate people who make a career out of being reprobate then this as a signaling function doesn't even mean that much and I got weird looks , but it's kind of what I've thought about it , because it's like I've mentioned with BYU , if this is , this is hegemonic , it also means that , like , almost like a good portion of the people who do this at least have double think around it .
Speaker 1I'm not going to say they don't believe it , but they believe contradictory things . And it really shows up to me when you see , when , like you look at like voting patterns versus expression patterns and whatnot , where people feel more safe , and it's just like , yeah , this is not as deep as people seem to think it is , or there's harder limits to it than people seem to realize , and and I think that that's interesting , but it does kind of bring me to the beginning of your book , to kind of circle back around . How does it feel like , even though the , even though the progressives kind of sort of got what they want in the case of Joe Biden , that 2020 just didn't happen ?
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean I , a lot of people who have done interviews with , asked , like you know , what motivated you to write this book ? And for me it was just a feeling that I was going crazy , because I was sort of it was like 2022 . I sold . I sold the book officially in May of 2022
. I was working on the probably started working on the proposal in February or March and I just thought like I looked around and I said , weren't we just talking about like a revolutionary moment , right ? I mean , it's really interesting because the sort of non partisan politics , the sort of outside of establishment politics , outside of Congress and sort of thing like the sort of activist left , was supposed to be in a revolutionary moment , whereas Joe Biden was supposed to be the extremely safe , moderate Clinton night kind of choice who wouldn't do anything . And it's kind of like flipped right , where the activist less appears more or less to have given up .
Speaker 1Right , black Lives Matter collapsed under all the graft and all the grift , or whatever you call it , and there's increasing disgust with the organizations of Black Lives Matter within the Black Activist class and weirdly silent about the problems with , with the , with the unaccountability and the 50 organizations , many of which turned out to be grifting because there was no control over the , over the , the hashtag , and I think , interestingly , you're right that I've heard more about that from Black activists and white activists who feel very uncomfortable talking about it as if they're seating some point to the right , and that always makes me uncomfortable , freddie , because it when , when we refuse to talk about that stuff , it makes it look like we're totally afraid to deal with these events , and I guess because , well , we are .
Speaker 2But yeah , we should go back to what you're saying no , but I mean look like , yeah , I mean look like , as with essentially any progressive movement you can name , the sort of anti racist slash , black power slash , civil rights slash , whatever movement its history is strewn with with grifters and with cons and etc . Etc . That in and of itself doesn't tell you much about the politics underlying it . But again it gets back to the moment , right , where who was going to be the one to stick their neck out and say , hey , where's all this fucking money going ? Right , I looked at a ton of numbers for the book and it's , you know , there's just , there's just many different sort of estimates . There's , no , there's no doubt that the amount of money donated in the name of Black Lives Matter in various ways was in the tens of billions of dollars and it at least rivals 9 11 as the biggest overall charitable contribution sort of thing in history . And nobody knows where the money went . There's a reporter for New York magazine who is Black , so he's offered at least a degree of protection about this who wrote a couple of essential stories about the fact that you know , hey , this just looks like people are just spending at some houses and a lot of it's missing . You know what he knows . But you know who in you know , november of 2020 was going to say boy , you know , it sure seems like there's a shitload of money getting sort of pushed around and absolutely minimal coherence about what , who is getting what and what it's for and where it's going to go . Nobody was going to make that . No one's going to be the person to stick their neck out and say that at the time , and if they were , they were probably conservative until they'd be ignored anyway .
Speaker 2You know , for me , mr Richard , to the point about Joe Biden , you know he's an establishment politician . He's a president , you know , and all presidents are work criminals . There's a million things that I wish he'd do differently . I do think that he is the best president of my lifetime , barring some sort of you know terrible sort of collapse and barring him invading Iran or something he's . You know he's been much more aggressive with expanding government spending and the sort of the role of the social state than I possibly could have imagined .
Speaker 2And you know , if you're someone like me , it's an uncomfortable moment to be in , where the activist left sort of collapses in on itself , where many of the people who sort of considered themselves part of the activist left suddenly started pretending like they weren't into this . You know , I mean , this is one of the weird things Again , like it was the reason I wrote the book , because it just was like I knew individual people who had been blaring and bleeding about Black Lives Matter every day for a year and a half , who just sort of stopped when it became clear that nothing was going to happen and when a bunch of people just sort of suddenly wanted to move on . And then meanwhile , right like the sort of the ultimate establishment arian , joe Biden , the ultimate insider , right like the senator from Mastercard who had one of the most horrific records as a senator in the entirety of the 1990s as a Democrat , you know for him to sort of be delivering where the activist left failed . It's not a comfortable position for me to be in .
Speaker 1Hmm , I'm not as much as a fan as Joe Biden , as you , although I agree that he might be the best president of our lifetime , but that's I mean , it's a damning low bar , permanently low bar , yeah . Yeah , it's given that my lifetime starts with Reagan , my entire lifetime is a series of disappointments around executive .
Speaker 2Right .
Speaker 1But , um , and if I'd have been born ? I mean , I guess I was technically born in the Carter administration , but I don't remember it , but that would also have been equally disappointing , really . So you know , I do think it's interesting and I do think it's interesting that I don't think Joe Biden is going to get a lot of credit for this either .
Speaker 2It looks like he's going to lose , which is just insane to me , Like I don't .
Speaker 2You know , the economy is pretty damn good right now . It's just the vibes are off and people think people think the economy is worse than it is , because I'm convinced that part of the reason people think the economy is worse than it is is because , like influencer finance things like on TikTok , on YouTube , on Instagram , like the whole world of , like finance gurus and influencers or whatever they have a like a permanent sort of incentive to say that the economy is about to collapse . And if you go on YouTube and click around and look at the various YouTube videos , all the videos without the most views are those that say that we're about to have the next great depression . Right , and I really think that that might be sort of helping to drag down Joe Biden's numbers , but he got I mean , like he's I guess he's still paying a price for getting us out of Afghanistan , which is one of the best things that a president has done in my lifetime , you know . So it's also weird and frustrating .
Speaker 1Yeah , I'm . I am torn on the economic data . I do think the economy is way better than I would have expected it to be , frankly , and yet I also think some of the malaise is real . So it's it's very difficult for me to parse what's going on and it's also very difficult for me to imagine what's going to happen and I'll say Trump wins in 2024 and , like he's not in prison , doesn't die whatever . I also don't see like the kind of response to Trump round two even though theoretically it might be more dangerous than Trump round one being the same because these people have deactivated in , are exhausted , right , like I , just like when people talk about Trump . I just can't see it being that heightened for another four years .
Speaker 2I can guarantee you that we will not have the same women's march , right , the women's march was like the biggest protest in American history , or whatever , with the pink pussy hats and everything . That's not happening for Trump . Part two Right , and you're right , I think , exhausted . I think exhausted , burnt out , shell , shocked , like you know , there's all this talk about this , like about a vibe shift or whatever , and you know , I'm naturally skeptical of that kind of language , but I do think that things have changed .
Speaker 2But the biggest thing is just that , like , no one has the fucking energy to do this anymore , right , like and this is this was sort of a core sort of message of the book is just that , like , I'm not sure if this analogy made it into the book , but I've used it before which is that after 9 , 11 , right , one of the things people said is we must be eternally vigilant .
Speaker 2And we have to be eternally vigilant . And you say we have to keep an eye on everywhere , we have to keep a special eye on everywhere , and you say where do we need to look especially ? And they'd say everywhere . We'd have to look everywhere , right , and the point that you had to make , you wanted to make these people , is like , if it's eternal , it cannot be vigilance , right , and if it's universal , then you're not . Actually , if you're keeping a you know a close eye on everywhere , you're not keeping a close eye on anywhere , right , and it's not possible for people to maintain this perpetual state of emotional excitation all the time . We're not built as as , as sort of as , animals to do that . And one of the demands of the George Floyd moment was to to was to maintain that same feeling in perpetuity . That could never have happened . It's just asking too much of people . And then , when there was a failure to sort of make structural change or administrative change in the name of George Floyd , it guaranteed that nothing was going to happen .
Speaker 1Yeah , I mean , we got we got some cultural change and that was about it , and even that cultural change hasn't stuck around particularly long .
Speaker 1I mean , I I am fascinated by , by a thesis that I've had , that 9 11 has become the thing that we all kind of claim we've gotten over , but our whole fundamental attitude towards security being everything and that being the primary motivator for everything , has infiltrated all of society in ways that , to me , are a little bit shocking , like the . It is true that that , like most long-roof terrorists in America have been of some degree right wing , but the amount of fear put on , say , like I said , right wing terrorism , for example , it actually feels to me similar to the amount of peer put on Islamic terrorism in in the odds , because it's still relatively rare and for it to be counted as , like we , particularly in 2020 , and this is something that I was going to ask you , you don't talk about as much in your book but all the civil war talk , that I thought was just absurd . You know that I was just like you . Literally think , like the proud boys are going to lead a war against , like liberals , and the military is just going to let it happen , like that , and you're talking about that in a way like I remember these interviews from 538 to MPR that were talking about that and if you pushed on people they'd be like , okay , we don't actually mean that .
Speaker 1We mean something like an increase of domestic terrorism . And and my response was kind of like we've actually had a deficit of domestic terrorism in the last you know , since the
late 90s . Frankly , if you look at like the long deray of 20th century American history , only during like World War II and the post-war consensus were we not a particularly violent country . So not to say that , it's not to say that this is good , but it doesn't seem to me to be this , this new thing .
Speaker 1And I remember talking to people even old people who who remembered the 70s , telling me like , oh , we've never been this divided . And I was like did I ? Did you just say the 70s basically didn't happen , like we were assassinating political figures all the time , like , yeah , what are we on ?
Speaker 2But I mean , you know , like I would use the term safetyism to sort of refer to the sort of cross , sort of cross ideological American sort of assumption . And you can totally see , you know , like liberal helicopter parents who are the kinds of people who would swear up and down that they would never be influenced by 9 , 11 . But where their approach to life and to parenting is still sort of based on the sort of the sense of like perpetual fear and we have to put security above all other things . And I know his daughter , I think she's like 11 years old and she's in a basketball league and one of her teammates took a bad elbow across the face , then she broke her nose and she had a lot of blood coming out of her nose , which is unfortunate , but she'll be fine and you know these things happen . But the league didn't just stop , you know , cancel the game and send everybody home . They then sent emails to all the parents saying that they were offering access to therapist services for any of the kids who witnessed that and needed additional support .
Speaker 2And it's like , you know , the sense that there's a real weird combination of a security state with a sort of rapaciously therapeutic approach to everything , right , like this constant , constant , constant expansion of therapy as , like the dominant mental model of American life , that is , you know , incredibly discouraging for me . I mean , I'm almost happy to know that , like , as our political system seems to be sort of slowly shuffling a little bit more in the direction of the kind of politics that I have , I just become more and more alienated by my culture all the time , so I always have something to write about . But the sense that , like you know , trauma has become the sort of definition of how we understand various elements of human suffering that the therapeutic model whether it's actually in therapy or just people using therapy concepts and vocabulary all the time , I mean , just slide so gracefully into the assumption that you know you can't bring liquids onto a plane , right ?
Speaker 1Yeah , it does seem like the revenge of feel reef in some ways . You know , the triumph of the therapeutic to the point . You know you've talked about your mental health issues . I don't talk about mine as much , but I actually am diagnosed with severe PTSD and the trauma talk I actually find I thought I would find it liberating Because , oh well , finally , like this part of my life is now in popular discourse .
Speaker 1I actually find it incredibly alienating because the threshold for what , for what counts in the identification with it is somewhat terrifying to me and you know , maybe it's my own psychological issues , I don't know , but it is something that that does not sit well with me to see us like talk about everything . I mean it started with the , with the switching of offense to triggering , like as if you know and trigger warnings which I , which a lot of people who you know had PTSD , warned were not the way it was being used and even a left culture didn't actually mirror trauma triggers at all and that you know it's not that easily predictable nor obvious and that is only intensified . I thought maybe we'd be moving away from . My first concern actually goes about back about 1520 years when I started seeing language of social justice being framed in psychological language , such as microaggressions , which is a psychological thing , and an implicit and explicit bias , which we yes , we've moved away from a little bit , but that was a huge thing in the team . And now , and collapsing all that . I mean that was Abraham X Kennedy's big move , even though I actually like parts of his first book , but like the whole , like we need to bigotry , systemic racism and implicit bias should all be the same thing .
Speaker 1Racism was like wait , why would you do that ? Those are , those have different fixes . They have different demands on people . Some of them are easier to tackle than others . Like you know , certain policy decisions you're going to make aren't going to do anything about implicit bias . Certain , bigotry , like you know , is dangerous between individuals , but it but unless it , like , dominates the culture , it's not nearly as a big a problem as systemic racism . Why would you collapse ? All those things ?
And similarly , I feel that way with trauma , to the point that now I mean , yes , you and I are both going to sound like old guys complaining about tick tock , but like psychological conditions being seen as positive identities is a little intense for me and and I think this is a person who really thinks we did need to destigmatize mental health . Like you know , the people could talk about this stuff . I just didn't think like talking about it meant talking like now . These are like who we are .
Speaker 2I mean , look like one of my obsessions is just the way that perfectly reasonable ideas are downstream of absurd behaviors and expressions that are sort of sort of taken underneath , the sort of I just have those reasonable ideas . So , like I said , optimism before . Right , the sort of the like boilerplate , sort of stock definition of what optimism is and was for , is perfectly fine . Right In the world , optimism is if I say I don't care for the music of Ariana Grande on Twitter , someone will dox me right and try to burn my house down . Right , like that thing . That's what sort of downstream from there , trauma talk is very much the same . Right , there is a . There was a tweet that I saw that I thought was pretty funny , and it's just that it's just as a . Oh , I'm sorry , I didn't know . You have trauma . You can go back to being mean to me now . Right , which is , in other words , trauma .
Speaker 2Talk was not supposed to be a free floating excuse for you to do and want and whatever you want . Right , like , trauma talk was not supposed to be sort of this excuse . Architecture that sort of sets you up in such a way that it enables you to say everything that I want is what I want and what I should get , and anything that I don't get is is injustice . And if you get mad about the way that I act , and that's ableism , because I can't help it because of my trauma . And this is why , like I think you know , medical things should stay in the medical field , why we shouldn't have therapy creep into our everyday language , because you know , trauma is real and it's something that needs to be addressed clinically right For many people to be able to live healthy and happy lives . But that's just not helped by someone posting an Instagram meme about trauma .
Speaker 2And one thing that I , you know , I sort of challenge people who are sort of in that world on is you know , does everyone have trauma , which is a question that I think people have a hard time answering . On the one hand , according to the world in which we live now , where again , seeing another little girl , seeing another 11 year old get a broken nose , is now presumed to be a traumatic enough experience to require therapy , then the answer would seem to be yes , right , Because everyone endures hardship in their lives and in their young lives . But the problem with universalizing trauma as an experience is the whole point of that discourse is to create special dispensation for people , right ? I ? You know , I've been saying this for a long time .
Speaker 2The problem was just letting the TikTok kids dictate who has mental illness and was saying , oh sure , they're probably faking it , but they have . But they let them pretend they have Tourette's . Let them pretend they have dissociative identity disorder . Let them say they have borderline personality disorder . What's the harm ? The harm is that we create special accommodations for people who have disabilities , but accommodations are inevitably zero sum right , like , in other words , once you accommodate everyone , it ceases to be an accommodation at all . So , because I write so much about disability and this stuff , I get emails from people and I've gotten a couple from people who are teaching , whether in high school or in college , where you know something like three quarters of the class has a diagnosis that gives them extra time to work on tests and various things such as that .
Speaker 1Yeah , almost everybody has a 504 . And the thing about a 504 accommodation I should be very careful saying this , because it's actually good cost , because you can kind of buy it , because all it takes is a doctor's notice of anything that could possibly require accommodation , and you know some .
Speaker 2But I think here's the essential point though right yeah , At the point where it's like three quarters of the people in a college class have are being given an accommodation on a test , that ceases to be an accommodation for the disabled minority and is now instead a disadvantage for actually the able-bodied minority , right , In other words , that , like at some point in accommodation , when accommodations become universal , they inevitably become just sort of hurting anyone who doesn't necessarily demand the accommodation , which of course continues to incentivize the behavior of more and more people seeking accommodation and diagnosis .
Well , I mean , we've talked about this in terms of education and people can go listen to one of my first interviews , which was with you on education and yeah , you know I work as a teacher . We've known about each other probably for a decade , but one of the things that I We'll just tell you it goes into our classroom design now is we now designed . All accommodations are pre built into the To best as we can . There are some things we can't but that most of the common accommodations are just automatically built into the program For everybody . Because we see that problem , and particularly when it when it's like I have to keep up with Also , I have 220 students and I have to keep up with 110 separate accommodations . I am going to bar actually more than that , probably like 250 and 150 out of 210 Accommodations . I'm just going to build towards the most common accommodations across the board .
Speaker 1Now , that might be progressive , it might not . I am torn on it because I'll tell you what I see . What I see is graduation rates going up but remediation rates at colleges Exploding and then a lot of kids graduating with that . That I think if we tested them Be a lot of them are going to college anymore . That's another trend is changing . But if we tested and we discovered they're entering adulthood with barely functional literacy , right and and so Are these accommodations helping everyone ? Or is it just raising Graduation rates and and I point out , the people who you know , there's just a writer could's about , about wokeness being the reason why this is happening . But I point out to be this happens in conservative states too . It's just framed differently . In Utah it's framed over parent choice , right like , but the state is the same effect . We don't measure as much we . We Moved away from standardized testing , which I will tell I'd be the first person to say we over relied on it in the odds , right . But now my big argument and this is one of the things that can kind of get us to the end of your book about class .
Speaker 1But in all these discussions about diversity in particularly in education , economic diversity has decreased significantly and precipitously .
Speaker 1The the more we move away from Standardized test , and I know you've written about , for example , grade bias and aggregate being actually worse , even racially Down to like skin tone , not just racial type In in grades , and yet no one's calling for us to abolish grades , and that I think you've also written about , I believe on your blog , on your sub-stack , that that we also have seen the way that things like Diversity statements actually code for class Upwardly , so like you have to be a certain social class to write a good diversity statement .
Speaker 1Like there's like to be able to say you've done this in this free internship to help in this , in this social justice cause , which you had to do for free , which would require additional resources , etc .
Speaker 1And it doesn't seem to me . It seems to me that every year I see this whole , there's a there's even less economic diversity in universities , which , on one hand , is indicating that and maybe correctly that people are no longer seeing them as a way out of their out of their social class predicament , and In a perverse way that may be a good thing , but on the other hand , it's also indicating to me that all this diversity is like really , really thick and so that the social justice isn't really helping the people it's saying it's aiming to help . I mean like that to me when I look at , for example , that like Racial poverty as a person in racialized poverty as a percentage has been kind of stagnant since 2010 is something that's like we should be ashamed of that , even from the standpoint of racial justice , and yet that doesn't get brought up very much in all this context .
I mean , look , every , all of these evolutions to how people get into college benefit the rich , right , you know the whole holistic Movement . I mean what ? I guess one of the few sort of things sort of bright spots I've seen this arena is there's more and more understanding that , like , rich kids are always going to be better able to to look at that , to look good in a holistic context , than poor kids , right , the kind of things that flatter the interests of elite colleges like you know who has a better ability to say , oh , yeah , I spent a Peru . I spent my summer in Peru after my sophomore year of high school helping build houses for habitat for humanity . You know who's got a better ability to do that ? A poor kid or a rich kid ? Right , I'm , I'm an avid sailor .
Speaker 2I've been learning , I've been sailing my whole life , right , because these , these colleges that are are academically elite but not Athletically elite , tend to prefer unusual sports , sports that are , you know , not the kind that can are easily afforded by public high schools . You know fencing , things like that . Who's better ready to do that ?
Speaker 1Yeah , I will cross fencing , yeah , yeah , although all sports have become more like , like it costs , I think now a student at a public school , if they don't have a waiver . In my state to play even Basketball will now cost a grand . So it's it's like sports have increasingly , even in the public school context , become An elite thing , unless you are Super poor , like , and can get a full waiver right .
Speaker 2Meanwhile , you know , one of the things that the SAT did right was it enabled kids who otherwise had no ability to Distinguish themselves in those terms and say hey look , ivy League . I'm coming from poverty and a deprived background , but I just rip the SATs in half . Take a look at me . There's many sort of success stories of people who were in that position .
Speaker 2It is really yeah , I mean , one of the totally bizarre things about this is , like , if you say you want a holistic approach to who you choose , then what are you doing ? Removing information , right , like if you're dropping the SAT , well , the SAT is providing some information . If you want to look at people holistically , include that information . If you want to broaden the number of factors that you look at , that's great , but don't say you're doing it in a holistic sense . I mean , one of the things that's important to say is , like , you know , sats and grades correlate fairly strongly , but not perfectly , and that's exactly what we want , because it means that they are capturing different kinds of academic excellence . Right , and you know , grades reward the grade grubbers , the grinders , that . They reward the people who , you know , follow the directions . The SATs tend to reward the kids who Are sort of intrinsically brilliant but who may not have it together to actually get their shit in on time , right , but the the bigger thing , though , is just that , like , none of that really matters . Right , because the majority of American high school students never even applies to a college that rejects more students than they accept . Right , the vast majority of American college students go to colleges that are not anything like like elite or exclusive it's . I think less than 30% of American colleges in university is reject more students than they accept . But even that's misleading because those schools tend to have unusually small student bodies . So , like , as a percentage of the total number of of , like you know , 18 to 22 year olds , the number of people going to these schools is just a tiny sliver of humanity . So you look at affirmative action .
Speaker 2I support race-based affirmative action For issues , for reasons of reparations for slavery . But if you just think about what's the addressable population there , right , like we had a month-long national conversation on affirmative action . We're talking about the black kids who apply to college . A majority of black students don't apply to college after high school . And then we're looking at the kids who are not in the same school . We're looking at the kids who apply to elite colleges . We're now we're at a small slice of the you know , black 18 to 20 year old population .
Speaker 2But then we're also talking about the kids who are good enough where they're in the conversation to get into an elite school , right , so they're not like , like where it's not even a In the realm of possibility . But they're also not the kids who are strong enough where they're gonna get any even without an affirmative action . Slice
the slot . You look at like that slice of humanity , and I mean the tiny percentage it's , it's it's completely back of the envelope map , but I've looked at it before it , like maybe being like 15 to 20,000 black kids across the country , right , right , where , whereas you know the untold millions of black kids who don't go to college at all , we know are in much , much worse shape and there's just no conversation about them , right ? But this gets back to the very beginning of what we were talking about , right , it's the path dependency of only seeing the meritocratic apparatus as the means through which we create social justice .
Speaker 1Yes , I mean , I don't think everybody needs a , a traditional academic education anymore , and I don't just mean that in the college , since also high schools having Moving away from vocational training and let's be honest as to why it's expensive , that's why they moved away from it wasn't like , yes , we got this big push in the 90s to push everyone in the college . It's absolutely true , but a Shop program is expensive and I Really do believe we would be better served Fixing high schools , putting viable , you know , putting making them , bringing the arts back to poor schools , but also like getting a vocational programs in them , in the poor schools , and then just Strengthening our basic math and reading , flowing down the number of standards that we do and teaching the ones that we do well , and for the majority of Poor kids of color , we would probably do a lot more for them , like , but then , beyond even that , you and I both know Industrial policy is gonna do even more than that . So you know it's , you know , I think , when you know , yes , we can make the schools a lot better and yes , we should be making the primary and secondary Schools a lot better , which seems to be totally out of the conversation , or it's conceited as somehow right-wing point to talk about , like decent public schools for everybody , I guess because it was co-opted by the charter movement in the 90s and and odds and odd teams . So maybe I get how we got there , but it seems to me that like I don't know , having jobs for people who don't need degrees would actually probably do even more , and then we can fix the schools too , like and right now we do have jobs for them . They're just not very good , but it does look like for geopolitical reasons , we're going to be reintegrating a lot of industrial production into the United States over the next 20 years .
Speaker 1So who knows , like some of this may happen anyway , and I guess that's I . If anything takes to wind out of my cells is that is that that all this seems to be kind of epiphenomenal , too larger and , frankly , somewhat historically arbitrary factors . I mean , one of the reasons why I think Joe Biden has been progressive from your point of view and I think Fairly , is having things just come up that have to be addressed for the fucking country to work , even in a capitalist way , and so they've had to , like start reversing certain policies . It's like you know not to sound like a vocal Marxist and not to say subjective conditions don't matter , but some of this is just material reality coming to bear right , you know .
Speaker 2I just think it's remarkable to that I'm 42 years old to have lived through the beginning of the Reagan , of Reaganism right , I mean , I was , I was a baby but and the acceptance of some of the core tenants of neoliberalism by the Democrats the Clinton administration being In many ways the epitome of American Neoliberalism and with even Democrats , you know , having a protectionist Industrial policy was just totally , totally contrary to where the Democrats were going and we , you know offshoring and globalization was good for everyone and NAFTA was good and the economy just doesn't work that way anymore and you know To where . Now there's , like you know , talk of a lot of companies on shoring their jobs again and all this work to sort of create domestic solar production and domestic , you know , chip manufacturing . It's the fact that you know everything old is new again . I guess it does sort of feel like , you know , in some ways , politically we're just caught in a cycle that I'm never gonna escape .
Speaker 1Yeah , it's , it's kind of a bummer , I interesting . You and I are almost the exact same age . That probably makes some sense , but it's . It's something that I thought a lot about , particularly in the focus on education , where , on one hand , I think we've Entirely over focused on education since the Clinton period , as if it's gonna be a magic for panacea to turn everybody into lower management for the entire planet .
Speaker 1I guess , yeah , that seemed to be the vision and and we have finally given that up , but Now it just there's still the focus on education , but we're not even talking about making like public schools better anymore , it's just like him and get a few people into better universities at a time , you know and I think this needs to be noted where fewer and fewer kids are even trying that just kids of color , kids period , right , you know one of the things I was thinking about when you were talking about the models for for people being rejected . I'm like , well , I think maybe people are thinking about these schools as if it's the late 90s and there was a ton of competition for them and it's when , you know , the first round of Millennials were entering and they were . There was like basically a ton of demand . That hasn't been true for like Seven eight years now .
Speaker 1Yeah , so , and I definitely like there's several colleges , even universities , here in Utah that accept everybody like they don't .
Speaker 2Look , the huge number of American colleges accept essentially everyone who applies if , if you I mean . Part of the reason why the affirmative action Debate is sort of pointless is that like , if , if you can cut a tuition check or sign a promissory note and you have a high school diploma , you you can be a college student somewhere . And the kind of kids who we're talking about , who are like , are not gonna get into Harvard . Maybe the black kids who are not gonna get into Harvard if , in fact , harvard honors the intent of the Supreme Court Ruling which they probably won't , but you know they're . So they're gonna go to Brown , don't be fine , you know what I'm saying . Like they'll go to Dartmouth or to Williams , right Like there . They're not the people that we should be worried about .
Speaker 1Yeah , yeah , there are any big takeaways you'd like to end off of , and then I'll let you plug , obviously plug the book .
Speaker 2But right , I , you know , here's what I'll
say . I so what I researched this at the beginning of the book writing process , knowing that I would not included in the book because I don't want to , like , put anyone on blast for Things that they said and did when they were 19 , 20 , 21 years old . But , you know , there was a sort of a thing that sort of presaged the , the 2010s and this moment , you know , and social justice movement in this sort of woke moment was , you know , happening on college campuses in like the early to mid 2010s , where there was a series of people called it the campus uprising and there was a series of , you know , protests and controversies and issues at colleges like Oberlin and Amherst and Wesleyan and etc . Etc . Yale had a big one where , like , an administrator was sort of In a in a confrontation with a student activist on camera , which sort of which blew up and went viral , you know . Anyway , these college students who sort of were engaged in that stuff have names and those names were in the public record in various forms in various places . Usually I found them in campus newspapers and so I just went to sort of look and sort of follow up on these kids lives and what they were doing .
Speaker 2And I don't think any of them became like Republicans , right .
Speaker 2I don't think any of them like like sort of sort of completely renounced their political ideals , but just about all of them had just sort of been absorbed into the machinery of American upper middle class life , right , like they went out and they became lawyers , you know , I thought one of them was like an environmental lawyer .
Speaker 2I guess that's cool . You know , a bunch of them sort of got job , that at nonprofits where they can sort of , you know , talk about changing the world . That's right , that's right . But by and large they did what kids at elite colleges do , right , which is like they go out and they just become part of the Upper middle class , the ruling class of American society . And these were the kids who do just , you know , a few years before Earlier , I guess , maybe ten years earlier now at this point , but who in a past life had been demanding , you know , revolutionary change on campus . And the whole point of the book for me is to sort of honor the sort of spirit with which they were once fighting , while also acknowledging this is what our system does , right it absorbs revolutionary fervor into the comforts of American middle-class and above life , and that's cyclical and it's not going anywhere anytime soon .
Speaker 1Yeah , I definitely agree . Yeah , All right . And where can people find your work , freddie ?
Speaker 2You can find me at Freddie , the board on substack that I come . More importantly , how elites ate . The social justice movement is In bookstores now and there are some like non-amazon , non-barns and noble options out there . If you want to buy it , but it's already so you can go to the physical store and check it out .
Speaker 1I agree , have it . Thank you so much .