This is a 10:1 compression and refactoring of George Packer’s When the Culture War Comes for the Kids
The parents on the fortunate ledge 0f this chasm gaze down, vertigo stuns them. Far below they see a dim world of processed food, obesity, divorce, addiction, online-education scams, stagnant wages, outsourcing, rising morbidity rates—and they pledge to do whatever they can to keep their children from falling…By kindergarten, the children of elite professionals are already a full two years ahead of middle-class children, and the achievement gap is almost unbridgeable.
The need for equality and the role of merit.
The claim of democracy doesn’t negate meritocracy, but they’re in tension. One values equality and openness, the other achievement and security. Neither can answer every need. To lose sight of either makes life poorer. The essential task is to bring meritocracy and democracy into a relation where they can coexist and even flourish.
In 2014 the front line of social advocacy hardened
This new mood was progressive but not hopeful…At the heart of the new progressivism was indignation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice against groups of Americans who had always been relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity…Over time the new mood took on the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology…its biggest influence came in realms more inchoate than policy: the private spaces where we think and imagine and talk and write, and the public spaces where institutions shape the contours of our culture and guard its perimeter…You could almost believe they spoke for a majority—but you would be wrong…The new progressivism was a limited, mainly elite phenomenon.
“For better or worse, it’s all identity now.”
The battleground of the new progressivism is identity…progressive politics meant thinking in groups. In politics, identity is an appeal to authority—the moral authority of the oppressed: I am what I am, which explains my view and makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts out with the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself—often a dead end, a trap from which there’s no easy escape and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited one—a new moral caste system that ranks people by the oppression of their group identity. It makes race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance—as when Representative Ayanna Pressley said, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”
De Blasio’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism…Carranza has mandated anti-bias training…One training slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture.” It included “Perfectionism,” “Individualism,” “Objectivity,” and “Worship of the Written Word” among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted.
Witchhunt?
At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent—these are qualities of an illiberal politics.
[In Jared Dillian’s Daily Dirtnap, he recounts “I’m not sure if you heard about the spectacle at the Des Moines Register, but here goes. Guy goes to a football game and holds up a sign asking for beer money over Venmo. He gets some money. He gets more money. Then more money. He has $1 million! He donates it to a children’s hospital. Reporter at the Des Moines Register digs up old racist tweets from him when he was 16. The guy who saved the children. Outrage mob forms, digs up old racist and homophobic tweets on the reporter. Pandemonium ensues. Thousands of people canceling subscriptions from the newspaper. Newspaper editors stonewalling. Now death threats. This is where we are. Every day is worse than the last. Tomorrow will be worse than today. Yesterday was worse than the day before. This will continue for the next 20-30 years.”]
[Dave Chappelle, in his Netflix special Sticks and Stones, calls out the prevailing ‘cancel culture’: “If you do anything wrong in your life and I find out about it, I’m gonna try to take everything away from you!”]
It struck me that this would punish kids whom the movement was supposed to protect…
In the name of equality, disadvantaged kids were likelier to falter and disappear behind a mist of togetherness and self-deception. Banishing tests seemed like a way to let everyone off the hook. This was the price of dismissing meritocracy.
The middle-school scramble subjected 10- and 11-year-olds to the dictates of meritocracy and democracy at the same time: a furiously competitive contest and a heavy-handed ideology. The two systems don’t coexist so much as drive children simultaneously toward opposite extremes, realms that are equally inhospitable to the delicate, complex organism of a child’s mind.. Wokeness prettifies the success race, making contestants feel better about the heartless world into which they’re pushing their children. Constantly checking your privilege is one way of not having to give it up.
Our goal shouldn’t be to tell children what to think. The point is to teach them how to think so they can grow up to find their own answers.
There is no answer to this
I can imagine the retort—the rebuke to everything I’ve written here: Your privilege has spared them. There’s no answer to that—which is why it’s a potent weapon—except to say that identity alone should neither uphold nor invalidate an idea
“The legacy of racism, together with a false meritocracy in America today that keeps children trapped where they are, is the root cause of the inequalities in the city’s schools. But calling out racism and getting rid of objective standards won’t create real equality or close the achievement gap, and might have the perverse effect of making it worse by driving out families of all races who cling to an idea of education based on real merit. If integration is a necessary condition for equality, it isn’t sufficient. Equality is too important to be left to an ideology that rejects universal values.