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AFTER THE IVORY TOWER FALLS: HOW COLLEGE BROKE THE AMERICAN DREAM AND BLEW UP OUR POLITICS – AND HOW TO FIX IT
By Will Bunch

Over the years, really since my own graduation from university, I’ve taken an interest in reading and sometimes reviewing books on the state of higher education, and in particular the oft-referenced “crisis of the Humanities.” Will Bunch’s take on the subject is a bit different from most of these though, in more specifically addressing the “college problem” in the United States.

What the “college problem” (and it’s always presented by Bunch in quotes) refers to is the way a divide between the college-educated and non-college educated in America has tracked, or even driven, that country’s current state of political polarization. Over the years there have been a number of attempts to classify the Trump voter, by gender (male), race (white), age (older), and residence (rural), but education is usually seen as one of the most determinative factors, with support for Trump coming mostly from the “poorly educated” he professed to “love” while on the campaign trail in the 2016 primaries. Why is this? Why has the college problem “come to define modern politics, even for the sizable majority without a bachelor’s degree”?

It’s a question that first took hold of Bunch while listening to Rush Limbaugh in the early 2000s:

What struck me the most was how much anger was directed toward a certain class of people – and not the people doing the most harm to Limbaugh’s heavily white, heavily male, heavily working-class audience, which were the billionaires outsourcing their jobs to China. Instead, the villains were college professors, or movie actors, or especially people like me, journalists. Was the root cause of division in the twenty-first century that simple? The differing worldviews, psychology, and lifestyles of folks who went to college, and folks who didn’t? The deeper I got into it – researching a book about the Tea Party at the end of that decade, and then watching the rise of Donald Trump like a slow-motion train wreck, the more serious “the college problem” looked.

Well, the root cause of the division probably isn’t quite that simple, but looking at the college problem is as good a place as any to start and goes a long way to providing an answer for the question of what’s gone wrong with American politics.

In explaining what’s gone wrong, Bunch takes a historical approach. In brief, higher education went from making the American dream to breaking it. After the post-war boom and the G.I. Bill, a period which saw an explosion in enrollment in colleges and universities and a growing economy, things began to contract. Meanwhile, credentialism made a college diploma more necessary at the same time as the cost of that diploma was skyrocketing. The middle class started to feel the squeeze, and a debt bubble started blowing that would eventually put the subprime mortgage market to shame. People began souring on higher education, and in ways that split down party lines dramatically under Trump:

The Pew Research Center’s annual survey of U.S. attitudes about higher education found that, among Republicans, support for the very idea of college practically dropped off a cliff starting in 2015. That year, 54 percent of GOP voters still believed that colleges had a positive impact on the country’s direction – despite a half century of political attacks against the academy – while a minority of 37 percent held a negative opinion. By 2017 – just twenty-four short months later – the Republican numbers had flipped. A whopping 58 percent said institutions of higher education played a negative role, with just 36 percent holding the positive view. By 2019, Republicans were 59 to 33 percent negative on higher ed.

Obviously poll numbers like these weren’t just the result of Trump’s election. The way a body of the electorate had turned against college and university education was the work of decades. What happened in the 2010s was part of a larger turn against experts, elites, and the meritocracy. A turn that, as has been chronicled elsewhere, was not undeserved. Bunch is particularly put out by the m-word, with jibes like the ladder of upward mobility being “greased with a snake oil called meritocracy,” and referencing how winners are chosen in America by way of “the rigged lottery billed as a meritocracy.” This is, in turn, very much part of what went into the discrediting of higher education, helping to explain “how the idea of higher ed as a public good got warped into a privatized dog-eat-dog inequality machine joking called ‘a meritocracy’,” and how “Higher education could have flourished as a public good – instead of a fake meritocracy rigged to make half of America hate it.” I don’t think it’s any mystery why so many people are using this kind of language today, and it suggests nothing good about where we’re heading.

You could say that higher education is selling a lie – indeed that the American Dream Bunch so often invokes is itself a lie, what used to be a birthright exposed as a con – but the damaging effect of what’s happened is impossible to ignore or deny. Nor are any of the solutions Bunch offers credible given the level of political polarization America is riven by. Instead, academia will likely now suffer the fate of most such institutions in a time of decline: to be slowly degraded or outright junked and sold off for spare parts while a few insiders get rich as the ship goes down. I would say we’ll miss it when it’s gone, but what was worth keeping has already mostly been lost. I won’t be that sorry to see what’s left sink beneath history’s waves.

Notes:
Other reviews I’ve posted on this site on books relating to the crisis in higher education include Lowering Higher Education by James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower by Professor X, Stefan Collini’s Speaking of Universities and Robert Boyers’s The Tyranny of Virtue, and some of the essays in Thomas Frank’s Rendezvous with Oblivion and William Deresiewicz’s The End of Solitude.

THE NINETIES: A BOOK
By Chuck Klosterman

Sometimes an author surprises you. In 2005 I reviewed Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live and was unimpressed. To be more specific, my review began like this: “It’s hard to imagine a worse book than Killing Yourself to Live, or one that says so much about the deplorable state of journalism, criticism, and even writing today.” Despite that, I gave Klosterman another shot eight years later with a review of I Wear the Black Hat, which I also didn’t like but that I thought showed that he was “on the road to recovery,” judging that in that book he “does have some interesting things to say, and while he’s still grating, he can also occasionally entertain and inform.”

Ten years later, it seems as though Chuck is growing on me. The Nineties is actually a pretty good book, still with some idiosyncratic faults but on the whole quite insightful and even challenging. There’s less of the self-obsessed me-journalism, even though the ground being covered is the history of recent memory. And to confess, that may be part of what I responded to the most about it, as Klosterman is only a few years younger than me.

A key theme of the book is memory: what was important once, or at least what played a big part in our everyday lives, but has now been almost entirely forgotten. And so when the chapter on the Internet begins with the literary flourish of a long description of the sound of a dial-up modem logging onto a server I was charmed by a sense of nostalgia that only a couple of generations now will share. That crash of static was the fanfare of Netscape and America Online. But who cares about any of that now?

To Lenin’s observation that there are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen, Klosterman has a corollary: “there are also weeks when decades of meaning disappear into mist.” This disappearance may come about in various ways. It may be the result of a superseding event, like 9/11 supplanting the 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in the collective consciousness. Or it may be the result of once ubiquitous technologies like CDs or dial-up modems becoming obsolete. Or it may be the result of memories being repressed (“There are things forgotten by chance, and there are things that are forgotten on purpose”: an instance of the latter being America’s involvement in getting Boris Yeltsin elected Russian president in 1996). Or it may be the result of changing tastes (remember Zima? I don’t). Or it may just be the result of people moving on. Whichever explanation you choose, or if you take all of the above, the nineties were, in Klosterman’s phrase, “a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.”

One wonders how much of this forgetting is real (that is, a general, objectively-observed phenomenon) and how much has been personal. Klosterman brings up two iconic albums of the nineties – Nirvana’s Nevermind (“the last truly canonical album of the rock era”) and Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill – as landmark works. I still have both on CD but haven’t listened to either in twenty years. But . . . Nirvana is currently one of the most streamed bands on Spotify, despite not having released a record in some thirty years, so apparently I’m an outlier there.

He also mentions how Americans had been falling out of love with baseball before the nineties, but that by the end of the decade and its steroid scandals, its cultural prominence had been obliterated. True? I listened to a lot of baseball on the radio in the nineties, especially when the Blue Jays were winning it all in 1992 and 1993. I haven’t watched or listened to baseball since, and couldn’t give you the name of a single World Series winner from the twenty-first century.

Movies? Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction was an instant classic, and much imitated, but has he done anything in the last twenty-five years that’s worth watching? And how do we feel now about the decade’s mega-blockbusters like Titanic and Jurassic Park? I liked both well enough when they came out, but haven’t bothered returning to either. David Thomson on the latter title: “It was a sensation when it opened . . . but I doubt today that one kid would lift a fat thumb in its favor.”

Then there all those names and events that I had never known, much less forgotten. I was a busy book reviewer in the 1990s, so it came as some surprise to me to find that the two names Klosterman picks as “most stridently ‘of the nineties’ while those years were happening,” the voices of their generation, are Elizabeth Wurtzel and Mark Leyner. I knew of Wurtzel but never read a word of anything she wrote, while Leyner’s name I didn’t recognize at all. Neither has enjoyed any afterlife. And was there really a literary movement known (at least in the media) as the New Sincerity? It sounds awful.

“What came from the nineties stayed in the nineties,” Klosterman (rather awkwardly) observes. Certainly for me that’s true. And I suspect it’s the same for a lot of other people as well, if not the culture at large. Which is even leaving aside the difference between what happened and what we remember as having happened. White House counsel Vince Foster, Klosterman tells us, “committed suicide in his car with a .38 revolver.” Actually, he was not in his car. After Foster’s death there were numerous conspiracy theories floated surrounding his suicide, so better fact-checking on this point might have been in order.

But even taking into account all of this, how much of the nineties was worth saving? Take the event that Klosterman sees as having been “the defining night of the nineties” and a “totemistic experience in American cultural lore”: the televised chase of O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco down an L.A. freeway. Was this in any way important? Consequential? Did it have any meaning? Or was it simply an empty spectacle? And if so, was that what made it so “defining” and “totemistic”? “What makes it so evocative of the nineties,” Klosterman writes, “is how devoid of drama it actually was.” Like Seinfeld, it was a show about nothing. The fact that it was news, loosely defined, didn’t mean as much as its status as entertainment.

Again, is this a personal bias in Klosterman’s reporting? His beat is entertainment and pop culture, and he doesn’t have much to say about politics or economics. But then wasn’t all of that “downstream from culture” now? What those living in the nineties shared wasn’t some communal experience or trauma like the Great Depression or Second World War, but what we all watched on TV. What was the grit of the nineties? Weren’t they a mostly forgettable period between decades when things really happened? A decade of political stability and economic good times that fell roughly between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11 (“the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers”)? I think if a car chase is what stands out the most from these years then there’s a strong argument for their unimportance.

Of course, this business of decades is a mug’s game. History, whether global or personal, doesn’t adjust itself to a calendar. “It’s popular (and maybe reasonable) to claim that the labeling of any generation is stupid and almost always wrong,” Klosterman tells us. Nevertheless every generation is shaped by its historical context and as long as we keep in mind that we’re speaking in generalities then there’s nothing wrong with trying to broadly describe a type. What struck me, being a member of Klosterman’s own Generation X, was how what came after the nineties mostly accelerated the same trends. The Internet was the great driver of this, an “inescapable whirlpool of cultural life” that effectively killed memory by storing everything in the cloud. It’s the nature of pop culture to be ephemeral, and can we say Taylor Swift or Avengers: Endgame will last any longer than Garth Brooks or Titanic? I think the answer may already be in, at least for the standing of the MCU. Meanwhile, in terms of politics the polarization that was born in the nineties (midwifed by then House Speaker Newt Gingrich) has only gotten worse. With the judgment of the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore “it was established that every sociopolitical act of the twenty-first century would now be a numbers game on a binary spectrum. My undefined Gen X worldview was instantaneously worthless. That was over. Now there were only two sides to everything.”

This was a strange new world, and one that was only going to get stranger.

As I began by saying, Klosterman seems to have outgrown his me-journalism. He is not, however, a historian, or even a cultural historian. He’s less interested in relaying a narrative of what happened, and explaining cause and effect, than in trying to capture what it felt like, which is what he presents as the true meaning of the nineties. This is both the strength and the weakness of his book. The personal perspective alerts us to a point Klosterman makes in a footnote, that “The way the past is considered in retrospect has almost no relationship to what was assumed to be obvious at the time of the event.” One example being the way that the 2000 presidential election was seen at the time as being a contest between two nearly indistinguishable candidates. Another: the almost religious sense of optimism at the dawn of the Internet and how we thought it was going to usher in a new age of human creativity and freedom.

How the nineties look to us now is very different from what they felt like at the time. And what they felt like at the time is perhaps the main thing that has been forgotten, of all the many things I’ve already mentioned in this review. And if you were there, and you mostly remember that it didn’t feel like much of anything, or mean much to anyone, then you probably got it right.

Notes:
Review first published online April 14, 2024.

THE HITLER CONSPIRACIES
By Richard J. Evans

There have been alternative histories surrounding key events in the rise and fall of the Third Reich since those events first occurred, from the myth of a “stab in the back” that led to Germany’s collapse in the First World War to the escape of Hitler from his bunker and his retirement to Argentina. In some cases these myths were born of political calculations, while others were produced by a mix of ignorance and paranoia. Pulling back a bit more, historian Richard J. Evans finds that “common to many conspiracy theories is a counterfactual suggestion amounting in the minds of at least some of those who purvey them to a degree of wishful thinking.” If only things had been like this, and not have happened the way the “official” story has it, then the world would make more sense.

Evans has no problem disposing of the line-up of conspiracies he addresses here: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the stab in the back, the Reichstag fire, Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain, and Hitler’s escape from the bunker. And since many of these conspiracies are still with us, and indeed are stronger than ever, such a service has a lot of contemporary relevance, making this “a book for own troubled times.” Ours is, after all, the era that has been labeled “post-truth,” one characterized by its love of “alternative facts” and made-up histories. And it is here where I think Evans might have dug a little deeper or speculated a bit more.

It’s true that conspiracy theories take the “puzzling complexities of politics and society” and reduce them “to a simple formula that everyone can understand.” At the same time, real conspiracies have existed, and we’d be wrong to think that those who look to such theories are merely too dim to understand all “the complexities of politics and society.” On one level, and I don’t think it’s too deep a level either, the social world really doesn’t make any kind of sense; it isn’t logical or coherent, but random and inexplicable. This is the reality that, as T. S. Eliot said, we can’t stand very much of.

Then there is the question of the value of truth. Again, in most cases this is self-evident. Evans, as a historian, unfurls his banner in a stirring peroration:

Among the most alarming features of some conspiracy theories is the apparent belief that whether they are true or not doesn’t really matter. Yet it does matter. Working out what really happened in history is difficult: it requires a great deal of hard work, it demands direct examination of the evidence, it presupposes a willingness to change one’s mind, it involves the abandonment of one’s prejudices and preconceptions in the face of evidence that tells against them. But it can be done, even in an age like our own, where the gatekeepers of opinion formation have been bypassed through the Internet and anyone can put out their views into the public sphere, no matter how bizarre they might be. Social media companies have begun to wake up to the problem, but in the end, the only way to establish what is true and what is false is by painstaking research. The case studies presented in this book are a modest contribution towards that end.

Yes, but . . .

While I agree that the truth matters, it might not always matter in the way Evans sees it as mattering. I don’t think it always “sets us free.” As I said in my brief review of Lee McIntyre’s Post-truth, it’s only dangerous to ignore reality in some circumstances. At times, believing a lie may lead to better outcomes for everyone (that is, not just for the purveyors of “alternative facts” intent on creating their own reality). It’s also the case that “what really happened in history” will only ever be able to be established to some degree of probability. We have to hold on to that “willingness to change one’s mind.” Historical truth is an ideal we can aspire to, not some safe harbour we can rest in.

The problem isn’t with radical skepticism and doubt. If you want to doubt that Marinus van der Lubbe set the Reichstag fire, that’s fine. But if you want to insist that it was actually the work of Nazis or Communists, without any evidence to support such a view, that’s another matter. Similarly, if you want to doubt that Hitler killed himself in the bunker – after all, no one was in the room with him except Eva, and she was probably already dead – then go ahead. But if you want to say he snuck out of Berlin, hopped on a submarine, and lived in Argentina for another thirty years, that’s crazy. As I said in relation to the “mythicists” who deny the existence of a historical Jesus, I get why they may be skeptical of the “official” or traditional Christian story. What I don’t understand is why they believe what they believe. And so with the conspiracy theories surrounding the Third Reich. This leads to all sorts of trouble because, as the saying has it, “it ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that ain’t so.”

It’s with regard to the latter category that conspiracy thinking comes in, and so this is where we need the helping hand of corrective scholarship. Evans helps point out some of the more obvious examples of bad history in relation to the Nazis and can be taken as a dependable guide through treacherous terrain in our present age of excessive doubt and indeterminacy.

Notes:
Review first published online March 8, 2024.

NETWORK OF LIES: THE EPIC SAGA OF FOX NEWS, DONALD TRUMP, AND THE BATTLE FOR AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
By Brian Stelter

One of my ongoing issues with the media analysis of Noam Chomsky is the emphasis he places on how the public is manipulated, misinformed, and brainwashed by the powers-that-be. It is his propaganda model of manufactured consent, and while I think there’s a lot of truth in it I don’t think it tells the whole story. Nearly twenty years ago, in my review of Failed States, I spoke of how the public shares a lot of the blame: “whether you call it faith, wilful blindness, or simply the abdication of reason, you can’t call it ignorance. It is a conscious closing of the mind. And it entails some moral responsibility.”

That conscious closing of the mind has proceeded apace, and indeed in the Trump years achieved an escape velocity from reality. And it draws into starker relief the question of who is in the driver’s seat. For Brian Stelter, a less academic observer of the media, this is a point that is of vital importance. Network of Lies is Stelter’s second book dealing with Fox News, an organization he is fiercely critical of but that he doesn’t blame entirely for the descent into madness that followed the 2020 U.S. presidential election, even though he does allow that “Fox was more directly responsible for the chaos than anyone realized at the time.” Fox, he concludes, was not a thought leader but the servant of its audience. It was an institution “not equipped or empowered – or even motivated – to lead.” As Geraldo Rivera put it while commenting on the craziness at Fox following January 6, “it wasn’t the malevolent media leading the audience. It was the audience leading the malevolent media.” “They are servants,” is how one Trump White House veteran described the network. “They simply serve the audience.”

In the media business, the name given to this phenomenon is “audience capture.” The problem, and I think we can call it that, is directly analogous to that of the takeover of the Republican Party by an extremist fringe, and the takeover of evangelical Christianity by the same. Each of these institutions called forth a demon that then swallowed them whole, forcing them to abandon all of their core values and principles. Or, in Stelter’s words, “Fox found itself in a prison of its own design.”

This isn’t to absolve Trump, the GOP, evangelical churches, or Fox News from all responsibility. They deserve a lot of the blame for hooking their audience on red meat. But it does point out that in all of this the masses weren’t simply sheep being directed by corporate interests. The root of the evil goes much deeper than that. Where Chomsky, who identifies as an anarchist libertarian socialist, has a blind spot it’s in his overly sunny view of human nature. People are naturally good, but are transformed by corrupt systems. The Trump voter/Fox viewer is made (manufactured), not born.

I think it’s a bit of both. It’s true people can get sick on a poor media diet. And I mean that literally. Audience capture has a personal impact as well as an institutional one. Stelter’s poster boy in this regard is Tucker Carlson. “Six years in prime time,” we are told, “reshaped him, darkened his heart, [drove] him to the edge.” Like so many of the avatars of the Trump movement, especially in the media, he “oozed hatred from his every pore, and from the depths of his psyche.” He was also a bubble-blower, broadcasting from remote locations and rarely even talking with this show team, much less anyone else. The one thing he could be sure of was that there was never going to be anyone around him telling him things he didn’t want to hear, no matter how much he needed this. “He was isolated in almost every sense of the word,” and like everyone who retreats inside such fortresses (or gilded cages) it only made him angrier, less tolerant, and more divorced from reality. He would come to “believe his own bullshit,” get high on his own supply.

But Carlson was only one of many lost souls. Maria Bartiromo is another. The question of “What happened to Maria Bartiromo, “a question that has spawned numerous articles and countless cocktail party conversations,” was asked of many public figures at the time, and is still being asked. The short answer? “What Rupert [Murdoch] and his hosts all had in common was selfishness and greed.” But these may be taken as widely held if not universal qualities. The deeper answer is audience capture, which provided the incentivization. Lying and the stoking of rage was what Fox viewers demanded. If they didn’t get their fix from Carlson or Bartiromo they could, and did, change the channel. When Fox called Arizona for Biden in 2020 the Fox audience migrated immediately to Newsmax, “in search of a safe space.” “They were like sports fans who didn’t want to see the action live if it meant their guy was in a dogfight and might lose. They just wanted to see the parts where he was winning.” When it came to honest reporting about January 6, “Fox fans did not want to see it, did not want to hear it, did not want to face it.” When the network aired the proceedings of the House Select Committee into January 6 their viewership immediately fell by nearly 50%. Like some crude experiment in behavioral psychology, Fox adapted their behaviour to a reward/punishment matrix (i.e., their audience’s whims). So selfishness and greed, to be sure. But there had to be incentives in place first.

Trump was a media creation in many if not most ways, so it’s not surprising to have one of the best books about the Trump phenomenon written by a media analyst. And even though the story is by now well known, one comes away amazed at the breathtaking cynicism of Fox at every level in selling a Big Lie that no one at their network believed in and that many ridiculed privately as being insane. But even after the epic settlement of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, which had Fox having to pay out some $787 million, what has changed? Just like Tucker Carlson, the Fox viewers have built a bubble to live in and won’t be leaving it anytime soon. And they’re the ones who are calling the shots.

Notes:
Review first published online February 19, 2024.

CORRUPTIBLE: WHO GETS POWER AND HOW IT CHANGES US
By Brian Klaas

The problem of kakistocracy, or “rule by the worst,” is the complement to the failure of meritocracy in our time. As many recent commentators have pointed out – see, for example, my reviews of Twilight of the Elites by Christopher Hayes and The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel – meritocracy, which from the get-go was a hard sell (with roots going back to a dystopic satire), has conclusively failed in the Age of Trump.

But alas, things are actually worse than that.

From the failure of meritocracy or the meritocratic principle, transition is smoothly made to rule by the worst. We’re no longer talking about the merely selfish and incompetent who have risen by way of the Peter Principle, but of the triumph of the genuinely wicked and hateful.

Is this a fair assessment, and if so why has it happened and what can be done?

Brian Klaas looks at the problem from the angle of corruptibility instead of moral evil. His starting point is Lord Acton’s famous line about how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. A line that was immediately followed by “Great men are almost always bad men.” But is it the case that power is the problem, corrupting otherwise good people, or is it rather that bad people are the ones who seek power in the first place?

The answer is Yes. Drawing on a large and growing body of research in social psychology and related fields, Klaas concludes that “all the available evidence points in one direction. Becoming powerful makes you more selfish, reduces empathy, increases hypocrisy, and makes you more likely to commit abuse.” But that isn’t the full story. It’s also true that bad people seek power, or that “power tends to draw in people who want to control other people for the sake of it.” This struck me as pretty obvious, indeed so much so that when Klaas references another study that argues that “being a good person – someone who is affable, altruistic, competent, and kind – helps you get power,” power which then erodes all of those same traits, I found myself shaking my head. Weren’t “dark triad” types (narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic) just going to fake all those good qualities on their way up, as a means to an end? I don’t know the state of the research into this, but that’s a better fit with personal observations I’ve made over the years.

And yes, it gets still worse. One of Klaas’s proposed solutions for dealing with the problem is to increase the competition for power. This struck me as misguided though. As society becomes more unequal competition for money, power, and prestige will inevitably become more intense. This will, in turn, likely lead to a further process of winnowing where “the worst” (the most power-hungry, the most unscrupulous in gaining power) will have an advantage just as much as dark triad types have been shown to have an advantage in job interviews. I think something like that is already what we’re seeing played out in the fields of business, politics, and entertainment today. But really it’s everywhere. Thirty years ago I was chatting with a professor friend of mine who was sitting on a committee overseeing applications for tenure-track appointments to the department he taught in. I mentioned the long odds that candidates even then were facing and that the successful ones would have to be truly remarkable. What he said has always stayed with me: “You’d think with so many people applying for so few jobs, the people we’d be hiring would be great. Only the best. But they’re not. We’re hiring the worst people. I don’t know why that is.”

I couldn’t answer him then, but I think I could offer a possible explanation now. In any event, the takeaway from this book is clear. Bad people want power. Bad people are well adapted to seizing and holding onto power. And once in power, bad people only get worse. Meanwhile, the reforms Klaas mentions all sound sensible, but who is going to implement them? Why would those in power want to make changes to a system they’ve played to their advantage? For the betterment of society?

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s constant theme was that elites – and he believed in the existence of true elites – were failing in their duties. One of the signs of our own time is not only that the worst people have risen to the top, or even that they are incompetent or wicked, but that they don’t have any sense of duty or social responsibility. This sort of psychopathy, long attributed to corporations, is now seen as a superpower possessed by the Übermensch. Klaas’s “corruptibles” are heroes. Not in Carlyle’s sense of the word hero – not by a long shot! – but in our degraded present understanding of these things.

Notes:
Review first published online January 7, 2024.

THE CANCELING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
By Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott

The title sets off a pair of echoes, starting with Allan Bloom’s now canonical 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, and leading up to 2018’s The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Addressing the state of the American mind, all three books are primarily focused on the authors’ observations on what’s been happening to American higher education. As a result, they tend to see the broader currents of American culture, business, and politics as being downstream from the classroom. “It’s no secret that college campuses are ground zero for political correctness,” Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott write in this latest treatise, and now that same “campus stuffiness has exploded into the wider world.” Which may not be the way things actually work but that’s a point I’ll get bak to.

We begin with some definitions. By Cancel Culture (capitalized throughout), Lukianoff and Schlott are referring to “the uptick beginning around 2014, and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is – or would be – protected by First Amendment standards and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick.”

That’s Cancel Culture, and the dates mentioned introduce a historical argument, that there was a First Great Age of Political Correctness (again capitalized) that ran from 1985 to 1995, which was followed by the Ignored Years of 1995-2013 where political correctness slipped into abeyance, and then the “uptick” or Second Great Age of Political Correctness from 2014 to the present. I think this is basically right, as it’s a phenomenon I’ve been writing about for some time now, though the terms I’ve used are first and second wave political correctness, with the same interregnum in-between.

Why did political correctness, of which cancel culture was an activist outgrowth, come roaring back at this time? And why did its political polarity shift from being a predominantly right-wing phenomenon to one where the whistleblowers were of what Lukianoff and Schlott characterize as the illiberal left? The claim made here is that colleges had (1) become more expensive due to an explosion in administrative staff who then had to somehow justify their existence, and (2) more homogenous in their intellectual point of view, leading to more groupthink and less tolerance for minority opinions. These strike me as plausible explanations, though I tend to think there may be simpler reasons.

If, as is argued here, the cornerstone of Cancel Culture is The Great Untruth of Ad Hominem, which supposes that “bad people only have bad opinions,” (this is actually the fourth Great Untruth, following up the three outlined in The Coddling of the American Mind), then I think its takeoff at the same time as the explosion in the use of social media is pretty obvious. Social media is all about moral outrage, which drives public engagement like nothing else. Most of what academics publish isn’t read by anyone, but their Twitter or X files can be followed by hundreds or thousands. And what’s more, that engagement can be monetized.

But there’s another factor in play as well. I first began noticing the way literary criticism and book reviewing was collapsing into ad hominem judgments of authors (and reviewers!) fifteen or so years ago. Aesthetic criteria all but disappeared from literary criticism, replaced with political and moral posturing (also known as “virtue signaling”). Bad people only write bad books was the takeaway, with the flipside being that good people (and by good here was usually meant some member of an oppressed group) only write good ones. By the 2020s this had become so much orthodoxy, both in academia and the media.

And why? Because, I think, it’s so easy. Prominent tastemakers and cultural custodians could now publicly opine on books they hadn’t even read, because they didn’t need to. All that mattered was a quick moral judgment that shut down any further discussion.

In brief, cancel culture, with or without capitals, had been incentivized with dollars and dopamine. It was profitable, easy, and fun. Given that most people are greedy, lazy, and pleasure-seeking, you could see where all this was going. And it’s worth noting also that the cues being taken came from outside the academy, through things like the way technology changed the economy through the monetization of attention and engagement, and in the increasing polarization of politics and its demonization of the other side. While I don’t want to let higher education off the hook for anything, a lot of its current problems are of external origin. What I’ve said elsewhere is that this kind of moral meltdown is more like the twitch of the death nerve for today’s universities than the cause of its demise.

Lukianoff and Schlott both work for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a group that defends people threatened with cancellation. As a result they have a lot of interesting case studies to mine. And by interesting I mean scary and depressing. Mobs, much like courts, are always odious. I hadn’t realized just how bad things had gotten though, with, for example, attempts to fire faculty now proceeding at a pace far outstripping the McCarthy era. And the rhetoric of social justice has indeed infected many other areas of life, even where you’d least expect it to show up. The short chapter on “social justice therapy,” where therapists now expect their (white) clients to do penance for their privilege was eye opening. Something is rotten in the moral state of the nation.

Diagnosing that “something” is where I think the authors here go wrong. (Well, that and their truly terrible attempts at labeling, coming up with awkward analytical frameworks like the Perfect Rhetorical and Efficient Rhetorical Fortresses to explain how Cancel Culture works). In one important way at least I think they’re too idealistic. What I mean by this is that they make two assumptions that are foundational to classical defences of freedom of speech: (1) that free speech means the debate between what may be radically different but honestly held and principled/reasoned opinions, and (2) in the free marketplace of ideas there will be a Darwinian competition that will see truth, or the Truth, emerge victorious over lies.

I don’t think either assumption is safe to make. The core problem as I see it today has to do with speech we might characterize as being made in bad faith. Or, to put it more bluntly, lies. Not controversial beliefs or opinions. Not offensive jokes made by edgy comedians. Not misleading advertising or propaganda. What I mean by speech in bad faith is the spreading of deliberate falsehoods for personal gain. To take some obvious examples:

There is almost no debate within the scientific community about the way that the burning of fossil fuels has contributed to global warming. Indeed, the major fossil fuel companies have been aware of the fact for half a century. But by bankrolling “merchants of doubt” they have sought to muddy the waters.

The idea that the 2020 presidential election in the U.S. was somehow stolen from Donald Trump has been investigated and litigated extensively. There is absolutely no evidence of there being any such conspiracy, and indeed his then Attorney General Bill Barr even called the idea “all bullshit,” making this particular untruth so egregious that it’s become popularly known as the Big Lie.

Alex Jones was successfully sued by parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting for his claims that the tragedy was a “false flag” operation. Fox News was successfully sued by Dominion Voting Systems for pushing the claim that their voting machines had been somehow rigged to throw the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Rudy Giuliani was successfully sued by a pair of Georgia election workers for false claims he’d made about them fixing the vote.

What we’re talking about in all of these cases isn’t the competition of ideas in the public arena. This is only what the political operator Steve Bannon once memorably referred to as flooding the zone with shit: the mass spreading of lies or “misinformation” in order to grow an audience, make money, or political gain. And it works.

What is the solution to this problem? As Lukianoff and Schlott point out, censorship doesn’t work. “Simply put, censorship doesn’t change people’s opinions. It encourages them to speak with people they already agree with, which makes political polarization even worse.” In cases involving defamation and libel there is a legal recourse, but Alex Jones made a fortune with his brand of “infotainment” before declaring bankruptcy in the face of the judgment against him, and Rudy Giuliani, who was only acting as a tool, was human wreckage before taking the same route. Most dramatically, despite the massive payout they had to make to Dominion ($787 million!), this was just the cost of doing business for Fox, and an expense well worth paying in order to allow them to maintain their market share among the believers in the Big Lie.

Something about the “marketplace of ideas” is clearly not functioning properly when a prominent figure like Donald Trump can lie (and by this I mean the making of claims he knew to be false at the time) on an unprecedented scale, while fact-checking him in real time makes no difference. “A healthy, pluralistic society depends on a citizenry who can have serious discussions without resorting to manipulative, ad hominem tactics.” That, as Lukianoff and Schlott conclude, is the ideal. But what relation does it bear to present reality? Discussion and debate are not even being pursued, and the reason manipulative, ad hominem tactics are used is because they work. Which, again, means making money and achieving political goals, no matter how damaging such “winning” might be. Meanwhile, when it comes to the corporate media the truth clearly doesn’t always win. More often the winner is the voice with the biggest megaphone, the largest platform, or the most famous celebrity spokesperson.

Lukianoff and Schlott talk about “censorship gravity,” a force which pulls all societies toward censorship. It seems that censoring is something we naturally want to do, an inclination we have to resist. I think this may be true, but of more concern to me when thinking of free speech and how it operates in the current cultural environment is our predisposition toward dangerous lies that make us feel good, even when we know they’re lies.

Notes:
Review first published online December 28, 2023.

THE UNDERTOW: SCENES FROM A SLOW CIVIL WAR
By Jeff Sharlett

The presidency, and thus far the post-presidency of Donald Trump has been an irresistible target for journalists seeking to understand what ails America. In The Undertow Jeff Sharlett offers up yet another example of a particular sub-genre of books on what he calls the Trumpocene: the attempt to understand the “Trump voter.” Like an anthropologist investigating the Trobriand Islanders he heads across the country looking for MAGA folk in their native environment. They aren’t that hard to find, as by their red caps, lawn signs, flags, and bumper stickers ye shall know them. And they aren’t afraid to talk.

There are other pieces included in this collection of “scenes,” but the meat of the book is a road trip Sharlett takes in search of the January 6 casualty Ashli Babbitt. Though it’s hard to say how his wanderings are following any logical trail. “I’m driving cross-country,” he tries to explain to one church revivalist, “following her ghost, as it were, trying to understand something about what’s happening, or might be happening. Or maybe it already happened and now here we are.” That’s a bit vague. And so is this:

The truth is this entire journey, from a rally for Ashli back to home, was conceived slant rhyme to the story I’m telling. Searching not for Ashli’s ghost but for my own grief, and through it maybe something of the grief that is in us all now, if not often spoken of. Or maybe it is on us, like the smoky sun. The fire’s ashes sift down into our lungs. All the dead whom we have not mourned. The passing of certain possibilities – democratic, ecological – imagine the gunman, feel the heat rising – which we still speak of in the present tense, as if they’re not already gone.

I don’t know what that means either, and I don’t think Sharlett had any clear idea of where he was going with this trip. Basically he’s just looking for various right-wing bogeymen – men’s rights “redpillers,” Christian nationalists, People attending Trump rallies, militia members prepping for the last stand – and gawks at them. But while many of the people he meets do seem truly terrible, Sharlett’s painting them as rednecks and rubes begins to grate after a while. And what he’s done seems unnecessary. He set out to meet these people, knowing what they believe and how they feel, so what did he expect?

The main takeaway has to do with America as Fantasyland, to borrow Kurt Andersen’s name for the kind of magical thinking that has taken over American culture and politics. Reality, especially as we experience it through the media, is a simulacrum of lies. What we need is a QAnon Great Awakening to expose the truth, a red pill that will allow us to see not as through a glass darkly but with perfect knowledge. The Biblical reference is deliberate, as Sharlett makes a connection here to Christian Gnosticism, which has evolved into today’s conspiracy thinking: “the deep-seated belief that there exist truths they – there is always a they in all these ersatz Gnosticisms, from the bishops and bureaucrats of the early Church to the modern media peddling fake news – do not want us, the people, to perceive.”

This is all well enough, if nothing new, but the superior tone is a bit much. Sharlett is an annoying guide, given to much off-putting virtue signaling. He not only capitalizes Black, but White as well when referring to people of different races. He uses the Latinx label, which never caught on and is now even considered to be a racial slur by some Hispanics. He calls the Zoltar fortune-telling machines “racist,” a charge I’ve never heard made before. He objects to the neologism “schizowave” for being “a vile term, a grotesque romanticization of mental illness.” It really has nothing to do with schizophrenia. He embraces land acknowledgments, and tribal names I’m pretty confident he wouldn’t be able to pronounce without coaching (the Sauk, for example, being now the oƟaakiiwaki-hina-ki). He tells us his own child is “non-binary” and uses the pronoun “they,” at the age of thirteen. He makes a dig at people who can’t imagine “other people” (that is, people who are not women) with wombs. For someone who spends this much time on the road hunting MAGA men, one gets the sense that Sharlett doesn’t talk a lot to people outside of his own virtue circle. Apparently only about 5% of Hispanics ever adopted the label Latinx, and I doubt you could find even 5% of Americans able to imagine people with wombs who are not women. Sharlett is in his own Fantasyland.

Such criticisms may not register with this book’s intended audience. But this in turn only reinforces the sense of a deepening cultural divide, with America splintering into different realities. It’s a divide Sharlett illustrates in some ways he might not have been conscious of.

Notes:
Review first published online December 12, 2023.