A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

It's Not Wokeism That Threatens Our Democracy

So how come editors so often boost it into a threat to the cosmic order?

It's a truism that it is easier for a writer to get a piece published
if it is consistent with the prejudices of its editor. This is something
that editors should be on guard for, as it naturally leads to the
acceptance of weak pieces that happen to conform to one's pre-existing
beliefs rather than one that does the hard work of adding valuable
insights to an existing debate. Few articles in recent memory prove that
truism more than the August 2 New York Times op-ed entitled "Elite
Universities Are Out of Touch. Blame the Campus
."

Its author, Nick Burns, an editor at Americas Quarterly, attempts to
solve what he calls the "paradox" that "as concerns about social
justice continue to preoccupy students and administrations, these
universities often seem to be out of touch with the society they claim
to care so much about. Many on the right

and in the center

believe universities have become ideological echo chambers. Some on the
left see them as 'sepulchers for radical thought
.'"

We pause to note the work that the journalistic weasel word "seem"
does in the above paragraph, together with "claim" and "believe"
and that classic, "some." The link to a New York magazine piece is
also to an unsupported claim, albeit in a much better piece. Other
words, every word in those two sentences might be total bullshit and it
would still be journalistically correct.

[link removed]

The author continues:

"It also takes away the chance to encounter people with different
roles in society, from retail workers to landlords-interactions that
would remind them they won't be students forever and open questions
about the social relevance of the ideas they encounter in the
university."

As @dandrezner tweeted
, "does
this guy think that profs live on campus? Like first-graders who believe
that their teachers live in their elementary school?" Burns also
apparently assumes that they do their shopping only in campus stores
(stocked only by other faculty members, presumably) and have families
that include only other faculty members, and perhaps a student or two.

Hello? When I was in "elite" college, I had to deal with landlords
and restaurants and supermarkets at the very beginning of my sophomore
year. I had no choice given the lack of housing for all but freshmen.
(Well, unless you think joining a frat is a choice.) I never ate in a
school cafeteria again despite attending two more "elite"
universities. (And by the way, they have an awfully nice one on the 14th
floor of the New York Times building. How much do those people get out?)

Being a professor is a job; it's not a prison. It may attract people
who care a little more than is good for them about their personal
pronouns and are a little too proud of themselves for which countries
they allege not to buy products from. They may also get a little too
excited when someone is invited to speak on their campuses in favor of
something they oppose. This is all true, and as a lifelong liberal in
real life but (relatively speaking) a conservative on campus-at least
insofar as the humanities go-I often find it frustrating and almost
always annoying.

I began writing about this weird obsession of the Times editorial and
opinion pages back in March 2018
.
I've kept at it a bit more than I like to admit, most recently on
Altercation in late March this year
.
To the Times editors, "wokeism" on elite college campuses is more
threatening to the nation's future than the destruction of our
democracy, the deliberate lying, dissimulation and mafia-style threats
against those who seek to save it. It's a bigger deal than the
attempted violent overthrow of the U.S. government by the de facto
leader of one of its two major political parties. A few silly professors
and students stick in the craw of Times editors more than people who
tried to hang the vice president and those who egged them on. (And by
the way, the vast majority of students who attend non-elite schools can
barely be said to exist in these pages. The two students
who
attended Amy Chua's dinner party

rate miles more ink

in this world than 275,000 students being educated in the entire CUNY
system.)

Part of the reason for this obsession can be credited to the success of
the nearly half-century-long campaign of right-wing working of the refs
.
There are no more prominent "refs" than the editorial page editors
of The New York Times, and dammit, they are determined to demonstrate
that they are not Democrats (even though they are). Annoying wokeism is
the easiest target available with which to try to prove it, however
unimportant and insignificant it is in the lives of real people. It
certainly does seem to rile them up.

But I have another theory. As someone who has spent, alas, 44 years
toggling back and forth between journalism and academia, I am here to
report that each one is filled with people who are made to feel
intellectually insecure by the other. First of all, there is an
epistemological divide between the two practices having to do with their
willingness to embrace the concept of truth. I wrote about that 11 years
ago, here
.
But perhaps more important is the respective fundamental ethos of each
profession. Journalists swear by the fact that one can learn everything
worth knowing about pretty much anything in a week at the most. They
drop into this or that country-or this or that controversy-and
explain it as if the whole thing is pretty simple after all. (And they
rarely credit the academics they learn from.) Academics spend years,
often decades, studying just a small portion of what journalists think
they know and, oftentimes, prove them wrong. By that time, however, the
journalists have moved on to pretend to know everything there is to know
about a dozen other topics. It's no coincidence, as Marxists like to
say, that among the worst insults one can level at an academic is that
he or she is "just a journalist," while, correspondingly, when a
piece of journalism is deemed insufficiently interesting or relevant to
the day's news, it's called merely "academic." Each side worries
that the other side looks down on them, and guess what-they're
right.

I tend to side with the academics when these conflicts arise. I mean,
can you imagine living in a world where you had to form your lifelong
opinions based on what they publish in Politico? (Its slogan should be:
"All the News That's Fit to Print ... for the next ten minutes.")
But there's also no question that peer-reviewed articles that take a
year or more to publish are not going to save us from the likes of a
Republican Party seeking to destroy our democracy, much less everything
else that's happening in the world.

The nonfiction writers who manage to bridge this divide-including,
merely for instance, Walter Isaacson, Nicholas Lemann, Robert Caro, and
Isabel Wilkerson coming from journalism; and Jill Lepore, Henry Louis
Gates, and Paul Krugman coming from academia-are relatively rare and
tremendously talented, but also worthy of emulation. Both journalists
and academics have a great deal to learn from their examples of how to
make journalism that stands up to scholarship and scholarship that can
be consumed by normal people who just like to read and understand the
world a little better. In the meantime, we can ignore nonsense like that
presented by, um, Mr. Burns.

[link removed]

What's (for Once) Totally Cool With Kansas?

A month ago, I wrote in a piece headlined "The 'Dobbs' Backlash
and the Democrats' Choice
"
that the silver lining in the Dobbs decision was the fact that it might
"inspire the kind of passion on the progressive side that the right
has consistently successfully ginned up for the past half-century. This
is especially true in a period when both the Democratic Party and the
resistance to Trump were-and are-female-driven
."

Lo and behold, if you click here
, you'll see
the chart shows the percentage of new registrants in the state who were
women (as a seven-day average). Note the spike after the Dobbs decision
leaked, and huge jump after the Supreme Court handed it down. Seventy
percent of the new registrants were women
, and according
to Wednesday's figures, nearly 20 percent of voters did not vote in
either primary but showed up just to vote on the amendment
. Note also that
in Kansas, registered Republicans (851,882) vastly outnumber Democrats
(495,574), with 560,309 registered independents
. Trump won the
state in 2020 by 15 percent; abortion rights won by nearly 18 percent.

Odds and Ends

A little late to the party, I saw the Hallelujah movie this week. I was
pleased by how much attention it devoted to the development of Leonard
Cohen's career that was unrelated to the song and by its generally
lighthearted and informative tone. I strongly recommend seeing it in a
theater with a good sound system.

I've never seen Shrek, but I understand from the film that it used the
John Cale version in the movie and the Rufus Wainwright version on the
soundtrack. This version
,
with Rufus and 1,500 backup singers, is my favorite, but here also is
Cale's version

and the famous Jeff Buckley version
.
Here is late-career Leonard
.
My favorite of his videos, however, is "Closing Time
,"
which you will likely hear if you happen to be at my funeral one day
(and my instructions are followed).

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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