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Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

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Re: Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

#51

Post by sbmassey »

klank wrote: post #24
smallnamespace wrote: post #10

Just as an anecdote, met a recent state school grad who said he arrived on campus as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, tried to get into campus activism, and his fellow activists and teachers scared him so much that he's now not sure where he stands politically. Obviously I can't verify this, but for example he had a professor who actively taught that nations are a completely artificial social construct, and as such all im…

> nations are a completely artificial social construct But if nations aren't simply social constructs, what are they? Is it the word "artificial" that is so surprising? Maybe I have more fringe beliefs than I thought I did.

I don't think anyone disputes that nations are social constructs, it is the "and as such all immigration policies of any sort are illegitimate and harmful." part that is controversial.

Re: Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

#52

Post by defen »

klank wrote: post #39
defen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if nations aren't simply social constructs, what are they? A Schelling point for coordinated actions by large groups of people, organized around ethnic, cultural, and/or linguistic grounds?

Had to look up "Schelling point", so apologies if I'm not fully grasping what you mean by it. However, "organized around ethnic, cultural, and/or linguistic grounds" seems like another way of saying "social construct". If you were to compare and contrast what you suggest with a social construct how would they be different?

Too often I see people argue "X is a social construct" as a way of arguing that X "doesn't exist", or that people who believe in it have a kind of false consciousness.

I'm trying to show why people believe in it. Yes, it's a social construct; but that doesn't mean it's worthless - "money" is also a social construct: it only has value because other people think it has value.

The nation appears to be the largest stable unit of organization humans are capable of, at present at least. The history of the world has shown that Empires don't last too long these days.

Re: Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

#53

Post by ashark »

klank wrote: post #24
smallnamespace wrote: post #10

Just as an anecdote, met a recent state school grad who said he arrived on campus as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, tried to get into campus activism, and his fellow activists and teachers scared him so much that he's now not sure where he stands politically. Obviously I can't verify this, but for example he had a professor who actively taught that nations are a completely artificial social construct, and as such all im…

> nations are a completely artificial social construct But if nations aren't simply social constructs, what are they? Is it the word "artificial" that is so surprising? Maybe I have more fringe beliefs than I thought I did.

It's not very useful to stress that they're "artificial" unless you're trying to introduce the term for rhetorical effect, say, edging it into the discussion on narrow or technical but not especially useful or broad applicability, relying on implications of the word or other, far less relevant meanings or shades of meaning to have an effect on listeners/readers. This happens a lot, especially in political discussion. It's sloppy as hell and should put you on high alert if you catch someone doing it, especially if they should know better.

Re: Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

#54

Post by the-dude »

klank wrote: post #24
smallnamespace wrote: post #10

Just as an anecdote, met a recent state school grad who said he arrived on campus as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, tried to get into campus activism, and his fellow activists and teachers scared him so much that he's now not sure where he stands politically. Obviously I can't verify this, but for example he had a professor who actively taught that nations are a completely artificial social construct, and as such all im…

> nations are a completely artificial social construct But if nations aren't simply social constructs, what are they? Is it the word "artificial" that is so surprising? Maybe I have more fringe beliefs than I thought I did.

It is not so much interesting in what nations actually 'are'.

What would the alternative be?

Re: Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

#55

Post by dragonwriter »

confuseddesi wrote: post #12
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #3

As the American right-wing moves further right and further way from participating in consensus reality, it should be no surprise they are increasingly less welcome in spaces dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. If you reject not only the politics of your opponents, but the value of fact itself, why should they listen to or accommodate you? https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16588964/a...

Perhaps it is the American right-wing moving further right, but I am more inclined to believe the American left is moving farther left: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/why-ame... Take for example this speech by Bill Clinton in 1995: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4654597/bill-clinton-illegal-... : "That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record…

> Perhaps it is the American right-wing moving further right, but I am more inclined to believe the American left is moving farther left.

The Republican Party is clearly moving further right over a long time scale; the Democratic Party is also moving further left. Whether those things are true of the “American right” and “American left” is a little more complex question (from where I sit, it seems that the American Right is moving to the right more clearly and across the board, while the American left is moving left on social issues but not so much on economic issues, but that the economic left is starting to regain power in the Democratic Party, which if you mistake the Democratic Party for the American left looks like the left moving farther left on economic issues.)

> Take for example this speech by Bill Clinton in 1995

Bill Clinton is not, and never was, part of the American left. He is a moderate economic and social conservative—all the prominent liberal figures in the Democratic Party took a pass on the 1992 primary expecting Bush to be unbeatable. Paul Tsongas was probably the closest thing to a left candidate in a major party primary in 1992 (he was at least a solid social liberal), but his campaign was hampered by health concerns regarding his cancer (which turned out to be not entirely misplaced.)

> To think that this was a speech by a Democrat president about 20 years ago is unfathomable to the left today.

Not any more than it was at the time; the left disliked Clinton during the primary in 1992, mostly saw him as the lesser of three evils in the general (though Perot’s anti-NAFTA stand got him some support from the left even though he was not in any way a left candidate), and attacked him mercilessly from 1993 on when it came to policy as most of his gestures toward the left in the campaign turned out to be hollow, and his health care reform foundered on exactly the grounds the left challenged it earlier: it was overly complex in pursuit of buy-in that wouldn't come anyway from corporate interests, when there was a strong public majority support for simple single-payer.

Re: Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

#56

Post by aaron-lebo »

amarkov wrote: post #41
smallnamespace wrote: post #10

Just as an anecdote, met a recent state school grad who said he arrived on campus as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, tried to get into campus activism, and his fellow activists and teachers scared him so much that he's now not sure where he stands politically. Obviously I can't verify this, but for example he had a professor who actively taught that nations are a completely artificial social construct, and as such all im…

> Obviously I can't verify this, but for example he had a professor who actively taught that nations are a completely artificial social construct, and as such all immigration policies of any sort are illegitimate and harmful. But that's a very mainstream position in economics, with much stronger arguments behind it than ideological purity. And it's typically supported by libertarians more than progressives, since the…

But that's a very mainstream position in economics, with much stronger arguments behind it than ideological purity.

What mainstream economists believe all immigration policies are illegitimate and harmful? Not being snarky.

That would be considered a fairly ideological stance in most other fields. I've never heard that expressed in political science (some overlap with economics) from anyone but people on HN and Reddit.

Re: Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

#57

Post by pavlov »

smallnamespace wrote: post #10

Just as an anecdote, met a recent state school grad who said he arrived on campus as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, tried to get into campus activism, and his fellow activists and teachers scared him so much that he's now not sure where he stands politically. Obviously I can't verify this, but for example he had a professor who actively taught that nations are a completely artificial social construct, and as such all im…

At least in the case of France, the point seems valid, and it's perhaps opposite of what you're assuming.

The modern French nation is actually a left-wing construct -- an intentional product of the French Revolution. The Kingdom of France was not really a unified nation-state as we understand them today. There were multiple languages and a rich spectrum of local identities. French subjects were not necessarily French-speaking: their native tongue could just as well be Provençal, Italian or something else, and the King didn't really care.

The Revolution triggered local counter-revolutions of people who didn't necessarily think themselves as French in the sense that the new government in Paris wanted them to. (The War in the Vendée was a particularly bloody local war even by Revolution standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Vendée)

To counter the insurgencies and establish their new order, the Revolutionary authorities set about to explicitly design what a French citizen should be. The predominance of the French language was one element of this.

Re: Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

#58

Post by matthewowen »

smallnamespace wrote: post #10

Just as an anecdote, met a recent state school grad who said he arrived on campus as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, tried to get into campus activism, and his fellow activists and teachers scared him so much that he's now not sure where he stands politically. Obviously I can't verify this, but for example he had a professor who actively taught that nations are a completely artificial social construct, and as such all im…

Liberal != left. The hard left (for want of a better term) don't describe themselves as liberals and are generally critical of liberalism. Liberal is largely a term of the soft left / centrists.

Re: Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

#59

Post by aaron-lebo »

pavlov wrote: post #57
smallnamespace wrote: post #10

Just as an anecdote, met a recent state school grad who said he arrived on campus as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, tried to get into campus activism, and his fellow activists and teachers scared him so much that he's now not sure where he stands politically. Obviously I can't verify this, but for example he had a professor who actively taught that nations are a completely artificial social construct, and as such all im…

At least in the case of France, the point seems valid, and it's perhaps opposite of what you're assuming. The modern French nation is actually a left-wing construct -- an intentional product of the French Revolution. The Kingdom of France was not really a unified nation-state as we understand them today. There were multiple languages and a rich spectrum of local identities. French subjects were not necessarily French…

Napoleon (whose political views were across the board, but fairly right-wing) had more say about establishing the French state than any of the revolutionaries that had power before him. The Code Napoleon, for example.

Re: Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

#60

Post by juliangoldsmith »

chowchowchow wrote: post #50
juliangoldsmith wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As the American right-wing moves further right and further way from participating in consensus reality, it should be no surprise they are increasingly less welcome in spaces dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. The problem is the gap between consensus reality and objective reality. A lot of what the American left has been preaching recently (the Russia-Trump story, for instance) has no basis in objective reality,…

That's way overstating it -- people may jump to conclusions that don't match objective reality, but the string of suspicious meetings, consistent omissions from security clearance forms and testomonies, peculiar behaviors by advisors and campaign managers, are all things that did happen in reality. Things like 3 million illegal aliens voted in California, or Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or John Podesta running a s…

If something being suspicious is cause to believe it, then we can believe that the Clintons had something to do with the large number of politically convenient accidents and suicides surrounding them.

Objective reality doesn't seem to be enough to cast a shadow on the Clintons. How many people on the left know much about the scandal surrounding the Uranium One deal that Hillary Clinton approved, after taking large amounts of Russian money [0]?

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton...

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