American Breakdown by Gerard Baker

Author:Gerard Baker [BAKER, GERARD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2023-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Intellectual diversity is as important to the mission of higher education as demographic diversity and that it’s appropriate to make more efforts in our major universities to promote intellectual diversity. And that’s certainly something I tried to do during my time as president of Harvard.

What started as college playground antics—politically correct neologisms, consciousness-raising, and anti-bias theology—has become mainstream and deadly serious, a process that is undermining faith in American education itself. The extirpation of dissenting opinion goes beyond simply limiting or “canceling” people who speak out in opposition to prevailing orthodoxies. It is actively and successfully promoting policies that replace America’s historical discrimination against minorities with a modern form that sorts Americans into racial identities and then prioritizes some over others.

How did American higher education become host to this monolithic ideological hegemony?

The answer, as Ernest Hemingway wrote of going bankrupt, is in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016, with his often crude and belligerent rhetoric, the left’s angry backlash to it, and the national turmoil that followed the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020 seem to have provided some of the sparks that lit this ideological conflagration. But there was plenty of kindling that had been laid over the previous few decades.

A significant part of this modern extremism has its roots in the development of a radical intellectual movement that emerged in university faculty common rooms more than three decades ago. Critical race theory, along with other what might be termed structuralist interpretations of history, society, literature, and other intellectual currents and first given a name by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor at University of California Los Angeles, was a successor ideology to traditional Marxist thought. The essence of the theory was that America, and to a large extent all western capitalist societies, is inherently and systemically racist (and patriarchal). Its institutions and rules reflect the hegemony of the white male and the promotion of his distinctive interests to the detriment of others.

The key thesis was that the system itself is structurally flawed and notions of “equality” that well-meaning progressives espoused were invalid. The ideas of what constitutes virtue and value in such a society must be inherently racist and so our concepts of objectivity, fairness, even logic, reason, and scientific method, are all shot through with white oppressive characteristics.

Just as Marxists saw the oppression of workers by capitalism in all aspects of life, so these postmodernists saw racial and gender oppression as the central guiding force in all aspects of economic, political, and social organization.

This emphasis on identity—seeing humans principally as belonging to groups in society—has been augmented by so-called intersectionality, which the dictionary defines as “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.”

In short, the dominant idea is that society has been built on systems of oppression—led by white male heterosexuals—and those systems of privilege and advantage still define the character of contemporary society.

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