Kay: Liberalism’s Lonely-Hearts Club

2025/12/15 Leave a comment

Good calling out of the hypocrisy of the anti-woke when it comes to their betrayal of liberal beliefs in the age of authoritarian Trump and his policies:

…While Quillette’s liberal editorial mission has never really changed, executing it became more complicated during the COVID pandemic—especially once vaccinesbecame available. When heated and pressurised under lockdown, the same sort of free-thinking scepticism that fuels heterodox political thought, it turns out, can readily blur into conspiracism and junk science. A prominent example is Bret Weinstein, the one-time Quillette academic darling who began telling Americans that COVID vaccines had, according to one “credible estimate,” caused “something like 17 million deaths globally.” (In fact, the figure represents a passable ballpark estimate of the number of lives that such vaccines have saved.)

Even in ultra-progressive Canada, where this sort of conspiracism is less common, I’ve seen a number of prominent anti-wokesters go down similar rabbit holes. And though it’s been years since the pandemic ended, not all of them have found their way back to the surface. 

Following a recent speech I gave to a free-thinking Toronto crowd, the organiser felt moved to explain to attendees that it was important to hear “diverse views.” This was a diplomatic reference to my (poorly received) observation that many self-described heterodox intellectuals who cheer on my opposition to trans-activist pseudoscience will also insist (falsely) that COVID vaccines don’t work and (also falsely) that anthropogenic global warming is a myth. Science isn’t a buffet where you get to pick and choose what proven truths to accept, I told them. Few in the crowd looked convinced.

Another major schism within our liberal movement has centred on Donald Trump and conservative populism more generally. Trump’s second presidency, in particular, has accelerated the ongoing process by which critics of progressive illiberalism have been self-organising into two separate camps—(1) one that continues to oppose illiberalism of all flavours (that’s us), and (2) another that’s just fine with authoritarian political creeds, so long as the authoritarians come from the conservative side of the aisle.

If the goal is to get rid of DEI and throw men off women’s college sports teams, members of this latter Trump-friendly faction reason, why bother with the hard intellectual slog of staging “heterodox” academic conferences and writing long essays about Martin Luther King Jr., Areopagitica, and the nature of human sexual biology? Just elect a strongman who tells university presidents and athletic directors what to do, on pain of losing their government cash. Problem solved.

…While the University of Austin is just one institution, it serves as a bellwether of the whole anti-woke project more generally—having been conceived as a sort of model liberal project by some of the leading lights of this movement. Its board of trustees includes historian Niall Ferguson and journalist Bari Weiss, while the board of advisors boasts Eric Kaufmann, economists Glenn Loury and Tyler Cowen, and famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Harvard professor Steven Pinker was also an early advisor; as was social scientist Jonathan Haidt (a founder of the staunchly liberal-minded Heterodox Academy)—though both have since departed. Every one of these people has been featured by Quillette at one time or another, either as author or podcast guest. It says a lot about the stormy seas that liberals now face that even a once-impeccably liberal organisation such as this can begin listing to starboard just four years out of the shipyard.

I find these developments not just politically disturbing, but also personally disappointing. Not so long ago, I imagined that the coalition of plucky liberal gadflies that began countering illiberal progressivism at around the time I began working for Quillette could be sustained indefinitely—and perhaps even solidify into a durable movement that would become my long-term political home. (I’ve never had one, and it would be nice if I finally did.) But that’s now been exposed as an exercise in wishful thinking.

O’Sullivan’s Law and Quillette’s Law (I promise that’s the last time I’ll use the phrase) both describe ideologically centrifugal forces—driving people away, in opposite directions, from the liberal democratic baseline that I’d always taken for granted as the natural resting point for mainstream intellectual life. Battling against illiberalism from both sides at the same time can feel like a lonely and hopeless intellectual project. But absent the emergence of some third law that will deliver me from my labours, I see no principled alternative.

Source: Liberalism’s Lonely-Hearts Club

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Idées | La montée du wokisme… de droite

2025/06/19 Leave a comment

Along with “snowflakes:”

Dès son assermentation, Donald Trump a signé un décret intitulé « Pour restaurer la liberté d’expression », mais peu après, des mots et des expressions comme « équité », « genre » et « discours haineux » ont disparu des sites Web fédéraux. Après avoir fustigé la fixation du wokisme sur l’identité de genre et de race, le président états-unien a accueilli comme réfugiés des fermiers blancs soi-disant victimes de racisme en Afrique du Sud. Le vice-président Vance a quant à lui accusé les Européens de bafouer la liberté d’expression en malmenant les médias de droite, alors que Trump écartait les journalistes qui s’opposent à ses politiques ou qui, simplement, refusent d’employer l’expression « Gulf of America » pour parler du golfe du Mexique.

Ce ne sont là que quelques exemples. La liste des assauts de Trump contre le wokisme est longue. Mais quand on l’examine, on constate que ceux-ci ne font en fait que substituer une forme de wokisme à une autre. « Trump is going woke », écrivait d’ailleurs Thomas L. Friedman dans le New York Times.

Des mesures « antiwoke » ayant tous les attributs du wokisme minent la liberté d’expression chez nos voisins depuis quelques années déjà. Des professeurs ont été menacés de renvoi en Floride s’ils soutenaient de leur témoignage la contestation d’une loi électorale restrictive. Des législatures républicaines ont adopté des lois qui « encadrent » l’enseignement de certaines matières. Un rapport de PEN America signale que plus de 10 000 bouquins ont été bannis des écoles publiques en 2023-2024, la plupart concernant les personnes de couleur et issues de la communauté LGBTQ+.

Le phénomène a attiré le regard d’observateurs de divers horizons avant même que Donald Trump n’entame son second mandat. Sous le titre « The Regrettable Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism », The Imaginative Conservative remarquait que la droite woke utilise l’histoire exactement de la même façon que la gauche woke, « la réinventant pour nous éloigner de nos mythes fondateurs dans l’espoir que nous embrassions sa vision de l’avenir ».

La revue The Atlantic titrait pour sa part « How the Woke Right Replaced the Woke Left ». Thomas Chatterton Williams y stigmatisait les dérives linguistiques du wokisme de gauche, mais il ajoutait qu’en dépit de son décret sur la liberté d’expression, Trump avait imposé sa propre liste de mots et d’expressions à bannir. « Cette fois-ci, disait-il, les règles ont la force du gouvernement. »

Dans un article paru dans Le Devoir il y a quelques années, le linguiste Gabriel Martin expliquait que le mot « wokisme », qui décrit une idéologie de gauche radicale structurée en fonction de questions identitaires, désignait à l’origine une sensibilisation accrue à la justice sociale.

En dehors du milieu concerné, on ne s’est pas formalisé de cette récupération qui dénaturait le sens original du mot. En revanche, l’expression « wokisme de droite » illustre les nouvelles dérives de la droite américaine sans dénaturer le sens courant du mot, puisque le wokisme repose sur des enjeux identitaires et qu’il se manifeste par l’intolérance, la censure et en corollaire, la rectitude. La droite américaine a simplement remplacé les enjeux identitaires de genre et de race par ceux de l’homme blanc, de préférence chrétien. Pour le reste, le wokisme de droite se manifeste lui aussi par l’intolérance, la censure et la rectitude, et c’est sans retenue qu’il embrasse la culture de l’annulation.

L’ex-chroniqueuse du New York Times Bari Weiss affirmait il y a quelques années que les gens sont toujours plus nombreux à s’autocensurer par crainte d’être attaqués par une horde woke. Aujourd’hui, ce sont aussi les sanctions du gouvernement que ses concitoyens risquent de s’attirer s’ils négligent de s’autocensurer.

Ce wokisme de droite qui touche nos voisins a aussi des effets chez nous. Parce que des chercheurs de l’Université de Montréal en font les frais, le recteur Daniel Jutras considère cet « autoritarisme à la Trump » comme une menace plus grande à la liberté académique que ce qu’il nomme le « wokisme interne ». Le recteur ne nie pas pour autant le danger de ce wokisme interne, « une menace réelle — disait-il en entrevue au Journal de Montréal —, mais qui a parfois été exagérée par certains commentateurs ».

On nous répète que le « wokisme interne », ou de gauche, est né dans les universités américaines avant d’essaimer chez nous. Le wokisme de droite, né dans l’esprit des gouverneurs et des législateurs de certains États américains, est maintenant embrassé par le gouvernement Trump. Ainsi soutenu par le pouvoir, il est d’autant plus efficace… et dangereux ! Il mérite donc d’être surveillé avec la même vigilance et dénoncé avec la même vigueur que sa contrepartie de gauche. « On a fermé la lumière aux États-Unis sur plusieurs sujets dont l’étude permet de faire progresser la société […] Il ne faut pas que la même chose se produise ici », disait la rectrice Sophie d’Amours, de l’Université Laval, lors d’un récent colloque sur la liberté académique.

Source: Idées | La montée du wokisme… de droite

Upon his swearing-in, Donald Trump signed a decree entitled “To restore freedom of expression”, but soon after, words and expressions such as “fairness”, “gender” and “hate speech” disappeared from federal websites. After criticizing the fixation of wokism on gender and racial identity, the US president welcomed white farmers so-called victims of racism in South Africa as refugees. Vice-President Vance accused Europeans of flouting freedom of expression by mistruting the right-wing media, while Trump dismissed journalists who oppose his policies or who simply refuse to use the expression “Gulf of America” to talk about the Gulf of Mexico.

These are just a few examples. The list of Trump’s assaults against wokism is long. But when we examine it, we see that they are in fact only substituting one form of wokism for another. “Trump is going woke,” wrote Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times.

“Anti-woke” measures with all the attributes of wokism have been undermining freedom of expression among our neighbors for a few years now. Teachers were threatened with return to Florida if they supported their testimony to challenge a restrictive electoral law. Republican legislatures have adopted laws that “frame” the teaching of certain subjects. A PEN America report reports that more than 10,000 books were banned from public schools in 2023-2024, most of them concerning people of color and people from the LGBTQ+ community.

The phenomenon attracted the attention of observers from various backgrounds even before Donald Trump began his second term. Under the title “The Regrettable Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism”, The Imaginative Conservative noted that the right woke uses history in exactly the same way as the left woke, “reinventing it to take us away from our founding myths in the hope that we embrace its vision of the future”.

The Atlantic magazine headlined “How the Woke Right Replaced the Woke Left”. Thomas Chatterton Williams stigmatized the linguistic drifts of leftist wokism, but added that despite his decree on freedom of expression, Trump had imposed his own list of words and expressions to be banned. “This time,” he said, “the rules have the strength of the government. ”

In an article in Le Devoir a few years ago, linguist Gabriel Martin explained that the word “wokism”, which describes a radical left-wing ideology structured according to identity issues, originally referred to increased awareness of social justice.

Outside the environment concerned, we have not formalized this recovery which distorted the original meaning of the word. On the other hand, the expression “right-wing wokism” illustrates the new drifts of the American right without distorting the common meaning of the word, since wokism is based on identity issues and is manifested by intolerance, censorship and in corollary, rectitude. The American right has simply replaced the identity issues of gender and race with those of the white man, preferably Christian. For the rest, right-wing wokism is also manifested by intolerance, censorship and rectitude, and it is without restraint that it embraces the culture of cancellation.

Former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss said a few years ago that more and more people are self-censoring for fear of being attacked by a woke horde. Today, it is also the government’s sanctions that its fellow citizens are likely to attract if they neglect to self-censorship.

This right-wing wokism that affects our neighbors also has effects on us. Because researchers at the University of Montreal pay the price, Rector Daniel Jutras considers this “Trump-style authoritarianism” as a greater threat to academic freedom than what he calls “internal wokism”. The rector does not deny the danger of this internal wokism, “a real threat – he said in an interview with the Journal de Montréal -, but which has sometimes been exaggerated by some commentators”.

We are told that “internal wokism”, or leftist, was born in American universities before swarming at home. Right-wing wokism, born in the minds of the governors and legislators of some American states, is now embraced by the Trump government. Thus supported by the government, it is all the more effective… and dangerous! He therefore deserves to be monitored with the same vigilance and denounced with the same vigor as his left-wing counterpart. “We have closed the light in the United States on several subjects whose study makes it possible to advance society […] The same thing must not happen here,” said Rector Sophie d’Amours, of Laval University, at a recent symposium on academic freedom.

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Kaufmann: If ‘Woke’ Puritanism Is the Disease, Trump’s Amoral Populism Isn’t the Cure

2025/04/12 Leave a comment

Funny to see some of the critics of left wokism become woke to the dangers of right-wing populist wokism and the failure of the right wing intelligentcia to counter the inherent destructiveness of Trump and his acolytes and sycophants:

To what extent should a society demand adherence to moral norms? Three months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, it’s a question worth asking. Having rejected the puritanical “woke” moralism of the 2010s and early 2020s, Americans are now enduring the opposite problem: Trump and his chief corporate enabler, Elon Musk, have over-corrected, embracing a morality-free style of governance fuelled entirely by a drive to hoard power and punish their enemies.

…This behaviour isn’t just amoral and anti-democratic. It’s juvenile. Trump and Musk have become America’s trolls-in-chief—as exemplified by the White House’s posting of an AI-generated cartoon depicting an immigrant crying in handcuffs. This type of “shitposting” is the furthest thing from presidential.

What makes this descent into power-drunk nihilism all the more regrettable is that it’s come on the heels of a historic “vibe shift”: Many serious liberals and centrists joined the campaign against woke overreach. The most interesting new ideas on the left have been coming from moderate leftists such as Matthew Yglesias, Noah Smith, and Ezra Klein, who leaven their pro-immigration sympathies with respect for border control.

In light of this, the intellectual right had a chance to broaden its coalition, and fashion what I’ve termed a “rational populist” consensus that marginalises leftist extremism. Such a development could, among other things, dispel the stigmatisation of “whiteness” and manhood pervading progressive discourse—which itself has become a source of populist grievance. More generally, it would also help spark a return to a moral consensus that promotes cultural wealth, personal resilience, and classical liberal values such as free speech and equality among group identities.

Trump could have shown the world a way forward by embracing this challenge. Instead, he’s provided a dark cautionary tale about what happens when a nation’s leader throws off all moral constraints.

Source: If ‘Woke’ Puritanism Is the Disease, Trump’s Amoral Populism Isn’t the Cure

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Nicolas | Victoire antiwoke

2025/03/28 Leave a comment

A reminder but yes, there have been excesses:

…En toute transparence, un sentiment de colère m’habite alors que je parcours et reproduis ici ces mots. Une colère saine, que je travaille à exprimer sainement. C’était écrit dans le ciel que l’obsession pour les wokes et le wokisme manufacturés de toutes pièces par Fox News et les autres grands médias de la droite républicaine visait le rétrécissement des libertés d’expression, d’association et universitaire. Les campus ont été des lieux cruciaux dans les luttes pour les droits de la personne dans l’histoire américaine : s’attaquer à l’université, c’était autoriser un recul des droits, et vice versa.

Je trouve lourd qu’il soit même nécessaire de rappeler que le wokisme est la clé d’une guerre culturelle inventée par la droite républicaine pour servir ses intérêts, et que c’est à partir du combat contre le danger woke — renommé parfois EDI de manière à peu près interchangeable — qu’on assoie présentement cette attaque contre la raison, la science, le langage et des pans entiers de la population.

Certains auront de la difficulté à admettre qu’en alimentant ces chasses aux wokes, ils sont tombés dans un piège extrêmement grossier dont on voit maintenant le résultat. Je crois que, derrière cette colère, il y a surtout une tristesse, une forme de deuil. Une déception aussi.

Marginalisé. Marijuana. Minorités. Multiculturel. Noir. Non binaire. Obésité. Opioïdes. Oppression. Orientation. Polarisation. Politique. Pollution. Personne enceinte. Populations clés. Préférences sexuelles. Préjugés. Privilège. Promouvoir. Pronoms. Prostituées. Qualité environnementale.

Si j’établis l’obsession pour les wokes comme le début de la fin des haricots, c’est parce que je citais Hannah Arendt la semaine dernière, et je vais me répéter : « La mort de l’empathie humaine est l’un des premiers signes et des plus révélateurs d’une culture sur le point de sombrer dans la barbarie. »

Et que le mot « woke », à la base, ne signifie qu’une sensibilité pour la justice sociale et un engagement actif dans la lutte contre la discrimination et les inégalités.

En écrivant semaine après semaine de manière négative à partir de ce concept, des chroniqueurs ont contribué à associer le souci des personnes vulnérables au ridicule, voire au danger ou au mal. On a stigmatisé l’empathie — sans prévoir que ça allait finir par revenir au nez d’à peu près tout le monde. Parce qu’on a tous des éléments de vulnérabilité en nous, d’une manière ou d’une autre.

C’était ça, le piège.

Des personnalités médiatiques américaines, européennes, canadiennes et québécoises ont passé une partie de la dernière décennie à cibler des personnes, principalement des jeunes, qui exprimaient des préoccupations pour le bien commun à partir de profondes réserves d’empathie, déclenchant souvent à leur égard une pluie de messages haineux qui a contribué à les faire taire. Il y avait bien sûr parfois des maladresses dans la manière de s’exprimer, maladresses qui ont servi de justificatif à cette dureté. Mais le traitement médiatique a tellement été dur envers les jeunes empathiques qui s’exprimaient de manière parfois maladroite dans l’espace public qu’il n’y a pratiquement plus de jeunes empathiques qui osent s’exprimer dans l’espace public. Problème réglé, je suppose ?

Race. Racisme. Rougeole. Santé mentale. Science climatique. Ségrégation. Sexe. Sexualité. Socioculturel. Socio-économique. Sous-représentés. Sous-représentation. Sous-estimés. Stéréotypes. Sujets à enquête fédérale. Sujets qui ont récemment reçu l’attention du Congrès. Sujets qui ont reçu une grande attention médiatique.

Il y a quelque chose d’obscène dans le silence des gens qui ont fait leur pain et leur beurre avec la « liberté d’expression » et l’antiwokisme à Fox News ces dernières années, face à cette censure — cette vraie censure —, c’est-à-dire ce bannissement de mots par legouvernement de manière à limiter la distribution des ressources. Mais une fois la colère, la tristesse et la déception exprimées, je retrouve accès à mes instincts plus généreux, voire optimistes, sinon sereins, dans l’interprétation de ce silence. Je me dis — j’espère — que certains ont entamé une réflexion sur la machine infernale dans laquelle ils ont mis le doigt.

Systémique. Trans. Transgenre. Traumatisme. Traumatique. Vaccins. Victimes. Violence fondée sur le genre. Vulnérable.

Au fond, la seule question qui importe vraiment, c’est : qu’est-ce qu’on est en train d’apprendre de tout cela ?

Source: Chronique | Victoire antiwoke

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Adam Pankratz: Wokeness is deservedly crashing. Let’s be careful about retribution

2024/08/24 Leave a comment

Good note of caution:

…This is the fear I have harboured for a while now: that the inevitable backlash against the insane and destructive scourge of activist identity politics would arrive and, when it came, the perpetrators would discover that they were a minority and, the majority now coming for them was not in a conciliatory mood. While minorities persecuting majorities is bad (as we have seen via cancel culture), a majority persecuting a minority, whatever they may have done, has the potential to be worse.

The most vehement and vocal adherents and actors in the culture wars of the past years have done enormous damage to both institutions and individuals. They have cost people their jobs, reputations and, in some cases, their lives. It is not unnatural to want to see such bad actors harmed as they harmed others. By doing so, however, those of us who have stood against the tidal wave of woke activism which threatened society, risk becoming the beasts we fought so hard to push back. The Capital Pride debacle demonstrates the societal pendulum is swinging back, my fear is it will bludgeon indiscriminately and plunge us further into extreme societal divides.

Source: Adam Pankratz: Wokeness is deservedly crashing. Let’s be careful about retribution

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Austin Harper: The Emerging Bipartisan Wokeness

2024/07/25 Leave a comment

Of interest:

…Underlying left-wing wokeness, even at its most performative and excessive, is a series of partial truths about American society: Even if die-hard progressives are wrong and anti-Black racism does not explain every problem in this country, it does explain quite a few of them. And 2020’s summer of reckoning did draw much-needed attention to entrenched and structurally reinforced racial inequalities in the United States, despite the movement quickly getting derailed by “elite capture”—the tendency of radical social movements to get co-opted by corporate and other rarefied interests.

As someone who became a professor in August 2020, at the incandescent height of progressive wokeness, I have watched higher education around the country become ever more outwardly progressive. But the social-justice rhetoric that now suffuses academia has done absolutely nothing to stop the relentless pace of gigification. More and more academics every year are employed as contingent laborers rather than as tenure-track professors. In fact, a good case can be made that wokeness greases the skids for this trend by allowing universities to appear like benevolent actors, hiring greater numbers of women and people of color, even as they pull the rug out from under labor by placing those new hires in adjunct roles.

It’s easy to argue that we should have known better, that the progressive ideas championed by CEOs and elite-university presidents were probably not that progressive after all, but the reckoning of 2020 happened for a reason. The Great Awokening was so galvanizing for so many precisely because it always had one foot in reality. The same can be said of conservative wokeness.

The right’s renewed focus on anti-white racism, its opportunistic seizing of the anti-Semitism debate, and the broader anti-DEI craze it has stirred up are also appealing to the masses precisely because they have some truth in them. For example, although it is not true that white men are unemployable in academia, the subject of a recent high-profile social-media culture-war battle, it is obviously the case that efforts to diversify the faculty at many universities mean that white candidates are viewed less favorably. The rise of racially themed cluster-hire initiatives—which allow universities to gerrymander diverse candidate pools by writing job ads for minority-majority subfields such as “decolonial theory”—are a way for academic institutions to skirt antidiscrimination laws. Likewise, although the right’s attempt to portray university students as hardened pro-Hamas, bike-lock-wielding terrorists is plainly ludicrous, it is just as plain that anti-Semitism within the progressive movement is real, however fringe these elements may be. If the ways the right characterizes these issues are often disingenuous and overexaggerated, they are not wholly fabricated either.

But as with left-wing wokeness, conservative wokeness preys on people moved by these legitimate issues to sell them on a hyperbolized politics. Woke conservatism leverages reasonable concerns about a range of issues—the plight of working-class white men, anti-Semitism, misandry, and the like—only to foment a hysteria that distracts from the fact that its principal champions are also the causes of many of the problems it allegedly seeks to solve. The primary threat to the job prospects of many working-class white men in America is not “reverse racism,” affirmative action, or pesky minorities, but accumulated decades of deindustrialization, market fundamentalism, and anti-union efforts that sent blue-collar jobs overseas and gutted the ones that remained. As for the loud warnings about left-wing anti-Semitism, the sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi has demonstrated that “liberals are consistently the least antisemitic ideological group in the US, and white liberals—the Americans most likely to embrace ‘woke’ ideology—are the least antisemitic people in the country by far.”

Wokeness is now the air we all breathe, a noxious miasma of bad faith, hysteria, and shameless opportunism that is animated by not ultimate principles but ultimate convenience. It has not peaked, and it is not peaking. Wokeness has become the status quo, a bipartisan lingua franca, the ruling style of American politics.

Tyler Austin Harper is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College and a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Source: THE EMERGING BIPARTISAN WOKENESS

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Paul: Who You Calling Conservative?

2024/06/28 Leave a comment

Of note, how the left eats its own?

….But liberal people can disagree without being called traitors. Liberals can even agree with conservatives on certain issues because those positions aren’t inherently conservative. Shouldn’t the goal be to decrease polarization rather than egg it on? Shouldn’t Democrats aim for a big tent, especially at a time when registered party members are declining and the number of independents is on the rise?

Those on the Democratic side of the spectrum have traditionally been far better at nuance, complexity and compromise than Republicans. It would be to our detriment if policies on which a broad swath of Americans agree are deliberately tanked by a left wing that has moved as far to the left as Republicans have moved to the right. Those who denounce militant fealty within the Republican Party shouldn’t enforce similar purity tests in their own ranks.

Source: Who You Calling Conservative?

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Christopher Dummitt: Four ways Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives can fight woke ideology 

2024/06/19 Leave a comment

Suspect some of these ideas are being seriously considered by the Conservative Party in planning for a likely change in government. In an ideal sense, this would lead to a new thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis, reversing some of the excesses of the current government while recognizing that greater attention to diversity and inclusion issues was needed to address representation and other gaps.

However, it is more likely that the temptation will be to wade into such “cultural war” virtue signalling given its appeal to their base and the lesser importance of these issues to Canadians compared to housing, healthcare, infrastructure, foreign interference etc. Checking and rating candidates for political viewpoints raises any number of issues whether with respect to right or left-wing views.

But Kaufmann and Dummitt should know better the risks of simply replacing one dominant ideological tendency with another rather. Interesting that they choose that approach rather than arguing for a “merit-based” or more balanced approach., suggesting the intent is as much ideological than arguing for of …Kaufmann outlines a 12-point plan but I’ll simplify it to four points and a coda.

I have sympathy for the view that the pendulum has shifted too far and that a rebalancing is needed but not convinced that some of these ideas are workable or lead to an improved syntheses:

Insist on politically neutral institutions

Conservatives should take the high ground and insist on politically neutral institutions. In everything from the CBC/Radio Canada to university research funding and heritage institutions, the government should enshrine political neutrality. This means not disseminating politically divisive concepts like “white privilege” or claiming that psychological “harm” can override free speech.

Even though some conservatives might not agree, the BBC in the U.K. could be a model. I used to live in London and attend live tapings of topical radio comedy shows. For every joke they did about one political party or idea, they had to have another taking on the other side. It was sometimes over the top—certainly, the comedians poked fun at it—but the emphatic insistence on equal treatment mattered. Right up and down the public service, a new conservative government should insist on politically neutral institutions and the end of spreading woke ideas “on the sly” through the seemingly neutral dissemination of leftist ideas. If an overwhelming majority of the public accepts these ideas—only then should they be taken up by public institutions.

Redo DEI to include political viewpoints

Kaufmann thinks that while it might be tempting to get rid of DEI this probably isn’t feasible. What is possible is to insist that it be done right. Any institution that wants to hire based on categories of identity must include political viewpoint as an equity category. Many of our institutions, especially but not only universities, are now left-wing monoliths. A Conservative government should insist that this obvious lack of diversity be tackled right alongside other issues.

A Conservative government should also insist that DEI be done accurately. That is, it can’t be done by comparing the share of a certain group’s place in a profession, like engineering, with their share in the general population. It should instead be based on that group’s share in the applicant pool. We should try to identify where the problem arises. Are discrepancies happening because of actual discrimination in hiring or are there just not enough applicants? If there aren’t enough applicants, deal with that problem (if indeed it is a problem). We shouldn’t expect every group’s share of the population to be exactly replicated in every field of work. Only if we have evidence of discrimination should discriminatory hiring quotas be implemented.

Focus on national belonging

Different groups of Canadians will find different parts of the Canadian story more meaningful. Maritimers will likely be more interested in our seafaring heritage. African Canadians might take more pride in Canada’s place as one part of the Underground Railroad (though others will of course be fascinated too). But our national heritage institutions should stop focusing on what divides us and instead embrace what brings us together.i

It doesn’t mean overlooking our blind spots. However, it does mean interpreting them correctly. A Conservative government should insist that those dark places in the Canadian record be considered from a global perspective. We should get rid of woke parochialism which exclusively focuses on Canadian and Western sins. When dealing with issues like colonialism and violence, heritage institutions must be made to interpret these parts of our history in line with the existence of worldwide non-Western forms of slavery, imperialism, and violence including among pre-contact Indigenous peoples.

This means embracing a “retain and explain” cultural policy where the assumption should be that names, statues, and other honorifics are retained except in very exceptional circumstances. What’s more, explanations cannot be one-sided accounts but must interpret figures and events within their global context.

 Remember it’s about the people

Given that so many of our institutions have been taken over by woke activists and their liberal sympathizers, a new Conservative government should make it a priority to restaff the boards and institutions to achieve political diversity. Time and again, conservative governments are stymied because the actual people in the public service align with non-conservative beliefs. This means working on two fronts.

First, find and appoint non-woke political candidates to cultural and public service institutions across the country. The goal is political balance. Second, and this is where Kaufmann really focuses, conservatives need to build pipelines to ensure that when a government goes looking for people, they can find qualified and trained individuals. This means creating a Federalist Society for the public service—the equivalent of that highly influential American conservative legal organization that funnels law students and ideas into the American legal system. Similarly, we need an Austrian School for culture—a conduit for woke-critical ideas in our university world that can generate an idea base that can serve as the cultural equivalent to what the Austrian School did for economic liberalism.

Coda

Finally, a coda. All of the above will help and can be put into action. But Kaufmann also has one final and important bit of advice that can be done right now. Stop using the woke language. Rip off the velvet glove and expose the radioactive illiberalism that lies beneath.

This means insisting on using evocative words and images. Unless there is specific evidence that a particular institution has been discriminatory, when that institution hires based on DEI quotas this should be called out for what it is: anti-White or anti-Asian or anti-male or anti-heterosexual prejudice. Unmask the language of equity to show the discriminatory and vengeful impulse at its heart.

Don’t accept the language of “gender-affirming” care when we are talking about giving adolescents drugs that might chemically castrate them. When people want to bind young girls’ breasts or surgically remove them, describe it for what it is: gender-based violence. Use vivid imagery like pictures of the outsized prosthetic breasts of the Toronto area teacher who caused such controversy recently. Canadians support liberal non-discrimination. They want a country that accepts all its citizens. But they also can smell when something is foul and conservatives need to be sufficiently brave and clear to point out when woke ideas are illiberal.

What all of this means is that modern social conservatism can look a lot different from the Liberal attack-ad caricature. A new Conservative government could stand for policies that treat all Canadians equally, could enshrine politically neutral public institutions, and could show pride in our national history and culture. These aren’t just defensible shield issues; they are worth going on the attack to promote.

Source: Christopher Dummitt: Four ways Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives can fight woke ideology

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , , ,

Dave Snow: When political scientists get political

2024/02/29 Leave a comment

Believe not unique to political science and his conclusions based on extensive article analysis.

Some of my academic friends, in broad agreement with Snow’s depiction of the shift, point out however that most academics prefer to publish in higher profile international journals given greater weight in tenure and related decisions:

…. I draw three main conclusions. First, Canadian political science scholarship is clearly shifting in important ways. For better or worse, papers published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science reflect the discipline itself. While the discipline has not undergone a wholesale change (as seems to be the case in history), a sizeable proportion of Canada’s flagship political science journal is composed of papers using critical approaches and methodologies that place a greater emphasis on narratives of historical marginalization, particularly with respect to Indigenous Peoples and decolonization. 

Second, the journal’s openness to critical methodologies and identity diversity has been accompanied by a narrowing of its ideological diversity. While authors’ policy recommendations are by no means ideologically homogenous, they generally range from centre-left to far-left. This tilt is most obvious in papers that focus on decolonization, but it is present throughout the entire journal. Of 227 papers published over the last five years, I did not find a single one that provided anything approximating a conservative policy recommendation. By contrast, even the journal’s most empirically rigorous quantitative papers often contain recommendations such as “political parties should recruit and promote more women candidates” and “Policy tools specifically designed to problematize, target and alleviate racial economic inequality also seem needed.” Conservative scholars used to publish mildly conservative policy recommendations in the journal. Those days are now long gone.

Third, the journal editors’ statement is sadly reflective of similar statements made in Canadian higher education regarding equity, diversity, and inclusion, insofar as it refuses to acknowledge any previous progressive change. The Canadian Journal of Political Science had already clearly opened itself up to diverse perspectives and methodologies in recent years. Several papers in a 2017 special issue had already identified some of these changes. Yet this did not stop its new editors from claiming that the discipline was still engaged in “gatekeeping” on behalf of “white androcentric paradigms.” Thankfully, political scientists are well-equipped to use data to test the truth of such speculative arguments.

In spite of the challenges facing our universities, Canadians continue to profess high levels of trust in academics, including those in the social sciences and humanities. To retain such trust, we must demonstrate a commitment to the core purposes of the university: intellectual curiosity and the pursuit of truth. We do ourselves no favours when we abandon these goals in favour of political projects. 

Dave Snow is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Guelph.

Source: Dave Snow: When political scientists get political

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Tara Henley: What happened to Canada?

2024/01/22 Leave a comment

Tara Henley, who left the CBC over concerns over its overly “woke” approach to stories, continues her critique of narrow identity focused analysis rather than more universal class-based approaches:

…During the same decade or so that housing affordability was tanking in Canada, an ideology arrived that took a radical posture on social issues while maintaining the economic status quo. 

This new line of thinking originated at elite American universities and spread to Canada through social media. It presents itself as leftist but eschews key leftist concepts such as class analysis, universalism, and the importance of free speech. Instead, it views politics through the lens of identity, focusing on equalizing outcomes between identity groups, as well as on problematizing language, criticizing social, cultural, and interpersonal norms, and building up a vast administrative class to advance such efforts.

Critically, it presents its ideas as moral imperatives, trading persuasion for campaigns of public shaming.

It is a political project that’s been widely embraced by economic elites in Canada, from individuals to corporate and governmental leaders, including Justin Trudeau. Though clearly well-intentioned in some instances, in practice it serves to assuage the guilt of the haves and to signal their virtue to the have-nots. (See the prevalence of Indigenous land acknowledgments at public events in Canada. This exercise makes participants look and feel good but does nothing to improve the living conditions of Indigenous people.)

Identitarian moralism, as it happens, has also appealed to a vocal and understandably pessimistic segment of the have-nots—chiefly a class of young, educated knowledge workers, whose economic prospects have markedly declined. As other writers have pointed out in the past, this ethos provides a low-effort outlet for feelings of powerlessness. The causes of Canada’s decline are multifold, complex, and difficult to address. Calling someone a bigot online is relatively easy….

Source: Tara Henley: What happened to Canada?

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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