The salient point you're all missing is this isn't academic- they're using Alinsky's tactics as well as taking a page from Islamism : lying about your motivation is perfectly acceptable because the ends justify ANY means.
I agree that you had the upper hand and better argument. My impression was that while you saw the reality of human interactions, he had more of what I once heard called, "the hand-wavy, it'll be fine" perspective, where if everyone just assumes good faith on everyone's part everything works out for the best. I just rolled my eyes.
Right. The world is not a debate society. The best ideas do not always win. The point of politics is how to wield power in the interest of justice. We cannot avoid the necessity of power.
“The world is not a debate society.” I agree. But let’s ask, “To what degree is the world a debate society right now?” An let’s be grateful for what we have and then ask, “What can I do to promote better discourse?” Let’s multitask as we go; you work the right flank and I’ll work the left, moving toward a world with much more learning and Socratic dialogue. This requires creativity and optimism. We can make huge improvements here; namely by reading and discussing your book here on Substack. Agree?
Further I’ll do a lessons learned on the lack of discourse of the past. For example, Substack is far superior to any “discourse platform” we’ve had before. We need to understand why it’s superior and then ask how we can make it better.
So in addition to your strategy of effectively wielding power in the interest of justice, we should be improving the incentives for better discourse on platforms like Substack. Agree?
Politics without virtuous leadership and virtuous dialogue, will have unintended consequences.
The elites on the "left" are sociopaths, narcissists and in some cases, Machiavellian psychopaths, evil depraved power seekers.
They see people calling for "debate" as weak and easily manipulated.
The only thing to do is to relentlessly smash them in the face as hard as possible, metaphorically speaking of course, and destroy them politically, which Rufo is doing masterfully.
Again, the psychopaths on the cultural-left see your calls for "debate", "improved discourse", virtuous leadership, morality, etc. as weakness to be manipulated.
Your argument didn't work against King George, the Confederacy, Hitler, Stalin or Mao, and it won't work against the lunatics on the far left.
The only thing you can depend on the left to do is to engage in infighting and stabbing each other in the back. The extremists always stab the "moderates" in the back.
"The best ideas do not always win." This is one reason I support secession. I think that if either Trump or Biden win the election, there could be civil war. Let people live in communities with other people sharing their values.
Yeah, that perspective is annoying, I know a lot of people who would consider themselves right of center or at least opposed to the woke stuff, who have that attitude.
A friend is a prominent academic. A fellow academic had been fired for having sexual relations with a student. And raked over the coals. His life was nearly destroyed. However....in fact she wasn’t a student. She was an older student at the university and had taken a course with him a year earlier. They had a consensual relationship. They were roughly the same age. He broke it off with her and she accused him of horrible things. Their emails showed she was lying. She had done this before at another University with a prof. Who had dumped her. Same pattern. Chases a prof. Gets laid. Gets dumped. Attack. I heard of the story as it was unraveling. The university eventually had to settle with the prof and paid him $167,000. I asked my friend if he had known him. He said ‘yes he is a good friend of ours. He has been here for dinner many times.’ I asked which version was correct and he said the prof was 100% innocent. It had been a travesty set against a really decent guy. I then asked ‘how is he doing now?’ ‘I haven’t talked to him since this whole thing happened.’ Whoa, what? He abandoned his friend, whom he knew was innocent. He hadn’t even phoned him! He explained being the head of his department he felt it best to distance himself from the attacked professor. Some friend. So, Yasha Mounk can talk all he likes about how discussion can bring about the requires changes but it can’t. The Academics fight for tenure. Not anything else. Mounk hasn’t fought DEI. Just as my friend wouldn’t support his friend in his time of need. If we count on the academy standing up for justice we are fools. The academy fell the first and easiest because the academy is filled with weaklings.
iirc, a book was written about a very similar incident, except a liberal, feminist professor (Kipnis) defended the falsely accused male, and the liberal feminist was also viciously attacked by the "woke" crazies. She eventually won in court.
" ... all of the ideas from the radical left of that era—the late 1960s, early 1970s—have infiltrated universities and then started to move laterally through bureaucracies in the state sector, in K–12 education, in HR departments, and even the Fortune 100 companies," and may I add the media and the churches. They have done exactly what the Italian communist Gramsci instructed, and some of them knowingly. "In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media ..." -- Antonio Gramsci. We know exactly what they have done and why, and why it must be reversed. They need the cultural hegemony, which they have achieved, in order to impose their historically disastrous economic system. They are also well on their way to achieving that, as well, if they are not stopped.
Prof Mounk lives in a “bubble”, he sounds elitist and I would never allow him to “teach””/indoctrinate anyone in my family. I have learned.... Professors such as this have a SHELF LIFE. Time for him to go live in the real world!
Right, the proof is in the pudding. If he could not limit this ideology in his own university, what confidence should we have that his ideas will somehow limit it more broadly?
To vastly oversimplify, the status and power hierarchies are:
1. global finance and digital capitalism (postmodern "Gnosticism", reality is a social construct)
2. the PMC, professional-managerial class, such as Mounk, who are dependent on, and deferential to, #1, so they are free to use postmodernist rhetoric about "diversity", etc.
3. manufacturing capitalism, business owners and the traditional working classes
The data collected by social scientists indicates that at the extreme, #1 wants what Koel Kotkin calls Neo-Feudalism. #2 is generally supportive of their status structure, and will go along with that.
In additional to Kotkin's voluminous data collection, Musa Al Gharbi, a black, liberal-heterodox PhD sociologist has done a decades of research on the alienation of actual working class non-"white" immigrants from the globalists and the PMC (Democratic party elites and the progressive/liberal/left).
So, the D-party "left" is not only evil and depraved, the basis of their core ideology and rhetoric is a horrible, dirty, nasty lie, and pure hypocrisy.
They are not "fighting oppression", they reinvented it to suit the purposes of gaining more power for their sociopathic elites.
The early discussion of Marxist influence upon/roots of Social Justice ideology is an example of productive discussion which yields what seemed a good and common understanding.
Most of the later discussion of the gestation of Social Justice ideology is comparable in value and, surprisingly, Mounk returned to the theme of Marxism which seemed to me earlier properly addressed, albeit in a summary way. The return of this theme does add to the prior discussion; as it turns out, Mounk was not satisfied with the initial treatment, and so properly reopened that initial line of discussion.
Weiss properly brings the discussion to the practical question, and Christopher, you sharpened (in mid-stride) what you were already saying in response to her prompt, and connected your reply to the differences in approach and understanding between yourself and Mounk - which in-turn prompted Mounk to make a comparable case for his own argument, which then led to a good differentiation.
My own understanding of Marcuse is that he attempted to renew Marxism ("pick up the pieces") after the empirical failure of Dialectical Materialism - which leads us also to Foucault, etc. Mounk is correct to say that Marcuse is mediated (my term) by Foucault in this latest iteration, but you correctly observed that this is not merely an academic debate, and that Marx via Marcuse and Gramsci is the real-world manifestation of this movement. This corresponded with your insistence from the start of the discussion that we must understand the phenomenon in-question as a fully-real phenomenon - as more than a set of ideas.
The content of the ideology matters as to what the ideologists will/plan to do in-reality, but ultimately - if I am correct - ideology's content is arbitrary. We have seen how it sheds/accretes "content" overnight and w/o regard for consistency (i.e. reality). It is a product of the imagination, rather than of reality. Voegelin called it a "gnostic dream-world."
The amount of recycled National Socialism within Bourgeois Radicalism demonstrates this point.
This leads to the only proper solutions - defeating it in-reality, or waiting for reality to defeat it, later.
Yes, I believe these ideologies are just intellectual rationalizations of underlying non-rational psychological impulses. The ideas may change, but the underlying psychological impulses remain the same.
I like how it’s finally admitted at the end that our institutions are ideologically captured by Marxists and they’re only backtracking now because of the sunlight being shone. Thank you, Chris and Bari
Great debate. Both Yascha and Chris have great merits. It reminds me of the great debates between Jefferson and Hamilton on how to start and sustain a republic with both high ideals and effective governance. Chris clearly has a better sense of the imperfect reality that our country is living through right now as Hamilton did in his time. The presidency of Jefferson shifted him significantly from the idealist towards the pragmatist direction. We need more leaders like Hamilton to plore through the rut but also Jefferson to remind ourselves why we are doing it.
I don’t think this is - currently - a winning argument. But I think it might be true. This goes way beyond politics and economics. There is something evil in the world. We are in a God vs Satan, angels vs demons, moment.
I agree that this ideology includes something evil. For more about this line of thinking, I suggest reading "The Devil and Karl Marx" by Paul Kengor, PhD, an expert on Marxism.
I think if you used that argument it would be used against you. But I also think ignoring it is tying one hand behind your back. Your debate opponent think discussion and ‘winning’ an argument will work. It won’t. Capitalism clearly is flawed and just as clearly is 20x as effective at improving everyone’s life, at every strata of society, as socialism. Which is HORRIBLY flawed. Yet the academy is fully compromised. Ergo rational debate will not win this.
Most people confuse "capitalism" (a system of market economics that began to emerge as part of "classical liberalism" around the 1300s with the Hanseatic League and German Free Cities and Constitutional order as a replacement for Fealty Oaths) with the modern, managerial corporate-state.
With the industrial revolution, "capitalism" mutated into Laissez Faire and that was the last straw in terms of class inequality.
The values of pre-modern, pre-liberal, medieval, feudal, pre-Capitalist culture were oriented toward communion/conformism.
Modernity, classically liberal, Capitalist culture flipped that to agentic values, individual achievement (and scientific-technological innovation).
The rise of the professional-managerial class and the postmodern corporate-state was yet another flipping of values, back toward communion/conformism and away from agentic values (individual achievement, merit, modern rationalism).
A number of social scientists have stated that the "left" is a Christian heresy, so you are correct that the argument is "religious", between two conflicting "religious" perspectives, one, historical and arguably more authentic, the other one (the "left") fake.
They’re coming for you Chris, but this is pretty weak! When they can’t beat your arguments they try to attack your character. Stand tall when you’re standing on truth!
The Guardian regularly publishes insane, toxic leftist narratives, lies and distortions, and this article is a good example of that.
The cultural "left" has been attacking actual science, specifically sociobiology since the late 1970s, on the basis of insane ideology that has nothing to do with real science. Why? Because the cultural "left" rests on a foundation of a psychological model of human nature as a "blank slate". The cultural "left" thought that if human nature was a "blank slate", then people could be reprogrammed like robots to serve the cause of leftist utopia.
What sociobiology did was to use genetic and evolutionary science to show that humans evolved to be both nasty and nice. Sociobiology supported the mythic value system that defined human nature as evil and depraved, but potentially "redeemed" via renunciate ritual practice and belief.
So, the cultural "left" started making up lies about science, evolution, genetics and sociobiology. And, as this Guardian article makes clear, they are still regurgitating the same toxic hate ideology under the guise of woke science.
Rufo is not a scientist, The Guardian is not a scientific news source, and sociobiology is only tangential to Rufo's project.
What the Guardian FAILED TO DO is to cite scientists and anthropologists that have debunked leftist "race denial" narratives such as Bret Weinstein and Razib Khan.
The left's "sex denial" (trans) narrative uses the same scientific errors, see Colin Wright (the creator of the left-vs-right chart* that Elon Musk helped go viral)
There is no excuse for the cultural-left's lies and scientific distortions, they have all been debunked. All they are left with is gaslighting and smears.
"The world is not a debate society." Perfect description of the difference between the two perspectives. It was hard not to turn it off when he started with that drivel, but knowing that you are skilled in arguing for Team Reality I stuck with it to hear you tactfully dissect the issue and the problems with his perspective. He was also rude, IMHO.
How to say "I have no idea what Chris Rufo's writings or position is about DEI and Marxism" without explicitly saying "I have no idea what Chris Rufo's writings or position is about DEI and Marxism".
This may relate to his conception of liberalism, tho IDK.
I wonder - sincerely - whether Mounk knows his Hobbes. Liberalism is first-of-all a social compromise - a cease-fire which becomes ongoing. One may call it an "ideal" (though that is another discussion), but not at the expense of forgetting its foundations - on pain of losing the whole thing.
Hobbes - Liberalism's philosophic author and deepest commentator - cuts past all the lesser commentators (Rawls, Rorty, etc.). Tocqueville and Locke, for instance, knew their Hobbes and so "saw past appearances."
One dislikes the "Leviathan" of the exercise of state power, but this is what is left if we have abandoned custom/tradition, family, patriotism, and the Founder's urgings concerning "the people's religion."
Probably because to be anti-woke you have to be opposed to corporate-woke. In his twisted mind, being opposed to corporate-woke is "Marxist" class struggle. Or something.......
In reality, classical liberalism has been about class struggle, the upper classes vs the middle and working classes, for almost 1,000 years.
Mounk is an idiot, like most of the dunclings in the PMC, a puppet of "woke" globalists. He doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds him, so he makes up stupid sh1t about critics of "woke".
I agree that you won the debate. What other option is there than to try and legislate against this vengeful, neo Marxist ideology? The radicals have captured the institutions. The long march has paid off. Thank you for all that you do.
The salient point you're all missing is this isn't academic- they're using Alinsky's tactics as well as taking a page from Islamism : lying about your motivation is perfectly acceptable because the ends justify ANY means.
Liberal taqiyya!
We are not missing the point, Ray - it was very "front and center" in the discussion. But you are surely correct about the rest.
I agree that you had the upper hand and better argument. My impression was that while you saw the reality of human interactions, he had more of what I once heard called, "the hand-wavy, it'll be fine" perspective, where if everyone just assumes good faith on everyone's part everything works out for the best. I just rolled my eyes.
Right. The world is not a debate society. The best ideas do not always win. The point of politics is how to wield power in the interest of justice. We cannot avoid the necessity of power.
“The world is not a debate society.” I agree. But let’s ask, “To what degree is the world a debate society right now?” An let’s be grateful for what we have and then ask, “What can I do to promote better discourse?” Let’s multitask as we go; you work the right flank and I’ll work the left, moving toward a world with much more learning and Socratic dialogue. This requires creativity and optimism. We can make huge improvements here; namely by reading and discussing your book here on Substack. Agree?
Further I’ll do a lessons learned on the lack of discourse of the past. For example, Substack is far superior to any “discourse platform” we’ve had before. We need to understand why it’s superior and then ask how we can make it better.
So in addition to your strategy of effectively wielding power in the interest of justice, we should be improving the incentives for better discourse on platforms like Substack. Agree?
Politics without virtuous leadership and virtuous dialogue, will have unintended consequences.
The elites on the "left" are sociopaths, narcissists and in some cases, Machiavellian psychopaths, evil depraved power seekers.
They see people calling for "debate" as weak and easily manipulated.
The only thing to do is to relentlessly smash them in the face as hard as possible, metaphorically speaking of course, and destroy them politically, which Rufo is doing masterfully.
I’m not on board.
Irrelevant.
Again, the psychopaths on the cultural-left see your calls for "debate", "improved discourse", virtuous leadership, morality, etc. as weakness to be manipulated.
Your argument didn't work against King George, the Confederacy, Hitler, Stalin or Mao, and it won't work against the lunatics on the far left.
The only thing you can depend on the left to do is to engage in infighting and stabbing each other in the back. The extremists always stab the "moderates" in the back.
And then what?
"The best ideas do not always win." This is one reason I support secession. I think that if either Trump or Biden win the election, there could be civil war. Let people live in communities with other people sharing their values.
No civil war if Trump wins. Some very slight possibility if Biden wins.
Nonsense. We are all stuck with each other.
A far better option is to reembrace federalism:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/we-do-not-need-a-national-divorce
If Republicans can get majorities in 38 state houses, they can call a Convention of the States to propose amendments to Constitution and pass them.
If it must be secession, here is a peaceful way that it might happen:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/an-american-civil-war-20-scenario
Yeah, that perspective is annoying, I know a lot of people who would consider themselves right of center or at least opposed to the woke stuff, who have that attitude.
1 prevent misinformation - destroy free speech
2 stop the meritocracy - DIE
3 climate crisis- high energy prices
That's what they want but they will start ldom admit the truth.
Seldom admit the truth.
A friend is a prominent academic. A fellow academic had been fired for having sexual relations with a student. And raked over the coals. His life was nearly destroyed. However....in fact she wasn’t a student. She was an older student at the university and had taken a course with him a year earlier. They had a consensual relationship. They were roughly the same age. He broke it off with her and she accused him of horrible things. Their emails showed she was lying. She had done this before at another University with a prof. Who had dumped her. Same pattern. Chases a prof. Gets laid. Gets dumped. Attack. I heard of the story as it was unraveling. The university eventually had to settle with the prof and paid him $167,000. I asked my friend if he had known him. He said ‘yes he is a good friend of ours. He has been here for dinner many times.’ I asked which version was correct and he said the prof was 100% innocent. It had been a travesty set against a really decent guy. I then asked ‘how is he doing now?’ ‘I haven’t talked to him since this whole thing happened.’ Whoa, what? He abandoned his friend, whom he knew was innocent. He hadn’t even phoned him! He explained being the head of his department he felt it best to distance himself from the attacked professor. Some friend. So, Yasha Mounk can talk all he likes about how discussion can bring about the requires changes but it can’t. The Academics fight for tenure. Not anything else. Mounk hasn’t fought DEI. Just as my friend wouldn’t support his friend in his time of need. If we count on the academy standing up for justice we are fools. The academy fell the first and easiest because the academy is filled with weaklings.
Title IX abuse
iirc, a book was written about a very similar incident, except a liberal, feminist professor (Kipnis) defended the falsely accused male, and the liberal feminist was also viciously attacked by the "woke" crazies. She eventually won in court.
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/2/8714215/laura-kipnis-northwestern-title-ix
The one thing you can always count on the left to do: infight and stab each other in the back.
I truly enjoyed this column. Thank you for having the discussion, thank you, Bari W. for moderating this important conversation!
Bari is great, appreciate her hosting it.
" ... all of the ideas from the radical left of that era—the late 1960s, early 1970s—have infiltrated universities and then started to move laterally through bureaucracies in the state sector, in K–12 education, in HR departments, and even the Fortune 100 companies," and may I add the media and the churches. They have done exactly what the Italian communist Gramsci instructed, and some of them knowingly. "In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media ..." -- Antonio Gramsci. We know exactly what they have done and why, and why it must be reversed. They need the cultural hegemony, which they have achieved, in order to impose their historically disastrous economic system. They are also well on their way to achieving that, as well, if they are not stopped.
MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2024/01/in-conversation-bruce-schneier-on-ai-powered-mass-spying
Prof Mounk lives in a “bubble”, he sounds elitist and I would never allow him to “teach””/indoctrinate anyone in my family. I have learned.... Professors such as this have a SHELF LIFE. Time for him to go live in the real world!
Right, the proof is in the pudding. If he could not limit this ideology in his own university, what confidence should we have that his ideas will somehow limit it more broadly?
I was thinking the same thing. His ‘rational’ arguments hasn’t worked in his own department. Why does he think more of the same is what is required.
To vastly oversimplify, the status and power hierarchies are:
1. global finance and digital capitalism (postmodern "Gnosticism", reality is a social construct)
2. the PMC, professional-managerial class, such as Mounk, who are dependent on, and deferential to, #1, so they are free to use postmodernist rhetoric about "diversity", etc.
3. manufacturing capitalism, business owners and the traditional working classes
The data collected by social scientists indicates that at the extreme, #1 wants what Koel Kotkin calls Neo-Feudalism. #2 is generally supportive of their status structure, and will go along with that.
In additional to Kotkin's voluminous data collection, Musa Al Gharbi, a black, liberal-heterodox PhD sociologist has done a decades of research on the alienation of actual working class non-"white" immigrants from the globalists and the PMC (Democratic party elites and the progressive/liberal/left).
So, the D-party "left" is not only evil and depraved, the basis of their core ideology and rhetoric is a horrible, dirty, nasty lie, and pure hypocrisy.
They are not "fighting oppression", they reinvented it to suit the purposes of gaining more power for their sociopathic elites.
So much for the "cultural revolution".
Very worthwhile effort by all three participants.
The early discussion of Marxist influence upon/roots of Social Justice ideology is an example of productive discussion which yields what seemed a good and common understanding.
Most of the later discussion of the gestation of Social Justice ideology is comparable in value and, surprisingly, Mounk returned to the theme of Marxism which seemed to me earlier properly addressed, albeit in a summary way. The return of this theme does add to the prior discussion; as it turns out, Mounk was not satisfied with the initial treatment, and so properly reopened that initial line of discussion.
Weiss properly brings the discussion to the practical question, and Christopher, you sharpened (in mid-stride) what you were already saying in response to her prompt, and connected your reply to the differences in approach and understanding between yourself and Mounk - which in-turn prompted Mounk to make a comparable case for his own argument, which then led to a good differentiation.
My own understanding of Marcuse is that he attempted to renew Marxism ("pick up the pieces") after the empirical failure of Dialectical Materialism - which leads us also to Foucault, etc. Mounk is correct to say that Marcuse is mediated (my term) by Foucault in this latest iteration, but you correctly observed that this is not merely an academic debate, and that Marx via Marcuse and Gramsci is the real-world manifestation of this movement. This corresponded with your insistence from the start of the discussion that we must understand the phenomenon in-question as a fully-real phenomenon - as more than a set of ideas.
Right, ultimately what matters is not the genealogy of the ideology, but the practical measures for defeating the ideology.
Yes, keep the focus on actions that produce Results.
Understanding the ideological origins help, of course, but that cannot be the goal.
To paraphrase Karl Marx:
Our goal is not just to understand the world but to change it.
The content of the ideology matters as to what the ideologists will/plan to do in-reality, but ultimately - if I am correct - ideology's content is arbitrary. We have seen how it sheds/accretes "content" overnight and w/o regard for consistency (i.e. reality). It is a product of the imagination, rather than of reality. Voegelin called it a "gnostic dream-world."
The amount of recycled National Socialism within Bourgeois Radicalism demonstrates this point.
This leads to the only proper solutions - defeating it in-reality, or waiting for reality to defeat it, later.
Yes, I believe these ideologies are just intellectual rationalizations of underlying non-rational psychological impulses. The ideas may change, but the underlying psychological impulses remain the same.
I go into more detail on this here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/understanding-the-left
DIE is the undertow that is destroying everything!! It doesn't matter if it's Marxist, Gramscian, or whatever. It's another way to say black undertow.
Right, the name is less important than the substance.
I like how it’s finally admitted at the end that our institutions are ideologically captured by Marxists and they’re only backtracking now because of the sunlight being shone. Thank you, Chris and Bari
Great debate. Both Yascha and Chris have great merits. It reminds me of the great debates between Jefferson and Hamilton on how to start and sustain a republic with both high ideals and effective governance. Chris clearly has a better sense of the imperfect reality that our country is living through right now as Hamilton did in his time. The presidency of Jefferson shifted him significantly from the idealist towards the pragmatist direction. We need more leaders like Hamilton to plore through the rut but also Jefferson to remind ourselves why we are doing it.
Yes, the Founders were philosophers, but also revolutionaries and statesmen. They struck an incredible balance.
I don’t think this is - currently - a winning argument. But I think it might be true. This goes way beyond politics and economics. There is something evil in the world. We are in a God vs Satan, angels vs demons, moment.
I agree that this ideology includes something evil. For more about this line of thinking, I suggest reading "The Devil and Karl Marx" by Paul Kengor, PhD, an expert on Marxism.
I think if you used that argument it would be used against you. But I also think ignoring it is tying one hand behind your back. Your debate opponent think discussion and ‘winning’ an argument will work. It won’t. Capitalism clearly is flawed and just as clearly is 20x as effective at improving everyone’s life, at every strata of society, as socialism. Which is HORRIBLY flawed. Yet the academy is fully compromised. Ergo rational debate will not win this.
Communion vs Agentic values
Most people confuse "capitalism" (a system of market economics that began to emerge as part of "classical liberalism" around the 1300s with the Hanseatic League and German Free Cities and Constitutional order as a replacement for Fealty Oaths) with the modern, managerial corporate-state.
With the industrial revolution, "capitalism" mutated into Laissez Faire and that was the last straw in terms of class inequality.
The values of pre-modern, pre-liberal, medieval, feudal, pre-Capitalist culture were oriented toward communion/conformism.
Modernity, classically liberal, Capitalist culture flipped that to agentic values, individual achievement (and scientific-technological innovation).
The rise of the professional-managerial class and the postmodern corporate-state was yet another flipping of values, back toward communion/conformism and away from agentic values (individual achievement, merit, modern rationalism).
A number of social scientists have stated that the "left" is a Christian heresy, so you are correct that the argument is "religious", between two conflicting "religious" perspectives, one, historical and arguably more authentic, the other one (the "left") fake.
I think a lot of Christianity has been co-opted too. It is a bit more than religious’ in my eyes.
The "heresy" is taking over the historic version of institutional Christianity.
(I've explained the heresy in other comments).
They’re coming for you Chris, but this is pretty weak! When they can’t beat your arguments they try to attack your character. Stand tall when you’re standing on truth!
https://apple.news/A0AtYyLWxSnO1TW_YzWeBng
The Guardian regularly publishes insane, toxic leftist narratives, lies and distortions, and this article is a good example of that.
The cultural "left" has been attacking actual science, specifically sociobiology since the late 1970s, on the basis of insane ideology that has nothing to do with real science. Why? Because the cultural "left" rests on a foundation of a psychological model of human nature as a "blank slate". The cultural "left" thought that if human nature was a "blank slate", then people could be reprogrammed like robots to serve the cause of leftist utopia.
What sociobiology did was to use genetic and evolutionary science to show that humans evolved to be both nasty and nice. Sociobiology supported the mythic value system that defined human nature as evil and depraved, but potentially "redeemed" via renunciate ritual practice and belief.
So, the cultural "left" started making up lies about science, evolution, genetics and sociobiology. And, as this Guardian article makes clear, they are still regurgitating the same toxic hate ideology under the guise of woke science.
Rufo is not a scientist, The Guardian is not a scientific news source, and sociobiology is only tangential to Rufo's project.
What the Guardian FAILED TO DO is to cite scientists and anthropologists that have debunked leftist "race denial" narratives such as Bret Weinstein and Razib Khan.
A "black" blogger (liberal scientist) explained why HBD's critique of "race denial" is correct about a decade ago: https://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/
The left's "sex denial" (trans) narrative uses the same scientific errors, see Colin Wright (the creator of the left-vs-right chart* that Elon Musk helped go viral)
https://substack.com/@colinwright
There is no excuse for the cultural-left's lies and scientific distortions, they have all been debunked. All they are left with is gaslighting and smears.
* https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144/photo/1
"The world is not a debate society." Perfect description of the difference between the two perspectives. It was hard not to turn it off when he started with that drivel, but knowing that you are skilled in arguing for Team Reality I stuck with it to hear you tactfully dissect the issue and the problems with his perspective. He was also rude, IMHO.
Still not sure why he accused me of being a Marxist! Very weird insult.
How to say "I have no idea what Chris Rufo's writings or position is about DEI and Marxism" without explicitly saying "I have no idea what Chris Rufo's writings or position is about DEI and Marxism".
This may relate to his conception of liberalism, tho IDK.
I wonder - sincerely - whether Mounk knows his Hobbes. Liberalism is first-of-all a social compromise - a cease-fire which becomes ongoing. One may call it an "ideal" (though that is another discussion), but not at the expense of forgetting its foundations - on pain of losing the whole thing.
Hobbes - Liberalism's philosophic author and deepest commentator - cuts past all the lesser commentators (Rawls, Rorty, etc.). Tocqueville and Locke, for instance, knew their Hobbes and so "saw past appearances."
One dislikes the "Leviathan" of the exercise of state power, but this is what is left if we have abandoned custom/tradition, family, patriotism, and the Founder's urgings concerning "the people's religion."
Yeah, very interesting point.
Probably because to be anti-woke you have to be opposed to corporate-woke. In his twisted mind, being opposed to corporate-woke is "Marxist" class struggle. Or something.......
In reality, classical liberalism has been about class struggle, the upper classes vs the middle and working classes, for almost 1,000 years.
Mounk is an idiot, like most of the dunclings in the PMC, a puppet of "woke" globalists. He doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds him, so he makes up stupid sh1t about critics of "woke".
I also thought you had the upper hand, Chris. Mounk was tiring to listen to - his entire approach is geared toward appeasement.
Hi Christopher,
I agree that you won the debate. What other option is there than to try and legislate against this vengeful, neo Marxist ideology? The radicals have captured the institutions. The long march has paid off. Thank you for all that you do.