Weekly Grounding #39
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
“Women, Non-White Voters Abandon Biden For Trump”
Handful of Earth has extensively covered American political realignments in the form of book reviews, Weekly Groundings, and Monthly Musings. Donald Trump is an unavoidable figure in these discussions due to his role as a catalyst and symbol for many of these realignments. Back in November, I addressed early general election polling that suggested that Trump was making inroads with unexpected groups, such as voters under 30. While some commentators predicted that the Biden campaign would adjust and win back key elements of the Democratic coalition, recent polling from multiple mainstream outlets suggests that the opposite has happened. This segment on Breaking Points summarizes recent polling from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal that demonstrates a dramatic shift of women and non-white voters away from Biden and toward Trump.
Notably, The New York Times reports on the findings its recent poll: “One of the more ominous findings for Mr. Biden in the new poll is that the historical edge Democrats have held with working-class voters of color who did not attend college continues to erode. Mr. Biden won 72 percent of those voters in 2020, according to exit polling, providing him with a nearly 50-point edge over Mr. Trump. Today, the Times/Siena poll showed Mr. Biden only narrowly leading among nonwhite voters who did not graduate from college: 47 percent to 41 percent.”
“Internal Emails Reveal Columbia’s ‘Task Force on Antisemitism’ is Causing Ruptures in Its Faculty”
As discussed in Weekly Grounding #36, Israel’s war on Gaza has brought about significant realignments in America’s domestic political landscape. This email exchange between two Columbia University professors, published at Literary Hub, highlights important elements of how the conflict continues to reverberate on college and university campuses. Remarkably, a key member of Columbia’s “Antisemitism Task Force” does not believe that defining antisemitism or even evaluating other definitions of the term is a worthy goal of such a Task Force.
In response, another professor points out the absurdity of the Task Force’s position: “So, ok, the task force is not going to ‘define’ antisemitism. Fair enough I guess, given that its focus so far, as you write here, is on ‘life at Columbia, especially among students.’ Still, it is called the ‘Task Force on Antisemitism’ not ‘The Task Force on, Like, Campus Vibes.’ And it was announced as super urgent because of an alarming increase in ‘antisemitism,’ which we’re all supposed to acknowledge as a given, even if we can’t point to any even provisional definition of antisemitism that would enable us to know what incidents might be used to account for this rise.”
“Academics Can No Longer Speak Freely”
At The New Statesman, Edward Skidelsky discusses why “many academics keep their more ‘toxic’ views to themselves”: “Some academics believe in the new agenda. Some see it as a route to personal advancement. But most, I suspect, are simply reluctant to say anything against it for fear of damaging their careers. Academics in general are a craven lot, for all their bold talk of ‘questioning authority.’ There are good sociological reasons for this. Academics live or die by the judgement of their peers – a small group of people all known to each other personally.”
Skidelsky goes on to expose “the fiction that the free-speech crisis in our universities is an invention of the right-wing press” and urges scholars of all political stripes to take this very real free-speech crisis seriously. For more on this topic, see my two-part essay, “Why Free Speech?” published here at Handful of Earth.
“A Better Model of Political Categories”
At
, argues that “cramming everything about our politics into Left vs. Right leads to some deep confusion about who is pursuing what ends and why.” He then provides an alternative model of “political personality types.” Lyons identifies four axes along which to think about politics: “Progressive (P) vs. Conservative (C),” “Egalitarian (E) vs. Hierarchical (H),” “Individualist (I) vs. Communalist (M),” and “Materialist-Rationalist (R) vs. Spiritual-Intuitive (S).” These axes can then be arranged in various combinations and permutations to describe specific political personality types.Lyons then gives particular examples of how these axes map onto actually existing political ideologies. For example, he characterizes classical liberalism as “Progressive, Egalitarian, Individualist, Materialist-Rationalist (PEIR)” and Anglo-American conservativism as “Conservative, Hierarchical, Individualist, Spiritual-Intuitive (CHIS).”
“The Roots of Right-Wing Progressivism”
Greg Conti engages with Lyons’ essay “The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives” (also previously discussed on Handful of Earth) at Compact Magazine. He argues that Right-Wing Progressivism is best understood “as a recent installment in a long-standing and powerful strain of thought—one that challenges our too-ready modern equation of progressivism with democratic or egalitarian attitudes. Throughout modernity, many of those who have opposed democracy have done so in the name of progress. It is a fundamental, if widespread, misunderstanding of the character of ideological cleavages as they have played out across the centuries not to see this. Silicon Valley’s hyper-progressive contempt for popular input and instincts, while consisting of many new features reflecting today’s economic and social environment, is in its basic structure an old story.”
Conti’s observations on the thought of John Stewart Mill were particularly interesting: “Much of Mill’s own writing, especially in his early adulthood, was devoted to showing that middle-class and professional interests on the one hand and working-class interests on the other could be advanced in harmony under this ‘liberal’ or ‘radical’ umbrella. In ideological rather than sociological terms, writers like Mill sought to keep the peace between technocratic and populist or democratizing conceptions of progress. For much of the century, technocrats and populists could stand together against a common enemy: the remnants of the ‘Old Corruption,’ as they called it, of aristocracy and privilege. But with further expansions of the parliamentary franchise and extension of other rights, the cleavage between these two visions of progress became more acute, and liberalism ultimately split and entered more than a generation spent mostly in the wilderness.”
“How Feminism Ends”
This spectacular essay by Ginevra Davis at American Affairs is, on its face, a review of anthropologist Emmanuel Todd’s 2023 book, Lineages of the Feminine: An Outline of the History of Women. But it is much more than that: Davis reappraises the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, offers personal reflections on growing up as a girl in the age of Tumblr, and ponders what the end of feminism looks like. She argues that “The female body is the unsolvable problem of feminist theory” and writes that if “the goal of feminism is to improve the lot of females, then there are dozens of changes, social and scientific, that could help alleviate their condition. But if the goal of feminism is perfect sexual equality—that no mind should ever have to make sacrifices, in productivity or love, because of its body—then the end of feminism must, necessarily, mean the end of females. There is no other way.”
Davis continues: “Females…are still haunted by a lack of female ‘greatness’—the same problem posed, seventy-five years ago, by Beauvoir. They work under male bosses. Their countries are run by mostly male leaders. Males continue to define the cutting edge in technology and industry, while females play catch-up in remedial programs (‘Women in tech!’ ‘Women in business!’). And even the most liberated female must still take her pills, and count her cycle, and watch her fertility ‘window’ while pretending that she doesn’t care. The female condition, one of constant self-monitoring and self-suppression, is now oddly similar to that of the gender-dysphoric, which is perhaps why we females are so obsessed with them (I never felt quite so understood as a female until I read the work of Andrea Long Chu, whom Todd cites as a leading chronicler of the transgender experience). It also seems designed to create a degree of self-loathing: females are constantly set up to compete at tasks at which they are slightly disadvantaged, and are promised a life which, any rational mind will quickly discover, they will never achieve. Social media aside, it is unsurprising that a growing number of women now report that they hate themselves.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.