Forgetting How To Be A Civilization

[Bigun]

Forgetting How To Be A Civilization

New survey data show that young people are losing the knowledge and the habits necessary to reproduce a stable society



Rod Dreher

Oct 5, 202211:25 AM

The political scientist Eric Kaufmann is no bringer of good news for us conservatives. In his latest CSPI research, there's a lot of handwriting on the wall for our kind. I tell you this not to discourage you, but to help you understand the immensity of the task in front of us. I know reading my blog can be awfully discouraging, but I firmly believe that real despair is to turn away from hard truths because they are too discouraging. If we are going to resist this tide, we need to know exactly what we are facing. I'll be taping an episode of The General Eclectic with Kale Zelden later today -- after our long summer hiatus forced by my visa problems (not a good idea to leave your mike in a country you can't enter because you screwed up your visa -- and we'll be discussing this.

Here is the summary of the findings:

America’s elite university students are more demographically diverse than the general population, but more politically divided along lines of race, gender, sexuality, and religion.

Minority and female students are far more liberal on campus than in the general population, whereas straight white Christian men are somewhat more conservative on campus than in the general population. Current trends portend a politics in which elite women, minorities, gays, and the nonreligious are more left-leaning while elite whites, males, and Christians remain relatively conservative.

White Christians tend to cluster in red state flagship universities, which are the most politically balanced in the country and have similar shares of liberal and conservative students. Yet many flagship universities in flyover states with conservative reputations actually have more liberal than conservative students.

A quarter of students are LGBT, and there are roughly equal shares of Christian and nonreligious students. LGBT, Nonreligious, and Christians are set to become more important political groups among America’s future leaders.

Liberal arts colleges are the least politically diverse. Many have almost no conservatives, and thus very low viewpoint diversity. But they have high sexual diversity, at nearly 40 percent LGBT.

Ivy League schools average 10-15 percent conservative and 60-75 percent liberal. Across 150 leading schools, there are nearly 2.5 liberals for every conservative.

Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 55-23 margin on campus, and liberals outnumber conservatives 53-21. Elite students are thus two-thirds more Democratic and twice as liberal as the American population.

Among elite students, there is a 15-point gender gap in political ideology and party identification between men and women. This is 3 to 5 times larger than the gender gap in the general population. It is also 2 to 3 times larger than the gender gap among either the 18-25 or college-educated general population. The campus gender gap has grown steadily since 2004.

The university with the highest viewpoint diversity ranking is the University of Arkansas, whose students are 35% conservative, 37% liberal, 36% Republican, and 41% Democratic. The least diverse is Smith College, at 81% liberal, 1% conservative, 78% Democratic, and 2% Republican.

Thirty percent of students and nearly the same share of academic staff in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) fields identify as the furthest left point on a 7-point conservative-liberal scale. For Sciences, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) subjects, a smaller share – 20% of students and 10% of staff – identify as far left.

Self-identified Jews make up only 3% of elite students and just 7% of Ivy League students, suggesting a considerable decline since the early 2000s.

Homeschooled and parochial schooled undergraduates are as or more likely to identify as LGBT or non-binary as those from public or private school backgrounds...

-- excerpt, rest at link above --

[Kamaji]

More money quotes from the article:

One thing that is very, very hard for conservatives today to understand is that elites matter immensely. It is true that they aren't everything -- thank God -- but they matter far more than many of us like to think. The sociologist James Davison Hunter, a Christian, has made this point powerfully. Why is it, he wrote in 2010, that Evangelical Christians make up something like 40 percent of the US population, but have almost no effect culturally, whereas Jews are less than two percent of the US population, but exercise immense cultural influence? It's because Jews are heavily represented among elites, while Evangelicals are not. To be clear, Hunter was not making an anti-Semitic point. He was simply pointing out a sociological fact -- one that is highly unpopular today among progressives, who assume that any demographic over- or underrepresentation can only be explained by bigotry. This is how you get Communist regimes sacrificing the truly talented on the altar of ideological egalitarianism. We are busy doing the same thing in America today (witness the rich Virginia school district that is erasing the lack of academic achievement by black students by embracing "equitable grading" practices -- that is, lying for therapeutic and ideological reasons).

[Kamaji]

You wonder why it is that our elites are pushing forward with implementing radical gender theory, even though polls show most Americans oppose it? This explains it. It doesn't matter what Joe Sixpack thinks. Look, I think this is wrong too, but that's how the real world works. It helps explain why Donald Trump could get elected president, but was hemmed in by institutional elites. If we are going to fight back effectively against woke hegemony, we need politicians who understand how elites think and work, and who is able to fight them on something like a level playing field. We do not have that now. We don't have anything like that.

It hardly needs saying (but I'm going to say it anyway!) that it's hugely significant that conservatives scarcely exist at the Ivies. As much as we like to make fun of Harvard, Yale, and the others for their crackpot wokery, the fact remains that those institutions produce the national elites. When I used to give talks to journalism students, I would tell them that one lesson I learned from actually practicing journalism, versus studying it in school, is that networking is far, far more important than we like to think. It's more important in terms of getting jobs, but it's also more important as a general phenomenon for how power works. In terms of one's career, for most people, it is more important who you meet at Harvard than what you learn there. When I was an undergraduate at LSU, two Louisiana friends who had gone to the Ivies to study came at different times to spend a semester at LSU, so they could participate in a study abroad program that their university and LSU participated in, while paying LSU tuition, not Ivy League tuition. Neither knew each other, but they both told me that they had been surprised by how much more they enjoyed studying at LSU than at the Ivy. Why? According to one (a liberal!), he appreciated how de-politicized LSU's campus was; even in the mid-1980s at that Ivy, proto-wokeness made everybody anxious about not making the wrong step. According to both of them, the classroom instruction was on the same level, but they got more attention from the professors.

[roamer_1]

The tenor of the article presupposes a statist position. And a non-individualist one.

And it also presupposes that all those young minds full of mush will retain their views once they hit the real world - Not true.

[sneakypete]

I am GUESSING that the claim of "40 to 50 percent of the students are LGBT,even though that is a really odd way to spell "queer".

Also,I do not believe in mythical creatures in charge of the universe and everything in it,and I am kinda conservative.

[Fishrrman]

Kamaji posted this quote:
"...If we are going to fight back effectively against woke hegemony, we need politicians who understand how elites think and work, and who is able to fight them..."

Maybe the solution is to just ---- ----.
(I'll let you fill in the blanks, dear readers and fellow comrades)

I've posted before that perhaps it's time to SHUT DOWN all colleges and universities -- ALL off them (with a very few exceptions, such as medical schools, engineering, technical, etc.). Dismiss the administrations and faculties, and bar most of them from ever working in educational fields again.

And then... rebuild the schools slowly, with traditional-minded folks in charge.

[Bigun]

Kamaji posted this quote:
"...If we are going to fight back effectively against woke hegemony, we need politicians who understand how elites think and work, and who is able to fight them..."

Maybe the solution is to just ---- ----.
(I'll let you fill in the blanks, dear readers and fellow comrades)

I've posted before that perhaps it's time to SHUT DOWN all colleges and universities -- ALL off them (with a very few exceptions, such as medical schools, engineering, technical, etc.). Dismiss the administrations and faculties, and bar most of them from ever working in educational fields again.

And then... rebuild the schools slowly, with traditional-minded folks in charge.

If it were up to me, there would be no such thing as a public (government run) school anywhere in this country.

[Cyber Liberty]

I remember when Jesse Jackson used to lead parades with the slogan, "Hey hey, Ho, ho!  Western Civ has got to go!"

I thought he was just against the West, but it turned out he really wanted the Civilization to to go.

[Smokin Joe]

Kamaji posted this quote:
"...If we are going to fight back effectively against woke hegemony, we need politicians who understand how elites think and work, and who is able to fight them..."

Maybe the solution is to just ---- ----.
(I'll let you fill in the blanks, dear readers and fellow comrades)

I've posted before that perhaps it's time to SHUT DOWN all colleges and universities -- ALL off them (with a very few exceptions, such as medical schools, engineering, technical, etc.). Dismiss the administrations and faculties, and bar most of them from ever working in educational fields again.

And then... rebuild the schools slowly, with traditional-minded folks in charge.

Note that:

For Sciences, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) subjects, a smaller share – 20% of students and 10% of staff – identify as far left.

Why so few? Far left 'beliefs' do not withstand the overwhelming assault of reality.

STEM fields still have right and wrong answers.

The 'social sciences' are still making it up as they go along, and the only way to stay relevant in a world where perceptions are constantly changing with new knowledge is to keep making it up.