we have never been woke paperback banner
HOME
in the news
bio
cv
book tour

Category: Analyses

  • Midterm Primary Cycles Are Ripe for Unorthodox Candidates

    Midterm Primary Cycles Are Ripe for Unorthodox Candidates

    In the June 23 NYC Democratic primary elections, recently-elected mayor Zohran Mamdani pulled off a series of coups. He put forward a slate of allies who defeated three candidates favored by New York governor Kathy Hochul, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries – including two incumbent politicians.

    A lot of ink has already been spilled on how he accomplished this task. One thing that has been underrecognized is the extent to which he secured his victory on Tuesday by adopting a strategy that was in many ways the opposite of what he did to win his mayoral victory last year.

    In the 2025 general election, Mamdani had to appeal to a wide range of moderate, independent, swing and undecided voters because he was competing not just against a Republican challenger, but a well-funded third-party challenger. The 2026 primary election was a very different type of race, and Mamdani shrewdly allowed these differences to govern his strategy.

    In general, the subset of Americans who turn out to vote is very different from the population writ large. Specifically, voters skew whiter, more-educated and more affluent than non-voters (or society as a whole).

    This is true for any election. However, compared to general election races, midterm electorates skew even more affluent, highly-educated, white and ideologically extreme.

    In primary elections, similar tendencies hold: the electorate skews more affluent, educated and white than in general elections or relative to population baselines. Fitting with the more posh and secure life circumstances of voters who fall into these demographic categories, both Democratic and Republican primary voters are much more extreme and uncompromising than the general electorate on most issues:

    In 2026, Mamdani was putting people forward for a primary election in a midterm cycle — a niche electorate of a niche electorate. This is exactly the type of cycle that is ripe for the types of candidates the mayor put forward.

    Some have compared the Mamdani slate to the Tea Party. Guess what? The Tea Party also rose to prominence in a midterm primary cycle (2010) and Tea Party supporters also skewed whiter, more affluent and more educated than Republicans overall or the electorate as a whole!

    AOC was able to win in 2018 by taking advantage of these same midterm primary dynamics. Although incumbent Joe Crowley significantly outperformed her in less affluent and less white neighborhoods, AOC was able to pull off a win by leaning into issues and rhetoric that would appeal to affluent, highly-educated, white, progressive voters, and they turned out in much higher levels and carried the day for her.

    You don’t win Democratic midterm primaries by centering working class voters nor the median voter in NYC, New York state or America writ large. You win by mobilizing highly-educated and relatively affluent white voters specifically. Mamdani did just that… by inverting his general election strategy.

    (more…)
  • On Renee Good’s Killing, ICE and Polarization

    On Renee Good’s Killing, ICE and Polarization

    I’ve seen the incident several times and from many different angles. What happened seems clear to me: two cars are trying to pull out from an area Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is operating in.

    A silver SUV goes first, successfully exiting to the right. A burgundy Honda Pilot tries to exit left. It inches forward, but then a silver pickup truck approaches from the left. The driver tries to wave them forward to allow the truck to pass before attempting their own turn. Instead the pickup stops. ICE agents exit the vehicle and demand the occupants of the Pilot to do the same. Another agent recording with a cell phone comes from behind the Pilot, and walks to the front of the vehicle, trying to block its exit with his body. He switches his phone from his left hand to his right, apparently to free up his gun hand, before positioning himself in front of the vehicle.

    The agent’s own video shows the same: at the beginning of the recording, he is on the driver’s side of the vehicle. He moves to the rear of the car and records the license plate. He moves to the passenger side and is insulted by Good’s wife. As his colleagues tell Good to get out of the car and try to open the door, he moves himself to the front of the vehicle to try to block her in.

    This is a major violation of law enforcement protocol. For federal, state and local agencies alike, the standard operating procedure is to approach vehicles from the rear and side. Officers are supposed to remain behind the motorist at all times, to talk to them from the driver’s or (ideally) the passenger-side window. They are never supposed to block a vehicle with their bodies. Nor are they supposed to shoot at moving vehicles. Agents are not supposed to use firearms to disable vehicles or prevent suspects from fleeing unless the lives of themselves or others are at imminent risk. Law enforcement officers are discouraged from even chasing cars unless the criminal poses an immediate threat to the health and safety of others if they are allowed to escape. If someone is trying to get away and it’s possible to take their license plate number and track them down later, that’s what law enforcement is supposed to do. That’s what would’ve been appropriate in this case.

    Instead of following these procedures, agents surround the car from the front and side before trying to force open the door. The driver seems to panic. The Pilot backs up a little before shifting to exit to the right like the previous vehicle did. At this point, the agent who had inappropriately positioned himself in front of the vehicle hops to the left and opens fire – shooting multiple times, once into the corner of the windshield, and subsequent shots at point blank range into the driver’s side window. With the steering wheel turned, and the now-dying driver with her uncontrolled foot on the gas, the car accelerates and completes the turn but then skids off to the side, hitting a white car.

    The shooter casually walks away from the scene, apparently unharmed. The ICE agents do not attempt to provide aid to the injured person in their custody. A physician approaches the agents and offers to check her pulse and try to stabilize her if she’s alive. He is waved away. Other ICE agents are recorded having a jovial moment with the carnage right behind them. The driver’s wife is heard sobbing.

    The person shot, Renee Nicole Good, is later declared dead. The 37-year-old mother of three had just moved to Minneapolis from Kansas City following a relationship change. This encounter with ICE agents happened shortly after she had dropped her youngest off at school in the morning. Good was a US citizen with no apparent criminal record (other than a few traffic stops). She has been described by her family as a devoted Christian who was kind to everyone she met. According to video footage of the event recorded by ICE agents themselves, her final words to the man who later shot her were, “I’m not mad at you.”

    The shooter, Jonathan Ross, is a longtime border patrol and ICE agent who was injured in a separate altercation with a motorist last year. He’s an Iraq war veteran. His wife is a naturalized citizen from the Philippines. Like Good, he has been described by his family as a devout Christian.

    Much more can be said about the organization Ross works for, and how changes at Immigration and Customs Enforcement likely contributed to the tragedy.

    (more…)
  • Don’t Overinterpret the 2025 Elections

    Don’t Overinterpret the 2025 Elections

    It’s been a rough decade for the political left in the U.S.

    In 2012 and 2014, Democrats saw extreme losses in both chambers of Congress. In 2016, they lost the White House to Donald Trump too. In 2020, Democrats took back the presidency, but it was obvious even then that the party had no mandate and its electoral coalition was fragile. In 2024, Democrats went down in flames, losing the popular vote and every single swing state.

    In each of these elections, the party’s losses have been driven primarily by shifts in voting preferences among the very constituents the party claims to serve, such as less socioeconomically advantaged Americans, religious and ethnic minorities, young people, and women. The Democrats weren’t just losing; they were getting consistently rebuked by their own imagined base.

    After such a bleak run, it is understandably tempting for supporters to overinterpret little wins. And they’ve been doing so in the wake of the 2025 elections.

    For instance, Zohran Mamdani, a self-avowed democratic socialist running as a Democrat, was recently elected mayor of New York City. This outcome was widely described as “historic,” and it technically was: Mamdani will be the city’s first Muslim and/or Asian American mayor. Overall, however, there was far less to his election than meets the eye.

    The top-line outcome (the Democratic nominee was elected mayor of New York City) should surprise no one. There have been 26 elections going back to 1932. Republicans won seven of them. Three of them went to independent candidates. Democrats won the rest. The last three consecutive mayoral contests went to Democrats by a 2:1 margin. Mamdani won because he was the Democratic nominee. In the absence of Mamdani, some other Democrat would have won instead.

    Compared with the performance of other winning mayoral candidates, Mamdani’s was far from extraordinary. Looking at all elections since 1953 (when the relevant data began to be tracked), this race ranks 13 out of 19 with respect to turnout. If you look at the vote share Mamdani won relative to his opponents, he’s tied for 12th place out of 19 cycles. The million votes Mamdani won? They’re mostly a product of a larger NYC population (and were achieved in spite of middling turnout and vote share). The coalition Mamdani built to win looks the same as that of any other successful Democratic New York mayoral nominee along the lines of class, age, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, religion or any other dimension. Mamdani’s supporters and opponents alike are reading much more into the electoral results than the results themselves support.

    A similar reality holds in Virginia’s gubernatorial election, where Democrat Abigail Spanberger flipped the seat. Many attributed the outcome to the government shutdown and DOGE, which have ravaged government workers, who make up a large share of the Virginia electorate, or to Spanberger’s moderate positioning, or to the extremism of her Republican rival. Yet we have every reason to think that the outcome would have been the same even if these specific details were changed.

    Here’s a fun fact: For the last half-century, every single time there was a change of party in the White House, the Virginia governorship has gone to the opposite party the next year.

    Presidential Election YearPresidential VictorSubsequent VA Governor Race YearVA Gubernatorial Victor
    1976Jimmy Carter (D)1977John Dalton (R)
    1980Ronal Reagan (R)1981Chuck Robb (D)
    1992Bill Clinton (D)1993George Allen (R)
    2000GW Bush (R)2001Marc Warner (D)
    2008Barack Obama (D)2009Bob McDonnell (R)
    2016Donald Trump (R)2017Ralph Northam (D)
    2020Joe Biden (D)2021Glenn Younkin (R)
    2024Donald Trump (R)2025Abigal Spanberger (D)

    It didn’t matter which issues were central at the time, which party controlled the presidency, how popular the president was, whether the economy was up or down, whether the gubernatorial candidates ran especially good or bad races, whether the candidates were men or women, Black or white, bland or charismatic, moderate or something else. Whenever the White House went to one party, the Virginia governorship has gone the other way a year later.

    Thus, the Democratic nominee winning the Virginia governorship after a Republican won the White House does not indicate anything unusual or special about this candidate or the current political moment. On the contrary, it suggests that this was a very regular cycle that played out in conventional and predictable ways.

    Even Trump’s approval rating has been dropping in a manner and at a rate that is almost exactly on trend with other second-term administrations. None of the president’s extraordinary behaviors seem to have given rise to extraordinary political dynamics at the ballot box.

    For Democrats, this might seem deflating. But it’s actually good news as they look toward the 2026 midterms. If the usual “thermostatic response” dynamics continue to hold, the GOP will almost certainly lose seats in the House — likely enough to lose the chamber.

    (more…)
  • On Protests, Violence and Public Support

    On Protests, Violence and Public Support

    On June 6, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducted aggressive raids in Los Angeles, sweeping up gainfully employed workers with no criminal record. This lead to demonstrations outside of the Los Angeles Federal Building. During these protests, David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union California, was arrested alongside more than 100 others – leading to even larger demonstrations the next day.

    Donald Trump responded on June 7th by sending federal troops to Los Angeles to quell the protests without any consultation with California governor Gavin Newsom and, in fact, in direct defiance of Newsom’s wishes. This dramatic federal response, paired with increasingly aggressive tactics by local police, lead to the protests growing larger and escalating in their intensity. They’ve begun spreading to other major cities too.

    Cue the culture war.

    On the right, the response was predictable: the federal clampdown was largely praised. Hyperbolic narratives about the protests and the protesters were uncritically amplified and affirmed. On the left, the response was no less predictable. There is a constellation of academic and media personalities who breathlessly root for all protests escalate into violent revolution while another (“moderate”) faction claims to support all the causes in principle but somehow never encounters an actual protest movement that they outright support.

    For my part, as I watched Waymo cars burning as Mexican flags fluttered in the foreground, I couldn’t help but be reminded of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In the documentary Sociology is a Martial Art, he emphasized, “I don’t think it’s a problem that young people are burning cars. I want them to be able to burn cars for a purpose.”

    It is, indeed, possible for burning cars to serve a purpose. However, it matters immensely who is perceived to have lit the fuse.

    Surveying the social science literature on social movements, violence and public perceptions, there are three core facts that stakeholders should bear in mind in trying to evaluate the efficacy of protests.

    #1: Most successful social movements entail some form of violence or coercion — either carried out by the demonstrators, or on their behalf, or against the demonstrators (who often willfully sought to provoke this violence).

    (more…)
  • Book Announcement: Those People

    Book Announcement: Those People

    Increased stratification and declining social mobility. A crisis of expertise. The rise of “populist” leaders. Heightened tensions around “identity politics.” Growing affective polarization. Political dealignments and realignments. These are not separate phenomena, they’re fronts in a broader struggle over which communities, stakeholders, lines of work, lifestyles and cultures are valued in contemporary society – and which seem destined for the dust heap of history.

    This is the argument of my second book, Those People, now officially under contract with Princeton University Press.

    I’ve immensely enjoyed working with PUP over the last four years (since We Have Never Been Woke was first put under contract). To my mind, no one does the crossover (academic + trade) book better than Princeton University Press. The whole team is really fantastic – from the editorial side to the marketing side and beyond. Thanks to their efforts, We Have Never Been Woke has been a major critical and commercial success. I’m eager to see what we can cook up together the second time around.

    A big thanks to my literary agent, Andrew Stuart, who negotiated the deal. Credit to PUP editors Eric Crahan (who got the dialogue rolling on the second project and shepherded We Have Never Been Woke across the finish line), and Rachael Levay (who will oversee the development and publication of Those People and took the lead in ironing out an agreement with Andrew). Additional thanks to the Open Society Foundations, whose generous support will allow me to have a reduced teaching load for the upcoming academic year that can facilitate research and writing.

    Completing the Picture

    In the original proposal for my first book, I planned to spend the first half of the project looking at symbolic capitalists, our history and culture, the communities and institutions we congregate in, and the ways “social justice” discourse get bound up with our bids for power, status, resources and opportunities. In the back half of the book, I planned to turn the analytic lens the other way, from the “winners” in the symbolic economy towards those who perceive themselves to be the “losers.” I wrote the book as originally envisioned, but it was far too long for a single text, clocking in at over 200k words. The book was instead split into two volumes.

    The first half was adjusted to stand without the back end. It was published in October 2024 as We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (although I signaled to the phantom content in the conclusion, pp. 308-309). I’m now in the process of reworking the content from the second half of the original manuscript into its own freestanding volume, Those People.

    (more…)
  • LGBT Identity, Elites, and Inequality

    LGBT Identity, Elites, and Inequality

    Beginning in the period between the world wars, and accelerating over the last half-century, the global economic order and political sphere have been restructured to the benefit of a category of people I call “symbolic capitalists.” Who are symbolic capitalists? Folks who make a living from what they know, who they know, and how they’re known. People who work in fields like media, tech, finance, consulting, administration, education, research, entertainment, and the arts. If you’re reading this essay, chances are high that you yourself are a symbolic capitalist. Like me.

    By virtually any empirical measure, symbolic capitalists are elites. We are among the primary “winners” in the prevailing socioeconomic order. However, symbolic capitalists have a hard time recognizing the ways in which we benefit from and perpetuate social inequalities because we often define ourselves as allies or tribunes not only of LGBT people broadly, but of the most marginalized and disadvantaged. And this self-perception is not entirely unearned. As I detail at length in my recent book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, there are deep and long-standing ties between the LGBT community and the symbolic professions going back more than a century.

    The modern “gay” identity and the idea that homosexuals were “born this way” was a product of elite culture in Berlin during the early 20th century. The first gay rights and sexual liberation movements in the U.S. arose during the first Great Awokening of the 1920s and 30s. Transgender identity was first cultivated by elites in the same period as well.

    In the contemporary context, as urbanist Richard Florida’s research has shown, symbolic capitalists in the US tend to congregate in cities with a vibrant “gay scene.” LGBT Americans are, in turn, especially likely to work in the symbolic professions compared to other fields.

    Among cisgender heterosexuals, those who are most likely to become symbolic capitalists (folks who are highly educated, relatively affluent, urban or suburban, liberal, and white) are also especially likely to identify as “allies” to LGBT people. Meanwhile, symbolic capitalist employers such as Match, Disney, Oracle, and Salesforce have been at the forefront of pushing back against anti-LGBT legislation in recent years (albeit with mixed motives and results).

    Moreover, starting after 2011, symbolic capitalists (and affiliated institutions) underwent dramatic shifts in how they talk and think about social justice issues and engage in political action. Alongside causes like environmentalism, anti-racism, feminism, and disability accommodations, LGBT rights and representation were central to this “Great Awokening.” And this did result in radically increased visibility for LGBT people and LGBT causes.

    For a sense of how pronounced these shifts were:

    In 2012, only 14% of major studio films included an identifiably LGBT character, and only half of those passed the “Vito Russo Test” (meaning, the character was an important part of the story and was not defined solely or predominantly by their sexuality). By 2020, nearly a quarter (23%) included identifiably LGBT characters — a 64% increase — and 90% of those movies passed the test. Representation in television and streaming shows followed a similar trajectory. The share of regular and recurring LGBT actors more than doubled from 2012 through 2020 — including a rapid expansion of queer and trans characters in children’s and family programming. LGBT representation also grew more racially diverse. By 2020, a majority of LGBT characters on the small screen were non-white. There was exponential growth in LGBT characters in video games too — with an ever-larger share of those characters featured as protagonists.

    Entertainment was not unique in these regards. News media and academic research also began to focus much more intensely on gender, sexuality, and LGBT issues. So did book publishing. Meanwhile, funding for LGBT advocacy organizations more than doubled from 2012 to 2021 (regrettably, non-trivial shares of that money seem to have been misused).

    LGBT organization donations
    Note: Dollars have been adjusted for inflation to 2021 dollars. Source: Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.

    Simultaneously, new forms of gender and sexual identification proliferated, and symbolic capitalists began adopting these labels at significantly higher rates — including growing numbers of celebrities and influencers such as Catelyn Jenner and Elliot Page (trans), Megan Rapinoe (lesbian), Miley Cyrus (pansexual and gender-fluid), and Frank Ocean (bisexual).

    Put simply, over the course of the last decade, there has been a dramatic increase in the prominence of LGBT individuals and issues, driven heavily by symbolic capitalists, their outputs, and their associated institutions. And yet, as Jean Baudrillard famously put it, “Behind every image, something has disappeared.”

    (more…)
  • Democrats Won’t Save Universities

    Democrats Won’t Save Universities

    The Trump Administration has withheld $400 million dollars in federal funds from Columbia University and vowed to remove even more if the president’s demands are not met. Columbia has an endowment of $14.8 billion and an annual operating budget of $6.6 billion. The cuts amount to roughly 6 percent of their annual budget – a non-trivial share. It is within the capacity of the university, through its trustees, to unlock part of the endowment in order to cover any lost funds over the next four years until Trump is out of office. However, the university seems more inclined to work with the White House to unlock the funds – a posture that will cost the university much more than money.

    In order to meet the Trump Administration’s demands, Columbia would have to adopt a number of illiberal measures. They’d need to put their Middle East, South Asia and Africa Studies department into academic receivership; they’d need to change their admissions policies to reduce admits of people from those countries and increase admissions of Jewish students; they’d need to grant campus police more power to include giving campus police far more power to surveille, detain and remove people from campus without following the usual due process. They’d need to accept permanently heightened restrictions on campus protest and speech. They’d need to actively facilitate (or, at the very least, passively comply with) unlawful orders to detain and deport people without probable cause or due process, as the Trump Administration is currently trying to do with Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil.

    Khalil has been thoroughly vetted by multiple governments over the course of his work prior to coming to Columbia, with no evidence of any ties or support of terror organizations. Columbia University not only cleared him of wrongdoing but formally apologized for suspending him during the crackdown against Columbia protestors, because he did violated no university policies. Even the federal government has acknowledged that Khalil has not been confirmed as committing any crimes and is not suspected of committing any crimes or having any concrete ties to terror organizations. In their own telling, they want to deport Khalil, a lawful permanent resident, based solely for his purported political beliefs. When he reached out to his alma mater for help, Columbia University offered no defense of its alumnus and provided no assistance with respect to financial or legal support. They couldn’t even bring themselves to file an objection that a Columbia affiliate was arrested on Columbia property, apparently without a warrant. And the federal government is demanding further silence and compliance of this nature in order to keep the prospect alive of restored federal funds.

    I have previously stressed, and I maintain, that the tumult at Columbia University and other elite schools about Middle East policy is of little consequence to the people struggling in the Middle East. However, what Columbia does is of immense consequence to the overall landscape of higher education in the United States because of a phenomenon sociologists describe as “institutional isomorphism.”

    (more…)
  • How We Lived in NYC

    How We Lived in NYC

    Media outlets consistently publish pieces about symbolic capitalists who understand and describe themselves as poor, or struggling, or barely getting by, or broke (e.g. here, here, here)– often despite healthy six figure incomes and/or low expenses (because they’re childless and either single or partnered with someone who works and whose income supplements their own rather than drawing from it). The impression you’d get from these narratives is that in order to live a decent life in New York City or similar metropolises, you need a minimum of $250k.

    Indeed, a third of Americans who make a quarter-million or more describe themselves as “living paycheck to paycheck” — largely because they decline to live within their ample means. Most millionaires understand and describe themselves as “middle class.” Most white collar professionals seem to agree that these folks are middle class, which allows them to think of themselves as “working class.” And insofar as both the millionaires and six-figure salary crowd mutually define themselves against billionaires, both parties tend to misunderstand their own social position by failing to understand that, compared to most non-billionaire Americans, they are quite affluent.

    Instead, having little sense of how most other people live, symbolic capitalists routinely describe themselves as “ordinary Joes.” They view the elite lifestyles they feel entitled to as “normal” or the bare minimum for a decent life. As a consequence, they have a tough time imagining how an individual could survive in New York City without a robust six-figure income — let alone a family. But people do it all the time. I would know.

    I lived in Manhattan for seven years (2016-2023) while pursuing my PhD at Columbia. My grad stipend was about $35k. As I note in the introduction to We Have Never Been Woke, this was more money than I’d earned in my life, working full-time at jobs that required real work. BUT, I was also supporting a family of four (wife, two kids), so I supplemented my income by public writing and working off-and-on (sometimes full-time, sometimes part-time, sometimes not at all). As a result of these additional revenue streams, our annual household income generally fluctuated between $75-85k per year.

    Our net income was never super far from our gross income: my grad stipend wasn’t taxed upon delivery, the income was declared at the end of the year. Almost all the taxes extracted from paychecks from my side jobs was typically refunded at the end of each year thanks to deductions and tax credits for families, students, cost of living adjustments, etc. (sometimes, as a result of credits, we got back slightly more than we paid in taxes).

    With respect to my gross income: to consistently bring in around $80k was amazing to me. It was far more than the U.S. median individual income at the time (it’s 173% the median individual income today). It was significantly more than the median U.S. household income during that period. Our earnings were roughly equivalent to the current median household income of New York City residents. That is, most households in New York today get by on less than what we were bringing in at the time.

    That said, if we look at households that had our same family structure, we did bring in less than most contemporary married NYC couples with children. If we don’t look at current NYC married families, but look at the wages of families during the *specific periods we lived there,* we were significantly closer to the NYC median for others with our family structure at the time. Zooming into our particular corner of NYC, we made significantly more than the median income for households with families on the west side of Manhattan and north of Central Park, where our apartment was located.

    There were lots of poor people around us. We were not poor. We were not anywhere close to poor.

    There were also lots of rich people around us. At the time, we were not rich or particularly close to rich. We were getting by comfortably. But even if we’d made significantly less money, I would have never described us as “working class” because I was attending an Ivy League school at the time. And as a result of attending said school, we’re now in a very different financial place.

    My family and I no longer live in the city because my job (tenure-line professor at an R1 research university) is in the center of the north shore of Long Island. These days, my wife and I’s combined income puts us around the bottom of the top quintile of all U.S. households. We are more than comfortable.

    But whenever I tell fellow symbolic capitalists that, for the seven years preceding this job, we lived a nice life in Manhattan on around $80k per year, I am regularly greeted with incredulity. Folks estimate that you’d need 2 to 3 times as much money as we brought in, minimum, for a family to thrive in the city. When I try to tell them that they’re wildly overestimating how tough it is to live in NYC due to all the poverty-cosplaying that goes on with white collar professionals in outlets like the New York Times, they have a hard time swallowing this reality. Instead, they often demand to see our financials.

    Obviously, I’m not going to post my tax returns, bank statements and/ or bills —  that’d be insane. So I’ll do the next best thing and sketch our expenses in general terms.

    (more…)
  • How Victimhood Became a Commodity

    How Victimhood Became a Commodity

    According to the prevailing narrative, it is a disadvantage to be non-white as compared to white. To be LGBTQ as compared to straight. To be a woman as compared to a man. To be a religious minority as opposed to a Christian. To be neurodivergent or disabled as compared to being neurotypical and able-bodied. Undergirding this narrative is tons of empirical data showing that, on average, people who belong to these latter categories do in fact fare worse in life, as a result of structural disadvantages, ongoing stigma and more. However, this isn’t quite the whole picture. 

    Understanding these identities as strictly stigmatized or disadvantageous makes it hard to explain why so many contemporary elites go out of their way to paint themselves as members of historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups – often stretching the truth to do so. To understand that tendency, we need to look at the origins and contemporary workings of a relatively new and increasingly powerful elite formation.

    Starting in the interwar period and rapidly accelerating in the 1970s, there were shifts to the global economy that radically increased the influence of the ‘symbolic industries’ – science and technology, education, media, law, consulting, administration, finance, non-profits, NGOs and advocacy organizations and so forth. Rather than providing physical goods and services, people who work in these fields traffic in useful knowledge or technical skills, novel and compelling ideas, social networks – and their social prestige or credibility. Because everything in these industries ultimately boils down to what you know, who you know, and how you’re known, we can refer to these professionals as ‘symbolic capitalists’. 

    I’m a symbolic capitalist. If you’re reading this, there’s a strong chance you’re a symbolic capitalist too.

    One defining trait of symbolic capitalists is our commitment to social justice. We are the group most likely to self-identify as feminists, antiracists, environmentalists or allies to LGBTQ people. Politically, we’re overwhelmingly aligned with parties of the Left. 

    Many of our professions are explicitly defined in terms of serving the common good as impartial adjudicators, knowledge producers, facilitators and advisers. Journalists, for instance, are supposed to ‘speak truth to power’, serve as a voice for the voiceless, and democratize knowledge in the service of democratic self-rule. Academics are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads and tell the truth as they see it, without regard to whether it serves anyone’s financial, political or other ends.

    From the outset of the symbolic professions, the high pay, autonomy and prestige symbolic capitalists enjoy has been tied to our altruism – including and especially our advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged in society. 

    This mode of legitimation set the stage for a unique form of status competition within the symbolic professions: those who are perceived to be more effective at, or committed to, promoting the common good and (especially) helping the least among us also tend to be perceived as more worthy of prestige, deference, autonomy and so on. Meanwhile, folks who are successfully portrayed as possessing values, priorities and behaviors that seem unworthy of their profession – those who come to be seen as selfish or myopic, as serving elite interests at the expense of the broader public or as parasitic on society rather than advancing the greater good – will often find their jobs in the symbolic professions, and their social status, in a precarious position.

    And so, for more than a century now, symbolic capitalists have sought to enhance their own prospects and undermine rivals through appeals to ‘social justice’. And, as detailed at length in my new book, We Have Never Been Woke, in moments when these competitions grow particularly fierce, the symbolic professions tend to get rocked by ubiquitous ‘cancellation’ and censorship campaigns, extreme moral grandstanding, growing activism and politicization within the professions and their outputs, and growing polarization around expertise as a result. We saw this cycle play out most recently throughout the 2010s.

    Over the course of the last century, however, the nature of these intra-elite struggles changed in important ways. For instance, in the wake of America’s Civil Rights Acts and other legislation, the symbolic professions grew more diverse (although they remain highly parochial compared to most other lines of work). This ultimately opened up a new front for ‘social justice’ competition.

    Rather than simply being allies and advocates for the marginalized and disadvantaged, growing numbers of elites and elite aspirants positioned themselves as literal embodiments of historically marginalized and underrepresented groups – as avatars or representatives who could make strong claims on behalf of said groups (even though they tend to be highly unrepresentative of those populations, in truth). Today, many symbolic capitalists simultaneously portray themselves as advocates for those victimized by society and as people who have been personally victimized by society on the basis of immutable characteristics they happen to possess. 

    There are many incentives for contemporary elites to position themselves this way: 

    (more…)
  • Why Awokenings Devolve Into Culture Wars

    Why Awokenings Devolve Into Culture Wars

    In his 1976 The Coming of Post-industrial Society, sociologist Daniel Bell highlighted how changes to the global economy were leading to the emergence of a new social order—one driven by a “knowledge economy,” dominated by technical elites, and highly stratified on the basis of factors like intellectual acumen and academic credentials. Meanwhile, he argued, the labor and assets of those who traded in material goods and services would become increasingly devalued, leading to growing tensions between the technocrats and everyone else. Exacerbating these tensions, Bell argued, was the widespread embrace among intellectuals of what essayist Lionel Trilling referred to as “adversary culture.”

    Within the new elite class, people gained status through delegitimizing and denigrating institutions, traditions, values, and ways of life associated with the middle class. This, Bell argued, would lead to further mistrust of and resentment against the new elites—as the “common man” was being marginalized not just within the economy but within the culture as well. Moreover, Bell noted, there were two deep tensions in the cultural project of these new elites.

    First, adversary culture was itself unmistakably a product of the very bourgeois culture it condemned and was, therefore, unlikely to present a true threat to the prevailing order. Indeed, although these new elites continued to view themselves as outsiders and subversives, they were themselves, increasingly, “the man.” This leads to the second core tension: Insofar as these new elites were successful in advancing adversary culture, they could ultimately end up destroying the foundations of their own authority (i.e., trust in science, expertise, rationality, meritocracy, universities, the press, etc.). 

    The dynamic Bell described becomes especially clear during Awokenings. These are periods in which frustrated erstwhile elites attempt to delegitimize and displace establishment rivals (to make room for themselves) by indicting symbolic capitalist institutions and successful symbolic capitalists as too cozy with the wealthy and the privileged—and by presenting themselves as more authentic or effective champions for minoritized populations and the poor. Incumbents generally respond to these campaigns by trying to show that they are just as committed to eliminating inequalities as their critics or are even better allies for the marginalized and disadvantaged. That is, they try to meet or outflank their critics on “social justice” issues—creating a new consensus position among symbolic capitalists that is more symbolically “left” than before the Awokening. This, in turn, creates an opportunity for the opponents of mainstream symbolic capitalists to enhance their credibility, notoriety, and influence.

    Again, symbolic capitalists are generally much farther to the left on “culture” issues than most Americans—and Awokenings drive them to stake out positions that are even farther out of touch with the rest of their countrymen. And as symbolic capitalists become more aggressive in trying to impose their values and priorities on others—and confronting, denigrating, marginalizing, or sanctioning those who refuse to get with the program—the differences between them and everyone else don’t merely grow larger, they also become much more salient. Moreover, during these interelite struggles, symbolic capitalists tend to be very publicly divided among themselves, with a faction of frustrated and aspiring elites explicitly disparaging more established symbolic capitalists and their affiliated institutions, often while they are themselves engaged in discourse and performative displays that strike most “normies” as extreme, unappealing, and ridiculous. Consequently, both established elites and frustrated aspirants often end up mutually discredited in the eyes of much of the public by the time Awokenings have run their course.

    Right-aligned symbolic capitalists—anti-wokes and conservatives—often try to exploit and exacerbate both the divisions within mainstream symbolic capitalists and the growing gulf between the mainstream consensus position and the rest of society. They attempt to lump insurgents and incumbents together as corrupt, out of touch, and out of control. Right-aligned symbolic capitalists and their allies paint themselves as populists who will restore order, sanity, and dignity to the country and its institutions—or, that failing, defund, dismantle, and disempower them. What starts out as an inter-mainstream struggle often devolves into a left-right struggle.

    (more…)
  • Two Cheers for Symbolic Capitalists

    Two Cheers for Symbolic Capitalists

    Starting in the interwar period (between World Wars I and II) and rapidly accelerating in the 1970s, there were shifts to the global economy that radically increased the influence of the “symbolic industries” – science and technology, education, media, law, consulting, administration, finance, non-profits, NGOs and advocacy organizations, and so forth. People who work in these fields traffic primarily in data, ideas, rhetoric, images instead of physical goods or services. These “symbolic capitalists” are also the Americans who are most likely to self-identify as antiracists, feminists, environmentalists, leftists or “allies” to LGBTQ people. And for good reason.

    From the outset, these professionals have defined themselves and their jobs through a commitment to social justice and altruism. Journalists, for instance, are supposed to speak truth to power and be a voice for the voiceless. Academics are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads, without regard to whether it serves others’ financial or political agendas. Symbolic capitalists successfully won higher pay, prestige and autonomy than most other workers under the auspices that providing us with these benefits serves the common good – including and especially helping the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in society.

    In the years that followed, symbolic capitalists sought to enhance our influence further by arguing that if still more resources and authority were consolidated in our hands, we would usher in an age of unprecedented social cohesion, progress and prosperity.  Under our rule, opportunities would be allocated according to merit. Resources would be redistributed according to need. Disputes would be adjudicated by disinterested experts, with decision making governed by reason and empirical facts. These experts would be mindful of the details and the big picture. They’d be oriented around the long term common good instead of myopic selfishness, the agendas of special interests or parochial and inflexible ideologies. And as a consequence, longstanding social problems and tensions would be ameliorated. We’d have an increasingly shared understanding of the facts of the world and the ‘correct’ course of action.

    And, to a large degree, we got what we wanted: over the last half century, the global economy has been increasingly reoriented around the symbolic industries. However, to put it mildly, things have now played out as we’d predicted. Instead, the U.S. has seen slowing innovation, economic stagnation, rising inequalities, increasing affective polarization, a “crisis of expertise,” diminishing trust in one-another and social institutions, and, allegedly, epistemic chaos.

    My forthcoming book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, attempts to figure out what went wrong. On the whole, the book is very critical of the symbolic professions. There is much to criticize about symbolic capitalists and the social order they preside over. There is much to critique about “wokeness,” the dominant ideology of symbolic capitalists, and how it is instrumentalized in struggles over power, money and status. However, it’s also critical to bear in mind that people are complicated. Societies, even more so. Social orders and ideologies tend to arise and persist for complex reasons, and should they fail, they leave behind complex legacies. The same is true of the symbolic professions and “wokeness.”  

    (more…)
  • Academia’s Biggest Bias Isn’t Political or Ideological

    Academia’s Biggest Bias Isn’t Political or Ideological

    In order to understand biases and exclusion in academe, it’s best to consider who comprises it. Professors, for instance, are overwhelmingly relatively affluent, urban and suburban whites who graduated with terminal degrees from the top programs in their fields.

    These kinds of folks don’t just dominate academia. They are the primary producers and consumers of most content produced in the “symbolic professions.”

    People who share this background tend to vary in dramatic and systematic ways from most other Americans. They perceive and think about the world differently. They have different emotional tendencies than most people. They have highly idiosyncratic political preferences and modes of engagement. And then tend to be disdainful and intolerant towards those whose perspectives diverge from their own.

    (more…)
  • Race to the Bottom: Both Parties Are Alienating Core Ethnic Blocs

    Race to the Bottom: Both Parties Are Alienating Core Ethnic Blocs

    Throughout the 2024 cycle, polling has suggested that Republicans are poised to do extraordinarily well with African Americans.

    Even with Harris at the top of the ticket, more than 1 out of 5 black voters say they support Donald Trump. Younger black voters seem especially open to casting ballots for the GOP.

    On its face, this seems like a sea change in Americans’ electoral affinities. The last time Republicans put up numbers anywhere near that level with black voters was 1976. And given that black voters currently make up nearly one-quarter of the Democratic base, a scenario where more than 20 percent of these constituents defected to the other side would be absolutely devastating for Kamala Harris’ electoral prospects.

    The good news for Democrats is that, even if the polls have been genuinely capturing overall black sentiment in America, they might not accurately predict the final vote distribution in November.

    To clarify why polls may not reflect the eventual vote margins for this particular subset of voters, it might be helpful to look at how things typically shake out for third party candidates.

    (more…)
  • With Kamala or Biden: Chaos is the Only Predictable Element of the 2024 Election Cycle

    With Kamala or Biden: Chaos is the Only Predictable Element of the 2024 Election Cycle

    Since Joe Biden was taken off the ballot, things seem to be going well for Kamala Harris. She formally secured her presidential nomination from the Democratic National Committee with minimal fuss. Other party faithful quickly lined up behind her. Mainstream media outlets have offered overwhelming upbeat, glamorizing and uncritical coverage of Harris since her predecessor stepped aside. Celebrity endorsements have flowed like wine. So have campaign donations. Folks who has been jaded about the race when it was Trump v. Biden are now looking with new eyes at the contest, leading to a solid bump in the polling.

    It might be tempting to think Donald Trump is toast. The race is all buttoned up. Democrats are back to being on the “right side of history.” For better or worse, it’s are not that simple.

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2

  • The Absurd Spectacle at Columbia Occludes the Grim Realities of Gaza

    The Absurd Spectacle at Columbia Occludes the Grim Realities of Gaza

    To understand broad trends, it can often be helpful to dig into a particular case. With respect to the tumult over the encampments protesting the U.S. backed Israeli offensive in Gaza, it would be hard to find a more illuminating example than Columbia University.

    Here, we can clearly observe students’ sincere but contradictory concern for the least among us on the one hand, and their ambitious social climbing on the other. Here, we can most clearly recognize elite institutions’ deep commitments to purely sterile forms of activism – and we can readily see how identitarian and safetyist approaches to “social justice” are easily weaponized in the service of the status quo. At Columbia, we can most readily perceive the jarring dissonance between the spectacle of unrest over Gaza on the one hand, and the realities of the conflict that has been overshadowed by the spectacle on the other.

    But let’s start with some basic facts.

    (more…)
  • We Have Never Been Woke: pre-orders now live

    We Have Never Been Woke: pre-orders now live

    I am pleased to report that my first book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, now has an official release date: October 8, 2024. Even better, hardcover editions are now available for preorder on Bookshop.org, Thriftbooks, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and through most other major retailers. You can also pick up a copy directly from the publisher via the Princeton University Press website.

    E-book versions are also now available for preorder on Kobo, Google Play, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

    Folks interested in the audiobook can preorder their copy (narrated by yours truly) through Apple Books, Audible, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Libro.fm and Kobo.

    Meanwhile, readers outside the U.S. can snag a copy via Blackwell’s, with free international shipping.

    Princeton University Press was very aggressive in keeping the price point down – it’s much cheaper than a typical academic press (which often cost $50- $100 or more), and comparable in price to a new release from an imprint like Basic Books or Penguin.

    I strongly encourage everyone to preorder the book as soon as possible. As Yashar Ali explains here, the best way to support an author is not just to buy the book after it comes out — but to pre-order. It makes a huge difference in terms of the impact of the book to have strong “day-one” sales.

    And this book is going to be an absolute banger.

    There have been many books published to try to understand the period of rapid change in norms and discourse after 2010. This book is not like those books. It’s not an “antiwoke” polemic – it’s a deep dive into how inequalities come about and persist, how they are legitimized, and who benefits from them and how. It’s draws on and synthesizes tons of empirical research from a wide range of fields (I’m a professor of communication and journalism who previously served as an instructor in political science; I have degrees in philosophy and sociology; I was mentored by, and have co-authored scholarly work with, prominent psychologists. All of these influences shine through clearly in the work). It has a hundred year historical arc. I can guarantee: you haven’t read this book before.

    (more…)
  • Bill and Hillary Clinton Revolutionized U.S. Politics (Twice)

    Bill and Hillary Clinton Revolutionized U.S. Politics (Twice)

    Joe Biden’s approval rating has been consistently underwater for most of his presidency. Although there has been a bit of improvement, the president continues to trail Trump in most swing states. Eager to turn around his fortunes, Biden has sought to enlist the Clintons into his reelection bid – starting with Hillary, who hosted a $1 million fundraise for Biden in her Georgetown home, then expanding to Bill, who has been stumping for Joe Biden and his record.

    On the one hand, this decision would seem a bit perplexing: Hillary Clinton is, herself, deeply unpopular and avoidably lost to the very candidate Biden successfully defeated eight years later (and is currently running against). Bill Clinton, meanwhile, faced myriad scandals that haunted his wife’s 2016 campaign. On the other hand, folding the Clintons into his campaign makes perfect sense. More than any other political figures, Bill and Hillary have set the contours of contemporary American politics by transforming the Democratic Party – not once, but twice.

    (more…)
  • It’s Easy to Misunderstand Antisemitism in America

    It’s Easy to Misunderstand Antisemitism in America

    According to many popular contemporary narratives, American society is rife with antisemitism. Institutions of higher learning are purportedly hotbeds of anti-Jewish animus, indoctrinating impressionable young people into a leftist ideology that paints Jews as extraordinarily privileged, Israelis as oppressors, Hamas as brave freedom fighters and Palestinians as blameless victims. Many people I deeply respect have embraced claims like these in recent weeks. However, I believe these narratives are demonstrably mistaken. 

    This is an issue that is near to my heart. As a Muslim who has done a lot of work on interfaith engagement, I view it as an imperative to stand with other “people of the book” — especially when they face persecution on the basis of their identity as Jews or Christians. On a more personal level, I have been supported throughout my intellectual journey by Jewish scholars who saw something in me that others did not, who helped me flourish as an academic and human being.  I would not be where I am today, indeed, I would not be who I am today, were it not for Jewish mentors and colleagues who stood with me every step of the way. 

    As a consequence of these experiences, relationships and commitments, I take antisemitism very seriously. As a sociologist of knowledge, however, I am acutely aware that fighting any problem requires an accurate picture of what’s actually going on. And surveying the best available nationally representative data, we can see that while antisemitic sentiments and behaviors do appear to be on the rise, there does not seem to be a major antisemitism epidemic in the United States, on colleges campuses or on the left. In fact, in all of these are contexts, antisemitism is exceptionally rare relative to the alternatives.   

    But before we get into that, it might be helpful to briefly define what is, and is not, antisemitism.

    (more…)
  • Israel’s Campaign in Gaza is a Failure on Every Level. The U.S. Must Stop Enabling It.

    Israel’s Campaign in Gaza is a Failure on Every Level. The U.S. Must Stop Enabling It.

    On December 14th, CNN aired a devastating peek into life in the Gaza Strip.

    The dispatch, from Clarissa Ward, marked the first piece of independent reporting from Gaza by a Western journalist since October 7th (all other reports by Western correspondents to date have come from people embedded with the Israeli army who had to subject their reporting to the IDFs official censor for approval).  

    Should other media outlets follow CNN’s lead in coming weeks, finding ways into Gaza that circumvent partisans in the conflict, presenting interviews and footage developed by and for Western audiences, the American public may come to understand the plight of Gazans through more than just statistics. In the meantime, the statistics tell a truly horrific tale.

    To date, Gaza’s Health Ministry has identified at least 22,185 people who have been killed in the Israeli offensive – nearly 1 percent of Gaza’s total population of 2.3 million. Since October 7, at least 47 entire bloodlines have been wiped from Gaza’s civil registry.

    Israel’s defenders have tried to downplay these numbers by emphasizing that the Gaza Health Ministry works for Hamas. This is technically true, in the same way that government employees who collected trash in Iraq technically worked for Ba’ath Party under Saddam Hussein (although formal responsibility for the Health Ministry still lies with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank). However, this does not entail that the ministry is exaggerating the death toll. Indeed, it’s not even in Hamas’ strategic interests to cook the books – their ability to exert international pressure on Israel is completely contingent on others taking the Health Ministry’s casualty numbers seriously. Being caught engaging in major exaggerations would deprive them of the ability to undermine Israel on the world stage in this conflict and all subsequent conflicts as well.   

    It should therefore not be surprising that the Gaza Health Ministry numbers have proven consistently reliable. The Associated Press observes, “In the aftermath of war, the U.N. humanitarian office has published final death tolls based on its own research into medical records. In all cases the U.N.’s counts have largely been consistent with the Gaza Health Ministry’s, with small discrepancies.” Likewise, “While Israel and the Palestinians disagree over the numbers of militants versus civilians killed in past wars, Israel’s accounts of Palestinian casualties have come close to the Gaza ministry’s.”

    In fact, Israeli intelligence services generally use the Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers instead of trying to collect their own data. As was reported in January 2025 by an Israeli intelligence official, “The secret services looked at the health ministry’s collection methods and determined the numbers were generally credible, so instead of collecting their own information they decided to use the [Hamas] numbers…There’s no possibility of collecting exact data in this situation but their system is generally transparent and credible.”

    The report notes that Israeli intelligence services are not unique in this assessment. European intelligence services also rely heavily on Gaza Health Ministry data in their briefings.

    Moreover, independent audits by U.S. media outlets and monitoring organizations also tend to match the Health Ministry’s numbers closely. 

    In fact, as Reuters notes, the Gaza Health Ministry estimates are likely an undercount of the total dead because there are many people who never made it to a hospital or other government facility to be identified. As of late 2023, there are an estimated 7000 Gazans still trapped in the rubble, whose bodies may never be recovered or identified.

    Moreover, the Gaza Health Ministry data only counts those directly killed by bombs, guns, fires, and the like. It does not count the even higher numbers indirectly killed, for instance, because of starvation and malnutrition, dehydration, infections (including from wounds sustained as a result of the bombings), and disease spread by the destruction of infrastructure for medical treatment, water purification, waste removal, etc. A study for Lancet found that when these indirect casualties are taken into account, the total dead from the war may be four times higher than direct casualties reported by the Gaza Health Ministry.

    Israeli politicians and defense officials have repeatedly boasted about the IDF’s precise munitions and their capabilities to minimize civilian deaths. The fact that Israel has such precise targeting capabilities raises troubling questions about the huge number of casualties in this conflict among groups that are supposed to be protected under international law.  

    (more…)
  • Is Nikki Haley the Next Hillary Clinton?

    Is Nikki Haley the Next Hillary Clinton?

    The contemporary GOP base is increasingly comprised of Americans who perceive themselves to be the “losers” in the knowledge economy and who seem to feel distant and mistrustful of mainstream institutions. The party, and especially its insurgent movements – from the Obama-era tea party through the present day – are increasingly backed by small businesses and family capital. In the contemporary Republican Party, candidates who seem beholden to multinational corporations, foreign powers, bureaucrats, et al. are very vulnerable to being rejected by the contemporary GOP base.

    Indeed, of the 13 candidates who made bids for the 2024 Republican nomination, the only “mainstream” or “establishment” candidates left as we’re heading into actual voting are former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (currently polling at less than 3 percent among the Republican base) and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley (the top choice of 11 percent of GOP voters).

    Three other candidates are attempting to style themselves as “populists,” even though their economic policies are basically identical to mainstream GOP orthodoxy: Florida governor Ron DeSantis, entrepreneur-turned-bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy and former President Donald Trump.

    Of the candidates in the ‘establishment’ lane, Haley is the only candidate who seems to have a plausible shot at the nomination. However, as last week’s debate made clear, Haley may be highly vulnerable to concerns about undue influence from “the establishment” and other bugbears of the Republican base. As her rise results in more scrutiny, these perceptions could doom her already long-shot effort to dethrone Trump, the far-and-away frontrunner for the Republican nomination, whose shadow lingered heavily over the debate despite his physical absence.

    Indeeed, the surging GOP candidate finds herself in a tough dilemma: Many Never Trump Republicans, foreign lobbying groups, big financiers and even some Democrats have begun to coalesce around her as the only remaining candidate with a plausible shot of pulling off an upset for the nomination. The resources being provided by these big-ticket donors are necessary to get her name and message out there and to expand her campaign operations nationwide, particularly since her rival is a household name who gets dozens of hours of free media a week and enjoys strong grassroots financial support. However, being embraced by these big-ticket donors is also a potential liability. If Haley appears to be the preferred candidate of Democrats, “globalists,” corporations and “the swamp,” then she risks seeming like the Hillary Clinton of the Republican Party.

    (more…)
  • It’s the (Knowledge) Economy, Stupid

    It’s the (Knowledge) Economy, Stupid

    The biggest divide in American politics at present is not along the lines of socioeconomic status (SES), nor educational attainment, nor type (urban, suburban, small town, rural), nor gender – although these factors all serve as important proxies for the distinction that matters most. The key schism that lies at the heart of dysfunction within the Democratic Party and the U.S. political system more broadly seems to be between professionals associated with ‘knowledge economy’ industries and those who feel themselves to be the ‘losers’ in the knowledge economy – including growing numbers of working class and non-white voters.  

    Two decades ago, sociologists Manza and Brooks observed, “professionals have moved from being the most Republican class in the 1950s, to the second most Democratic class by the late 1980s and the most Democratic class in 1996.” The consolidation they noted at the turn of the century is even more pronounced today. And as these professionals have been consolidated into the Democratic Party, they’ve grown increasingly progressive, particularly on ‘cultural’ issues (sexuality, race, gender, environmentalism), and especially relative to blue-collar workers.

    FEC campaign contribution data provides stark insights into how firmly knowledge economy professionals have aligned themselves with the Democratic Party in recent cycles. In 2016, roughly 9 out of 10 political donations from those who work as activists, or in the arts, academia, and journalism were given to Democrats. Similarly, Democrats received around 80% of donations from workers involved in research, entertainment, non-profits and science. They also received more than two-thirds of donations from those in IT, law, engineering, public relations, or civil service. Among industries that skewed Democratic, the party’s highest total contributions came from lawyers/ law firms, environmental PACs, non-profits, the education sector, the entertainment sector, consulting and publishing.

    Similar patterns held in 2020: the occupations and employers with the most workers who donated to the Biden/ Harris campaign included teachers, educators and professors, lawyers, medical and psychiatric professionals, people who work in advertising, communications and entertainment, consultants, HR professionals and administrators, architects and designers, IT specialists and engineers.  Industries that provided the highest total contributions to the Democrats included securities/ investments, education, lawyers/ law firms, health professionals, non-profits, electronics companies, business services, entertainment and civil servants. Geographically speaking, Democratic votes in 2020 were tightly clustered in major cities and college towns where knowledge economy professionals live and work — and outside those zones, it was largely a sea of ‘red.’

    The alignment of knowledge economy professionals with the Democratic Party has also shifted the socioeconomic composition of the Democratic base. To give some perspective of how much has changed: in 1993, the richest 20 percent of congressional districts were represented by Republicans over Democrats at a ratio of less than 2 to 1. Today, they tilt Democrat by nearly 5:1. The socioeconomic profiles of Democratic primary voters have shifted significantly as well. Counties with higher concentrations of lower and working class Americans are today a much smaller portion of Democratic primary voters than they were in 2008, while counties with large concentrations of affluent households comprise an ever-growing share. This has important consequences for the types of candidates that succeed in primary elections, the language those candidates use, the issues they center, what the party platform ends up looking like and, ultimately, who is drawn to the party and their candidates in national elections (and who is alienated therefrom). 

    The increasing dominance of knowledge economy professionals over the Democratic Party has had a profound impact on the contemporary U.S. political landscape:

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2

  • New paper explores censorship and self-censorship in science

    New paper explores censorship and self-censorship in science

    In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, my co-authors and I explore the prevalence, causes and impacts of censorship and self-censorship in science.

    We find that censorship is driven heavily by scientists themselves and, although the consequences of censorship are often pernicious in practice, censors tend to be motivated by prosocial concerns, such as curbing potential misinformation or protecting vulnerable populations.

    The paper is open-access, so people can read it without concern for paywalls and other gatekeeping. Ditto with the subsequently published response to a criticism of the paper (wherein the critic modeled the very phenomenon the paper highlighted: justifying censorship under the auspices of prosocial ends).

    For those interested in exploring the themes of these essays in greater detail:

    • Nicole Barbaro and I published an essay in Inside Higher Ed highlighting some of the ways scholars can empirically study censorship and self-censorship, and some of the challenges of distinguishing censorship from legitimate criticism or rejection, etc., available here.
    • Cory Clark and I published an essay in Chronicle of Higher Education exploring reforms that could make censorship less likely to occur and easier to observe when it does occur, available here.
    • In Reason magazine, I published an essay emphasizing that, although censorship is often carried out in the name of protecting marginalized populations, the people most likely to be censored, and who suffer the most pernicious impacts of censorship, are generally people who are institutionally vulnerable and isolated. More here.
    • In Times Higher Education I published an essay explaining that although discussion of censorship and self-censorship often focuses on ‘kids these days,’ if we want to understand what’s happening in higher ed and other knowledge economy institutions, we need to turn our gaze towards ‘adults these days’ instead. More here.
    • Cory and I will discussed the paper with science journalist Andrew Revkin here.

    Pages: 1 2 3 4 5

  • If Truth Matters in the Conflict Between Israel and Gaza, Now’s the Time to Tell It.

    If Truth Matters in the Conflict Between Israel and Gaza, Now’s the Time to Tell It.

    On October 7, hundreds of Hamas fighters breached the boundaries dividing Israel and Gaza and committed atrocities against vulnerable populations. They targeted non-combatants hiding in shelters. Women. Old people. Children. Foreign nationals. They rampaged through Israel for more than a day before being driven back by Israeli forces.

    When it was over, 695 Israeli civilians were confirmed killed, including 36 children, alongside 373 members of Israeli security forces and 71 foreigners. Hamas also took roughly 240 hostages with them as they fled.

    In response, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a full siege of Gaza – cutting residents off from all food, water, electricity or aid. Communications infrastructure has been targeted, limiting Gazans’ ability to communicate with the outside world. Ariel bombardments have killed over two thousand Palestinians including over 700 children. Huge swaths of Gazan cities have been destroyed, rendering an estimated 300,000 Gazans homeless. A ground invasion seems imminent.  

    In the days that followed Hamas’ raid, online spaces were flooded with images and videos conveying the horrors visited upon Israeli civilians. However, many false or unsubstantiated claims began to circle as well. As the conflict escalates, it will be critical that journalists, academics and observers of all kinds work overtime to make sure that we are talking, thinking and writing about events on the basis of things we fully know to be true.

    (more…)
  • On Populism, Labor and Partisan Politics

    On Populism, Labor and Partisan Politics

    On September 27th, the Republican Party will hold the second debate in their primary contest. The decisive frontrunner for the nomination, Donald Trump, has once again declined to participate. Instead, the former president will deliver a primetime campaign speech in Detroit to a purported audience of current and former members of the United Auto Workers union and non-unionized manufacturing workers.

    The split screen is deeply telling.

    Republicans running against Trump aren’t just fighting for the GOP presidential nomination. They’re also fighting for the future of the party. Earlier this month, former Vice President Mike Pence described the primary as a “time for choosing” between a Republican Party oriented toward free markets, limited government and personal responsibility versus a party oriented toward populism. And the populist path, he warned, is a “road to ruin.”

    Pence is hardly the first politician to characterize populism as a grave threat. As political analysts Thomas Frank and Matt Stoller have demonstrated, leaders across the political spectrum have consistently denigrated populist impulses.

    However, the twin insurgencies of Trump and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in recent presidential races have shown that there is a strong appetite for populism in America today. Social science can help us understand why.

    Mapping the U.S. voters by the extent to which they skew left or right along economic and cultural lines, political scientist Lee Drutman illustrated that it’s possible to divide the American electorate into four quadrants:

    Populism four quadrants us electorate

    The “traditional Republican” quadrant includes folks who are both socially and economically conservative. The “traditional Democrat” quadrant contains those who are both culturally and fiscally liberal. And then there are two other quadrants of voters who are liberal in some respects but conservative in others. As political scientist James Stimson emphasized in his landmark book “Tides of Consent,” these constituents make up the “swing vote” whose ballots play an outsized role in deciding elections.

    Drutman characterizes one of these cross-pressured quadrants as “Libertarian”: socially liberal yet fiscally conservative. There aren’t many ordinary voters here. However, elites in both parties tend to inhabit this ideological space.

    As statistician Andrew Gelman famously demonstrated, elites in the Republican Party tend to be significantly more culturally liberal than the rest of the GOP even as they’re more dogmatic on free markets. Meanwhile, Democratic-aligned elites tend to be much further left on cultural issues than other Democrats but very warm on free markets. As a consequence of this confluence, the priorities of “Libertarian” quadrant constituents tend to be significantly overrepresented in the political arena.

    The final quadrant can be characterized as “populist.”

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2

  • Education and Privilege Laundering

    Education and Privilege Laundering

    We’ve recently concluded another graduation season. The annual ritual wherein professors and deans, decked out in their wizard regalia, engage in a collective mystification of contemporary inequalities. By the end of the ceremony, diplomas in hand after four years of striving, graduates will come to believe they “deserve” the relatively comfortable jobs, above-average (dual) incomes, and relatively stable homelives that likely await them. Over time, an implicit (and often explicit) conviction will grow that non-graduates are reciprocally unworthy of working the same jobs, enjoying the same lifestyles, and being afforded the same respect or deference as people like themselves. In previous eras, magic men sought to transform lead into gold. Contemporary wizards perform an even more arcane sort of alchemy — transforming gold into perceptions of “merit.”

    This isn’t all we do, of course. Institutions of higher learning serve many social purposes. They are hubs for knowledge production and dissemination. They are centers of civic development and cultural exchange. For those from non-traditional academic backgrounds who defy the odds, educational institutions can serve as important engines of social mobility. More typically, however, colleges and universities are dedicated to social reproduction – that is, helping children from relatively affluent backgrounds reproduce or enhance their parents’ social position. Elite universities in particular serve as the final components in a privilege laundering scheme that starts before kindergarten and extends through the job market (and, for those who stay in higher ed, all the way up the tenure track).

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2

  • One Lesson To Learn From Ted Kaczynski

    One Lesson To Learn From Ted Kaczynski

    Ted Kaczynski was recognized as a genius at an early age. He graduated high school at age 15, began attending Harvard at 16, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at 20. Five years later, he had attained a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Michigan. The next fall, he began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and was soon awarded a tenure-track appointment, making him the youngest professor ever hired by the university. However, he abruptly resigned after just two years at Berkeley. He moved to the outskirts of Lincoln, Mont., where he built and began residing in a cabin with no electricity or running water—working odd jobs here and there, and engaging in intensive private studies of social theory. Within a few years, he began experimenting with explosives. Over the next two decades, he would carry out a series of bombings against scientists and corporate representatives that killed three, maimed several, and created widespread panic and fascination. 

    In a 1995 letter sent to a number of prominent media outlets, Kaczynski agreed to end his decades-long campaign of terror if a major journalistic outlet published his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, in its entirety and unedited. He seemed to believe that the publication of this document would lead to a revolution. On Sept. 19, 1995, The Washington Post ran the “Unabomber Manifesto” in accordance with Kaczynski’s specifications. And true to his word, Kaczynski sent no more bombs. Contrary to his hopes, however, no revolution materialized. While some cultural critics lauded particular elements of the manifesto as poignant, provocative, or insightful, many others were unimpressed. Few read through the full 35,000-word treatise. And in any case, there was little appetite for revolution in the middle to late 1990s.  

    Instead, Kaczynski was arrested shortly after the manifesto was published. His brother had recognized the writings and tipped off federal law enforcers to his whereabouts. Kaczynski was sentenced to eight consecutive life sentences, without the possibility of parole. He spent the next quarter-century in a supermax prison in Colorado. In 2021, he was transferred to a less secure facility in North Carolina owing to his declining health. There, he committed suicide and was found dead in his cell on June 12, 2023, aged 81. 

    Despite the lackluster reception of his original manifesto, Kaczynski began to enjoy something of a “moment” toward the end of his life. In the wake of the Great Recession and the latest Great Awokening, Kaczynski’s writings were interpreted in a new light, and he began drawing acolytes from across the political spectrum (there was even a term for it: getting “Ted-pilled”). Multiple documentaries have been released in recent years analyzing his life, his deeds, and his thought. A collection of his essays, entitled Technological Slavery, was published in 2010, with a fourth edition released in 2022.

    On the whole, Kaczynski’s writings aren’t as original or interesting as he seems to have believed. He drew intensely from a small number of thinkers who he didn’t credit. His arguments, minus the calls for violence, largely expressed the conventional wisdom of his day. As his biographer Alston Chase put it, “The manifesto was ignored not because its ideas were too foreign, but because they were so familiar… its message was ordinary and unoriginal. The concerns It evinced about the effects of technology on culture and nature are widely shared, especially among the country’s most highly educated. The manifesto was an academic – and popular – cliché.”

    However, there are moments of striking lucidity that help explain his appeal.

    (more…)
  • Contextualizing Ideological Gaps in Mental Illness and Well-Being

    Contextualizing Ideological Gaps in Mental Illness and Well-Being

    In a recent essay for Social Science & Medicine – Mental Health, epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and co-authors identified a significant gap in depressive attitudes between liberal and conservative teens. This gap was present in all years observed in the study (2005-2018). However, it grew significantly starting in 2012, as depressive affect unilaterally spiked among liberals. Three years later, conservatives also began reporting increases in depression – although that rise tapered off relatively quickly while the increases among liberals continued unabated. 

    Liberal girls tended to be significantly more depressed than boys, particularly after 2011. However, ideological differences swamped gender differences. Indeed, liberal boys were significantly more likely to report depression than conservatives of either gender.

    The authors also found that the more educated a teen’s family was, the more likely the young people were to be depressed, and the more dramatic their rise in depression was after 2012. 

    depression well-being ideology

    Why is it that liberal teens are more consistently depressed than conservatives? Why might familial education correlate with heightened depression for liberal youth? Why was there a spike in depression (and a growing ideological divergence in depressive affect) post 2011, corresponding with the onset of the ‘Great Awokening’?

    This essay will provide a deep dive into the literature on the relationship between ideology and subjective well-being in the hopes of shedding light on possible answers to these questions. The links will near-exclusively direct readers to peer reviewed research or (occasionally) preprints. It is my hope this essay serves as a one-stop shop for work on ideology and well-being in much the same way as a previous essay of mine has served as a key resource for understanding the (in)efficacy of diversity training. Let’s dive in.

    (more…)
  • The ‘Great Awokening’ Is Winding Down

    The ‘Great Awokening’ Is Winding Down

    Beginning in 2011, there was a rapid shift in the ways people associated with the knowledge economy talk about, and engage on, ‘social justice’ issues.  

    Those who work in fields like tech, finance, education, journalism, arts, entertainment, design and consulting (and students who aspired to these professions) grew much more politically ‘radical’ over the last 10 years and increasingly intolerant of dissent. The shifts were especially pronounced on matters pertaining to ‘identity’ (e.g. sexuality, race and gender).

    A lot of the public discussion of the ‘Great Awokening’ focused on ‘vibes’ and unrepresentative anecdotes. However, as I illustrate in my book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, it’s possible to measure the changes that have taken place among knowledge professionals in a more systematic way. Interestingly, many of the same types of data that substantiate a significant transformation in discourse and norms after 2011 now seem to suggest that the ‘Great Awokening’ may have run its course.

    For instance, post-2011, there was a notable surge in protest activity, concentrated in knowledge economy hubs and driven by knowledge economy professionals – beginning with the Occupy Wall Street Movement, continuing through the post-Trump #Resistance movements, and culminating with the 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd.

    There was significant unrest within knowledge economy institutions as well – from campaigns to get people fired for saying the wrong thing, holding the wrong views, or minor behavioral infractions to internal movements demanding that institutions issue strong statements on contentious political issues, donate to activist organizations, expand DEI initiatives, and so on.

    There were dramatic shifts in knowledge economy outputs as well. For instance, there was a rapid increase in terms referring to various forms prejudice and discrimination in print and television news outlets, in books, in academic scholarship, in video games and beyond.

    Even before the election of Donald Trump, art has grown increasingly political since 2010. After the 2016 election, political art became the only work perceived to ‘matter.’

    Entertainment outputs followed a similar trajectory. As New York Magazine columnist Molly Fischer observed, content produced by entertainment companies not only grew more political over the last decade, and grew more intensely focused on ‘identity’ issues (race, gender, sexuality), it also increasingly adopted “a tone along the lines of an after-school special.”

    Within the arts and entertainment industries, works that failed to tow the preferred line or conform with the newly-imposed norms and expectations on social and political issues grew increasingly difficult to produce, and regularly faced cancellation campaigns post-publication when they were published over the protest of progressive staff.

    There were also dramatic changes in expressed attitudes on contentious topics, and in the political alignments and behaviors of knowledge economy workers.  

    Most knowledge economy professionals in the U.S. are highly-educated whites who self-identify as liberal. Polls and surveys show that, post 2011, there was a rapid shift in how highly-educated white liberals responded to questions related to ‘identity’ issues — they became significantly more likely to strike the maximally ‘left’ posture on questions pertaining to ‘cultural’ issues.

    Whites affiliated with knowledge economy fields also became much more likely to self-identify as ‘liberal’ and to vote for the Democratic Party over the past decade. This, in turn, significantly reshaped Democratic Party’s priorities and rhetoric, often alienating non-white, less educated, and less affluent voters.

    The times, they are a-changin

    It’s been ten straight years of heightened unrest among knowledge economy professionals and within knowledge economy institutions and knowledge economy hubs. However, it seems like the wave is now beginning to crest.

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2 3

  • U.S. College Professors Do Not Well-Represent the Rest of America

    U.S. College Professors Do Not Well-Represent the Rest of America

    Tenured and tenure-track college professors are drawn from a narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society. Many backgrounds and perspectives are dramatically underrepresented in the academy. This gulf between the ivory tower and the rest of society undermines knowledge production, pedagogy, and public trust in experts and scientific claims.

    A new study published in Nature Human Behavior argues that, at its current rate of change, the faculty will likely never approximate parity with the broader U.S. population. The paper did not provide a deep dive into why, specifically, the faculty remains so unrepresentative. Nor did it provide a road map for efficiently closing the gaps. This essay will dive into those questions. 

    However, let’s start by establishing some baselines with respect to how the faculty is composed today.

    Who Are Professors?

    In chapter 2 of my forthcoming book, I marshall statistics from the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), and other sources to sketch out the composition of the U.S. professoriate. Professors, I argue, are in many respects illustrative of the broader gap between knowledge economy professionals and the publics they ostensibly serve. Many other “knowledge” fields, such as journalism, law, consulting, tech, and finance, are similarly parochial, to the detriment of aligned institutions and American society more broadly. 

    Here is a chart from the text, comparing the demographics of U.S. full-time faculty with the broader adult population (see here for additional information on the provenance of these data).

    comparing professors to the general public

    We can see that in terms of raw percentage point gaps, the most overrepresented groups seem to be people on the ‘left’, the religiously unaffiliated and whites. The biggest underrepresentation gaps, looking at raw percentage points, are for Christians, people on the ‘right’ and Hispanics.

    In addition to looking at absolute percentage point gaps, we can also visualize this data as a series of ratios. This would allow us to see more clearly which groups are the most over or underrepresented relative to their baselines in the broader society (and allow us to better normalize comparisons across different categories):

    comparing professors to the general public

    For a host of reasons, it would be difficult to include the socioeconomic backgrounds and the community types (rural, urban, suburban) that faculty were typically raised in within these same charts. However, an ambitious recent study exploring the socioeconomic backgrounds of faculty members found that nearly 9 in 10 professors have grown up in urban areas; on average they enjoyed household incomes that were 23.7% higher than the national average at the time of their childhoods. More than 3 out of 4 grew up in houses their parents owned (also higher than national averages during their childhoods). Most faculty had at least one parent with an advanced degree; nearly three-quarters had a parent with at least a B.A. Moreover, the authors found, those raised by one (or more) parent with a Ph.D. were significantly more likely to land a tenure-track position at an elite school as compared with faculty whose parents did not have terminal degrees. 

    There are differences across fields in terms of affluent backgrounds: humanities scholars tend to be most likely to come from top SES quintile households. However, in all fields, most professors tend to come from families who earned above the median household incomes during their formative years.

    Complementing these studies, others have found that roughly 80% of tenured and tenure-track faculty in the U.S. hail from a small number of elite schools, which themselves cater primarily to students from well-off families. 

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2 3

  • On Christian Nationalism and the ‘Religious Right’

    On Christian Nationalism and the ‘Religious Right’

    In recent years, there has been growing scholarly and media focus on Christian nationalism.

    Google nGrams, a search engine that tracks word frequencies in books, show that the contemporary resurgence of interest in Christian nationalism  seems to correspond with the 2016 election cycle. A search on Google Scholar produces roughly 7,000 results for scholarly works on Christian nationalism, roughly 60% of them produced since 2015.

    Looking at the pattern over time on Google Trends, the public conversation really took off roughly two years from the present date. The events of January 6, 2021 led to a huge spike in searches about Christian nationalism, as many were eager to find some easy narrative or master framework to explain that was wrong with ‘those people’ who engaged in the riot and/or embraced the ‘big lie’  that the 2020 election was stolen. Christian nationalism became one of the more prominent frameworks for understanding ‘the problem.’

    Search interest reached unprecedented highs from April – July 2022, corresponding with the publication of timely and highly-influential books by sociologists Andrew Whitehead, Samuel Perry and Philip Gorski: “Taking Back America for God” and “The Flag and the Cross” (both published by Oxford University Press).

    With respect to media discussion, Boolean Query data from Lexis Nexis Newsdesk shows that over the last year there have been roughly  2,100 print and online news media articles published mentioning Christian nationalism – on average roughly six published each day over the last year — with the coverage skewing decisively negative (according to sentiment analysis).

    The term ‘Christian nationalism’ is on many people’s lips. What, specifically, people are referring to, however, is often a little unclear.

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2 3

  • The 2022 Midterms Results Should (But Won’t) Definitively Kill Disparaging Narratives About U.S. Voters

    The 2022 Midterms Results Should (But Won’t) Definitively Kill Disparaging Narratives About U.S. Voters

    In the run-up to the 2022 midterms, a dominant narrative in mainstream media spaces was that Americans were on the cusp of throwing away democracy in order to save a few dollars on gas. Should Republicans lose, they would refuse to concede defeat. The legitimacy of the electoral results would be undermined by widespread conspiracy theories. The elections and their aftermath could be marred by violence, intimidation and other forms of voter suppression.

    None of these dystopian predictions panned out. Instead, as NPR noted, the elections were “largely uneventful.” Rather than widespread voter suppression, turnout was exceptionally high. Instead of the expected “red wave,” Republicans did worse than the opposition party usually does when a new party comes to power. The GOP only narrowly won the House (an outcome that was likely unavoidable). It failed to capture the Senate. Election deniers overwhelmingly went down in flames. 

    There were no major demonstrations contesting the results. There was no violence. Although Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake still hasn’t admitted defeat, she’s a huge outlier even among election deniers this cycle (who overwhelmingly conceded their races without drama). Polling suggests that most rank-and-file Republicans view the elections as free and fair despite their party’s anemic performance.   

    In short, the reality of the midterms had almost nothing in common with the narratives going into them. This should not have been surprising.

    As I’ve explained elsewhere, popular narratives about how Republicans overwhelmingly support the “big lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and are dragging the U.S. to the precipice of civil war or a fascist coup, are obviously overblown. They are the result of credulous reactions to polls and surveys and insufficient attention to how people actually behave. 

    The sociologists Colin Jerolmack and Shamus Khan call this the “attitudinal fallacy.” People portray themselves in all sorts of ways for all sorts of reasons in data they provide to social scientists and news outlets. As a result, this data may not be a reliable guide to how people actually behave in the world. If you want to know what people really believe or care about, prioritize their actions over their words. 

    So let’s look at how the voters behaved: Turnout for Republicans was high across the board, including in highly competitive races. Americans grew less likely overall to back candidates from different parties. This would seem to presage major Republican wins. Why didn’t it? Races with election deniers were a noteworthy exception to the broader down-ballot tendencies.

    Many who backed the GOP for most other candidates on the ballot voted for Democrats when the Republican option was an election denier. In other words, GOP-sympathizing voters were the Americans who defied the trend against splitting tickets — precisely to avoid electing candidates who might foment another Jan. 6. If you want to know why we didn’t see a ‘red wave’ in the House, why Democrats were able to hold the Senate, why election-deniers were not elected en masse (potentially setting the stage for a 2024 electoral coup) — thank right-aligned voters. Turns out they’re not as extreme as the popular narratives would lead one to believe.

    What’s more, the Democratic Party clearly knew that the narratives they espoused about GOP-aligned voters’ authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies were hyperbolic at best. As political analyst Matt Yglesias observed, Democrats spent the 2022 electoral cycle claiming that America was a heartbeat away from autocracy while behaving as though they believed the opposite. Democrats even spent tens of millions of dollars helping election deniers win Republican primary contests, something that would obviously be unconscionable if they literally believed that American democracy was on the cusp of being dismantled (and that these kinds of candidates genuinely appealed to and energized GOP-sympathetic voters rather than alienating them). The cynical bid paid off: Literally all the extreme GOP candidates that Democrats boosted failed in the general election. Again, this should not have been a shock. 

    (more…)
  • Democrats Will Lose the House in 2022. It Probably Doesn’t Matter What They Do.

    Democrats Will Lose the House in 2022. It Probably Doesn’t Matter What They Do.

    In the Abrahamic religions, there is a profound mystery in how to reconcile belief in free will with faith in divine providence. Similar mysteries lie at the heart of political science.

    For instance, over the past 45 years, every time there has been a change of party in the White House, the opposing party won the governorship of Virginia a year later.   

    2021 was no exception. Democrat Joe Biden took the White House, Republican Glenn Youngkin became governor of Virginia. In media circles this outcome was widely described as a ‘shock.’ Given the electoral pattern over the past several decades, it shouldn’t have been.

    The outcome of that race was chalked up to debates over ‘critical race theory’ in K-12 schools, among other things. While those narratives may not be wrong exactly, the historical pattern over nearly the last half-century suggests that even if these specific issues had not been salient, some other controversy would have risen to the fore, and the outcome for Democrats would have been roughly the same.

    Similar patterns hold at the national level. For instance, every time there is a change of party in the White House, the new incumbent party loses seats in the House of Representatives during the subsequent midterm elections. Here, we can go all the way back to the creation of the Democratic and Republican two-party system, and there are only two exceptions to the rule:

    (more…)
  • On Clarence Thomas, White Liberals and Racial Politics

    On Clarence Thomas, White Liberals and Racial Politics

    There were six Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade this week. The majority opinion was authored by Justice Samuel Alito. However, in the aftermath of the ruling, there has been an intense and particular focus on a different justice: Clarence Thomas. This may have been in part a product of Thomas’ post-ruling remarks urging the court to review and reconsider other Supreme Court precedents as well. But there also clearly seemed to be… something else…. at play.

    Soon after the court handed down its decision, many pro-choice advocates began hurling outrageous and overtly racist remarks Thomas’ direction with impunity – to the widespread acclaim of other liberal whites. A brief sampling:

    The remarks were so ubiquitous that “Uncle Clarence” began trending on Twitter, a reference to the eponymous character of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who has emerged as a symbol of Black men perceived to be too subservient to whites.  In practice, however, the term is primarily deployed today against black people who strike positions that elite liberals find distasteful. For instance,  “Uncle Tim” previously trended on Twitter after Black Republican Sen. Tim Scott’s rebuttal of President Joe Biden’s inaugural address to a joint session of Congress. They called him an ‘Uncle Tom’ for challenging a white guy. It’s wild.

    Then again, in other cases, minorities who violate the preferences and sensibilities of liberals are literally declared to be white instead. At least insofar as Thomas and Scott are branded as race-traitors, critics still recognize their race. Glass half full.

    Nonetheless, there is a deep irony in characterizing Thomas as an “Uncle Tom” (or worse) given that, prior to pursuing public service, he identified with Black nationalism. He is currently married to a white woman and has aligned with the GOP. However, as political theorist Corey Robin has shown in his book The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, his views on race and racial issues have remained highly consistent over the course of his life.

    Black Nationalists, White Liberals

    Many assume that Thomas’ rulings flow out of a commitment to conservative orthodoxy, fervent Christianity, or partisan politics. The truth is much more interesting than that, albeit perhaps more unsettling.

    (more…)
  • The Loneliest Americans

    The Loneliest Americans

    Jay Caspian Kang’s life story is both extraordinary and somewhat normal for families like his. That’s kind of the point.

    His parents’ family had roots in North Korea, although they fled to the South in the leadup and aftermath of what is known in America as the ‘Korean War.’ Upon getting married, and for very different reasons, his father and mother came to an agreement to move to the U.S., and later, to stay here indefinitely. They arrived with relatively humble means, yet his parents enjoyed significant social mobility, and their children flourished in the U.S. too. Although his path was far from straightforward, Kang ultimately attained a BA from an elite liberal arts college (Bowdoin) and a MFA from an Ivy League University (Columbia). He published a well-regarded novel. He worked as a reporter and/ or editor for ESPN, the New Yorker, Vice and elsewhere before joining the New York Times, where he is now a columnist (and you should definitely check out his columns, which are consistently great).

    Kang’s latest book, The Loneliest Americans, draws on his own family’s story, his reporting over the years, and subsequent reflections on both of these, and the relation between them, in order to explore what it means to be Asian in America today.  It deftly situates his own life and work within the broader journey of Asians in America, from the mid-1800s through the present. The book was inspired by the birth of his daughter, whose mother is non-Asian. Thinking about how his child would come to navigate her hyphenated identity led Kang to reflect on his own struggles with these questions, and on the struggles of his peers, and on those of the generations that came before.

    (more…)
  • Some Awkward Truths About the ‘Big Lie’

    Some Awkward Truths About the ‘Big Lie’

    According to a number of polls and surveys, significant majorities of GOP-aligned voters seem to believe the ‘Big Lie’ that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election and, consequently, the Biden Administration is illegitimate.  

    Taking these data at face value, a growing chorus insists that we’re living in a ‘post-truth’ era, where members of one political party, the Republican Party, can no longer tell facts from falsehood. As a result of the GOP becoming unmoored from reality, the narratives typically continue, America is drifting headlong into a fascist takeover or a civil war.

    Fortunately for all of us, these dire predictions are almost certainly overblown. We are not living in a ‘post-truth’ world. We are not on the cusp of a civil war. The perception that we are is almost purely an artifact of people taking poll and survey data at face value despite overwhelming evidence that we probably shouldn’t.

    For instance, in the wake of the 2016 election, Trump claimed to have had higher turnout at his inauguration than Barack Obama did. Subsequent polls and surveys presented people with pictures of Obama and Trump’s inauguration crowds and asked which was bigger. Republicans consistently identified the visibly smaller (Trump) crowd as being larger than the other. A narrative quickly emerged that Trump supporters literally couldn’t identify the correct answer; they were so brainwashed that they actually believed that the obviously smaller crowd was, in fact, larger.

    Of course, a far more obvious and empirically plausible explanation is that respondents knew perfectly well what the correct answer was. However, they also had a sense of how that answer would be used in the media (‘even Trump’s supporters don’t believe his nonsense!’), so they simply declined to give pollsters the response they seemed to be looking for.

    As a matter of fact, respondents regularly ‘troll’ researchers in polling and surveys – especially when they are asked whether or not they subscribe to absurd or fringe beliefs, such as Birtherism (a conspiracy that held that Barack Obama was born outside of the U.S. and was legally ineligible to serve as President of the United States). However, many academics and pundits do not seem to be in on the joke.

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2 3

  • The Media’s ‘Great Awokening’ Preceded Trump and has Continued Uninterrupted Since He Was Deposed

    The Media’s ‘Great Awokening’ Preceded Trump and has Continued Uninterrupted Since He Was Deposed

    Over the last five years, poll after poll has found that the GOP base has grown warmer towards Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants and Muslims. They’ve simultaneously become more skeptical of Christian nationalism. They’re now significantly more accepting of same sex marriage and non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ Americans. The rest of America has shifted even further in these directions. 

    Yet, based on prevailing coverage patterns in mainstream media outlets, one would be forgiven for assuming the trends have been heading the opposite way.     

    We recently published a scholarly paper in the journal Social Science Computer Review (summarized here) exploring how media coverage patterns around prejudice and discrimination evolved from 1970 through 2019. Analyzing 27 million articles from 47 of the most popular news media outlets in the United States, we identified a major spike in the use of terms related to most forms of prejudice and discrimination, occurring at roughly the same time.

    This phenomenon was not limited to left-leaning outlets. It was pervasive across the political spectrum – in right-aligned outlets just as much as on the left. Centrist outlets did not spend as many words on prejudice and discrimination relative to their partisan peers, but their rate of increase in prejudice-denoting words usage between 2010 and 2019 was similar to left and right-leaning news outlets:

    It may be tempting to interpret these spikes as a reaction to the heated candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump. Yet, in the paper we show that the trend of increasing usage of prejudice-denoting words in news media discourse started prior to the 2016 electoral cycle. In the year 2014 for instance, the usage of many of the words analyzed were at then-record highs. However, we also found some evidence that the trend might have accelerated after 2015. 

    The data analyzed in our paper spanned the beginning of 1970 through the end of 2019. From our current vantage point in mid-2021, we can now get a sense of how the 2020 election cycle and Trump’s subsequent exit from the White House may have affected media discussion of prejudice and discrimination. For instance, to the extent that Trump could have been a partial potential driver of the observed shifts in media discourse, one might assume that the trends reported in our paper would stall or reverse following the end of his presidency. In order to test this possibility, we updated our analysis — tracking the prevalence of prejudice denoting words in news media through 2020 and all the way to June 30, 2021. Here is what we found:

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2

  • Book Announcement: We Have Never Been Woke

    Book Announcement: We Have Never Been Woke

    I am thrilled to be able to officially announce that my book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite has been acquired by Princeton University Press and is slated for release on October 8, 2024.

    Huge shoutout to my agent, Andrew Stuart. Much love to PUP Executive Editor Meagan Levinson, who was able to put together an aggressive bid in a highly-competitive auction for the rights to the book. I am also deeply grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers at the publishing houses we sent the proposal to, whose strong votes of confidence in the project (and helpful feedback) helped us arrive at this point.

    And now, I have a request of you, dear reader. As Yashar Ali explains here, the best way to support an author is not just to buy the book after it comes out — but to pre-order. It makes a huge difference in terms of the impact of the book to have strong day-one sales.

    Readers can now order the book from any vendor and in any format they’d prefer:

    Paperback/ Hardcover

    E-Book

    Audiobook (narrated by yours truly)

    Princeton University Press was very aggressive in keeping the price point down – it’s much cheaper than a typical academic press (which often cost $50- $100 or more), and comparable in price to a new release from an imprint like Basic Books or Penguin.

    For those who want to read the book but are unwilling or unable to purchase it right now, information on how to get the book in your preferred format via local or college libraries is available here. You may also eventually be able to get a discounted used copy via AbeBooks here.

    (more…)
  • A Post-Religious America? I Wouldn’t Count on It.

    A Post-Religious America? I Wouldn’t Count on It.

    In a recent essay for Interfaith America, I explored how Americans seem to be losing faith in organized religion.

    Looking at the overall U.S. trends in recent decades, the picture can indeed seem dire. For instance, this chart shows the share of Americans who are affiliated with a church, synagogue or mosque – a figure that peaked at around 76 percent in 1945 and is currently at 47 percent, with a sharp accelerating trend that seems to appear after the year 2000.

    religious trends usa1

    This chart, meanwhile, explores whether respondents have attended a service at a church, synagogue or mosque ‘in the past seven days.’ The picture, while not identical, is quite similar. We see a peak of 49 percent of Americans attending religious services in the mid 1950s, and a steady decline that begins post-2000, going from 44 percent attendance to 30 percent attendance over the past twenty years.

    religious trends usa2

    Notice that the share who attend service in a given week is always significantly smaller than the percentage who identify with a religious institution (and the share who belong to a religious institution is itself consistently smaller than the share of Americans who personally identify with a religious tradition such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc.).

    In any case, scanning these charts, one might come to believe that the levels of religious attendance and church membership that are reflected in the 1940s data were perhaps the ‘normal’ state of America in ages past, and the current levels of church membership and attendance are at some kind of unprecedented low. In fact, neither of these assumptions would be correct.

    Consider church membership. When we zoom out a bit, we see that the percentage of Americans who are affiliated with a church, synagogue or mosque today is roughly equivalent to what it was in 1900. And prior to 1900, even fewer Americans belonged to a religious congregation.

    religious trends usa3
    (more…)
  • African Americans Seem to be Losing Faith in Organized Religion… and the Democratic Party

    African Americans Seem to be Losing Faith in Organized Religion… and the Democratic Party

    Throughout the Qur’an, God charges people of faith “not just to be nice and avoid doing wrong in their personal lives, but instead, to support the good and prohibit or resist that which is incompatible with al-sharia (the Path). This mandate, which is repeated over and over again throughout the Qur’an (e.g. 3:110 & 114, 7:157, 9:71 & 112, 31:17), has two distinctive characteristics:  First, it is active rather than passive: believers are called to take action, rather than merely permitting or refraining from certain behaviors. Second, it is social rather than personal: enjoining and prohibition are actions which occur in the context of communities, undertaken with others, and for the sake of others.”

    The Gospels are quite similar to the Qur’an in these respects. Most of the time Jesus discussed religion per se, it was to criticize performative religiosity, condemn those who profiteer on religion, or to denounce those who adopt a dogmatic and inhumane approach to religious faith and practice that misses the forest for the trees. Overall, his message was directed primarily towards how the faithful should act in the world – particularly, how they should engage with their fellow believers, and others who are vulnerable, suffering or oppressed. In short, the Gospel of Jesus is fundamentally social in its orientation.

    These are not features unique to Christianity or Islam. Scriptures and faith traditions near-unanimously include messages about how society should be ordered and towards what ends, about the duties and responsibilities people have towards one-another, to the divine, and with respect to various earthly authorities. Therefore, to define religion primarily in terms of ‘personal’ beliefs is to misunderstand the character of religion entirely (for instance, beliefs about appropriate gender roles, family structures, sexual relations, about whether trans women are women – these structure how people interact with one-another in profound ways. Such beliefs can radically change, and indeed have radically changed, the course of societies).   

    Within the United States, black people seem to be particularly attuned to the political nature of religious faith. They are significantly less likely than whites or Hispanics to think that churches and houses of worship should stay out of politics – and much more likely than other racial groups to assert that religious institutions should express views on social and political questions, or even political candidates.

    More than other religious congregants in the U.S., black people report that sermons within their places of worship touch on issues like voting, political participation and organizing, crime and criminal justice reform – and much more than most other Americans, black people view it as ‘essential’ or ‘important’ for places of worship to offer sermons on political topics. Not only do black places of worship touch on politics more, they help drive political and civic participation: African Americans who attend religious services are much more likely to volunteer in their communities, attend public hearings or neighborhood meetings, and to contact elected officials as compared to those who don’t attend religious services.  

    Black Americans describe combatting racism and sexism as essential to their faith, and recognize black churches as vehicles for promoting equality and helping the vulnerable and needy. African Americans report that their religious communities help them establish a sense of agency and control of their lives, even when they feel politically powerless.

    And yet, black Americans, especially young people, have become significantly less likely to identify with organized religion. They have also become significantly less likely to belong to a church, mosque or synagogue: in the period from 1998-2000, 78 percent of African Americans belonged to a religious congregation. In 2008 – 2010, it was 70 percent. In the period from 2016- 2018 that number had dropped to 65 percent. In the period from 2018 – 2020, it was 59 percent. Although black Americans remain significantly more likely than whites and (especially) Hispanics to be a member of a church, synagogue or mosque, the gap between blacks and whites has been shrinking, because the declines have been sharper for the former than the latter.  

    (more…)
  • College, Inequality and African Americans: Change and Continuity

    College, Inequality and African Americans: Change and Continuity

    At the turn of the 20th Century, WEB DuBois’ hoped a ‘Talented Tenth’ would eventually emerge from institutions of higher learning and leverage their social capital to lift up their peers. Putting social solidarity above their own interests, they would dedicate their efforts primarily to leading and empowering other people of color. 

    Today, DuBois’ vision seems audacious due to the demands it ostensibly places upon elites of color: why should we be obligated to dedicate our efforts and hard-earned resources to rectifying inequality for others rather than placing this obligation upon whites? In DuBois’ time, his vision was radical in part because postsecondary institutions were simply not open to black people.

    For most of U.S. history, African-Americans have been excluded from higher education (indeed, even primary education throughout most of the 19th century). To the extent that blacks were able to attend college at all, they were typically constrained to universities run by and for former slaves. Throughout DuBois’ life (he died in 1963), the vast majority of higher education institutions in America would remain racially segregated. 

    Brown v. Board of Education (1954) called for an end to segregation in public schools, which was interpreted to apply to public universities in principle. However, in practice, black students remained locked out for decades more.  

    The Civil Rights Act of 1964 added new anti-discrimination protections for students of color. The 1965 Higher Education Act expanded funding for (and formally recognized) HBCUs, while expanding federal aid for students of lower incomes through Pell Grants and federal student loans – rendering college more financially accessible for people of humble backgrounds. Meanwhile, Executive Order 11246 (1965) empowered the federal government to enforce affirmative action – that is, to ensure that institutions were actively trying to recruit and integrate qualified applicants of color.   

    Nonetheless, 19 states continued to operate dual systems of higher education into the 1970s:  

    college segregation 1970

    It was not until Adams v. Richardson (1973) that universities nationwide were finally compelled to admit qualified African American students – and it wasn’t until 1978 that the constitutionality of affirmative action and race-conscious admissions in higher ed was upheld by the Supreme Court (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke).  Consequently, African Americans did not begin enrolling in universities in the U.S. in large numbers until the mid-1970s. 

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2

  • On the January 6 Capitol Riots and ‘Teaching to the Moment’

    On the January 6 Capitol Riots and ‘Teaching to the Moment’

    In the aftermath of the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol, which left five people dead, and nearly derailed Congressional certification of the 2020 election results, many in higher ed have been wrestling with questions around what they can do to help mitigate the cultural and political crisis we find ourselves in, and how they can ‘teach to the moment.’

    Without a doubt, it can be valuable to present students with readings and resources to contextualize the present; to compare and contrast what is happening today with events in other geographical and/or historical contexts; to explore the huge difference between how police responded to the Capitol riots as compared to how they responded to the racial justice movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder; to think through what would have happened if the insurgents were leftists, Muslims, people of color, etc.

    However, a word of caution is also warranted here:

    It is critical to make sure students are given a rich and nuanced understanding, rather than being provided with simplistic narratives that feel good to us but don’t explain much, and that primarily serve to caricature or condemn the actors whose behavior we are ostensibly trying to understand or explain – while conveniently diverting attention away from realities we’d like to avoid.  

    (more…)
  • Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

    Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

    In Science Fictions, psychologist  Stuart Ritchie explores how the scientific enterprise systematically goes awry, and what can be done to right the ship. The book is focused on, essentially, the inverse of the problem that Heterodox Academy was created to solve. The key problem with science today, as Ritchie sees it, is not that there is too much orthodoxy, but instead, too much focus on critique and innovation at the expense of careful, iterative knowledge building.  

    Everyone wants to coin their own specialized terms and acronyms, to establish new paradigms, to pilot promising new interventions. Novelty, big effects and positive results are what determine whether research is perceived as valuable. 

    As a consequence, we end up with an overwhelming number of false positives (findings that do not replicate or generalize), misinformation cascades, and a failure to publish and learn from null results. We have people reinventing the same wheel, over and over, in slightly different form. Or coming up with the same null findings — which are never published (because positive results are what ‘matter’) —  resulting in subsequent scholars pursuing the same dead ends over and over again. 

    Staggering amounts of money, labor and other resources are wasted in the process. But really, that’s the least of it. People continue to suffer and die from problems that could be much more tractable in a world where scientists were not going in circles like this. Still more are harmed or killed by social, psychological and medical interventions based on these erroneous studies. These outcomes generate understandable skepticism towards science, technology, expertise and institutions of knowledge production. However, the good is often undermined alongside the bad, leading to still more adverse consequences as sound science is mistrusted, underutilized or defunded.  

    Of course, any critique of a status quo implies normative judgements of what should be the case. Ritchie recognizes this off the bat, and opens up the book by endorsing as his ideal the Mertonian norms of science: universalism, disinterestedness, communality and organized skepticism. The book is then organized as an exploration of how contemporary institutional structures and cultural trends often push scientists away from these ideals, as manifested in the central problems the book sets out to describe: fraud, bias, negligence and hype. 

    (more…)
  • Are Democrats Actually Capable of Learning from 2020?

    Are Democrats Actually Capable of Learning from 2020?

    The U.S. presidential races in 2000 and 2004 went for Republicans. In 2008 and 2012 went for Democrats. In 2016, for Republicans. In 2020, for Democrats again.

    Despite Democrats winning the presidential elections in 2008 and 2012, they saw historic losses in the midterms for 2010 and 2014.

    If we want to understand how we got these different outcomes from cycle to cycle, we would not look at people who voted the same way across time; we would look at those whose voting behavior changed from one year to another.

    This is a basic rule in statistics: variance must be explained in terms of other things that vary. One cannot explain variation by appeal to a constant.

    However, many, many people have seemed really keen to do just this with respect to the racial dimensions of the U.S. elections.

    (more…)
  • On the ‘Great Awokening’ and Racial Realities

    On the ‘Great Awokening’ and Racial Realities

    Is there anything of which one might say, ‘See this, it is new?’ Already it has existed for ages which were before us. There is no remembrance of earlier things; and also, of the later things which will occur, there will be for them no remembrance among those who come later still.” Ecclesiastes 1: 10-11 (NASB)

    As I have highlighted previously, within modern history, there were at least three periods of major attitudinal shifts and broad cultural unrest around identity issues.

    The first, of course, was in the mid 60’s through the mid 70’s. The second was in the late 80’s through the mid 90’s, leading to the last major blow up around ‘victimhood culture,’ ‘political correctness,’ ‘free speech on campus’ etc. (on my read, in response to changing demographics at American universities and other elite institutions, and the tensions that more-or-less inevitably accompany significant increases in diversity). And apparently, we are in the midst of another today.

    We see these three movements across a range of data. For instance, political scientist Eric Kaufmann has highlighted the same three temporal spikes with respect to book publications on identity issues. Communications scholar David Rozado has highlighted similar patterns in media discourse from 1970 through 2018.

    Each of these periods were preceded by significant shifts in public opinion — typically among pivotal segments of the white population. Explaining the relationship between these attitudinal shifts and the discourse about these attitudinal shifts, political scientist James Stimson emphasized that, generally, by the time we see widespread activism or public debates around changing norms or values, the shift is a fait accompli.

    The activism is a product of shifts that have already occurred. The attitudinal changes have generally slowed or ceased in the leadup to widespread demonstrations. Activists try to push public sentiment further, typically in vain, often provoking slight retraction if anything (although there is something like a ‘trap door’ quality to many of these shifts, Stimson argues. While attitudes often regress from their movement peaks, they rarely return to their antecedent baselines).

    Similarly, by the time that journalists and academics start talking about a shift in culture, the story is already mostly over. It takes a while before deep shifts in public attitudes show up consistently in polls or surveys. Even longer before journalists notice and highlight a shift. Longer still until books or journal articles dive deeper into these changes and speculate about their causes (eventually generating a second wave of public debate about the shifts in question, and what they ‘mean’).

    Much like how astronomers cannot see celestial events until they are long past, social observers generally do not recognize cultural shifts until they are already over. Their shock at the sudden realization that a dramatic change has occurred contributes to an illusion that the change is itself new or sudden – and is a product (rather than a driver) of the associated social movements and public debates – when in fact, this is rarely the case.

    The cultural changes being argued about today are no exception to the rule. The biggest shifts happened years before anyone noticed them.

    For instance, there was a major uptick in student protests on college campuses nationwide beginning in the fall of 2014 (with signs that something was afoot visible even in 2012). But it took until 2016 for most to recognize that a significant shift may be underway – with the debate over contemporary youth reaching its zenith around 2018.  That is, four years later.

    In fact, it turns out, there had been a major normative shift among white liberals overall. Indeed, not only were the shifts on identity issues happening among liberals, the changes in attitudes were causing more people to identify as liberal. From 2013 through 2019, there were significant increases in the number of Americans who identified as ‘liberal’ – although, critically, this was a trend driven overwhelmingly by whites:

    great awokening liberal

    In short, at least part of the reason why the normative changes seemed so pronounced at institutions of higher learning is because these are spaces that are dominated by the very populations who were undergoing the normative shift: people who are white, liberal, relatively well-off, highly-educated, etc. Focusing so intensely on young people from these demographics, many missed the larger trend.

    Indeed, as noted above, there was a spike in student protests that became visible as early as 2012. There was a radical leftward shift in the platform of the Democratic Party during the same year. The shift, in other words, was hardly contained to young people.

    (more…)
  • The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

    The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous


    American liberals often charge that Christians seem unusually preoccupied (even obsessed) with sex and sexuality, and have a bunch of strange hang-ups about marriage and family structure.

    Conservatives, meanwhile, argue that the “traditional family” lies at the core of Western Civilization, and that weakening foundational norms around sex, marriage, and child-rearing would likely have destabilizing and adverse effects on affected societies and cultures.

    The WEIRDest People in the World, a new book by Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich, suggests that both parties in this debate are onto something, even as it casts the entire conversation in a different light.

    Specifically, Part II of the book (Chapters 5–8) demonstrates that what is often referred to as the “traditional” family is, in fact, anything but. Looking worldwide, historically through the present, the family structure that people in the U.S. and Western Europe take for granted is actually highly peculiar — a product of a centuries-long campaign by the Western Church to dismantle kindreds, clans, tribes and other competing structures of allegiance and authority, and to reorient society around the Church instead.

    Central to this endeavor was what the author calls the Western Church’s Marriage and Family Program (MFP). Critically, many aspects of this program had a tenuous relationship with scripture or Christianity per se.

    Indeed, many of the prescriptions and proscriptions of the West Church’s MFP were extra-Biblical. The Tanakh, for instance, allows for plural marriage, cousin marriage, divorce, and concubinage. Although these practices were all rendered taboo in the Western Church’s MFP, the Eastern Orthodox Church (and many other interpretations of Christianity) did not have as stringent or unusual rules regarding sex, marriage, and family structure — instead continuing to tolerate many of these practices that were explicitly permitted and regulated in the Scriptures.

    These differences proved extraordinarily consequential.

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2

  • Whatever Happened to the Obama Coalition?

    Whatever Happened to the Obama Coalition?

    In 2008, Barack Obama was widely described as having built a game-changing political coalition: young people, racial and ethnic minorities, educated professionals, urban and suburban voters. He was held to have built an innovative campaign infrastructure, leveraging big data and social media in an unprecedented way, increasing turnout and Democratic vote share with constituencies that are typically underrepresented at the ballot box.   

    All of this was thought to not only benefit Obama, but the party writ large. Indeed, in the wake of the 2008 election, Democrats had won the presidency and consolidated their hold over both chambers of Congress. At the state level, they held governorships in 29 states and controlled both chambers in 27 state legislatures. For contrast, Republicans controlled just 14 state legislatures and 21 governorships.

    Many went so far as to believe that the Obama coalition heralded the arrival of a long-prophesied enduring Democratic majority in U.S. politics. They were wrong.

    (more…)
  • Religion and Politics in the Age of Trump

    Religion and Politics in the Age of Trump

    In a previous essay I demonstrated that Democrats have been consistently losing ground with both people of color and people of faith in virtually every midterm and general election cycle after 2008. Republicans, meanwhile, have seen consistent gains with many constituencies. What occurred in 2016, therefore, was not an aberration – but the culmination of long-running electoral trends.

    Following the emergence of Trump on the political scene, however, there was a bifurcation in the racial trends: white people grew increasingly alienated from the GOP, beginning in the 2016 Republican primaries and persisting through the 2020 election eve polling. Meanwhile, Republicans continued to make gains among people of color throughout the Trump Administration. Indeed, Edison exit polls, AP VoteCast, the American Election Eve Poll, and precinct voting data all seem to tell the same story: Trump did worse with whites than he did in 2016, and better with black, Hispanic and Asian voters.

    A good deal of attention has been paid to these racial trends – but how did Trump fare with religious voters?

    Analyses have often focused narrowly on groups where Democrats have seen gains, and states where that might have mattered. For instance, many have flagged apparent Democratic gains with white evangelicals in particular, and how it could have influenced the outcome in Georgia (again, Democrats significantly increased their vote share with whites overall). These insights are interesting and valuable. However, it is also productive to zoom out at the broader picture of the U.S. religious landscape and how it has evolved over the Trump years. That is, not just looking at white evangelicals, but Protestants overall. And not just looking at Protestants and Catholics, but also Mormons, Muslims, Jews and other believers.   

    To do this, I charted the margins between Democrats and Republicans among religious voters from 2016 through 2020 (more info on the data available here). What we see is that the GOP continued to gain — and Democrats continued to lose ground – with people of faith virtually across the board. There were, however, two notable exceptions: non-religious Americans and Catholics.

    religion trump

    How can these trends be explained?

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2

  • The Biden Administration Has a Weak Mandate

    The Biden Administration Has a Weak Mandate

    In his masterful book Tides of Consent,” political scientist James Stimson explains that voters usually put a party in power in order to realize moderate change in a particular direction. However, once in office, parties regularly overstep their mandate, going farther than the public wanted. Other times, parties fail to realize the reforms they were voted in to accomplish, or pursue a number of much less popular policies besides.

    As a result, the public tends to grow increasingly alienated from the regime it ushered into power, leading to shifts in favor of the opposition in subsequent elections. This is why enduring majorities don’t really happen in modern American politics: Voters are chronically faced with two choices, both of which resonate with them on some levels and alienate them on others. And once in power, for various reasons, parties often pursue the least popular parts of their agenda over those that have the broadest support.

    The more a party misperceives its mandate, the more pronounced backlash it is likely to receive. Unfortunately, the Democrats already seem poised to badly misread the 2020 election, and it will likely come back to haunt them – sooner rather than later.

    (more…)
  • Trump is Doing Surprisingly Well with Minority Voters. It Might Not Matter.

    Trump is Doing Surprisingly Well with Minority Voters. It Might Not Matter.

    In 2016, Donald Trump got a lower share of the white vote than the previous Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, and white turnout was stagnant as compared to 2012. Trump was able to win nonetheless because he got a higher share of Black and Hispanic voters than his predecessor — up roughly 3 percentage points with African Americans and 2 percentage points with Hispanics — helping tilt pivotal races in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania toward Trump.  

    That is, it was minorities, not whites, who proved most decisive for Trump’s victory.

    Going into Election Day in 2020, Trump seems poised to do even better with minority voters. His gains in the polling have been highly consistent and broad-based among Blacks and Hispanics — with male voters and female voters, the young and the old, educated and uneducated. Overall, Trump is polling about 10 percentage points higher with African Americans than he did in 2016, and 14 percentage points higher with Hispanics.

    Perceptions of Trump as racist and sexist seem to be a core driving force pushing whites toward the Democrats. Why would the opposite pattern be holding among minority voters — i.e. the very people the president is purportedly being racist against? 

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2

  • How Our Social Networks Shape Our Politics

    How Our Social Networks Shape Our Politics

    An ambitious new project, the American National Social Network Survey, looks at the social networks of thousands of Americans over time, exploring how who people associate with affects their worldview.

    The project is sponsored by AEI and the Knight Foundation, carried out in partnership with NORC (who administer the General Social Survey).

    The latest report from the project, “Socially Distant: How Our Divided Social Networks Explain Our Politics,” highlights how polarized Americans have become from those who hold different political views and provides insights on how forging relationships across partisan lines changes our orientation towards politics.

    A Polarized Public

    Americans overwhelmingly choose to surround themselves with others who share the same political views as themselves. For Democrats and Republicans alike, roughly three-quarters of their core networks are co-partisans, with less than a fifth of relationships crossing partisan lines. Independents are split pretty evenly in terms of associating with Democrats versus Republicans:

    Moreover, the more strongly one identifies with a particular party or ideology, the more likely it becomes that one’s core social network is comprised entirely of people who share one’s own political leanings:

    Consistent with a good deal of other research, the American National Social Network Survey report finds that negative affect across party lines seems to be very high, and that negative partisanship seems to play a growing role in political decision-making.

    However, inter-political friendships were shown to help mitigate these trends. Having a politically diverse core social network corresponded with a 12-15 percentage point reduction in highly unfavorable views about the other party.

    Moreover, people with politically diverse social networks also seem to possess more epistemic humility with respect to their own political views. Less than half (47%) of Americans with politically homogeneous networks say they sometimes doubt whether their political positions are correct. The number is 10 percentage points higher (57%) among those with politically-diverse social networks.

    People with more diverse social networks are also far more open to voting for the other party’s political candidates:

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2

  • Diversity is Important. Diversity-Related Training is Terrible.

    Diversity is Important. Diversity-Related Training is Terrible.

    In wake of George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed, many colleges and universities have been rolling out new training requirements – often oriented towards reducing biases and encouraging people from high-status groups to ‘check their privilege.’  The explicit goal of these training programs is generally to help create a more positive and welcoming institutional environment for people from historically marginalized and underrepresented groups.

    As I have explained elsewhere, there is a long literature on the benefits of diversity on knowledge production. However, many of the approaches to training people how to navigate and utilize diversity were implemented by corporations, non-profits and universities before their effectiveness had been tested rigorously (if at all).

    Although the precursor to contemporary diversity training, sensitivity training, actually dates back to the mid 1940s,  diversity training became especially important beginning in the mid-80s to early-90s. Why? Starting in the late 70s through early 80s (as a result of affirmative action and related legislation), universities began enrolling significantly higher numbers of women, minorities, and people from middle-class and lower-income backgrounds. Soon thereafter, employers found themselves with a much more heterogenous labor pool. They had to face, often for the first time, some of the challenges that come along with the benefits of diversity — as people with increasingly divergent backgrounds and perspectives were put side by side and tasked with common goals. Diversity training was intended to help mitigate those challenges.

    Due to their lack of validation, however, it was difficult to gauge how effective these programs were with respect to their stated goals. Over the decades that followed, it became increasingly obvious that many of the problems that diversity-related training was supposed to help mitigate seemed to be persisting or growing worse, raising the prospect that many widely-used interventions may be ineffective or even harmful. And so, beginning in the mid-90s, social scientists set out to systematically test the actual outcomes of these trainings.

    In the years that followed, a robust empirical literature was built up measuring the effectiveness of diversity-related training programs. The picture that has emerged is not very flattering.

    Resources on these points:

    The limited initial research suggesting diversity-related training programs as efficacious was based on things like surveys before and after the training, or testing knowledge or attitudes about various groups or policies. And to be clear, the training does help people answer survey questions in the way the training said they ‘should.’ And many people who undergo the training say they enjoyed it or found it helpful in post-training questionnaires. 

    However, when scientists set about to investigate whether the programs actually changed behaviors, i.e. do they reduce expressions of bias, do they reduce discrimination, do they foster greater collaboration across groups, do they help with retaining employees from historically marginalized or underrepresented groups, do they increase productivity or reduce conflicts in the workplace — for all of these behavioral metrics, the metrics that actually matter, not only is the training ineffective, it is often counterproductive.  

    (more…)

    Pages: 1 2 3

  • Trump Voters Have Been Misunderstood All Along (Including By Trump)

    Trump Voters Have Been Misunderstood All Along (Including By Trump)

    Unprecedented numbers of Americans — including a growing share of Republicans and independents — recognize racial injustice as pervasive, support police reform and back the protests against police brutality. Apparently oblivious to this emerging consensus, Trump is trying to run a Nixon-style “law-and-order” campaign for the 2020 election. And it is killing him politically.

    Trump has seen a dramatic and precipitous collapse among people who used to support him, according to an intensive study of swing voters by The New York Times. Critically, this shift does not seem to be driven by economic turbulence or perceived mismanagement of COVID-19; his approval ratings in these domains are equal to or higher than his general approval rating.

    Instead, for many voters who have stuck by Trump up to now, the president’s grotesque response to the killing of George Floyd, and especially the protests that followed, seems to have been the main driver. Most Americans, among them significant numbers of Republicans and independents, agree that Trump is exacerbating racial tensions — and it is driving many towards his political opponents.

    Critically, these defections are occurring primarily among white voters. According to the New York Times data, the president’s margins among minorities are holding fairly steady.

    That Trump is seeing major losses among whites specifically as a result of his racially inflammatory behavior seems fairly inexplicable given the common narrative that whites who voted for Trump were motivated largely by racism. But in fact, that common narrative is wrong. The underlying dynamics at work here have been present from the outset: Trump’s racialized rhetoric and policies have always been a drag on his candidacy, including among many whites who have traditionally skewed Republican.

    Here the reader may be perplexed. After all, there are thousands of studies ostensibly ‘proving’ Trump voters were driven by racism. Yet as I demonstrated in a recent paper for The American Sociologist, this literature is plagued by glaring errors, oversights and prejudicial study design.

    In a typical example, an author purported to demonstrate that Trump voters were especially motivated by racial animus. In fact, his data showed that Trump voters were less “racist” than Romney voters — and less ‘authoritarian’ too (see pp. 7-11).

    (more…)
  • My Problem with the ‘Harper’s Letter’

    My Problem with the ‘Harper’s Letter’

    On July 7th, Harper’s Magazine published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” colloquially known as the “Harper’s Letter.” The collective statement was signed by more than 150 public luminaries, from prominent academics and journalists to bestselling authors.

    The signatories denounced a culture of repression, fear, and reprisal which they claim has overtaken many institutions of cultural production — rendering the work of conveying important truths far more difficult and precarious than it needs to be. This, they argue, poses a grave threat to Western liberal democracy.

    As a corrective, the signatories call for all citizens to rally around free expression, and to engage in good-faith debate with those they disagree with. Many friends of mine and close colleagues decided to sign this letter. Then, as now, I disagreed with them about the value of such a stunt.

    I should start by saying, I’m hardly unsympathetic to what the signatories were trying to argue. While I tend to find “crisis” talk unhelpful, I do think there is a real problem, and I have been outspoken in pushing back against many of these excesses myself. Indeed, I’ve actually been canceled (i.e., let go from a position following an outrage mob) — albeit by the right.

    I also get why open letters are a thing. People perceive there to be a big problem. They want to do something big in response — something larger and more impactful than anything they’re capable of individually. However, open letters are generally a terrible approach to coordinated action. Let me briefly explain why, and then sketch out a more effective alternative.

    (more…)
  • What about the ‘good apples’?

    What about the ‘good apples’?

    Isaac “Ike” Lambert was a decorated detective who had served more than 24 years in the Chicago Police Department. In 2017, an off-duty officer shot a teenager named Ricardo Hayes, who had autism and whose caregivers had reported him missing hours before. Some officers then tried to charge Hayes with assault on the basis of a distorted police report. Lambert noticed that his colleague’s official narrative of the encounter was sharply at odds with eyewitness accounts and other evidence (including video of the incident). Lambert declined to press charges against Hayes, then repeatedly refused to sign off on the officers’ fraudulent report—despite higher-ups insisting he help bury the incident. For this, Lambert was promptly “dumped” to patrol duty.

    In a case like this, an understandable inclination would be to focus on the victim, an unarmed autistic kid who had committed no crime — or on punishing the police officer who assaulted him. (Officer Khalil Muhammad received a mere six-month suspension for shooting Hayes.) Lost in the discussion are principled officers like Lambert, who resisted attempted malfeasance by his colleagues and paid a price for it.

    He is far from alone. Police officers in the United States engage in all manner of bad behavior, such as excessive force, sexual misconduct, financial impropriety, and the manipulation of evidence. Holding them to account criminally, civilly, or professionally is extremely difficult, even in cases involving blatant malpractice and misconduct. Yet, even as bad cops evade punishment for wrongdoing, those who stand up to corruption, report negligence or abuse, or decline to comply with bad orders are frequently marginalized, demoted, or outright fired.

    (more…)