While I get that debating which of the two is worse can move the focus away from where it needs to be, everything is going to get debated because that's how it is these days.
My opinion (based in small part on living in DeSantis's state):
If they're clowns, Trump is Bozo and DeSantis is Pennywise.
Trump's a grifter with thuggish tendencies; DeSantis is just all thug all the time.
I'm not sure which one is ultimately more dangerous. And I'm not sure there's a Democrat out there who's less dangerous than either of them.
But, then, I haven't voted Republican or Democrat for president since 1988, and have no plans to. So I guess I don't have to choose from the box of assorted poisons the two parties have on offer.
I have literally written articles comparing Barack Obama to Emperor Palpatine for claiming unilateral executive power. You might want to take a few moments to look me up. But what you seem to be complaining about is that I don't accept a Tu Quoque argument that excuses one side's misdeeds because the other side did it.
What you have not done is place this argument in context. If there was no illiberalism of the left (which there was not, some decades ago), that would be fine. But in the present situation, where our politics is dominated by the illiberalism of the left (and I write as a 67-year-old who was on the left until very recently), the present article appears to have been written with blinders on.
Please read N.S. Lyons' substack for cogent summaries of the illiberalism of the left.
Zigmund and Mark, if I'm understanding your respective comments correctly, you've made the point that this article would have been more persuasive to people on the (broadly constituted) political right, if Robert had added two elements of context: 1) that the executive branch (at the state level, not just the Federal level) should have less power, and 2) there are many instances of illiberalism on the left, the greater context within which DeSantis may be pivoting to a somewhat analogous illiberalism on the right.
From my point of view, as someone with broadly center-left leanings but also some sympathy to traditional conservative and libertarian views, your suggestions make sense. One might want to know that an author understands such broader contexts, and is willing to share them with his readers, rather than just being politically partisan or an ideologue.
That's also an effective persuasion technique: saying things at least much of one's audience intrinsically agrees with, before going on to potentially challenge some of their viewpoints related to, or at least adjacent to, those.
From Robert's own point of view (not trying to put words in his mouth), he may feel that his long-time body of work makes his own views on all of that quite plain. After all, he appears to have written a great many, easily-findable, opinion and analysis pieces in the broad domain of classical liberalism, for multiple publications.
As well, perhaps he felt that the core audience at The UnPopulist might not need such context or assurances? (Again, not trying to put words in his mouth; perhaps that wasn't on his mind.)
Anyway, just trying to summarize what I've perceived to be a truly interesting disconnect. Thanks to you all for your comments here!
Yes, the argument completely ignores the ideological capture of the federal bureaucracy by the left and its imposition of its own unpopular ideology. For example, requiring men who falsely claim to be women to be allowed to play women's sports, a highly unpopular notion according to polling, is going to be forced down our throats by the Biden administration via Title IX. This is just as illiberal as anything Rufo and DeSantis want to do, but it gets a free pass from those who like it.
You really might want to look me up. I know there is a reflex that when someone criticizes your side, you assume they must support the other side, but that frequently is not true.
The following post was straightforward to find via a search on Google for "Barack Obama Emperor Palpatine Trascinski", given what Robert mentioned in a comment elsewhere:
I completely agree with that critique of Obama, and it applies to plenty of stuff Biden is doing too (eg student debt forgiveness). So why is DeSantis more of a threat to "democracy" than Obama and Biden? This is what Trascinski fails to explain. And if he thinks that, I believe he is wrong.
Illiberalism begets illiberalism. DeSantis is guilty as charged, but there's plenty of blame to go around.
“The rule of law implies impartiality in the use of power'?
So who picked this fight? Who decided that "colorblind" equals "racist"? What's "affirmative action"? Where's the impartiality in policies that explicitly direct resources to "the underserved," "the marginalized," "the most vulnerable" (as defined by those who wield the very power in question)?
As Joel Kotkin writes, "The fate of Asians and Jews in America is about the efficacy of equal and fair treatment under the law, and a democratic system based on merit rather than ethnicity. Neither Jews nor Asians—nor our increasingly diverse society—benefit from the replacement of the 'post-racial' ideal by what writer Wesley Yang describes as a racialist 'successor ideology' that instead celebrates victimization as the prime value."
Such striving also applies to Latinos, who are following in the footsteps of (equally "brown") immigrants from Italy. And don't even get me started about "Latinx"!
As it happens, I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing "Queer" about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud simply to be myself.
I’m old enough to remember “sodomy” laws — when government was taking an intrusive position on intimacy itself. OTOH, I never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World, promulgated through the schools.
So much for (self-)marginalization.
Meanwhile, as we mince our pronouns and pick each other to pieces over "privilege," the oligarchs keep laughing all the way to the bank.
Every person exists at a unique intersection of identities. Respect the individual, AS an individual -- and to heck with the would-be arbiters of the Oppression Olympics.
Critics of 2023 Hungary love to regurgitate each others' "news" --- with hardly any of them ever visiting the country or learning about it. All that know-nothingness makes for a minor irritation to those of us who know Hungary.
A weighty example of this empty litany: While in "woke" Europe Jewish schools and institutions have to be protected by armed guards and many Jews emigrate, Hungary's Jewish community is flourishing.
Just noting that a government's protection of Jews isn't, *in itself*, a fully reliable indicator of whether that government is, or is not, authoritarian.
"BAGHDAD - Under Saddam Hussein, they were a privileged group, protected and left to worship as they wished.
"Since U.S. troops toppled Saddam in April and Iraq cascaded into lawlessness, they have taken refuge behind high walls and closed their house of prayer. One Muslim cleric has made death threats against them and they say they fear for their future.
"They are the 34 Jews of Iraq.
""I speak the truth: Saddam Hussein was good to us," said Tawfik Safer, 80, outside the now locked doors of Baghdad's last synagogue."
In response to some of the comments below, the left generally respects rule of law. The right should too. I thought the point of "small government" was to lessen government interference. But, apparently, the new thing is to use government power to fight the culture war for keeps. Tracinski is exactly right: the red states are becoming "laboratories of autocracy". Besides Orban, I think the real impetus for this is Putin's style of governing Russia. Use a conservative Christian ideology and associated conspiracy theories to drive people's fears about a despised group - LGBTQ in order to justify using the levers of the state to come down on independent critics of the regime. The more that religion comes into the political picture, the more the tactics, and the metaphors become the all or nothing perspective of warfare. Iran should be a lesson to us all. Once a religious group takes power the best and the brightest leave as fast as they can and the country becomes a stagnant backwater. The leader can be like Trump - and be irreligious, as long as he pays lip service to his Christian Nationalist allies and gives them the bullhorn. The conservative Christian majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is another example. Overturning Roe vs Wade should be seen as a violation of the first amendment - the separation of church and state. Red state republicans are using religion both to motivate their political base and to suppress dissent. I think it was Pat Buchanan, a conspiracy theorist Presidential candidate that came up with the term "culture war". It's not hard to see what's coming: the red states become "laboratories of autocracy". The voices for "secession" become louder, and racially and religious motivated mass shootings become more and more frequent. The religious motif is an accelerant to violence and the end state is Fascism.
This makes me more concerned about Orban/DeSantis, not less. The most dangerous people are those who believe they have a good cause for "overriding liberal democratic norms." But you're not offering an answer to wokism, just a mirror image.
And your answer is to go all-in with the illiberalism of wokeism.
I am a tenured professor in a STEM field at a large state university in California. In order to get routine promotions, I have to write a report on what I have done to advance DEI.
Politically, I am an unreconstructed content-of-character-not-color-of-skin liberal, and up until last year, I have voted exclusively for Democrats.
In fact, in concert with my political beliefs, I do nothing for DEI. But of course some of my mentees are Government Approved Minorities, and so I write about them. This seems to be good enough, but, like Havel's greengrocer, I am never sure. Or whether I could write down what I truly believe, which is what Nobel Laureate Steve Weinberg did at U Texas. But he was a Nobel Laureate. I am not, and so my true speech is self-suppressed.
This is lliberal. If you want to be against illiberalism generally, and not illiberalism of the right only, you must call it out as well.
If you have indeed done so elsewhere, please provide a link.
"In order to get routine promotions, I have to write a report on what I have done to advance DEI."
For starters, am glad your existing mentorship work is satisfying this requirement. And if the criteria for what's desired, in faculty responses to such questions, is ambiguous or arbitrarily changeable, can understand that being stressful or oppressive.
In a better world, one farther removed from the ideological culture wars of recent years, an acceptable response to a routine job performance/advancement question about "advancing DEI" might mean something like the following. I don't know if your institution (or others) might see it that way, but I'm hoping they arrive at that point, if not:
Taking some *reasonable* time and effort to identify whether there may be prospective candidates for an academic panel discussion, co-authors for a journal article, research collaborators, students to mentor, prospective students to encourage to enroll, or the like beyond the "usual suspects."
Some of whom may happen to be women, or historically disadvantaged minorities, or be present in the US on work visas. Or for that matter, be white men who don't typically come to mind because they don't work at top-tier academic institutions, don't work at four-year institutions, or don't work in academia altogether. That might even include people irrespective of any group identities who work in industry (or in government or NGOs, or perhaps even are self-employed), including those who might not have an advanced degree, or even a bachelor's degree, but have demonstrated expertise, creativity, and accomplishment.
Am thinking here of Diana Marcum's call to "let the interlopers in," after she won a Pulitzer Price for the Los Angeles Times in 2015:
I may be naive, but that's what "diversity, equity, and inclusion" means to me: putting in some reasonable (but non-zero) amount of time and care to go beyond "the usual way we've done business" and seeing whether involving people we might not otherwise have considered, in various project and activity opportunities, might benefit the ultimate work product / deliverables.
And yes, to make this feasible for time-crunched tenure-track academics, it'd be highly beneficial to create and build an ecosystem of directories, tools, and services that make it far easier to find suitable people – in these non-traditional realms – with whom to collaborate, with whom to consult, and to which we might extend invitations. (AIUI, some of those already exist, even if nascent.)
Plus providing resources, such as central pooled or departmental-level staffers who can greatly assist faculty with this. So that advancing "DEI" isn't just yet another unfunded mandate, an additional demand piled on top of all of the others, and one viewed as primarily a responsibility for individual faculty rather than as an institutional commitment.
"Taking some *reasonable* time and effort to identify whether there may be prospective candidates for an academic panel discussion, co-authors for a journal article, research collaborators, students to mentor, prospective students to encourage to enroll, or the like beyond the "usual suspects.""
I do all that, and always have. But I do it because of class, not race/sex (which is still technically illegal to base decisions on).
FIRE also opposes Santis' proposed HB999, and I definitely see their point. But I'm willing to tolerate a small amount of illiberalism from the right to combat the massive amount from the left.
"But I do it because of class, not race/sex (which is still technically illegal to base decisions on)."
D'accord. Agreement with this approach (hopefully) also evident in my full comment, and in Diana Marcum's essay, linked from it.
As Brent Orrell at AEI wrote in January 2023, https://www.aei.org/articles/systemic-disadvantage/, tackling "systematic disadvantage" based on class may offer both a broader and, on balance, ultimately more productive and actionable focus than seeking to define and address "systematic racism":
"The search for contemporary racist actors when socioeconomic factors are often the real culprits causes us to fall back on ... measures that are ill-designed to target the issues we are trying to address."
P.S. I'm a supporter of FIRE, as well. Am glad we've both found their work valuable.
What an odd response. There is not one word about 'wokeism' (however you define the term...it seems to mean whatever 'those who use it 'want' it to mean) in my response. It's the go-to response when there is no moral or logical response.
The requirements of your job are not equivalent to censorship by the state. Your argument is logically inconsistent.
I have no issues with good-faith arguments about excesses in cultural positions in general, but I do have issues with cultural positions disguising illiberal state action.
"Within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state's governing instruments…themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology, a 'secularized religion'…it is therefore necessary to see, argued Havel, that power relations…are best described as a labyrinth of influence, repression, fear and self-censorship which swallows up everyone within it, at the very least by rendering them silent, stultified and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the powerful…" John Keane, Vaclav Havel's biographer, describing Havel's view of "post totalitarian" government.
An institution requiring compromise and flexibility is different from state-imposed censorship. To the extent that an institution becomes intolerant towards change, there is a choice to leave. No such choice exists where freedoms are curtailed by state action.
Right now the overwhelming majority of US universities have similar requiments, including those of Florida. (Look up faculty openings at, say, Florida State, and read the requirements.) So there is no "choice to leave", because there is nowhere to go. That is a totalitarian system. DeSantis is engaging in some pushback against it. Will he go too far? Maybe, but there is a LONG way to go before he gets to "too far".
I'm really hoping that some of the commentors are trolling. If not, as you note, it speaks to the type of moral rot that permits dehumanization of others. The idea that the 'other' is too dangerous because of 'fill in the blank justification' has enabled atrocities throughout history.
"People like this author are angry because they thought that progressive activists could keep on with their strategy of infiltrating institutions, and that they would get no resistance."
Have you even taken a moment to read any of Trascinski's other writings? (They're easily findable by Googling his name.)
You might start by noting that he wrote many of them for a publication you might have heard of, called "The Federalist." (And reflecting on what types of points of views they typically publish.)
Ugh. I firmly believe that we get the government that we deserve. We need to check ourselves.
While I get that debating which of the two is worse can move the focus away from where it needs to be, everything is going to get debated because that's how it is these days.
My opinion (based in small part on living in DeSantis's state):
If they're clowns, Trump is Bozo and DeSantis is Pennywise.
Trump's a grifter with thuggish tendencies; DeSantis is just all thug all the time.
I'm not sure which one is ultimately more dangerous. And I'm not sure there's a Democrat out there who's less dangerous than either of them.
But, then, I haven't voted Republican or Democrat for president since 1988, and have no plans to. So I guess I don't have to choose from the box of assorted poisons the two parties have on offer.
This argument would have more teeth if you argued that the executive branch should have less power in order to stop potential abuses.
You don't make that argument, which leads me to conclude that the whole point of this is just to tar and feather Republicans.
I have literally written articles comparing Barack Obama to Emperor Palpatine for claiming unilateral executive power. You might want to take a few moments to look me up. But what you seem to be complaining about is that I don't accept a Tu Quoque argument that excuses one side's misdeeds because the other side did it.
What you have not done is place this argument in context. If there was no illiberalism of the left (which there was not, some decades ago), that would be fine. But in the present situation, where our politics is dominated by the illiberalism of the left (and I write as a 67-year-old who was on the left until very recently), the present article appears to have been written with blinders on.
Please read N.S. Lyons' substack for cogent summaries of the illiberalism of the left.
Zigmund and Mark, if I'm understanding your respective comments correctly, you've made the point that this article would have been more persuasive to people on the (broadly constituted) political right, if Robert had added two elements of context: 1) that the executive branch (at the state level, not just the Federal level) should have less power, and 2) there are many instances of illiberalism on the left, the greater context within which DeSantis may be pivoting to a somewhat analogous illiberalism on the right.
From my point of view, as someone with broadly center-left leanings but also some sympathy to traditional conservative and libertarian views, your suggestions make sense. One might want to know that an author understands such broader contexts, and is willing to share them with his readers, rather than just being politically partisan or an ideologue.
That's also an effective persuasion technique: saying things at least much of one's audience intrinsically agrees with, before going on to potentially challenge some of their viewpoints related to, or at least adjacent to, those.
From Robert's own point of view (not trying to put words in his mouth), he may feel that his long-time body of work makes his own views on all of that quite plain. After all, he appears to have written a great many, easily-findable, opinion and analysis pieces in the broad domain of classical liberalism, for multiple publications.
As well, perhaps he felt that the core audience at The UnPopulist might not need such context or assurances? (Again, not trying to put words in his mouth; perhaps that wasn't on his mind.)
Anyway, just trying to summarize what I've perceived to be a truly interesting disconnect. Thanks to you all for your comments here!
Yes, the argument completely ignores the ideological capture of the federal bureaucracy by the left and its imposition of its own unpopular ideology. For example, requiring men who falsely claim to be women to be allowed to play women's sports, a highly unpopular notion according to polling, is going to be forced down our throats by the Biden administration via Title IX. This is just as illiberal as anything Rufo and DeSantis want to do, but it gets a free pass from those who like it.
You really might want to look me up. I know there is a reflex that when someone criticizes your side, you assume they must support the other side, but that frequently is not true.
I have no idea who you are. I just read what you wrote. If you want to point me to somethiing else that you wrote, please do.
The following post was straightforward to find via a search on Google for "Barack Obama Emperor Palpatine Trascinski", given what Robert mentioned in a comment elsewhere:
https://thefederalist.com/2014/11/21/president-palpatine-obama-dissolves-the-old-republic/
And if you click his author name at the top of that post, there's a page linking to many other posts of his on The Federalist's website:
https://thefederalist.com/author/rtracinski/
I completely agree with that critique of Obama, and it applies to plenty of stuff Biden is doing too (eg student debt forgiveness). So why is DeSantis more of a threat to "democracy" than Obama and Biden? This is what Trascinski fails to explain. And if he thinks that, I believe he is wrong.
Illiberalism begets illiberalism. DeSantis is guilty as charged, but there's plenty of blame to go around.
“The rule of law implies impartiality in the use of power'?
So who picked this fight? Who decided that "colorblind" equals "racist"? What's "affirmative action"? Where's the impartiality in policies that explicitly direct resources to "the underserved," "the marginalized," "the most vulnerable" (as defined by those who wield the very power in question)?
As Joel Kotkin writes, "The fate of Asians and Jews in America is about the efficacy of equal and fair treatment under the law, and a democratic system based on merit rather than ethnicity. Neither Jews nor Asians—nor our increasingly diverse society—benefit from the replacement of the 'post-racial' ideal by what writer Wesley Yang describes as a racialist 'successor ideology' that instead celebrates victimization as the prime value."
Such striving also applies to Latinos, who are following in the footsteps of (equally "brown") immigrants from Italy. And don't even get me started about "Latinx"!
As it happens, I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing "Queer" about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud simply to be myself.
I’m old enough to remember “sodomy” laws — when government was taking an intrusive position on intimacy itself. OTOH, I never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World, promulgated through the schools.
So much for (self-)marginalization.
Meanwhile, as we mince our pronouns and pick each other to pieces over "privilege," the oligarchs keep laughing all the way to the bank.
Every person exists at a unique intersection of identities. Respect the individual, AS an individual -- and to heck with the would-be arbiters of the Oppression Olympics.
Got a problem with that?
Critics of 2023 Hungary love to regurgitate each others' "news" --- with hardly any of them ever visiting the country or learning about it. All that know-nothingness makes for a minor irritation to those of us who know Hungary.
A weighty example of this empty litany: While in "woke" Europe Jewish schools and institutions have to be protected by armed guards and many Jews emigrate, Hungary's Jewish community is flourishing.
Just noting that a government's protection of Jews isn't, *in itself*, a fully reliable indicator of whether that government is, or is not, authoritarian.
From Reuters via Haaretz in June 2003:
https://www.haaretz.com/2003-06-30/ty-article/safe-under-saddam-iraqi-jews-fear-for-future/0000017f-e9bb-d62c-a1ff-fdfb65070000
"BAGHDAD - Under Saddam Hussein, they were a privileged group, protected and left to worship as they wished.
"Since U.S. troops toppled Saddam in April and Iraq cascaded into lawlessness, they have taken refuge behind high walls and closed their house of prayer. One Muslim cleric has made death threats against them and they say they fear for their future.
"They are the 34 Jews of Iraq.
""I speak the truth: Saddam Hussein was good to us," said Tawfik Safer, 80, outside the now locked doors of Baghdad's last synagogue."
No example, "in itself," is entirely indicative of anything. Sophistry is not my bag.
Like any other human, Orban can be criticized, as he is in Hungarian media loudly and daily.
I am looking forward to posts that speak to the besmirching of today's Hungary.
" . . . They threaten not just to impose a few bad policies, but to undermine the institutions of a free society."
State-owned universities are not the institutions of a free society.
In response to some of the comments below, the left generally respects rule of law. The right should too. I thought the point of "small government" was to lessen government interference. But, apparently, the new thing is to use government power to fight the culture war for keeps. Tracinski is exactly right: the red states are becoming "laboratories of autocracy". Besides Orban, I think the real impetus for this is Putin's style of governing Russia. Use a conservative Christian ideology and associated conspiracy theories to drive people's fears about a despised group - LGBTQ in order to justify using the levers of the state to come down on independent critics of the regime. The more that religion comes into the political picture, the more the tactics, and the metaphors become the all or nothing perspective of warfare. Iran should be a lesson to us all. Once a religious group takes power the best and the brightest leave as fast as they can and the country becomes a stagnant backwater. The leader can be like Trump - and be irreligious, as long as he pays lip service to his Christian Nationalist allies and gives them the bullhorn. The conservative Christian majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is another example. Overturning Roe vs Wade should be seen as a violation of the first amendment - the separation of church and state. Red state republicans are using religion both to motivate their political base and to suppress dissent. I think it was Pat Buchanan, a conspiracy theorist Presidential candidate that came up with the term "culture war". It's not hard to see what's coming: the red states become "laboratories of autocracy". The voices for "secession" become louder, and racially and religious motivated mass shootings become more and more frequent. The religious motif is an accelerant to violence and the end state is Fascism.
This makes me more concerned about Orban/DeSantis, not less. The most dangerous people are those who believe they have a good cause for "overriding liberal democratic norms." But you're not offering an answer to wokism, just a mirror image.
And your answer is to go all-in with the illiberalism of wokeism.
I am a tenured professor in a STEM field at a large state university in California. In order to get routine promotions, I have to write a report on what I have done to advance DEI.
Politically, I am an unreconstructed content-of-character-not-color-of-skin liberal, and up until last year, I have voted exclusively for Democrats.
In fact, in concert with my political beliefs, I do nothing for DEI. But of course some of my mentees are Government Approved Minorities, and so I write about them. This seems to be good enough, but, like Havel's greengrocer, I am never sure. Or whether I could write down what I truly believe, which is what Nobel Laureate Steve Weinberg did at U Texas. But he was a Nobel Laureate. I am not, and so my true speech is self-suppressed.
This is lliberal. If you want to be against illiberalism generally, and not illiberalism of the right only, you must call it out as well.
If you have indeed done so elsewhere, please provide a link.
"In order to get routine promotions, I have to write a report on what I have done to advance DEI."
For starters, am glad your existing mentorship work is satisfying this requirement. And if the criteria for what's desired, in faculty responses to such questions, is ambiguous or arbitrarily changeable, can understand that being stressful or oppressive.
In a better world, one farther removed from the ideological culture wars of recent years, an acceptable response to a routine job performance/advancement question about "advancing DEI" might mean something like the following. I don't know if your institution (or others) might see it that way, but I'm hoping they arrive at that point, if not:
Taking some *reasonable* time and effort to identify whether there may be prospective candidates for an academic panel discussion, co-authors for a journal article, research collaborators, students to mentor, prospective students to encourage to enroll, or the like beyond the "usual suspects."
Some of whom may happen to be women, or historically disadvantaged minorities, or be present in the US on work visas. Or for that matter, be white men who don't typically come to mind because they don't work at top-tier academic institutions, don't work at four-year institutions, or don't work in academia altogether. That might even include people irrespective of any group identities who work in industry (or in government or NGOs, or perhaps even are self-employed), including those who might not have an advanced degree, or even a bachelor's degree, but have demonstrated expertise, creativity, and accomplishment.
Am thinking here of Diana Marcum's call to "let the interlopers in," after she won a Pulitzer Price for the Los Angeles Times in 2015:
https://niemanreports.org/articles/let-the-interlopers-in/
I may be naive, but that's what "diversity, equity, and inclusion" means to me: putting in some reasonable (but non-zero) amount of time and care to go beyond "the usual way we've done business" and seeing whether involving people we might not otherwise have considered, in various project and activity opportunities, might benefit the ultimate work product / deliverables.
And yes, to make this feasible for time-crunched tenure-track academics, it'd be highly beneficial to create and build an ecosystem of directories, tools, and services that make it far easier to find suitable people – in these non-traditional realms – with whom to collaborate, with whom to consult, and to which we might extend invitations. (AIUI, some of those already exist, even if nascent.)
Plus providing resources, such as central pooled or departmental-level staffers who can greatly assist faculty with this. So that advancing "DEI" isn't just yet another unfunded mandate, an additional demand piled on top of all of the others, and one viewed as primarily a responsibility for individual faculty rather than as an institutional commitment.
"Taking some *reasonable* time and effort to identify whether there may be prospective candidates for an academic panel discussion, co-authors for a journal article, research collaborators, students to mentor, prospective students to encourage to enroll, or the like beyond the "usual suspects.""
I do all that, and always have. But I do it because of class, not race/sex (which is still technically illegal to base decisions on).
I subscribe to the principles of FIRE:
https://www.thefire.org
FIRE also opposes Santis' proposed HB999, and I definitely see their point. But I'm willing to tolerate a small amount of illiberalism from the right to combat the massive amount from the left.
"But I do it because of class, not race/sex (which is still technically illegal to base decisions on)."
D'accord. Agreement with this approach (hopefully) also evident in my full comment, and in Diana Marcum's essay, linked from it.
As Brent Orrell at AEI wrote in January 2023, https://www.aei.org/articles/systemic-disadvantage/, tackling "systematic disadvantage" based on class may offer both a broader and, on balance, ultimately more productive and actionable focus than seeking to define and address "systematic racism":
"The search for contemporary racist actors when socioeconomic factors are often the real culprits causes us to fall back on ... measures that are ill-designed to target the issues we are trying to address."
P.S. I'm a supporter of FIRE, as well. Am glad we've both found their work valuable.
https://twitter.com/aronro/status/1501082083241852929
What an odd response. There is not one word about 'wokeism' (however you define the term...it seems to mean whatever 'those who use it 'want' it to mean) in my response. It's the go-to response when there is no moral or logical response.
The requirements of your job are not equivalent to censorship by the state. Your argument is logically inconsistent.
I have no issues with good-faith arguments about excesses in cultural positions in general, but I do have issues with cultural positions disguising illiberal state action.
"Within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state's governing instruments…themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology, a 'secularized religion'…it is therefore necessary to see, argued Havel, that power relations…are best described as a labyrinth of influence, repression, fear and self-censorship which swallows up everyone within it, at the very least by rendering them silent, stultified and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the powerful…" John Keane, Vaclav Havel's biographer, describing Havel's view of "post totalitarian" government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless
An institution requiring compromise and flexibility is different from state-imposed censorship. To the extent that an institution becomes intolerant towards change, there is a choice to leave. No such choice exists where freedoms are curtailed by state action.
Right now the overwhelming majority of US universities have similar requiments, including those of Florida. (Look up faculty openings at, say, Florida State, and read the requirements.) So there is no "choice to leave", because there is nowhere to go. That is a totalitarian system. DeSantis is engaging in some pushback against it. Will he go too far? Maybe, but there is a LONG way to go before he gets to "too far".
I'm really hoping that some of the commentors are trolling. If not, as you note, it speaks to the type of moral rot that permits dehumanization of others. The idea that the 'other' is too dangerous because of 'fill in the blank justification' has enabled atrocities throughout history.
The problem is not ideology.
It's certainty.
I agree...certainty leaves little room for compromise and tolerance.
"People like this author are angry because they thought that progressive activists could keep on with their strategy of infiltrating institutions, and that they would get no resistance."
Have you even taken a moment to read any of Trascinski's other writings? (They're easily findable by Googling his name.)
You might start by noting that he wrote many of them for a publication you might have heard of, called "The Federalist." (And reflecting on what types of points of views they typically publish.)