Not quite. Native Marylander here.
(Wisconsinite here.) I must say the argument that government should not spend money that would help culture lest (God forbid!) some of those receiving money criticize the West (as, as mentioned, what is the Enlightenment without people being critical of the Enlightenment) boils down to simple empty right-wing so-called big-L ‘Libertarianism’.
By that count we should not spend any money that does not either help funnel money to the ‘deserving’ (i.e. the rich) or help defend the interests of the ‘deserving’ (i.e. the same rich). Why is it the same people who complain about a smidgen of money going to fund things like CRT research have no problem with bucketloads of money going to fund the military-industrial complex?
If we want to actually save money and help people, defund the military-industrial complex and put some of the money into providing universal health care. But of course, those who would be helped by universal health care are ‘undeserving’ while those we feed bucketloads of money on arms are ‘deserving’!
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CRT is an idea. One among many. So is Christianity. Or feudalism. Do we think the government should decide which idea needs more research, pick a winner, and then take a little money from everyone and fund one of these but not the others? How about none of them instead?
The military is at least certainly a job for the federal government. No one else can fund that. We can fight the military industrial complex, but is giving the government more money to pick research projects a good start to fight government military policy and spending you disagree with?
So what if (to fight CRT fire with fire) Rand Paul decided to move college research funding into right-wing, Libertarianism, and he convinced Congress to do it? How would you like to contribute your tax money to that?
That’s what you are asking libertarians to do with CRT - pay to grow CRT.
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I appreciated that post. Well said. Just one note about CRT: the property damage related the George Floyd riots was around $2 billion. Much of that damage was incurred by retailers like Walmart. It was on a larger scale than the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
In both cases, frustration associated race relations was the engine of violence. I do think that if they had their druthers, the Walton family would be happy to fund investigations into systemic racism. If we looked around for some intellectuals who have ideas on how to do that, it’s going to be American critical theory.
I’m just saying: CRT is a little more than an idea. There are problems that CRT could help us address.
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Has anyone argued in favour of this here? Or are you saying that’s the frame anti critical theory folks are using in the US?
Yes but is it possible that teaching CRT is one of the catalysts, or perpetuators of race tension and reactionary violence?
CRT is an idea, but you are right, it is also an ideology that directs toward specific action, and activism, and policy change. The idea is good to discuss in college, like any other idea. And critique, and revise, and hypothesize about, and even experiment. But we don’t teach about the flying buttress in engineering to make sure more flying buttresses are built into the world - actual buildings are for someone else to decide and implement beyond the classroom. That should be for each newly formed adult member of society to pay for or not. Similarly, CRT based activism is not the job of college to promote (but that ship has sailed), and so it shouldn’t be the job of the federal government to fund either.
I agree that race relations continue to need work, but to a lot of black, brown, women, and other minority folks, think and say things have opened up for them greatly over the past 25 and more years. Not everyone feels victimized by racists anymore. Many people have truly moved on, and the only way racism is shoved in their face is when some new political correctness is imposed upon society. (The badness of “cultural appropriation” is a new idea and makes new rules - before people thought they were honoring the other culture by emulating it’s style - but now, they are called racist and insulting, when many people in that culture only felt honored and emulated.) Maybe more CRT is looking at a different world that we’ve greatly overcome. Maybe some people are poor and uneducated for other reasons besides power structures based on race (or because of white people).
Maybe we are more divided than ever (which we are) because of rhetoric - because division gets votes and sells ad space. In the world, physically, at least in the US, there is no state sponsored segregation, or separate but equal, or race-based slavery - Jim Crowe and worse are gone (certainly no longer state sponsored, and not widespread privately by any means). These were real, physical problems 50 or 60 years ago, and more real the further you go back. Today its in country clubs and less expressly in neighborhoods (all races in certain neighborhoods gatekeep). But this isn’t the racism of 50 years ago, or 100 years ago - not even close. But now that it is actually, measurably better, people still go out of their way to call people with my opinion a racist, evil low-life. They go so far out of the way, many think racism today is worse than ever, when it is truly the opposite. What is worse today, is the moral judgment people feel is their right to scream at other, labeling them a racist and shutting down all debate or any chance at mercy or forgiveness and reconciliation. Just judgment.
Not everyone agrees CRT is a clear, or even net, good. And those that disagree are not just some white people. That is worth discussion and debate. Certainly CRT has some wisdom in it. BUT, it’s not the job of the government to figure out a better way for me or you or anyone to think or act (government steps in when I act or attempt to act against the law, not when I’m thinking or debating). “That CRT could help” is not a given, and should be up for debate, like anything else. It’s not time for funding CRT initiatives (although that ship has sailed too.)
Because everyone has been trained to think the slightest hint of racism is evilness incarnate, people don’t really want to talk about racism at all. I’m sticking my neck way out here. You are not - seeking funding for CRT is an approved social discussion across the board. People who don’t agree with CRT are too quickly deemed racist sympathizers. I’m sure I am breaking some rules or revealing to many readers here a subconscious racial problem right right now. So free-thinking, self-determinate people (of all races, but especially white) are not encouraged to speak their minds in our society. Even with Trump. Republicans and libertarians don’t hold back their views on race to hide the fact that they are racist (because they are no more racist than any other group); we hold back to avoid being wrongly accused by the left.
I don’t think the federal government can help with this situation, certainly not by funding the forgone conclusions of CRT. Federal, state and local leaders and academics could and should speak to race, and could help, because they have the microphone and have our respect, but instead, they pick a side and call the other evil-doers. The government shouldn’t also fund one side over the other, and should stay out of funding any of it.
People of all races are moving away from prioritizing race because the race discussion has become too dogmatic, inflexible, CRT dominated, and unproductive of unifying change.
I’m not sure 25 years of CRT (which existed 35 years ago but no one knew about it) hasn’t made the lines between the races even starker and fortified a fairly shallow and empty construction called “white man” or “brown man”.
Do we think the two sides of the debate are those that accept and respect all races on the one side, and those who are racist on the other? I do think that. The problem is, I also think CRT is racist, promotes racism, and is more harmful than good. Just like the left thinks people like me are secretly hateful of other people because of race (which I’m not), the right thinks some people on the left act and sound like they are racist and prejudiced about a lot of things.
So I went way into the weeds. Would you want feds to fund me developing my ideas? I wouldn’t ask for it, and disagree the government should be in the business at all.
We’ve strayed for over 100 years from the genius that was the US constitution. Limited government to protect individual freedom. And a democratic-republic platform to implement that - genius - built a super power that attracts mass migration and how many copycat constitutions to this day. (It was written by the French and the English, and ancient Greece and Rome - but by Monroe, Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson and you and me.) The government doesn’t grant rights; rights are inherent and self-evident (at least that is what we agreed in 1776), so the government can only protect those rights, not grant them as some sort of gift or title (like a king does). Similarly, the government shouldn’t be given tax dollars from everyone to grant funding to some - it’s just not the role any of us should want for the government. The welfare state and government as a source of funding is a necessary evil, not a good. It’s too powerful to be a good. Let’s shave it down to the bare necessities, and small. Much smaller. Before the hopes for migrants and the poor and minorities are gone from this place.
So tell me what you really think…
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I think CRT research funding should be continued. There’s no reason government funding should be going to a Critical Theory program, though. It can be folded into education about the history of philosophy.
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Honestly, this sounds like you’re trying to split hairs to get the outcome you actually want. You’re saying keep CRT but then turning around and gutting the bigger field it comes from, like saying you want apples while cutting down the whole orchard. And ‘just teach it as history’ is basically code for putting it behind glass so it can’t actually be used for anything today. It doesn’t read like a consistent position, it reads like you’re trying to sideline the parts you don’t like while pretending you’re being reasonable about it.
Let me note something curious. The OP was about critical theory, and @Frank gave us a specific, helpful description of what he meant by that (from UC? not clear where it came from). It was that description I addressed in my initial reply. Nowhere does the word “race” appear. At some point in the thread, people began talking about critical race theory, exclusively. What do you make of that?
The discussion was hijacked by a culture warrior who insisted on talking about CRT. But to be honest, the whole topic and its framing invited that kind of participation, and was probably designed that way.
I probably should have just PMd the person who ended up helping me explore the issue. I just didn’t know who that was going to be. Note to self for next time.
This is a reddit discussion about the rift between the left and the right, if you’re interested.
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It depends. Most public discussion of these things is steeped in morons talking about it - BLM discussions of CRT were abhorrently bad, historically, semantically, epistemically - and it’s likely no right-winger wants to be associated with such nonsense. However, I’m someone who’s a bit of a mole. I am definitely a lefty, and have always been - but i’m extremely (and I do mean extremely) disillusioned with people on the left and their inability to do anything reasonable, helpful or honest in public life (this is hyperbole, for sure). This means I’ve spent pleeeeeeenty of time talking to right-wingers of all stripes. Most would accept CT as-described in terms of good, concept-based analysis of current social hierarchies and systems, with a view to improving them. They, in fact, think this is what they are already doing. And in some sense, that’s quite true.
To get this out of a right-winger, you need to discuss goals first, instead of policies first. What do you want? Where are you wanting to go? Then you get your priorities out in the open, and describe a possible academic pathway to assessing the correct problems and possible solutions - and ouila, you’re both hovering over CT.
Personally, I don’t think much of CT because I don’t think it can be wielded by humans without some pretty intense and disruptive emotionality (i.e confirmation bias and self-interest (although, tihs is guised as a group-interest usually)). Right wingers probably take this to mean it is worthless, which I disagree with. The problem with CT is that it’s what’s known as a “destruction” theoretical framework. It’s used in law, and goes absolutely nowhere because nothing is suggested in a positive sense - just complaints and ideas about what not to do - which I think comes with the territory - these types of thinkers are quite good at seeing problems, but generally cannot think about solving them so just conclude we need to tear it all down.
However, they are right to be aggressively dismissive of CRT. It is an absolute monstrosity.
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If it were intentional, you’d think they’d be clever enough to make it less obvious, and when called out, honest enough to admit guilt.
I’m an agnostic and a quietist about most things but my intuitions are leftist. I find politics extremely dull and most of the folk who are really engaged in political discourse seem to be monomaniacs, whether left or right. I wonder about the West’s orgiastic self-hatred and how this dynamic is reinforcing right-wing nationalism. Personally all I do is vote and try to ignore as much as I can.
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It seems to be hte reason there is still an unreasonable right, the unreasonable Left. The West-bashing is just pure stupidity, let alone reasonable in terms of accuracy. I think its correct that a faction within the West is pushing back against an attempt to be continually, without any guide to an end-goal, dismantled. BUT, humans gonna human, and so many see anything which smacks of crticism of the West as somehow “wokeism”. Which it’s obviously not, but when the Left thinks that any positivity about hte West, or criticism of that deconstructive agenda is somehow bigotry, we get this cesspool of the dumbest 20% of both camps being the voices for them. You’ve likely made the right move - but I enjoy robust discussion which can border on the dangerous, in my real life.
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Strangely, they’re allied with a section of the Right that abandoned the Left because the Left is perceived to be impotent (the Dark Enlightenment crowd). So we get representatives of the Right (Vance) who are fascinated by Bernie Sanders. Every now and then the earth’s magnetic poles switch. The actual north pole flips around to the Antarctic. I think this might be happening in western politics. 
As I’ve noted, politics isn’t really my thing. But isn’t the word Right lacking meaning? I struggle to tell what is reactionary from what is conservative or what is libertarian or neoliberal or even nascent fascism. Much of the right are not interested in conserving culture, apart from token gender roles. Very few Roger Scruton-style conservatives in the right.
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Yes. A political party is basically a crowd of people who have put aside their petty differences to stand together on some issue that’s important to all of them. That issue, whatever it is, is the glue that holds the party together, and the party has power to the extent that it’s unified.
I really couldn’t tell you what the important issues of the day are. I might be a little out of touch, though.
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To some degree, yeah I think so. But it does seem to only apply to the fringes - which kind of makes sense - if you skirt the edges, you eventually re-treat old ground. It seems to me that extreme left and extreme right (and, when I say extreme, I don’t mean like psychotic groups like the KKK or Weather Underground but the most extreme among the general voting population who would not be sanctioned in the way those groups would be) are essentially saying the same things these days but railing against different targets. Which makes sense: moral certainty is destructive of cohesion and it removes (almost) any ability to come to terms.
So people start dying. Unfortunately, that, currently has only uni-directional force but I don’t make as much of that as many do. It comes with the territory of a Red president (we can talk about the accuracy of claims about it elsewhere - here, it’s just his party that seems to stoke the flames).
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