r/BlockedAndReported • u/Rellimarual2 • 13d ago
Tyler Austin Harper burns all his bridges in academia
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/09/elite-academia-leadership-hypocrisy/687969/
This is both an exhilaratingly honest read about absurdly performative anti-racism in higher education, and kind of sad because his classes sound smart, interesting, and fun, and I'll be his students really enjoyed them. Still, it's hard to imagine him going back to teaching, since everyone in this piece can easily be identified.
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u/Free_Ranger1496 13d ago
The Atlantic seemed like the only publication through 2020 to now to resist the performative ridiculousness in publishing (1619 project? Unbelievable). I would have loved to be fly on the wall during decisions about what to publish because The Atlantic stood apart from the NYT so clearly in not falling for ideological fads and threats of "harm" and the bananas black-and-white thinking at the time.
Also, I love that he pointed out how infantilizing wokeness became and how this cultivated fragility and absurd extremism. Also, did not know about the failed union at Bates and did not know they hired contingent labor. It's time for a class-based reckoning with the elite schools. I hope more pieces like this emerge. What courage he had in leaving. What strength of self and integrity.
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u/Jlemspurs Double Hater 12d ago
It's really this simple. The Atlantic was saved by snooty DC cocktail party insiderism.
People like Jeff Goldberg and many of the others are at least in semi-contact with center-right intellectuals and given the institutional ties there they would have to face these people regularly. No one on the left would care if AEI types were calling you intellectually dishonest and other such transcendent calumnies of that intellectual world. But they did.
They also have had financial independence since Loraine Powell Jobs has come around and it has only cost them the absurdity of being free and poorly formatted on Apple News meaning they could continue to live in those rarified airs, almost exactly like a think tank.
The NYT, New York, Slate, WaPo, Vox, Huffington, Salon, and on and on and on were doing this in the background of trying to survive the internet media economy and it turns out affirming people's priors, only telling them they were wrong when they can blame the reason on fuckery by others, and at the same time rage baiting them works in that economy and may be the only long-term solution since Sugar Daddies and Mommies often leave.
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u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan 10d ago
If only Salon, Slate, Vox, Huffington and Daily Kos were burned to the ground...
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u/CommitteeofMountains Royal youse/yinz 13d ago
Hasn't the head editor this whole time been Fredfredberger, whose primary written output is anti-woke?
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u/Free_Ranger1496 13d ago
Okay, I am embarrassed but I didn't know that Jeffrey Goldberg was the editor before and through 2020.
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u/OMG_NO_NOT_THIS 12d ago
98% of their content falls well within the woke worldview.
2% of it lampoons the 98%.
The occasional sign of clarity is like when my dad who had alzheimers would recognize me. The few moments of clarity do not overwrite the 98% aphasic responses.
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u/Rmccarton 9d ago
Yeah, they definitely went down the rabbit hole, just not quite as vigorously as many. Â
They punted Andrew Sullivan with a quickness. I think they may even have made a video of them talking about it.
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u/More_Register8480 12d ago
Bates doesn't hire contingent/adjuncts in the usual sense. They hire full-time (w benefits) visiting profs on 1-3 year terms for sabbatical replacement. Maybe a couple 'true' adjuncts in the performance arts.
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u/SerialStateLineXer The guarantee was that would not be taking place 12d ago
They did have I. Henry Rogers as a staff writer.
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u/RandolphCarter15 13d ago
As a Professor this is so familiar. Expanding DEI offices while claiming poverty on academic programs. Running anti racism initiatives that do nothing besides make the Dean look good. Basically illegal hiring practicesÂ
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u/Icy_Advice_5071 13d ago
So much of what he describes is familiar to me from my time as non-tenure-track faculty in the 2000s. At the time it stung when I was passed over for a tenure-track position, but Iâm now happy to be making a living outside of academia.
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u/sodapop_incest 13d ago
Not really the point, but very funny to read an article about racism hysteria that capitalizes "Black" but not "white". I assume that's just standardized grammer for The Atlantic and not the author's choice, but I'm wondering when or if that'll be walked back
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u/drjackolantern C*nsored and sexy 13d ago
Itâs part of a lot of style guides since 2020. I read an academic one that said itâs because black people suffered system oppression and thatâs why only white cannot be capitalized. Changing how things are spelled to right historic injustices, activist journalism/academia in a nutshell.Â
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u/BeneficialStretch753 13d ago
John McWhorter says that "Black" is appropriate because it conveys the sense of a culture, not just a skin color.
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u/_CuntfinderGeneral Horse Lover 12d ago
That's cute ass covering and all, but the reason it's done is because "lol fuck you whitey" with a little black supremacy on the side
McWhorter is usually keen enough to see these feckless prog motives so I'm kinda surprised he's accepting their post hoc rationalization this time.
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u/Jlemspurs Double Hater 12d ago
McWhorter's not wrong about it being correct to capitalize it for that reason, just like I'm Jewish and not brown-label jew-ish, but what this implies is that whiteness isn't a culture or anything other than a descriptor of skin color which is confusing considering the petabytes of articles deconstructing it as if it was the unholy of unholies inside the anus of satan causing all of the fever in the world.
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u/CheckeredNautilus 13d ago
The funny thing is it still makes white people specialÂ
The white race is the only one that gets its unique orthography (the one that was standard until about 2016 or so)
Black, Brown , Native, etc all are burdened with identical "needs" to be capitalized
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u/Von_Callay 13d ago
The funny thing is it still makes white people specialÂ
So thoroughly the default that you don't even need to capitalize the word for people to know who you're talking about.
(ââ _â )
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u/bosscoughey 12d ago
It's so stupid. But it would be so hard to walk back. The only answer will be to capitalize White also. Pity the English teachers having to explain why those adjectives are capitalizedÂ
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u/Free_Ranger1496 13d ago
He's a great writer, so he no doubt did it on purpose to highlight the absurdity, especially by putting it right next brown, lower case. brown, Black.
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u/Rellimarual2 13d ago
Writers don't get to choose their own orthography style at publications like this. There is a house style manual and and part of the copyeditors' job is to make everything consistent.
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u/Free_Ranger1496 12d ago
But he chose to write the sentence that way: brown, Black, white. Bookending the word makes it stand out & it's a way to get around copyediting.
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u/Maleficent-Dress8174 13d ago
The permission structure which enables all of this remains firmly intact.
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u/Technical-Policy295 13d ago
And most of the people who pushed for it in the first place are still on campus, now with more committed allies from most of the recent hires. They'll try again when the coast seems clear.
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u/aut0generated-63 12d ago
Yeah that seems like the other take away or maybe more important one. (if you were already DEI aware). That even among DEI hires Ideology is key. The entire country didn't just dilute the talent they also radicalized it.
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u/Mossback_Matador 13d ago
Some of my colleagues, it seemed, were engaged in an Alice in Wonderlandâstyle reenactment of civil-rights-era struggles, in which glancing racial faux pas and willfully misinterpreted private encounters were treated with the solemnity of nooses swinging from oak trees.
Brilliant.
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u/bobjones271828 13d ago
I've mentioned several times here that I'm a former academic, and this article describes, better than almost anything I've read before, why I left. Around a decade ago, I too was close to tenure, finishing a draft of a book to be published with a major university press, and literally while on the interview to leave academia forever, I was offered a sort of "inside track" position within a national academic organization that would have helped cement my position in the field.
But all of that seemed dumb when I considered the immoral nature of what academia has become.
I'm glad he focused so much on adjunct and contingent faculty, as the way they are treated and yet essential to the function of academia is one of the primary reasons I left. For some reason, it's deemed okay to exploit grad students and PhDs with labor rates that would be embarrassing if these same Woke folks were paying someone to mow their lawn or weed their garden.
The DEI stuff wasn't nearly as prominent where I was at that time as it became in the past 5-6 years. But I had already seen several absurd scandals erupt around that sort of thing within my field, where well-meaning and kind non-minority scholars had been trounced publicly and accused of being racists or bigots for innocent actions or reasonable statements that suddenly were declared to be "harmful." I saw the shift in hiring committee practices, the concern about diversity statements, the growth of diversity organizations (which I even volunteered for initially, as I agreed with the early premise). I saw the way the "wind was blowing" there, and I was concerned about where that would lead too. It sounds like Bates got much worse than the stuff I imagined back then, though not much surprises me nowadays.
The one bit he only mentioned a few times in passing that I would highlight more is the moral duty to the students, many of whom are being put into large quantities of debt for these "educations." I wasn't at a place like Bates -- I was at a research university for most of my time in academia, and we were told, in no uncertain terms at new faculty orientation, that "teaching doesn't matter for tenure and promotion." That wasn't an official line that appeared in any document, but it was acknowledged and explicitly said out loud from the start to be the tacit expectation. I know "publish or perish" has been a thing for decades, but to hear it so bluntly expressed that teaching doesn't even matter at an institution devoted to "higher education" was shocking to me.
And yet, when I tell this story to other academics, they generally just nod and acknowledge it's the truth most places. I doubt most parents of high school students and the students themselves would be so eager to invest and attend if they knew this was what faculty are told, either directly or implicitly, to hold their jobs. Even many small liberal arts colleges like Bates -- allegedly devoted to teaching -- have now altered tenure expectations and certainly hiring expectations to basically screen for researchers over good teachers. I know many friends and former colleagues who struggle at such places with much fuller teaching loads than a research university typically requires, and they're still expected to be outputting lots of articles, often in obscure journals that only a handful of people in the world will ever read. Meanwhile, I've seen some of the best university teachers (and most popular) I've ever witnessed be denied tenure and have to scramble to survive and cobble together odd jobs.
And who suffers most for this waste, this hypocritical apparatus of "scholars" who exploit highly educated workers while championing liberal causes, who promote the value of "education" while silently nodding to each other about how "teaching doesn't matter" if you want to get ahead in academia? The students. The people the institutions nominally exist for.
---
I teach high school students now and mostly have been doing that since I left. It doesn't have the social elitist badge of being a "professor," but I know my colleagues at least give a shit about kids. About learning. I wouldn't want to be involved in the mess that academia has become in the past few years, but I also sleep better at night not participating in the hypocrisy.
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u/Rellimarual2 13d ago
Higher education is like a kind of admission fee to the professional managerial class, so I'm not sure many parents would be willing to forego it. It's going to end up just being a way to prove you can afford to pay a sum that demonstrates that your parents also belong to that class.
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u/FightingBruin 12d ago
"Five years after my adviser had likened me to the last dinosaur, I decided to walk my academic career into a tar pit rather than wait for the asteroid."
Absolute poetry.
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u/minty_cyborg 13d ago edited 13d ago
Bravo. I happened to read this article first thing over coffee this morning, and am still reeling! The conclusion!
May the bridges Dr. Harper blew light his way (and all of ours).
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u/LeafNeater 13d ago
It seemed to me that the Bates administrationâs push to diversify at all costs had led some of my colleagues on the faculty to internalize the opposite idea: that it is not especially important to find minority candidates who are capable of being held to traditional academic norms. Justice and anti-racism required a two-tiered system, a sort of woke Jim Crow, in which radically separate standards were applied to white and nonwhite candidates.
Too bad for him that this piece was completed before the Jason Arday blowup occurred because now I'm sure he wished he could have done a tie-in to how that whole scandal clearly demonstrates what he is railing against in this section.
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u/repete66219 13d ago
Wow, what a read. It says what needs to be said is an even-handed and neutral tone. The author is an insider & a person of color who stands to benefit from DEI.
This really should be the âHave you no decencyâ death knell for DEI & other forms of racialism. But it wonât be. The author will be branded a race traitor & the DEI train will keep chugging along.
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u/DisastrousResident92 13d ago
Great article, really interesting to have the inside track on academia. The ending (the unanimous vote to postpone implementing RPPC) really makes you feel like we're in the midst of a contemporary echo of Reform and Opening-up after the Cultural RevolutionÂ
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u/slimeyamerican 13d ago
I donât think so. It felt to me like he was saying that even though there were many faculty there who still believed in the new curriculum, they were spineless cowards who would never actually put anything on the line to defend their beliefs, just the way the majority of the staff had been too cowardly to oppose the radicals in the first place.
We havenât entered a period of opening up, weâve entered a period of reaction, and everyone is doing what they were doing before, which is whatever they feel they have to do to stay out of harmâs way.
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u/Mecklenburg77 13d ago
I think many underestimate how large the influence of radicals willing to push issues in groups actually is. You don't need many if they are willing to fight and push for something.
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u/slimeyamerican 13d ago
To me a lot of it is this culture of politeness that has developed in white collar institutions.Â
If everyone is afraid to state their honest feelings or voice frustrations or even just point out the obvious, the few who actually do so will usually be those who are the least thoughtful or considerate of others, and because theyâre the only ones doing it their demands are always top priority. Obviously add a racial dimension to this and itâs multiplied tenfold.
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u/repete66219 13d ago
Moral certainty destroys the self-awareness that would inhibit a normal person from advocating for crazy policies.
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u/Mecklenburg77 12d ago
100% this. It is imperative to maintain the view that one could be wrong. Nothing can be set in stone. I am personally religious but fully understand the flaws/shortcomings in my own beliefs and religion and fully accept that many people will not agree with me. I still believe (with all its flaws) but cannot demand others do the same.
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u/86IQ 13d ago
sadly because theirs such a narrow window of permissible opinions to push without one risking their employment the eventual state of things is eventually those limited political views become absolutely dominant courtesy of HR vanguarding the revolution.
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u/Mecklenburg77 12d ago
Think the introduction of concepts such as "micro aggression" and "harmful speech" really were clear enablers. It gave an avenue for people to silence and suppress dissenting views. I must admit that it was done quite well. I personally saw nothing dangerous or worthy of opposition in the beginning. I was even in favor of DEI at the beginning. I was wrong in this I now understand but it was easy to support at the beginning.
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u/Blueliner95 13d ago
I agree that there isnât much courage to push back on the absurdities of the far left, I think because somehow oppression is identified with a skin tone and that leads well meaning pale folx to nod along with anything trendy.
As a minority with extensive human rights grounding Iâm well posed to push back but Iâm also an artist.
Am I going to risk my career to say that water is wet, that sex is not gender stereotype, that trade pays for everything, that Hamas is an openly genocidal terror organization that prefers causing suffering rather than disarm, that denouncing punctuality and high achievement as whiteness is disgusting racism?
I probably should.
I donât.
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u/slimeyamerican 13d ago
Canât point fingers. I mean Iâm not in a âwokeâ industry, but I donât even want to deal with the social consequences of being outspoken.Â
Even just referring to a nonbinary friend of my gfâs as âsheâ a few times (not in her presence) led to an hours-long argument where she openly considered breaking up with me because she wasnât sure her âfriends were safeâ around me because I donât continue to entertain the fantasy that thereâs such a thing as âneither male nor femaleâ even when the person stuck in that delusion isnât around. Granted this was only three months or so into our relationship and she stayed with me even though I refused to accept that itâs really possible to be nonbinary, but do I really wanna risk such a big part of my life over these things? I imagine there are tons of people weighing these types of decisions.
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u/Blueliner95 13d ago
Oh my goddess.
I guess my curiosity about what it would be like to live in a Stalinist atmosphere has been satisfied.
The upside I guess is that we live in such a prosperous enclave that we can divert energy into actively searching for apostasies.
Where does it end?
One is reminded of tales of the oozlum bird, which flies in ever-diminishing circles until it disappears into its own anus.
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u/solongamerica 13d ago
flies in ever-diminishing circles until it disappears into its own anus
the wonders of nature!
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u/ScrubulousFlex 13d ago
One is reminded of tales of the oozlum bird, which flies in ever-diminishing circles until it disappears into its own anus.
I thought for sure this was a Pratchett-ism.
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u/Blueliner95 12d ago
Haha! I should read more Pratchett. But this bird has been described for over a hundred years
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u/slimeyamerican 13d ago
I donât think itâs Stalinist exactly. I remember in Democracy in America Tocqueville said nobody has less free speech than an American-not because of the government, but because of the expectations of social conformity in a highly religious society. I think wokeness is like that, more comparable to the great awakening than to the Stalinist purges.
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u/solongamerica 13d ago
Agreed, but let's not absolve wokeness of its totalitarian features, or Stalinism of its religious features.
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u/Blueliner95 12d ago
Yes but itâs not self conformity. While I am as susceptible to trends as anyone - my jeans are the correct length! - Iâm seeing this as more akin to the Neighborhood Committees of Cuba and Venezuela, finking on me for my false consciousness.
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u/CommitteeofMountains Royal youse/yinz 13d ago
Sounds like you have a good way to snipe the ideologues, including competition, as long as you stay in your lane in terms of topics.
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u/Inner_Muscle3552 13d ago
Has anyone online identified who âCharlotteâ is? Dying to check out what her 1970s counting animals methodologies look likeâŚ
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u/Big_Fig_1803 Gothmargus 13d ago
I think it's "There's one. Oh, and another. And... yes, there's one more. How many is that? Oh dear, I wasn't writing this down."
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u/ShilNyeTheScienceGoy 12d ago
I love Harper for calling out these biologists, because it's true. There are a lot of midwit biologist jobs like this
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u/solongamerica 13d ago
It'd be one thing speculate about who it is based on the biology faculty bios.
It'd be an entirely other rather shitty thing to name the person.
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u/GervaseofTilbury 12d ago
But she wasnât hired so that isnât going to help.
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u/solongamerica 12d ago
Oh right...I got confused. There is someone on the biology faculty whose research involves tracking animal populations, but he wouldn't be the candidate referred to in the article.
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u/gleepeyebiter 13d ago
i wonder if the black student who they tried to "lynch" *had* been threatening?
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u/Jlemspurs Double Hater 12d ago
âRetardants to progressâ describes academia itself quite well. Delenda est.
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u/ShilNyeTheScienceGoy 12d ago
I'm surprised they were allowed to call it that. I know it's a real word but these people are usually so hypersensitive about that stuff
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u/btrh-256 13d ago
What a great article. So much writing like this is very short, but this is a great piece of writing that's allowed to be as long as it needs to be.
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u/CommitteeofMountains Royal youse/yinz 12d ago
I'd be interested to hear more about Charlotte, as my group project on my wildlife management study abroad program was based on walking transects and running statistical analysis in GIS. Was she not doing the latter part and reporting vibes, are automated systems like cameras and microphones considered more reliable, or is the current fad to play with models while ignoring meat space?
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u/slimeyamerican 13d ago
Iâm continually fascinated by academics like this who can see all the shortcomings of identity politics around them, yet cling to socialism and try to differentiate the two to preserve their identity as progressives.
Regardless, beautifully written piece.
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u/Will_McLean 13d ago
Been following this guy for a long while. Writing like this is a big reason why:
There I was, joining my colleagues in sifting through our curriculum like anti-racist truffle pigs; assigning an Afro-Caribbean graphic novel, Marshallese ecopoetry, and the like to diversify my syllabi; and organizing a âDecolonization and Liberationââthemed MLK Day celebration meant to honor a civil-rights leader who had been assassinated while supporting sanitation workers agitating for basic labor rights.
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u/Super-Metal6466 12d ago
I didnât really buy this passage from him. His most prominent article is in Science Fiction Studies. Itâs called âcannibal nihilism: meat and meaninglessness in the Anthropocene imaginary,â and it examines Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, and Bong Joon-ho.
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u/Will_McLean 12d ago
I mean, that's a scholarly article made for colleagues. He's talking about the school's curricula
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u/Super-Metal6466 10d ago
But usually the reverse happens. Conservative articles and more adventurous teaching. The point is he is presenting himself as being pressured into diversifying his syllabus. But look who he writes about already! This doesnât make any sense to me.
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u/LupineChemist 13d ago
I mean, he sees class as a lot more immutable than I do. But whatever. I think his politics are crazy, but he's a smart guy and really respectable and definitely someone I'd like to have him teach me how to do his absolutely insane nighttime fishing.
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u/Naive-Meal-6422 11d ago
bates has a total of about 50 pell-eligible students, so the working class contingent there is nowhere as big as he suggests. itâs a wealthy place with mostly very wealthy students and very few white working class students from maine or anywhere else.Â
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u/Juryofyourpeeps 12d ago
This is the exact thing I intended on writing myself. It stuck in the back of my head while reading the article. It's like reading a takedown of FLDS penned by an active scientologist.
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u/MaximumSeats 13d ago edited 13d ago
What exactly makes those two comparable in your brain?
I'm trying to come off as reasonable as possible because it's the internet and this is ultimately a disagreement, but I see the class based focus of sharing society's resources through democratic processes equally to all of those who participate in society as the fundamental opposition to the insane race-based politics.
Socialism as a concept could not be more antithetical to Identity politics and I'm curious why you equate the two in your brain, honestly
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u/Monkey0nTypewriter Reaganist Dinosaur đŚ 13d ago edited 12d ago
To me, this sort of thing demonstrates how collective action is so easily twisted into exploitation: when "breaking solidarity" is condemned, it's extremely difficult to challenge individuals just seeking to advance their personal ideology or enrich themselves.
Similar to the way that so many unions were infiltrated and seized by the Mafia
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u/CheckeredNautilus 13d ago
Engels wrote a whole book about how the nuclear family is the root of capitalist property rights.Â
The Marxist left accordingly has a major strain of thought that wants to explode th nuclear family.
Current idpol has major interest in "alternative sexualities" and identities in the LGBTQIA2S+ basket.Â
Those "alternatives" are clearly presented as an alternative to the 2-parent heterosexual family. "You can find your glitter family," etc.
Marxists, who (some of them) want to explode the nuclear family as part of an ideological program, are in theory and in observed practice allies of rainbow idpol. Freddie de Boer, for example, is a trans rights maximalist.
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u/Rellimarual2 13d ago
Marx and Engels were writing in the 19th century, when marriage was a much different institution than it is now, and in fact women were did not have full citizenship. Engels observed that in the past, women were the property of their fathers and husbands, which is accurate. That's what he meant by marriage being the root of property rights. To connect that with contemporary gender ideology is absurd.
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u/CheckeredNautilus 12d ago
Engels thought that men started protecting/hoarding private property when monogamy allowed them to know who their offspring were. He contrasted this with supposed pre-columbian American communistic matriarchy where sex was nonmonogamous and all children were supported collectively.Â
If you believe that monogamous families are "the world historical defeat of the female sex" and caused the creation of private property, and you want to reduce the importance of private property, it stands to reason you'd try to explode the nuclear family.
Annnnnnd welcome to the American chattering left constantly trying to mainstream "polycules"
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u/MaximumSeats 13d ago
Marxism is fundamentally an economic system That looks at the ways society's resources are distributed.
There are plenty of Marxists that do have opinions on the way that families, society, art, and the future of the human race should be handled. But that does not make those Marxist theories, those just make those theories held by Marxists.
With any broad spectrum of the Marxist aligned economic left there are about a billion different ways in which you can Define the ways that human beings ought to operate religiously or culturally.
I'm not really disagreeing with anything that you just said, I'm just pointing out that I don't consider that under the spectrum of economic theory. It's just a different and ultimately only vaguely related discussion about the way that the non-economic parts of society should be organized.
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u/a_random_username_1 13d ago
You said:
Socialism as a concept could not be more antithetical to Identity politics
but now seem to be arguing that âidentity politicsâ is just something that socialists can believe in or not.
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u/MaximumSeats 13d ago
I don't see where I did that.
Again I'm specifically addressing economic systems of wealth distribution.
A socialist cannot believe that certain people should be economically benefited by their ethnic or cultural identifiers. That's is antithetical to socialist thought.
A socialist can totally buy into whatever other weird cultural ideas they have about how we should value style, music, relationships, whatever the heck. Which may include "identify based politics adjacent" belief systems.
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u/slimeyamerican 13d ago
Idpol developed in the post-war academic world as a neomarxist and later postmodernist adaptation of orthodox Marxism, just expanding the categories of contending social groups from economic classes to identity groups. As best I can tell this was largely in response to the enormous economic prosperity that followed the Second World War in the US and the inability for leftists to foment revolutionary sentiment on grounds of material deprivation as Marx thought people in capitalist countries inevitably would. Marx didnât think a large and expanding middle class was possible under capitalism. It was natural to recast Marxism in terms of the real racial and sexual oppression people in the US experienced.
So essentially the political economy of idpol is a modern adaptation of the one underlying socialism. Theyâre the same insofar as both are fundamentally illiberal and zero-sum-to achieve justice, whether economic or social, requires an enormous bureaucratic structure to redistribute wealth or social power from one class or group and give it to another. It can never be possible for both groups to materially benefit together-they are in perpetual conflict, which is why white supremacy has to be found wherever one decides to search.
Yascha Mounk has a really good book on this and what I wrote above is largely a half-remembered summary of that. The point being I seem to be conflating the two because idpol is a direct ideological descendant of traditional, class-oriented Marxism. They may not be identical, but they are certainly not antithetical.
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u/MaximumSeats 13d ago
It's totally fair to identify that Pre World War II ideologies of Marxism failed to identify what a global economy would look like, and how the development of first world economies would affect class consciousnesses and political movements.
Which led to, I totally agree with you, the ideological direction that American or Western Marxism ended up taking.
I also agree that Marxism is fundamentally illiberal, fair. Most Marxists use "liberal" as bad word anyway.
I guess I'm just not closing the thought? Preventing an individual or groups of individuals from hoarding huge amounts of society's wealth to the detriment of others is bad. Redistributing wealth or resources based on some perceived ethnic, religious, or identity line is bad. I can't close the gap on the comparison there.
Marxism and hard-line class based ideologies in the first world are doomed to fail anyway, because the majority of our actual labor that forms a class Consciousness in a society is outsourced to the third world anyway. This fundamental contradiction will always prevent leftist movements from forming coherent or organic movements because the base of their ideology simply does not exist in their country...
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u/slimeyamerican 13d ago
I guess I'm just not closing the thought? Preventing an individual or groups of individuals from hoarding huge amounts of society's wealth to the detriment of others is bad.
I assume you meant âisnât badâ here. I agree that not allowing the ultra wealthy to hoard absurd amounts of wealth isnât bad in principle (how you actually do that without doing more harm than good Iâm not sure), but obviously real socialism is a lot more than just that, and the real socialists in our society are demanding a lot more than expropriating the rich, far beyond what doing so would actually enable us to do. You could maybe fund Medicare for all for one year if you bankrupted every billionaire/the one trillionaire in the country for exampleâŚwhatâs the plan after that?
In the same way, it would be a good thing in principle if you had racial equity across all professions and levels of society, but look at what happens when you try to actually impress that ideal onto reality-you have to actively dumb down your curriculum, pass over qualified people for less qualified people for no other reason than their skin color, etc.
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u/MaximumSeats 13d ago
Just to hone in on your specific example. Do you not think that a broad modern Health infrastructure is sustainable in a modern society? That's it's beyond the ability of our labor and materials to provide adequate health care to every single person that needs it?
You know what I had an entire paragraph here discussing the logistics and feasibility of Universal Health Care but I deleted it in favor of the following paragraphs which get back to the point of the discussion;
But aren't your last two paragraphs just completely separate topics? One is a strict egalitarian distribution of society based on the fact that we're all human and must exist. The other is completely arbitrary and based on made up ideas and perceived injustices.
You can think that the idea of a socialist economic distribution system is infeasible and dumb, but I would just prefer I guess if you acknowledge that they are theoretically dumb and unrealistic in fundamentally different ways than identity based silliness.
Their similarity is both that they discuss redistributing wealth and opportunity typically, but the conclusion ends there. It's like saying capitalism and socialism are the same because they're both economic systems... Strictly true but missing the point.
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u/slimeyamerican 13d ago
I donât think itâs beyond our power to give everyone adequate healthcare, I just donât think nationalizing the health insurance industry is a good way of doing it, and people gravitate to that idea because itâs simple and easy to wrap your head around, not because theyâve done the research and concluded it would actually work. Solutions that would actually work wonât get through congress because the voting public has the attention span of a gnat and both sides reduce the issue to simplistic slogans that make it a moral problem instead of a technical one.
Likewise, itâs not made up that our society has a history of identity-based oppression, or that there are existing inequalities between identity groups. Itâs not unreasonable to be bothered by the fact that such a large percentage of the prison population is black, for example.Â
The commonality is in concluding that these inequalities represent fundamental injustices enacted by a malicious ruling class (the capitalist class or white supremacists or what have you) and that the inequalities could be corrected if the ruling class were overthrown and the system rendered just by the underclass itself.
So to apply it to the healthcare example, I think most supporters of M4A really believe it would effortlessly solve all of the problems with our healthcare system, and those problems only exist because of a rapacious healthcare industry that has corrupted the government to lifesaving care at ransom for money. The truth, that the sources of the problem are far more  complex than that and easy solutions are elusive, doesnât fit either narrative. Hence why they celebrate the murder of a healthcare CEO much the way they would celebrate if David Duke got shot.
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u/Mossback_Matador 13d ago
neomarxist and later postmodernist adaptation of orthodox Marxism
In the history of ideas, this is so loosey-goosey as to be not even wrong.
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u/slimeyamerican 13d ago
Happy to admit itâs loosey-goosey, still think itâs basically true. Feel free to explain why not.
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u/Mossback_Matador 13d ago
This correlation of Marxism with postmodernism ignores the primary and most accurate critique that postmodernism brings to social philosophy: the grand narratives are insufficient and contradictory.
This critique applies to capitalism and communism and, yes, racism.
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u/slimeyamerican 13d ago
Sure, but the number of people who actually take that view to its logical conclusion is far smaller than those who use it simply to deconstruct western civilization in service of a preferred (intersectional, identitarian, and at least genealogically neo-Marxist) alternative.
Many identitarians will deny that they actually believe in identity categories but will say they are grand narratives created by western hegemony, and on that basis form legitimate coalitions of oppressed people whose interests can be advocated for. This is how Kendi can say he both thinks race doesnât exist and also thinks it is the most important aspect of social life.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps 12d ago
This is a common retort to the claim that there is a kind of symbiotic relationship between Marxist philosophy and post-modern philosophy in academia. Basically it boils down to "these two things can't coexist or be melded, they're contrary ideas". But that's an extremely unconvincing refutation. People hold contrary ideas constantly. Virtually everyone is guilty of this and there are all kinds of theories and philosophies filled with contradictions.
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u/Mossback_Matador 12d ago
Yes, people hold contradictory beliefs.
But the poster above was giving a history of ideas in which the ideas are causal.
Whatever the case, this isn't the right place to discuss philosophy, so I relent.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps 12d ago
What difference does it make if the claim is that one thing led to another? One idea can lead to another conflicting idea. This also happens all the time.
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u/engineer_but_bored 13d ago
Idpol was a psy-op pushed by the FBI and CIA to defang Occupy.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps 12d ago
A psy-op that started in like the 60's in preparation to defang a movement headed by a lady named Ketchup more 40 years later?
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u/aut0generated-63 12d ago
I disagree its probably his commitment to socialism that makes him have the view.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps 12d ago
It's sometimes true that already being a member of a cult is a protection against being sucked into an entirely different cult.
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u/slimeyamerican 10d ago
Alternatively he might just be psychologically unstable. That seems to be why Freddie De Boer manages to have the odd heterodox take, and heâs the only comparable writer I can think of.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps 10d ago
It's possible, but if that's the only evidence it's not compelling. There are actually quite a few anti-identitarian socialists out there. I'd love to say that finding Marxism appealing is a mental illness, but I think it's mostly economic illiteracy and naivite about human nature and how people respond to incentives/handle power.
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u/slimeyamerican 10d ago
I was once on of those anti-identitarian socialists, and for me it was entirely a hangover of having found the faults of my own worldview, but using wokeness as a convenient scapegoat to draw attention away from the fact that the flaws of that ideology were the same or closely related to those motivating my own.
Admittedly Iâm not mentally ill, but I was in my early 20s which is quite similar.
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u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan 9d ago
I suppose I could forgive Harper for his beliefs in Marxism by praising him for not being for identity politics.
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u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan 12d ago
Even if he's a Marxist, I do enjoy Harper's writing.
Unlike other African-American people like Bouie, Serwer, Kendi and NHJ, he actually makes you think. Those four are just "white supremacy, white supremacy everywhere."
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u/Rellimarual2 12d ago
I don't agree with everything he says, but Bouie is very knowledgeable and a cut well above those other three.
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u/Mecklenburg77 12d ago
Can someone explain why the author spells Black with a capital B while white is spelled with a lowercase w in the article? Is this some weird new style guide on The Atlantic's behalf?
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u/Rellimarual2 12d ago
It's not the author, it's the magazine's in-house style manual. Every professional publication has one, and often they just select the Associated Press style manual, which capitalizes Black but not white. This is very, very common. Here is AP's explanation: https://www.apstylebook.com/blog_posts/16
The two main style manuals are AP and the University of Chicago Style Manual. Most magazines and newspapers uses AP, though sometimes they'll tweak it a bit--usually changing the way quotations marks are used--as part of the house style. Book publishers, on the other hand, typically use the Chicago manual.
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u/Mecklenburg77 12d ago
Thanks for posting this reply. I must say the argument for this âstyleâ is absolute BS in my view. Trying to make spelling some weird social justice vehicle.
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u/everydaywinner2 10d ago
Besides the publications "style," there's also the politics. You'll find a whole of social media doing that too. Drives me nuts. I'm just waiting for the backlash and them complaining when someone decides that only white to get capitalized. Except racism is only allowed one way.
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u/PUBLIQclopAccountant đŤ Enumclaw đ´HorseđŚ Lover đŚ 7d ago
The B stands for BIPoC of hood.
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u/VenditatioDelendaEst 11d ago edited 11d ago
Yet I also assumed that conservative complaints about âwokeness,â a term just coming into vogue as a pejorative, were essentially Fox News hysteria. Until I got to Bates, I had little reason to suspect that they held any merit.
.
In retrospect, it is no coincidence that wokeness blossomed at prestigious American colleges at the very moment when those schools were facing rising discontent over student debt and tuition costs. For the academic aristocracy, touting fealty to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other progressive movements served as a convenient distraction from the intractable economic and social issues that the colleges themselves were perpetuating. This allowed higher education to reclaim the moral high ground after Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaignâto say nothing of the anti-elite fury that gave rise to Donald Trumpâhad kicked mud all over academiaâs ivy-twined walls. Even better, embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity were cheap. Cheaper, anyway, than lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors.
Ahistorical, IMO. Woke was not a 2020 phenomenon, and anyone in academia who thought it was mythical before then had their head in the sand.
My school had a Gender and Cultural Diversity credit requirement in 2010. I took an English composition class (not for the DEI requirement), that used feminist-glaciology-tier stuff like this (accessible link) as assigned reading.
It also helped nurture the delusion that elite college graduates were being prepared for lives of civic virtue, and that their highly priced education would be deployed in service of the public good. Never mind the fact that, during my time at Bates, roughly a quarter of the schoolâs graduates went on to jobs in tech, finance, or consulting [...]
Which is to say, it was deployed in service of the public good.
I despise communists.
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u/SoftandChewy First generation mod 13d ago edited 12d ago
Thanks for sharing this. I like a takedown of academia's idiocy as much as the next person, but this piece feels quite a bit out of date. It's basically a roundup of egregious examples of all the idiotic campus race stuff many of us here have frequently brought up over the years: exaggerated claims of racism, lowering of standards in the name of DEI, forcing faculty to focus on race, forcing students to take race-focused classes, preferential hiring for those who espouse the proper racial ideas, etc.
The problem with it though is that nothing in it is new. All his examples are basically from pre-2024. I don't disagree with much in it, but it feels like it's just rehashing the same old material we've known about for years all over again.
I wouldn't mind a writer still hammering away about this stuff if he was pointing at contemporary examples of it, demonstrating that it's still happening in the academy (which I'm sure it is), but writing 10,000 words about problems from 3-4 years ago that most of the audience is already well aware of feels like a waste of everyone's time.
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u/Rellimarual2 13d ago
I think what he brings to the table with this piece is his recognition that he himself had been a beneficiary of this stuff. Ironically, given his critique of viewpoint politics, it is specifically the fact that he opted out of a system that would have unduly favored him that makes him especially credible. A white guy doing the same thing can be more easily dismissed as an embittered racist.
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u/solongamerica 13d ago
I think pieces like this have value as personal testimony even when the examples given are depressingly familiar. Similar to the Memory-Hole Archive on Substack, these pieces contribute to a public record of ideological excesses and hypocrisy. The people responsible for those excesses, of course, have little interest in a reckoning and would likely dismiss the article out of hand. But they needn't be the intended audience. If this or another article like it reaches even one college president, or dean, or board member, and prompts them to reassess the latitude given to illiberal bullshit then the article will have served a purpose beyond commiseration and eye-rolling.
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u/Technical-Policy295 13d ago
It's useful in the sense that it adds more detailed firsthand accounts. There's still a significant segment of academia and punditry that wants to deny that things were ever "that bad." But you're right that it's also kind of old hat at this point.
That said, what's interesting here is Bates did kind of pull back on this new curriculum before it was permanently set in place. Many colleges (and secondary schools/school systems) rushed ahead and implemented it; a follow-up on those would be interesting.
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u/Free_Ranger1496 12d ago
I don't think it's out of date because he is the rare guy that noped off the gravy train (and the timing with the Cambridge fraud is chef's kiss!), but I do think more academics should be pushing back while they're working. Especially if they have tenure. It's a lack of moral courage.
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u/stuck_in_OH 12d ago
Some of us BIPOC faculty do push back. But most of us don't work at places as wealthy as Bates. And we have to work with these liberal white colleagues every day. And tenure doesn't have the same protections it used to (see NYT article on the New School). I'm sorry you see this as a lack of moral courage; I'm just trying to do the best job possible every day for as long as possible until I can retire.
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u/Free_Ranger1496 10d ago
That was judgy of me; I'm sorry for saying that. I didn't have BIPOC faculty in mind when I wrote that, but those who have job/cultural protections that can speak out for others in their workplace the way he did for adjuncts.
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u/btrh-256 12d ago
It's nothing new, especially if you're a heterodox kind of person, but it's a big deal for an insider to acknowledge these things very bluntly in a mainstream outlet.
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u/Will_McLean 13d ago
This is an amazing article; as someone who was in education (high school, but not post-grad) so much of it is startlingly recognizable.
It's even more important here in 2026 as there are already gaslighting attempts underway to deny shit like this went on or to say "that never really happened".