It’s All About the Power

This piece is part of Yellow Scene Magazine’s Opinion section. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent a reported news position. At Yellow Scene, opinion pieces speak freely, challenge assumptions, and say the quiet parts out loud.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread,” – Anatole France, French author and Nobel Laureate

Ah, the majestic equality we’re living today! The kind that finally allows the much beleaguered white man to have his manifest disadvantages take their rightful place in the pantheon of injustices.

If history survives with any clarity, ours will be known, in part, as the age of the Grand False Equivalence.

My morning reading this week included an eminently “reasonable” piece in the New York Times crafted by a Harvard sophomore. As always, the comments surpassed the essay, both in volume and grievance. You should read it all, if your post-holiday stomach can take it.

The essence of the actually pretty well-written piece was: The progressive, “woke” excesses of the past few decades were horrid, but the conservative response has been little better. Progressive orthodoxy has been replaced by conservative orthodoxy on Harvard’s campus.

An excerpt from my 2016 book is relevant in challenging this equivalence:

Conventional wisdom, or what passes for wisdom among many folks, is that the progressive era of the late ’60s and early ’70s ruined virtually everything. Moral values disappeared in a haze of marijuana smoke. Highly sexualized music and an epidemic of free love led to a decline in marriage and erosion of family values. Progressive political values created a spineless, dependent populace, which accounts for the tens of millions of feckless “takers” who look to the nanny state for care and feeding.

And permissive progressive education created a generation of self-indulgent brats who were told everything they did was right when, in fact, they didn’t learn anything at all. This misrepresentation of progressive education suggests that child-centered means spoiling children, that self-esteem means every child gets a trophy, and that in progressive schools the teachers wear Birkenstocks and flax shawls and smoke weed as their students run wild and barefoot. This caricature is often advanced by folks who seem to have lingering resentment over the “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” era. (I’ve always suspected that their resentment lingers in part because they didn’t get enough of those things.)
There are many problems with this narrative, foremost of which is that none of it happened, at least not to an important extent.

As a veteran of the ’60s, I testify from experience. The vast majority of young folks who joined the counter-culture, wore bell bottoms, smoked weed, went to Woodstock and protested the war, were no more genuine than Justin Bieber wearing saggin’ pants, lots of bling and a big brimmed cap on sideways. Most hippies were no more Che Guevara than Bieber is 50 Cent. It was almost all costume and fad or, to use a more current quip, all hat and no cattle.
I attended many anti-war demonstrations in the late ’60s and early ’70s and most protestors couldn’t find Vietnam on a map! In my middle/upper middle class community, many bra-less girls and bell-bottomed boys had been Brownies and Cub Scouts a few years earlier, and would be aspiring bankers and real estate agents a few years later. At the core there were, as now, small numbers of deeply committed activists, but the majority of folks were along for the ride – and it was a fine trip!

But the bigger lie is that the progressive educational practices of the ’60s and ’70s eviscerated standards and account for the allegedly miserable state of education today. So-called reformers want rigid accountability, more structure, longer school days, longer school years, more tests and more discipline. Undoing the damage of those loosey-goosey progressive practices is arduous work!

That didn’t happen either.

There was a brief flurry of progressive activity in the ’60s and ’70s, when some schools adopted open floor plans and a few humanistic and humane programs poked through the dull homogeneity of public education. Most schools were designed in spirit-numbing form, and curriculum and pedagogy trudged along in the same rote, uninspiring way.
Here too I’m a veteran and I testify as both participant and witness. I graduated high school in 1964. My younger brother went to the same schools in the late ’60s and ’70s. I had children early and my daughter began school in the same community in 1975, my son three years later. That’s pretty good coverage of the alleged progressive era. All of this happened in one of America’s most progressive suburban communities (Cleveland Heights, Ohio)

Progressive education never happened there … or most anywhere around the country.

What existed at Harvard and other campuses before Trump – and the anti-woke complaining – was so distant from progressive power as to be laughable. The power has always rested with fabulously wealthy trustees and donors and the mostly compliant leaders they hire. The things that irritated them were futile efforts by powerless people to address actual injustices: Like undeniable racial injustice, pitiful representation of women in positions of power (along with low wages), insufficient progress for LGBTQ+ people (especially violent rejection of trans folks), and many more.

The powerful take satisfaction in diminishing these justice advocates by calling their actions“cancel culture,” calling them “social justice warriors.” They then lend a sympathetic ear to the privileged white majority who had their feelings hurt now and then. Of course there were loud and excessive examples to cite as woke-run-amok when, for example, young women and men tried to keep virulent racists and homophobes from speaking. And, of course, affirmative action was swept into history’s dust bin because, gee whiz, today’s brilliant white kids are not responsible for what happened generations ago. And all this absurd pronoun business!

As in my excerpt, the fact is that progressives have very little power and never have. Intractable wealth inequality and poverty are proof enough. As a nation we have primarily excelled at breaking the promises offered in our founding documents. The insufficient granting of civil rights in the 60s and the grudging acknowledgement of gay rights were signs of progress, but real power then, as now, was consolidated in the private and institutional clubs of white men.
For the Harvard student and, seemingly, the majority of white Americans, the current pendulum swing is equivalent.

That view is intellectual and ethical malfeasance.

First, there is a factual and moral difference between those who fight for racial justice and those who claim that there is no injustice. There is a moral difference between those who support transgender humans and those who despise them and deny basic rights and dignity. I would offer more examples of non-equivalence, but leave you to consider them yourself.

But the most egregious violation is willful blindness of the role of power. The reversal of human rights gains, the imposition of conservative curricula and faculty, the denial of trans rights, the erasure of gender studies, the elimination of DEI programs, the canceling of research grants, closing of entire departments . . .

These are not cultural or policy swings of the pendulum. They are direct manifestations of an increasingly authoritarian government which uses immense economic power and, frighteningly, military power to effect the changes they desire. And almost all of these things are in service of providing comfort and control to white men who feel their hegemony slipping.

The occasional excesses of the so-called woke movement and the full force of the United States government are not remotely equivalent.

As with the progressive era of the 60s and 70s, the progressive uprising the conservatives are now crushing never happened either.