The beginning of the story of the book banning is important. It has arisen out of challenges to remove false history (such as the Civil War was about "state's rights") and to add anti-racism to the curriculum. In response, we have this right-wing shit storm about feelings. The end result? A stalemate which is exactly what the right w…
The beginning of the story of the book banning is important. It has arisen out of challenges to remove false history (such as the Civil War was about "state's rights") and to add anti-racism to the curriculum. In response, we have this right-wing shit storm about feelings. The end result? A stalemate which is exactly what the right wants. Universities may have become liberal bastions but that is certainly not true with most secondary education. In fact, do conservatives ever consider that Universities are as liberal as they are in part because students learn that much of the conservative bullshit they learn in high school was false or at least misleading? I know that helped develop my politics.
People like Rush Limbaugh spent years trashing science and higher education, all while the Republican party became an unholy alliance between young-earth fundamentalist Christians and climate change deniers. Convinced that the mainstream media's biases justified the construction of a "world as we see it" parallel universe of thought and epistemology, American conservatism slowly surrendered its former status as the intellectual rock of political thought, as the Republican party increasingly relied upon a polity encased in "Conservapedia" reality to win elections. People of learned backgrounds inevitably began to be turned off by the right's antagonistic relationship with basic truth, and Republicans went from being the party of the educated to the party of the ill-informed.
Conservatives aren't wrong to say that modern universities have become infected with a dangerous strain of left-wing illiberalism. But they would be wrong to deny the part the Right played in this long, gradual transformation in which they voluntarily abandoned institutional learning to the American left.
The beginning of the story of the book banning is important. It has arisen out of challenges to remove false history (such as the Civil War was about "state's rights") and to add anti-racism to the curriculum. In response, we have this right-wing shit storm about feelings. The end result? A stalemate which is exactly what the right wants. Universities may have become liberal bastions but that is certainly not true with most secondary education. In fact, do conservatives ever consider that Universities are as liberal as they are in part because students learn that much of the conservative bullshit they learn in high school was false or at least misleading? I know that helped develop my politics.
People like Rush Limbaugh spent years trashing science and higher education, all while the Republican party became an unholy alliance between young-earth fundamentalist Christians and climate change deniers. Convinced that the mainstream media's biases justified the construction of a "world as we see it" parallel universe of thought and epistemology, American conservatism slowly surrendered its former status as the intellectual rock of political thought, as the Republican party increasingly relied upon a polity encased in "Conservapedia" reality to win elections. People of learned backgrounds inevitably began to be turned off by the right's antagonistic relationship with basic truth, and Republicans went from being the party of the educated to the party of the ill-informed.
Conservatives aren't wrong to say that modern universities have become infected with a dangerous strain of left-wing illiberalism. But they would be wrong to deny the part the Right played in this long, gradual transformation in which they voluntarily abandoned institutional learning to the American left.