Campus Reform’s coverage of post-election therapy sessions, canceled classes, and public diatribes do nothing to dissuade the impression that professors don’t really teach anymore. Yes, there are classes, but the confluence of grade inflation, lower academic standards, and activist scholarship has gutted higher education’s value.
No wonder that students are struggling to cope with a reality that their inward facing and ideologically driven professors have left them unequipped to understand. Contrary to the far-left’s narrative that all human interactions can be reduced to the false oppressor-oppressed binary, it has never been white versus everyone else, or even straight versus everyone else.
Societies, elections, and individuals are far more complicated than that.
Elections, politics, and social relations change over time, sometimes transforming rapidly and at other times mutating at a gradual pace. “Change come fast and change come slow but change come,” the Broadway musical Caroline, or Change states. Mark Twain understood this process, stating that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
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Good teachers develop students’ critical thinking skills and cultural literacy to recognize these rhyming patterns, and to help them see that not every political defeat is necessarily some unprecedented catastrophe.
Election night confirmed a trend that was occurring, but too few people were prepared (rationally or emotionally) to accept: that American society is living through our own version of Victorian politics.
Victorian politics was – for those students in the back using class time to plot their next social justice protest – the political system and debates in the United Kingdom between 1837 and 1901 during the reign of Queen Victoria.
At its core, Victorian politics was a conflict between two understandings of history and culture.
Liberals believed in a whiggish interpretation of history – that progress was the inevitable force driving societies to invariably change for the better. Conservatives recognized that the Industrial Revolution was changing everything, but believed that traditional social institutions and relations protected people from harmful changes that happen as societies evolve.
For the last few election cycles, Democrats have acted as hyper-sensitive Victorian liberals who assumed that “demographics are destiny.” The Latinos, young Black men, and Gen Z voters who shifted to Trump on Tuesday night proved that theory wrong.
Meanwhile, Republicans have formed a multiracial working-class coalition that rejects elite coastal social policies and virtue signaling. These voters understand that saying “Latinx” neither decreases the cost of butter nor respects a minority population’s culture.
On Tuesday, working-class Americans voted for the traditional social relations and dynamics that give them dignity and respect in capitalist societies – a respect that the overeducated left does not afford them when they do not vote the “correct way.”
Though racism and misogyny do exist in America, it is the intellectually lazy choice to blame Kamala Harris’s loss on those forces. But that is the default reaction of so many academics who are smart enough to know better.
Victorian politics were an existential debate about how society should be organized and go forward through significant historical changes. American politics feel existential now because we are facing the same set of questions as a new wave of technological innovation upends what we have been accustomed to.
The Victorian brand of liberalism and conservatism is playing out in 21st century America as our debates about culture and democracy rhyme with those same fights that took place in the 1800s. AI and X are the new automation and railroad. But our country does not see it that way because too few people can see what’s happening.
Critical thinking skills are necessary because we need them to abstract the events we see around us and ask: What is going on here? Without that ability, we are reducing to reacting emotionally to disagreeable things and slapping false labels on them.
We need teachers to show us how to make sense of things, but we have not had good teachers on college campuses for quite a while.
The activists on college campuses carrying professor titles have less vocational desire to teach than they have ideological zeal for social action. They resemble the intellectual leaders that communist dictator Vladimir Lenin considered necessary to corral the masses and revolt more than the disinterested mentors our nation needs.
Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
