Whatever you do today, make time for this blockbuster Atlantic essay by Tyler Austin Harper, titled “Confessions Of A Token Black Professor.” It is absolute dynamite, from the first sentence to the last. Douthat said it will be remembered as a defining essay of our time. He’s right.
A bit of background: Tyler is a real socialist, but he’s definitely anti-woke. We met a couple of summers ago as invited guests at some Soros confab in Vienna. Everybody in the room was a conventional liberal, except for Tyler and me. We came at the libs from both sides, and ended up going to dinner that night, just the two of us. What a great evening it was! We discovered that even though he is a black socialist and I’m a white conservative, we had a lot in common. We had both grown up in Flyover Country, and had the same suspicions of the mindset of power elites. And he’s just a nice, everyday guy who loves fishing.
In his *Atlantic *piece, which could not have been more perfectly timed, given the Arday scandal, Tyler talks about how he came to be hired at Bates, a pricey liberal arts college in Maine. He arrived in 2020, thinking that conservative complaints about the wokeness of academia were overstated. And then reality hit him upside the head like a cast iron skillet. The first blow came right after he and his wife moved to Lewiston, Maine, where Bates sits like a well-manicured oasis within a declining postindustrial swamp. “Ava” is the name he gives his then-neighbor, who is also black, and who was a DEI administrator at Bates:
As I got to know Ava, I was surprised to discover that she viewed central Maine as a Stephen King–esque hell, a place where ancient prejudices and violence lay just beneath the friendly college-town facade. She regaled my wife and me with stories of alleged racial offenses, both major and minor, and generally made it clear that she thought Lewiston—an island of diversity in an otherwise famously homogenous, if not notably reactionary, state—was a hub of white supremacy. One evening, Ava confessed to me that when she drove through town and spied the local “crackers” sitting on their porches (not unlike the very porch we were sitting on), she sometimes thought to herself that these townies would probably like to kill her.
I didn’t know what to make of Ava’s views. I won’t pretend that my sensibilities were inflamed by the word
cracker, but the epithet also didn’t seem like one that a college administrator should be using—especially at a school that admits a not-insignificant number of white, working-class Mainers. I also had a difficult time taking seriously the idea that I had moved to a place with would-be Klansmen around every corner. I grew up outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—another deindustrialized, permanently revitalizing urban center—and Lewiston felt familiar to me. The people I met were nice, hardworking; they minded their own business. I don’t think it ever occurred to Ava that I could have come from a similar place and similar people.
Tyler is a real socialist, which means he focuses on the material aspects of political economy. When all the Social Justice Warriors in the Bates administration tried to quash a unionization effort by the college’s employees, that set him off:
All of this social-justice rhetoric also felt wildly hypocritical. The same October day that the dean promised to abolish “retardants to progress”—including classism—adjunct faculty and staff announced that they were starting a union drive, citing “low pay, and poor working conditions at the college.” The union was intended to be “wall-to-wall,” meaning that it would include not just non-tenure-track faculty but also people working in facilities, the dining hall, and other nonacademic roles on campus. The administration’s skulduggery started almost immediately.
Just over a week after the unionization push became public, the student newspaper took down an article about it from its website when a college spokesperson requested that it do so, citing inaccuracies. (The student journalists
[denied being pressured by the college to remove the article]and said that they wanted to ensure that it was accurate.) Shortly thereafter, a new version of the story appeared with talking points and edits suggested by said spokesperson. The college declared that it would not remain neutral during the unionization drive, and by November, Bates had hired the same consulting firm that was helping Amazon crush labor organizing on Staten Island.I began to develop a case of political vertigo. 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 “Decolonization and Liberation”–themed MLK Day celebration meant to honor a civil-rights leader who had been assassinated while supporting sanitation workers agitating for basic labor rights. Meanwhile, the college was paying ungodly sums to corporate mercenaries to ensure that it could continue exploiting its most vulnerable employees. But if administrators felt the least bit sheepish about their hypocrisy, they didn’t show it.
Starting to see how Jason Arday happened yet? The ruling-class elites — most of them white liberals — are caught up in an ideological fantasy in which their unjust and anti-white racist beliefs have lasting impacts upon the lives of real people. Never mind the deserving white scholars never given a shot at a job; after seeing how the DEI sausage was made on faculty hires, Tyler talks about how their racism made him start wondering who among his black colleagues at Bates were incompetents hired only because they were black.
Key graf:
I never stopped believing in affirmative action in principle, but I slowly stopped believing in it in practice. I’d understood the spirit of affirmative action to be about recognizing that people from historically underrepresented groups often face additional barriers, about affirming that talented minorities who may be less connected and superficially less refined can nonetheless rise to the occasion if given the opportunity. It seemed to me that the Bates administration’s 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. In short, I came to see Bates College, self-styled beacon of progress, as an institution that was deeply, incorrigibly racist.
Read the whole thing (it’s a gift link, so you should be able to). It’s one of the most important things to be published this year.
Yesterday I wrote in this space about how the Arday scandal gives me more sympathy for the deeply un-conservative “tear it all down” sentiment among Zoomercons. You wonder how on earth institutions as profoundly (intellectually) corrupt at Cambridge and Bates can be reformed. They didn’t become this way overnight, but arrived at this nadir as the result of the Left’s Gramscian “march through the institutions.” Well, now they’ve gotten what they wanted. There are relatively few conservative professors on campuses, and, it seems from reading Tyler’s piece, relatively few actual liberals, or even socialists who oppose DEI on grounds of intellectual integrity and justice. Those who still exist have in many cases had to learn to keep their mouths shut to avoid being set upon by the mob.
I’m not an academic, so I have no idea how reform should be carried out, or even if it’s possible. One thing we can do is stop sending our children to DEI madrassas like Bates (where a single undergraduate year costs $95,000). What kind of education can happen at a place so hysterically compromised by woke ideology? Most state public universities, I’d wager, are pretty liberal, but I’d bet you’d have a far better chance of getting a more balanced and legitimate education there, and at least you wouldn’t be going deeply into debt to have your mind wrecked by Ibram Kendi Thought.
If wealthy Americans who donate generously to their now-woke alma maters would redirect their donations to start-ups like Ralston College and the University of Austin, or to established colleges that are bastions of old-fashioned excellence, contra wokeness (e.g., Hillsdale), things might stand a chance of reforming. Problem is, this wokeness thing has been an unaddressed problem in academia for so long that one wonders how many younger academics there are whose minds have not been pulverized by ideology. Do any of you academics who read this newsletter care to hazard a guess?
I took the image above from ▶this podcast TAH did with Yascha Mounk; it’s billed as TAH giving his ideas for how to fix academia. Gotta listen to it later.
Harper reveals as an insider how academia rotted from within because of race-obsessed identity politics. Evan Barker does the same thing regarding the Democratic Party.
I’m talking about Barker’s much-discussed new book, * Nothing Left: Confessions Of A Democratic Party Operative*. I read it in a single sitting yesterday — it’s a real page-turner for someone like me. I won’t say a lot about it here right now, because it has inspired an idea for a
Barker was a professional Democratic Party fundraiser, before she exited the party in disgust. In her introduction, she writes:
I’ve worked across the spectrum of Democratic politics on and off since 2008. For the last five years of my time as a Democrat, I built my name as a ruthless fundraiser who taught progressive politicians and organizations how to raise money. I wasn’t just an eyewitness to the Left’s takeover of the party; I was a live player who helped progressive insurgents infiltrate from within. Many of the stories in this book Democratic staffers would be embarrassed to admit out loud, but all of them know it’s true. It’s time someone said it.
As a disclaimer: This book is not a piece of propaganda on behalf of the Republican Party. I did not leave one path of partisanship to join another. My story is at times absurd, sometimes heartbreaking, but, most importantly, it is fair and true. It is the story of how the Democrats fell out of touch with ordinary America—and how the Left lost me.
In this book, I am going to break every single rule and write as if everyone I know was dead—because, in some ways, they are.
Barker grew up working class in the Midwest, in what we used to call a “broken family.” She got involved in progressive politics because she was born with an incurable genetic condition that affects her lungs, and could kill her. She needed health care. Universal health care — or at least better health care for all — became her driving passion. And then she was taken with Bernie Sanders, and went professional.
She found out she was really good at raising money from donors. One of the pleasures of this book — if “pleasures” is the right word — is Barker’s discussions of how the sausage really gets made in American campaigns. This could have been boring, but Barker tells it in a lean, straightforward way that almost makes you feel sorry for members of Congress. You might think you’re going to Washington to Change The World, but you and your staff are going to be forced to raise money all the time.
And this is a big part of Barker’s tale of how the Democratic Party lost her. She reveals a party that has been ideologically captured by its wealthy donor class and its identity-politics-obsessed activists. Because raising money is absolutely vital to the process, the people who give lots of money have de facto control over the party. And because among the Democrats, those donors align with the young, ultra-woke activists, people like Barker — a progressive (note: not a liberal) whose left-wing passions come from material concerns — get pushed out. I mean, she became a Democrat, and indeed a progressive, because she wanted to make life better for the working class, like the family she comes from. But she realized, eventually, that the Democrats hate people like her and her family.
Early in her process of disillusionment, Barker, who worked her butt off raising funds for progressive Congressional primary candidates, saw how the Washington party sabotaged Bernie Sanders-aligned candidates.
That was the night I experienced my first brutal beating from the Democratic machine, getting a true taste of what the establishment will do to fight against dissenting voices. The experience made me bitter and rageful against the mainstream party, and their desire to stamp down and control candidates who don’t do what they tell them to. Now I understood why progressives had such disdain for the establishment. They felt like all their hard work to turn out grassroots support was being actively suppressed by shadowy figures who threw money at races and recruited empty candidates.
I had been skeptical of the stories going around progressive circles that Washington Democratic insiders had sabotaged Bernie for Hillary’s sake. Not any more.
Barker was thrilled by the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez … until she paid her first visit to the progressive poster girl’s Bronx headquarters:
That day in AOC’s office, I saw a bunch of crumpled-up American flag stickers at the bottom of a trash can. When no one was looking, I scooped them out and put them into my backpack. To be honest, I felt a pang of anger seeing them there. I decided I’d take them to Charles’s two children, who lived in Virginia.
Charles was her brother, a Navy man who died in a ship accident while serving. After his death, she writes, “I became deeply patriotic.” Seeing these NYC socialists throwing away American flag images pissed Barker off.
The scales gradually began to fall from her eyes:
It was becoming clearer that most of the other people I met in politics, who had coveted jobs working for prestigious DC-based organizations, came from a similar background. They were usually from upper-middle-class or wealthy families, typically coastal, and lived in power cities like DC or New York. Most of them had gone to private school; many of them went on to the Ivy League. Sometimes their parents led NGOs and other political-adjacent projects. Often their parents were donors themselves. If they weren’t involved in politics through work or donating, then their parents were usually professors or lawyers. I was a rare bird.
Barker writes about how the party workers of her generation (she’s now 33) were obsessed with guilt over their “privilege.” But Barker’s mom and grandmom lived together in a trailer to save money. She didn’t grow up with privilege, or the self-hatred that obsesses most white leftists involved in Democratic politics:
I felt bad when any fellow human was suffering or had an injustice done to them, but I didn’t view life through a lens of “race”; instead, I viewed things as simply right or wrong. At this point, I suppressed these thoughts, but later, I felt great resentment toward peopl…
