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FROM THE NEKROMANTEION: DICK RORTY AND HILLARY CLINTON  ON DIVERSITY 

11/23/2016

2 Comments

 

I thought Dick Rorty was one of the smartest of my colleagues at Princeton.  Now he has proved it – from the grave. His 1998 book Achieving Our Country (Harvard University Press) has suddenly caught on, after Donald Trump and his pals fulfilled what Dick predicted:
 
“At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”
 
I n the Times for November 21 Jennifer Senior tells the story of the reception of Rorty’s 1998 book, then and now. But, of course, Rorty’s predictions only came fully true because of our bizarre Electoral College system; it’s import to remember that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Trump is a minority president much as he may hate the word.
 
But Rorty’s observations raise questions that start in the political realm and reach more deeply into our culture, not least What is a genuinely diverse education?   That question surfaces now, not because  of Trump’s contemptible rants, but because of  the well-intentioned strategy adopted by Hillary Clinton.  
 Hillary, I am convinced, made a bad blunder in accepting the advice of those advisors who were sure that a coalition of women, African Americans, Hispanics and other “identity groups” could assure her election.  Demography would triumph over Trump’s trumpeting of his devotion to the working class.  
 
That strategy didn’t work - not because its emphasis on diversity was rejected by a bunch of bigoted rend-necks. It failed because its brand of diversity was not  inclusive enough. It sent the message, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that she did not really need, or especially want the support of white working class men. They got the message and so did many women of this class.  Many of these men and women voted for Trump, others just stayed home and opened the door to Rorty’s strongman.
Hillary turned out to needed these votes; she needed more diversity, not less.  That simple point, clear in the voting statistics, raises a wider cultural and educational question:  how do we achieve a truly inclusive culture?
 
The answer will not come, I am sure, by rolling back the accomplishments of the past half century, nor by insisting that colleges and universities turn their bacs on affirmative action, or abandon their diverse course offerings that have been developed.  Instead, we need to be sure every student, whatever sociological or demographic group he or she may fall into, experiences a genuinely diverse education, one that opens up the rich experience of cultures beyond the one with which they most readily identify.  That would be a strategy of inclusive diversity. We need t in politics and in education. It’s a winner.
.
 
November  23rd,  2016
 
 
 
 

2 Comments
James tautm link
11/27/2016 01:31:48 pm

Sun, Nov 27, 2016 at 12:09 PM, James H. Tatum <James.H.Tatum@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

Dear Bob,

I began this brief (woof) comment like your correspondents, intending it to be to the point and largely copy-editing. The problem is, your piece is stimulating so much that it induced way more than editorial comments. Reactive--probably reactionary--response follows. Most of it simply letting off steam. But you have to expect that when you write such a provocative and smart essay.


****


A Lot of Class



I think your piece is good and I also think the typos and other minor infelicities need attention, but they are not of much moment. (I do think you don't want "Trump's trumpeting," since when you bad-mouth it weakens what you're saying, narrowing the focus to true believers. Think of Hamlet's Osric.) A similar point, "Nekromanteion" is very close to HP Lovecraft's "Necronomicon," and you don't want to stir up that association. (For them that gets it.)


Typos and other minor errors or points aside, when you mention in passing our "bizarre electoral college system" you touch on a major--maybe the major--problem in the American Constitution's prescription for the electoral process. It certainly account for the outcome of this election, not just the perceived shortcomings in Democratic political strategy.

As you of course know, this system was put in place precisely to keep the awful, ignorant demos from gaining too much power by popular vote. (Think Philadelphia in 1787, as it was put together.) This enduring Constitutional safeguard (safe for the slave-owners, et al.) is the fundamental reason American election strategy and demographics take the peculiar shape they do. It is an Rx for every political movement and as long as it stands no matter how egregious the gap between popular vote and electoral college may be, nothing's going to change easily, if at all. The Democratic Party used to know this and for some reason now does not. Or doesn't know it, amateurs as they were this time, until it was too late.


Another stylistic point but I think perhaps more significant than that, is the rise to orthodox, everyday American political talk of the word "class," as in "working class," which as you duly note applies to women as well as to men. It's not a neologism, of course, but its current usage across the whole political spectrum marks a significant transformation of a social-scientific term into a popular political label. Think of the 1930s movies: of course everyone knew about class, but "class" isn't mentioned because it was an analytical term, largely employed by Marxists, NEVER by politicians and the people who wanted to get them elected. FDR & CO well understood and treated their prospective voters with dignity.


It is offensive to be "classed." I know plenty of people who voted for Trump and they may or may not have been in a "working class" because of how wealthy or poor they were, but the one thing they sure didn't like was to be classed. If you think about it, the person applying such an offensive label is not so far from the biologist sticking a specimen on a board and labeling it by its class (or phylum or whatever). To think of FDR or LBJ prattling on about "class" is unimaginable. In the words of an appropriately non-Eastern or Western Seaboard song, "Don't Fence Me In."


In effect, what you have in the now almost universal American usage of "class" is an annoying--to me, nauseating--appropriation, a loan from the English, who perfected, articulated, and practice to this day a "class system" that rebels me deeply. One of the reasons that the smart, educated Democrats are getting their asses kicked is that they, notice, use the word "class" all the time, especially "middle-" "upper-" "lower"-, and they use it above all in trying to analyze this election. If you hadn't noticed it, to be talked about as a member of a "class" is to begin to feel that you are being analyzed like some lower life-form, by some kind of super biologist, peering at you through a sociological microscope.


The Republican Party and its candidates do not use this word much at all, because their candidates know all about it and they treat "the working class" the way it used to be treated by Democrats from FDR onwards, through JFK and LBJ and beyond, even Clinton (the president, not the spouse). They talk about the Constitution's "people," period. They are simply the electorate, and you don't need to spill your calculating guts on them to win them over to your cause. The New Yorker Trump was raised from the ground up knowing this, the Wannabe New Yorker and Wellesley-Yale-first Lady Senator etc etc Hillary Clinton was not. He effortlessly acted out as a tycoon and enrerpreneur of World CLASS stature, not at all embarrassed to be admired. Hillary

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James Tatum
11/27/2016 01:38:19 pm

MY entire comment was NOT uploaded , so the conclusion follows here:
The Republican Party and its candidates do not use this word, because their candidates know all about it and they treat "the working class" the way it used to be treated by Democrats from FDR onwards, through LBJ and beyond. They talk about the Constitution's "people," period. They are simply the electorate, and you don't need to spill your calculating guts on them to win them over to your cause. The New Yorker Trump was raised from the ground up knowing this, the Wannabe New Yorker and Wellesley-Yale-first Lady Senator etc etc Hillary Clinton was not. He effortlessly acted out as a tycoon and enterpreneur of World CLASS stature, not at all embarrassed to be admired.

For me, the Clintons are the true villains of the piece, not Trump. Their dynastic assertiveness surpasses even the Kennedys, even though the Kennedys were notably more successful in winning offices than the Clintons ever will be. (Naturally they will try a Chelsea candidacy one of these days. Good luck.) The one good thing about Hillary has been how far she got, to be the first woman nominated for president of a major party. We can dream all we want to about what a Hillary Presidency could have been, but the sleaze factor was already high before she even won the nomination.

Enough. This grandis et verbosa epistula is entirely my fault, but it can happen when you read a stimulating piece like yours. I hope you agree it doesn't need circulating!

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