The Cult of Smart: Meritocracy's Tensions

How have politics changed from the  Bill Clinton era to that of  Donald Trump? How have identity politics diverted attention from economic issues, and how have the educated elites derailed activism?

Fredrik deBoer is the author of both fiction and nonfiction works, including The Mind Reels, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.

Greg and Fredrik discuss the American political left and why the left-right dichotomy fails to tell the complete story.  Fredrik provides a critical examination of the internal divisions within the political left, identity politics, and the impact of social media on political engagement. He argues that the left's preoccupation with symbolic issues often undermines its ability to build broad-based coalitions, and suggests a return to class-first politics as a more effective strategy. They also touch on the role of nonprofits, the evolution of meritocracy in education, and the challenges of achieving genuine economic and social justice.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

How social media turned politics into identity performance

45:28: What makes all of this particularly more pernicious in the 21st century is, it's not just now your immediate peer group of people you see face-to-face. You've got to answer to a couple thousand people on social media who know your name and who know where you work, and who will yell at you if you have the, quote-unquote, wrong position. Right? And this is a thing that has happened all over the world of the left, which is, cultural issues began to be foregrounded above economic issues to an extreme extent. There was a development of a very narrow sort of list of approved opinions that you could hold on cultural and social issues. They came to be seen as sort of outside of the realm of politics, and without anyone actually intending for it to happen, what the sort of default young Democrat in politics was shifted over time in an extreme identitarian direction.

When politics becomes a team sport, everyone loses nuance

29:18: I think we are just training generations of young people who do not understand politics as anything other than a sort of blood sport, organized around a very simplistic binary.

The heart of politics is empathy, not ideology

07:23: I have a very long list of disagreements with Bill Clinton, but he was a political genius, and everyone knows, his signature phrase is, I feel your pain. And to me, that's the heart of politics. It's saying, I understand that you need something, and I'm here for you. In that sense, the identity politics on the left in the last 15 years has been about telling large groups of people that they do not have real problems, right? So, if you go show up to a university campus and you start to talk about some of the problems that afflict, for example, the white working class, you'll be told quite directly, oh, to center the white working class, right, is to privilege racism and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It's saying directly to these people, your problems are not real problems. And so, like, that's the perfect example of where you are sacrificing potential allies for a benefit that I just do not even understand.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Socialism
• Marxism
• Progressivism
• Single-Payer Healthcare
• Bill Clinton
• Donald Trump
• Adolph L. Reed Jr.
• Paul Ingrassia
• Occupy Wall Street
• Iron Law of Oligarchy
• Robert Reich
• Barack Obama

Guest Profile:

• FredrikdeBoer.com
• Wikipedia Profile
• Fredrik deBoer Substack

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The Mind Reels
• The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice
• How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

Related UnSILOed episodes:

• Michael Spence - A Deep Dive into Signaling and Market Dynamics

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.