At its core, the Woke are building a movement that subverts the Left and renders it impotent in the face of its very real theocratic and fascist enemies. It sets male against female, straight and cis-gendered against queer, Black against white, and the working class against the intelligentsia. It debases science with various offshoots of the meaningless pseudo-science known as “critical theory” – a field so rigorous that one of its leading journals published a (fabricated) paper that purported to chronicle endemic rape culture…at a dog park.[1] Above all, however, the Woke teach young and idealistic students that they should seek refuge in “safe places” rather than learn how to overcome their fears…and their enemies.
It is almost as if our enemies invented this thing.
[1] Lindsay, James, Peter Boghassian, and Helen Pluckrose. “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.” Areo, 10 February 2018.
This is from Jonathan Lipow, Public Policy for Progressives, 2023.
Jonathan is a professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School. He’s in a different part of the university than the one I was in but we interacted as colleagues for many years.
Jonathan is a progressive and he wants to talk to other progressives who he thinks, correctly, need to hear his economic message. Jonathan and I don’t agree on everything, of course. Remember that he’s a progressive. But we agree on a number of things.
In the next week or so, I’ll have a few more posts about content in his book.
Here’s one more excerpt, with my brief commentary, for now:
Yet, as we shall see, logic and evidence strongly suggest that some policies currently popular among American leftists are indeed literally ridiculous, such as opposition to charter schools and nuclear energy. Meanwhile, other policies widely advocated by progressives – such as a $15 minimum wage – are not silly, but large bodies of evidence suggest that they are ineffective and essentially a waste of time. [DRH note: I wish they were just a waste of time rather than a policy that makes it more difficult for young unskilled workers to get on the first rung of the economic ladder.] On the other hand, readers might be pleased to know that progressives’ instinctual support for universal health insurance [DRH note: hmmm] and liberal immigration policies [DRH note: yes] are well supported by both logic and evidence.
More to follow.
Postscript: Here’s a post I did in 2016 about a previous book by Jonathan in which he said nice things about me: he did so to argue that my libertarian views wouldn’t work in the world nearly as well as I thought they would.
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