This essay was aimed directly at you as much as anyone. I quoted IK specifically to goad you, so I don't expect you to like it. My takeaway point: No matter how bad the right is, liberal societies also have enemies to the left. "McCarthyism," then and now, isn't the only threat.
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Replying to @DamonLinker
I think part of the problem with the Cold War framing here is that it posits that the things lumped under CRT (basically performative anti-racism) are "left." But in fact they occupy liberal spaces (NY Times, elite universities) & have been criticized by left (Jacobin, Reed etc)
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Replying to @HeerJeet
And yet it is what the “progressive” left increasingly means and how it defines itself here and abroad. You can hold up another vision of the left if you want, but that reality will remain.
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Replying to @DamonLinker @HeerJeet
I should add that, as I say in the column itself, this is an analogy. The “CRT” movement is not communism or a front for a totalitarian dictatorship with atomic weapons. The stakes are quite different in myriad ways. But the ideological factionalism is parallel to some extent.
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Replying to @DamonLinker @HeerJeet
Damon, I generally enjoy your work, and you're absolutely right that there are valid worries about schools (but *not* generally school curricula) being used to present airy progressive propaganda. But I don't see why this means we should respond to lies with concessions. 1/
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There is NOT a nationwide problem with curricula being too "woke" -- there is a nationwide problem with the opposite. The fear tactics being used right now are being aimed at teachers, whereas they should (if anywhere) be aimed at corporations & some school administrators. 2/
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But whether or not one tries to address subtle issues that understandably irritate parents who are not "woke", the idea that children are being taught to hate America is false and risible. Children are being taught a more complete understanding of history, by and large. 3/
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If a more complete understanding of history really creates a problem for certain people on the right, it's not the duty of a centrist like you to cater to their objections.
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Replying to @Daniel_Propson @HeerJeet
Thanks for this Daniel. But what your evidence that there's a "nationwide problem" of "the opposite"? My own kids are already taught about slavery (and Native Americans) in every year of school, with plenty of other stuff hardly touched on. Meanwhile, ....
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... thousands of classrooms are now using 1619 Proj materials when that package explicitly reframes American history with slavery at its "very center." Why? Who asked parents if they want this to happen? What justifies that obsessive focus on this single dimension of the Am Exp?
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I honestly don't think it's outrageous to see slavery (and abolition & legacy) at center of American story. (I have other problems with 1619). I'd teach my kids a comparable story about Canada with Indigenous dispossession at center.
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Replying to @HeerJeet @DamonLinker
I would teach both the traditional story and the 1619 Project story, give students a variety of primary materials, and have them work it out for themselves. The truth is very rarely what a huge mass of the population (whichever mass you pick) wants you to believe.
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