32. As late as 2008 Debra Thompson, in an article titled "Is Race Political?," has to make the case for seeing race as fundamentally political. She points out that politics is generally understood as concerning "the relationship between the state and society."
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33. Thompson points out that "feminist, Marxist, and critical race theorists have long argued that the superstructures of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy infiltrate and exist beyond the state arena . . . and as such, everything is political."
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34. Unfortunately, this is precisely what APS has historically denied, and the division between political science and political theory since the mid-20th century was constructed precisely to avoid the axiomatic truth that "everything is political."
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35. Thompson also highlights the discipline's "elite-focused and colour-blind approaches to the study of politics." She connects this to the assumed classical liberalism: "The focus on the state suggests a particular colour-blindness inherent in the liberal idea of equality."
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36. Thompson is touching on a key issue in the American political order: the liberal Lockean system written into our Constitution basically only recognizes two actors: the state and the individual. Structures that don't fit these categories are essentially invisible.
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37. It is this colorblind racism, this underlying inability to see individuals as belonging to socially constructed identities and systems—those analyzed by critical theorists—that has made constitutional law incapable of addressing matters like institutional racism.
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38. Sidebar: I am also the editor in law and legal history at Kansas, and some of the same issues I see in political science are replicated in this field as well. But the big difference is that legal *historians* are much more attuned to structural matters like race.
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39. Here's the point: if you want to study gender, sexuality, race, class, and other systemic issues in the American political order, you will likely not enter a political science program but rather a field like American studies, African studies, English, sociology, or history.
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40. APS is structurally and historically designed to explain the white liberal capitalist order, and to do so by using quantitative methods involving survey and statistics. APS largely examines "what is," not "what should be"—and only what is mathematically visible.
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41. It is probably no surprise that, according to the Langbert survey, the more math-heavy fields are more conservative. Political science, computers, physics, mathematics, economics, and engineering all have Dem to GOP ratios under 10:1.pic.twitter.com/Bjw3xBs8ud
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I see the bar for threads these days is quite low.
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