May the modern GOP die quickly

Over the weekend, the New York Times rolled out the printed version of The 1619 Project, a sprawling historical-journalism project devoted to changing the way Americans currently understand and discuss the legacy of slavery in this country. The premise was that slavery was not a passing and painfully corrected mistake, but a foundational feature of all aspects of life in this country—and that therefore the black experience is at the center of the American experience.

[...]

Right-wing intellectual heavyweights such as Newt Gingrich or right-wing intellectual junior middleweights such as Erick Erickson spent the past few days obsessively tweeting or yelling at you from your TV screens to make sure America knew that the New York Times was trying to—well, that part was not entirely clear.

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For white conservatives, accepting that the United States wouldn’t exist without slavery would mean acknowledging that [...] success and prosperity owe more to centuries of exploitation than to God’s blessing of an exceptional people.

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And so their response was equal parts furious and vague, a barrage of arguments that discussing this country’s history is the last thing this country needs: the Times was being divisive, or it was being nihilistic, or it was implementing a secret scheme to make Americans vote against Trump by claiming that racism was an ongoing problem.

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The fact that they took a wide-ranging examination of slavery’s lasting ills as an attack on themselves was a fairly obvious confession.

  Slate

It gets better...

A new report from the Pew Research Center details an ever-growing partisan divide about the core value of colleges and universities, with 59% of Republicans arguing that colleges and universities, as institutions, are having an overall negative effect on the country.

  CNN

Say what??

Fox News, sites like Breitbart or Daily Caller, and Youtubers like Dinesh D'Souza and the anti-college site PragerU repeatedly allege either that colleges are trying to brainwash all students or trying to silence conservative students.

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Many in the Republican party and the right-wing media ecosystem have been attacking specific college professors and liberal students for a long time. But as higher education itself becomes a flashpoint exploited for partisan gain, we impoverish the soul of our nation as we move away from the chief mechanism of building an informed citizenry. We also impoverish young people, as we lose our consensus that publicly supporting the costs of higher education is a common good.

MAGA.

Most recently, Alaska's universities came close to total financial collapse, before a deal could be found that cut only $70 million over the next three years (instead of $136 million all at once).

The conservative attacks are largely myths. Conservative students on campus do sometimes feel marginalized, but there are lots of them, and their grades are just as good as those of liberal students (as found in a major study led by a professor who told me over the phone that he was a life-long Republican). Conservative professors are as likely to thrive as liberal ones, and while outnumbered in some disciplines, this may have more to do with values than discrimination. Humanities professors make a lot less money than you might think. No wonder conservative intellectuals gravitate to economics and the business school. They tend to go where the money is.

And yet the perception of bias, of political correctness run amok, is only intensifying, especially (as Pew found) among older Republicans who presumably have not been in the classroom for a long time.

Knee jerk jerks who've been told lies about why they're falling behind and the evil liberals.

Back in 2011, Louis Menand wrote for The New Yorker that college "exposes future citizens to material that enlightens and empowers them, whatever careers they end up choosing." Higher education isn't the only way to create an informed citizenry, but it's surely one way that works.

And that is the whole problem with college - it informs and helps people learn how to think for themselves. That's the opposite path to take if you want to keep the GOP in power.

It may, of course, be that many Republicans keep attacking colleges because they are afraid of an informed citizenry, afraid that in a war of ideas, they'll lose. If that's the case, maybe instead of attacking learning, they could work on getting better ideas. One place they might find them is ... their local college.

"Desperate acts of defeated men" -- Bobby Kennedy

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.