The Dispatch Podcast - How George Floyd Changed American Education | Interview: George Packer

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

George Packer joins Jamie to discuss how a new round of progressive culture in universities stems from the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests. The Agenda: —The competitive atmosphere of getting into elite pre-schools —Rejection of nuance and debate —How to teach history and civics —New progressivism and its roots —Progressive ideologies leading to cancel culture —Culture wars and anti-Zionism Show Notes: —Packer: When the Culture War Comes for the Kids —Packer: “The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. Before I get to my guest today, I just want to make a mention that I read all the comments that I have on the podcast, whether they come from Twitter or in the forum. And there were many after last week's episode with Bill Ayers. Some people very much disliked it. Some people enjoyed the conversation. I hear all sides. I appreciate all sides. And what's wonderful about the dispatch community is everyone articulates their you, I think, in a pretty smart way. And even when I might disagree with what's being written, I find the reasoning and the thought behind it worth my time to think about and contemplate to see if I am doing a good job and the right job. So I appreciate everyone who writes comments. Please keep doing those. My guest today is George Packer. He is a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of many books, including a biography of Richard Holbeck called Our Man, Richard Holbrook,

in the end of the American century. He's also the author of The Unwinding and Inner History of the New America and many other books. The reason I have him on the podcast today for an important conversation, it's actually longer than usual, is because of a piece he wrote in 2019,

when the culture war comes for the kids. It's an incredibly important piece. I've been recommending it for the last five years. And I think it answers a question that I've been asking over and over again of guests on this podcast. How did we get to a point where we have people on campuses across the country that are, in effect, if not just a matter of fact, pro Hamas demonstrators? So we talk about the piece from 2019 and another piece he wrote recently, the campus left occupation that broke higher education. Both pieces, I think, are tied together even though he tells me he didn't think of them as tied together when he wrote them. And I think this interview is maybe one of the most important ones I've done at the Dispatch.

So I hope that you enjoy it, you learn from it, and I welcome your comments about it in the comments section. So without further ado, I give you, Mr. George Packer. George Packer, welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. Nice to be with you, Jamie. Well, I'm super excited for this conversation. Your piece from 2019, when the culture war comes for the kids, I've been giving out for the last five years to people in various places and times to read.

It touches on a theme that I've had on this show. And I think another recent piece might be the connective tissue that I've been looking for, the answer I've been looking for. So I thought maybe we'll get to that, whether there's connective tissue at the end. I'd love just to go through the piece with you. I read both of them again and just go over parts of it and even quote extensively and get your responses to sections.

Maybe I'll even refresh your memory from some of what you wrote five years ago. Yes, I haven't read it in a few years. Well, let's maybe just first by asking. This is a piece you wrote in 2019 when the culture war comes for the kids. You basically talked about your journey trying to find a first private school, then public school in New York City. some of the excesses that you saw both with maybe the meritocracy, but also maybe progressive excesses, I think, is what a lot of people were particularly interested in reading about,

or shocked to read about. And I had similar experiences here in D.C. with my oldest child who's five looking for schools here in D.C. and being in schools. But what compelled you to write the piece in 2019? I had been living the experience of being father of a kid in the New York schools for at that point, maybe nine years. And in New York, it starts really young. Trying to get your kid into preschool is a competitive exercise all by itself or even pre-prischool. And by 2019, I was just, worn out and wondered if there wasn't a better way to treat children in school. And by extension, their parents, because two things were coming at us at the same time, as you said, Jamie. One was the just unbelievably competitive atmosphere. And this is New York. This is not every school district in the country. But in New York, the competitiveness of trying to get into a good,

either private or public school. And our son was in private preschool. And from then on, he's been in public school ever since kindergarten. There's this feeling of if you make a mistake or if you don't get there at 5.30 in the morning or if you don't get on this when he's two years old, you are doing your child an extreme disservice because you might fall very far down into a school that is not going to educate your child. And whether or not that's factually true, that's the mental atmosphere in at least my world, the world of, let's say, professionals. And so the meritocracy feels like you're constantly arriving five minutes late and all the seats have already been taken. That's the anxiety that it induces. And that of course goes all the way through college and

beyond. And it seems almost as if anxiety is a false state that's been ginned up by some interested party, and it's very hard to say exactly who's benefiting. Maybe it's the schools, maybe it's the colleges, maybe it's the parents. The other force coming at us, and this took a little bit longer to grasp, was what I call the new progressivism, which was extremely, strongly strong at our son's elementary school, which was a harbinger of what was coming at a lot of schools. I think we were a bit of a leading edge of whether it's anti-testing, no boys and girls, bathrooms, racial affinity groups, and generally an atmosphere of, you could say, kind of coercive social justice. This was not the The school that we saw when we arrived, because what we saw was a wonderful school that was based on the progressive model, the old progressive model, the John Dewey progressive model, which was the whole child, education by experience and by doing, project-based learning, all those pedagogical cliches. Those fit our son really well. But sometime around 2014, and this is for me the year American character began to change, it became more dogmatic. It became, there was less room for dissent. And I remember the thing that really made me sit up and take notice was when I realized the school not only had an opt out for state

standardized testing, but was pushing hard for parents to not let their children take the state standardized test. They wanted a 100% opt out. And this just rubbed me the wrong way. Like, can't we make up our own minds about this? So between those two, the jaws of meritoporcy and progressivism, it seemed as if some basic common sensical aspects of education and even of childhood were being, had the life squeezed out of them. And by 2019, I was at the Atlantic and found a very receptive institution there for this kind of essay. And so I just poured it all out to the displeasure of some people, but I think for others,

it was revelatory and maybe even spoke for them. Well, that's interesting. You mentioned receptive. Do you think you could have published this elsewhere? I mean, were there a lot of publications in your world that you think would have passed on this? I had convinced myself that, yes, a lot of other places would have looked at it

and seen it as being either, maybe too self-absorpe, which is the occupational hazard of personal essays, or politically pushing in the wrong direction, criticizing the left in a very sensitive way, because I was criticizing it where we lived, literally where we live, in our neighborhood, and in the values and the habits of people in my world. And some of them quietly said to me, yeah, I've seen that too, and it troubles me. And others, I mean, the reaction publicly online was the worst I've ever had in my life, and I've had a few.

I was canceled for a week. I guess that doesn't really mean I was canceled. I was certainly the most hated man on Twitter, at least so it seemed from my little tiny corner of Twitter for about a week. It was a long spell in the doghouse. So I don't, I think the Atlantic was not unique but rare in wanting, not just being willing, but wanting to publish an essay that brought the to light the fact that the culture war was really getting very hot in schools in education. And the next year with COVID, it became all too clear. So this, this was just ahead of the pandemic when schools and culture wars and epidemiology kind of collided in a way that, We now know her children a lot. Well, let's dive in a little bit.

You mentioned 2014 is when you started noticing this. You write in the piece. Around 2014, a new mood germinated in America. At first in a few places, among limited number of people, but growing with amazing rapidity and force, as new things tend to do today. It rose up toward the end of the Obama years and part out of disillusionment with the early promise of his presidency,

out of expectations raised and frustrated, especially among people under 30, which is how most revolutionary surges began. The new mood was progressive, but not hopeful. I think what's interesting is that some people might point to Donald Trump's election as the accelerant to what we're seeing in these schools or might have pointed post-George Floyd this occurred. You're pinning it kind of in the towards the end of the Obama presidency.

I mean, you kind of mentioned disillusionment, but was there a catalyst that you think that pushed these thoughts and, I mean, I guess dogma into a more full view? I think pretty simply it was Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. I think it was Black Lives Matter that caught the imagination and the energy of a whole generation. There had been smaller movements like Occupy Wall Street on the left that for a brief time expressed the deep pessimism of the millennial generation. But 2014, in my mind, was when Black Lives Matter became a nationwide phenomenon and one that had a really large influence on a whole generation.

And it was when writers like Tanahazi Coates began to move from a kind of cautious optimism about America, a kind of left liberalism that was not all that different from Obama's were not a perfect union, but we are always becoming more perfect, that kind of thing, to a real pessimistic, even fatalistic sense that we can never escape our history, that slavery and genocide founded this country and defined it and still define it. and a lot of the new progressivism in journalism and in academia looked back at that history as a lens to understand the present. That all started before Trump. Trump confirmed it for a lot of people, for codes and others, confirmed that, yes, this country is almost congenitally

poisoned and can't be improved or improvement requires some fundamental upheaval and uprooting of institutions and of concepts that liberals have had for a long time. That spoke to a lot of young people who also were feeling like maybe their own lives weren't so hopeful. And so, yeah, Trump accelerated what was already beginning. And 2020 was the, you know, sort of the climax of it. But these things don't have. happen overnight. They take a little while to bubble up. You mentioned there was a part of you writing the piece about the opt-out movement in your child's school of trying to get all parents not to have their children take the standardized

test. And you write, if orthodoxy reduced dissenters to whispering, if the entire weight of public opinion at the school was against the tests, then I thought our son should take them. You were writing, again, in the context of tests, which doesn't seem like a super controversial issue where you shouldn't be able to raise an opposite opinion to it. But that does seem more familiar to us today on all sorts of issues. What is it with this new dogma, if you want to call it that, that just seems not to like to hear debate at all? I ask myself that every day, Jamie, and find that it becomes more and more true.

Well, that particular aspect of it, the Opt-Dop movement, began as a reaction to teaching to the test and schools that just had worked cramming the kids all year long to take standardized tests. And we're not appealing to their imagination or their reason, but rather we're just treating them like Thanksgiving turkeys before the slaughter. And that seemed like a viable critique of tests. But what happened was it then became a critique, not of the way the tests were being taught to, but of the very meaning of testing, which was, quote, harmful or could be harmful to students. It could be, it could demoralize them. It could make them think that that's all that mattered. And then, step further. And this is always about going a step further. It can't settle for remaining at a

kind of qualified critique. It has to become total. The next step was the tests are racist because there are racial gaps in results. Therefore, according to the dogma that says any disparate outcome means the policy is racist in itself. I think once you're there in that, a totalizing concept like that, you really do have a, you are with it or against it. There can be no subtle critique, there can be no qualification, there can be no nuance because if there is, then the whole thing might collapse. And there seems to be both intellectually and emotionally a desire for it to be all one thing. Because I think when something new, comes into the world that sees failure and even sin everywhere, its impetus is to erase the

sin. There is no bargaining with sin. Racism is a sin. We're not going to bargain with it. We're going to eliminate it if we can. We're at least going to call it out. And if someone says, well, I kind of want my son to take the test just because I want to see how he's, doing or maybe even by opting out, you're actually making it easier for some kids to be left behind because we don't know how they're doing. And maybe we're fooling ourselves about their progress, which is actually more of a justice critique. Those are threatening when you have a totalizing dogma. And it's a kind of authoritarian impulse that makes me really uneasy because I've always felt the heart of liberalism is a willingness to argue, to listen, to reason, to look at evidence,

and to see life as a complex thing rather than a simple thing. And that's when I began to feel alienated enough to opt out myself from the new progressivism. You write in the piece, the battleground of the new progressivism is identity. You go on, In politics, identity is appeal to authority, the moral authority of the oppressed. I am what I am, which explains my view and makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts with the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself, often a dead end, a trap from which there's no easy escape and maybe no desire for escape.

Instead of equality, it sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited one, a new moral caste system that ranks people by oppression of their group identity and makes race, which is a dubious and sinister social contract, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency and circumstance. You know, I'm reading that, I wonder,

and maybe you have the answer for it, is, you know, when I grew up in schools, you know, we would learn about Martin Luther King and his dream. And, you know, obviously there's nuances to King and everyone wants to claim Martin Luther King, as, you know, standing by their cause. But, you know, the concept of, you know, content of your character

is more important than the color of your skin. You, you know, we should all be treated equally regardless of our identity. How did that concept seem to now go out the wayside? It seems like that is not a concept that is at the forefront of this new movement. That's been happening for a long time, I think. There's been an argument on the left. forever, maybe, between the reformers and the revolutionaries, between those who think we can improve things within the institutions and the values that have been handed to us and those

who think, no, they're so corrupt, they're so evil that we have to get rid of them. And so there, I don't know that the term structural racism was current in the 60s, but the idea that a colorblind society was an illusion and maybe an illusion that made white people happy and left black people in the trap that they'd been put in. That was there in the 60s. I think what's happened since the 60s

is it kind of went into the academy, that idea, and underwent a kind of metabolizing process of being theorized and getting, acquiring a large apparatus of terminology and philosophical concepts that include post-colonialism and critical race theory, post-structuralism. And that language, which we're now very familiar with, was new. It was not really the way people talked in the 60s, but by the 90s, it was in the academy. And I think what happened around 2014 is it began to leave the academy and to enter this larger society, whether that's government or business or media or education, schools.

And it is impatient with the idea that we can achieve true equality without some kind of root and branch transformation that forces what now is called equity, which is to say not individual equality, not equal opportunity, but equality of outcome between identity groups. That's the only test of whether we're moving toward justice. And that requires the opposite of colorblindness. It requires, as Ibram Kendi says, new discrimination. And that's, that became a kind of fixed idea and a very powerful idea in the new progressivism. And it came from this pessimism about gradual improvement. And I think maybe the end of Obama's presidency, which seemed not to have solved all the problems that maybe some of his most ardent supporters thought he would

solve, especially on racial issues, left young people thinking, well, if that didn't work, We were promised to post-racial America. We clearly don't have one. There's all these viral videos of police shootings of unarmed black men. Well, then we're going to look for something that actually works. And that something is going to be strong medicine. It's out the window with content of your character, because the content of your character really doesn't matter in the larger scheme of a society

that is structurally, fundamentally racist. So all of that was in the air in the 60s, but I think it came back and we're reliving the 60s in many ways, including campus protests right now. It came back in a more refined and kind of academic way that was very persuasive for a lot of people.

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not having to give it up. When you mentioned equity, DEI is the term that corporations have started whole new departments on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I guess I had two questions here. One is, do you think they understand that what that actually means the way you're discussing it the way that Ibrahim Kendi discusses it, or do they just see it as diversity, these corporations? And B, do they adopt these programs to do what exactly you said here, you know, a way to not have to give up your own privileges to create these D.I. programs and, you know, act like you're doing something. Meanwhile, you know, you're still in your corporate suite. You're not, you're not giving up any power in any significant way. I mean, I wrote that maybe six,

months before the George Lloyd protests, which led to this explosion of DEI policies and language across society. I mean, in every little looking cranny, Target and Citibank embraced the new progressivism. And there was a lot of talk of reckoning it. A historic, this was almost like the fourth founding after 1776, 1863, and 1965, or the fourth founding. That was an illusion. It was, I think, a boomlet that was mostly in the professional class that was responding to immense emotion and outrage and was essentially appeasing it and saying, we're with you. And in the end, what did it really, what did it achieve in the way that? of true equality and true justice.

It was, it suited professionals who wanted to feel they were on the right side of history. And they were in every sector of society. And now, I think there's plenty of people who were saying, what did, whatever came of that? How did that actually make our society a better one? It seems to have created a lot of tension and anxiety in those institutions,

without reaching the truly oppressed, those truly suffering from racial or class injustice, because it wasn't about them. It was about professionals. And you could almost say it was about white professionals. So my analysis usually goes toward class as the most fundamental division in our society, the one that people suffer from the most.

and the class divide just keeps growing and I would love to see a social justice movement that was all about that and not about language and concepts and struggle sessions and dinner parties where you confront your own whiteness and why did it go that way? I think because it was always a movement that came out of the professional and upper sort of the elite sectors of our society did not come from the grassroots. Some of the protests did after George Floyd, but they were certainly taken over by well-educated people who were very articulate and knew how to coerce institutions into doing what they wanted done. And so I know I'm sounding a bit cynical about it all, but I really would love to

see someone describe exactly in what way the revolution of 2020 made America a better society. You write in the piece. I asked myself if I was moving to the wrong side of a great moral cause because its tone was too loud because it shook loose what I didn't want to give up. It took me a long time to see that the new progressivism didn't just carry my own politics further than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don't believe democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.

Have you seen people with that type of mindset creep up in even the writing world, the world that you're familiar with, the world of essays, places with, with, with, you know, great, great, you know, heredages or great legacies, having people that now kind of are our basically arguing for what you would call illiberal values. I'd say it's rare to see someone come out and say, I don't believe in free speech. I don't believe in due process in a liberal publication. there's still lip service paid to the liberal values that you were talking about, but I think there are some wonderful journalistic outlets. I'm not going to name them that are uncomfortable with the real exercise of those values.

And when there's a controversy or when there's a very difficult call to make, because you might be alienating the people you think of as your allies, your tribe. It's not always a lot of willingness to take that on. We live beyond anything I knew, even when I wrote that essay in 2019, in a herd society where people follow the path that they think they're supposed to be on after checking to see who else is on it. And this is disappointing because I kind of come up thinking writers, the thing that characterizes us is we, We were supposed to think for ourselves. And if we find that we're at odds with people whose approval we want, that's a hard thing

to face, but you have to face it or else, what are you doing it for? And, you know, people could argue back that they just don't agree with me. And I'm sure that's true. But I also know that there's a good deal of cowardice and of group think. and just a desire not to be the person with the target on you. It's not fun. Who wants to be that person?

And social media makes it a truly ugly experience. I'm not on social media, Jamie. I never done it. I read it to know what the hell is going on out there. And it is a bit addictive, but it's addictive. Yeah, it's like I'm addicted to arsenic. Like, I can't stop sipping arsenic three times a day. It has that feeling.

And I think it hasn't been good for writers, it hasn't been good for free thinking and for the spirit of the individual, which is at the heart of a liberal society. And that's why I see a lot of people who always seem to be fellow liberals of mine saying things, doing things, failing to do things that show that those values actually were illusory or they hardly counted or they were disposable. And this is a dynamic that the left and the right are involved in. each side is seeing the others in liberalism or its extremism or its outrages and digs in even deeper to its own extremism because look at them and it makes it a kind of dangerous place to try to be in that fragile space where you are not simply embracing

the entire buffet of whatever one side of the other is demanding. You're right in the piece. I wish that our son's school would teach him civics. By age 10, he had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, in the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery, but he was never taught about the founding of the republic. He didn't learn the conflicting values and practical compromises are the lifeblood of self-government. He was given no context for the meaning of freedom of expression, no knowledge of the democratic ideas that Trump was trashing or the instruments with which citizens could hold those in power accountable.

Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including one darkening his childhood, but he wasn't taught the principles that had been betrayed. What is it about this new dogma, this new progressivism, that you can't teach about the wonders of the revolution, the things that they brought forward or what made America unique, while also teaching the sins of slavery. Why is nuance and complexity and truth, I would guess? I think it's not really honest if you're not teaching the full truth of it. So I guess troubling to these people who are teaching it and promoting it. And let me add a corollary to that, George. It doesn't seem that they're teaching complexity in other countries. I mean, I'm not, and you see it on the right

and the left sometimes, but, you know, they're not teaching the horrors of what the Soviet Union was doing, I don't think very much either. It does seem to be a, and correct me if you disagree, they don't like America. This is not some, a, a movement that likes America very much. And I guess my question will be, if this is what's being taught to children, can, can a superpower remain great if its children are being taught only the bad parts and that it's only bad? Well, first, I want to say, our son did subsequently study early American history, the founding, et cetera. And so it wasn't as though he was completely deprived of it. By the time he got to middle school and early high school, he was learning that stuff.

And as I wrote in the essay, he also learned it by becoming obsessed with the musical Hamilton, which our whole family listened to endlessly during that year 2016 leading up to the election of Trump. we were hanging on to Hamilton as if that was going to keep the country from falling into the clutches of this monster. I think it's an ideology and a reflex that believes that concession is to give in, as I said earlier, to evil. And if there were slaves in the early Republic and if the constitution acknowledged that, then as the 1619 project said, the declaration, the constitution, the founding documents were, quote, lies. They were false. Not they were betrayed in practice or they were not lived up to by the authors. They were introduced by the authors. But no,

they were, there, there was nothing to be salvaged here. We are defined this way. It's a, I don't know, it may just be something in our Protestant heritage, Jamie, that has a need to see, um, the world in terms of sin and confession and forgiveness and redemption. And that's the sort of the path. I think John McWhorter's book about wokeness describes it as as a religious faith. And I think there's something to it. I try to avoid the word wokeness because I think it's become meaningless. But what I call the new progressivism

has a religious dimension to it, even though it's a secular faith. And it, like any religion that is trying to educate its followers, those complexities, those tricky questions, those. But what about this? Those are threatening. They're threatening to the faith. The faith has to have an answer for them. And it's like in your gut, you really do think this country is the source of so much of the world's evil, whether it's carbon in the atmosphere or colonialism or the arms trade or racism, then that's a very powerful,

tool to analyze everything. It explains everything. And who wants to be the person who's, you know, sort of saying, yes, it's this way, but it's also that way. Or no country is all one thing or another. Or American foreign policy is both a source of great suffering to foreign people and can also be liberating for foreigners. All those things are, there's just not much room for that in our discourse. But George, can I just jump in? I mean, I guess the point, part of the point I was trying to make is, I mean, you mentioned he taught, he learned, your son learned about ancient China, Africa, the Mayans, all have some pretty horrible aspects. All good, all good. I did learn about, yeah, I did learn about that stuff when I was in elementary school. I'm really glad

he did, yeah. I'm not against that. Yeah. I thought you meant all good. I bet he only learned good parts about ancient China in the Mayans in Africa? No, no, I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that. But no, it's good that he learned those things. What he learned about this country was essentially slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, Indian removal, and a bit of Cold War foreign policy. I mean, he learned other things at home.

And he learned other things just by being a curious and interested kid. But there was very little to make him think that American democracy was on the whole a great thing for the world and for this country. And to me, patriotism can be a dangerous weapon, but it's also an absolute necessity if you want to achieve anything across a country as large. diverse is this. You can't end racism. You can't fight climate change. You can't create more equality unless you give people a sense that this country is worth fighting for and has the potential for goodness and that your fellow Americans and you are somehow in it together,

that you owe each other something. All those things are essential for reform. Franklin Roosevelt knew that. Most great reformers in our history knew that. Frederick Dumbliss knew it. Martin Luther King knew it. He waved a promissary note, which is what I'm trying to say. What was revolutionary at the time, slavery was our founding sin, but what was revolutionary was an idea that all men are created equal, even if we didn't live up to it.

And for that to be kind of missed is kind of missed the point of America entirely. Intercreating Equal became the key line that allowed Lincoln to argue against Douglas and to turn the Civil War from simply a fight for the Union to a fight for a new birth of freedom. And without it, even if it was betrayed in practice, what was the Civil War for? It was, you know, for the big industrial north to force the agricultural south back into the union. It's, it had its just cause from the words of the declaration. You need, we need those words. We need something to believe in.

We need something to attach to this country. Any country needs it in order to make it a better place. I would just add that, but no other country had it. which is why it was revolutionary at the time. And what made America unique is that it really was a unique concept, even if not. Exactly. And let me just say one more thing about that, Jamie. The horror of Trump is based on the fact that this country was founded on principles that Trump is betraying. You can't really be against Trump in the way he deserves to be opposed.

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This September, Lisa, 2026 X-E-90 plug-in hybrid from $599 biweekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. I want to go to this line because I think this also will help with the connective tissue to the second essay I want to bring up in a second. This is one final line from your piece. back to the perversions of meritocracy, but the country's politics had changed dramatically during our son's six years of elementary school. Instead of hope pendants around the necks of teachers in one middle school hallway, a picture was posted of a card that said, uh-oh, your privilege is showing. You received this card because your privilege just allowed you to make a comment

that others cannot relate to. Check your privilege. The card had boxes to be marked like a scorecard next to white, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied citizen. Our son struck that school off his potential list. This language is now not uncommon in the education world. A teacher in Saratoga Springs, New York, found a privilege reflection form online with an elaborate method of scoring and administered to high school students, unaware that the worksheet was evidently created by a right-wing internet troll, and awarded Jews 25 points of privilege and doxed Muslims 50.

Why do you think Jews are seen by this ideology as a privileged cast? And I guess it's a corollary to where we're going to one of your next says. Do you think what was being taught and what you wrote about in 2019 that started in 2014 helped produce what we're seeing

on college campuses today, which in my mind, and I don't think this is an exaggeration and please push back, you see pro Hamas basically protests. Some of them are goodhearted, I'm sure, but you have the leadership of these protests unwilling to criticize Hamas. Is that how we got here? I think there's a pretty direct line from 2014 to 2020 to 2024. And to answer the question about Jews, I think the main reason is quite simple. Jews are considered white. White people are oppressors. Non-white people are oppressed.

Jews, therefore, are the oppressors, Palestinians are the oppressed. And that kind of covers over just a tremendous amount of tragic history over the last 100 years that just can't conform to such a ridiculously rigid and wrongheaded idea. But it's the idea that really did animate the George Floyd protests. They were, the proximate cause was a policeman murdering an unarmed black man, but very quickly it developed a kind of ideological framework that talked about whiteness and blackness oppressor and oppressed. And that framework has, I think, been transferred overseas to the Middle East and imposed on the Israeli-Palestadian conflict, leaving out decades and decades of

efforts at peace and wars and complex politics of Israel and the two intifadas and all kinds of things that make you really do wonder who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed here. And does being the oppressed make you good or does it mean you behave badly, which is something that a lot of intelligent people over the centuries have understood that being a victim doesn't necessarily make you virtuous. So that's why we're translating our own American framework. work onto the Middle East where it doesn't fit. And then I think there is a seasoning of anti-Semitism in some of it. Not all, and maybe even not a lot, but it has slid into

anti-Semitism because what began is simply a peace movement for the most part. Obviously, there were pro-Hamas demonstrations within hours of October 7th, but basically a peace movement has become an anti-Zionist movement. That's the common currency now, is to be against Zionism. Zionism is the evil. And it's, for me, been a bit of a nightmare, not nearly as much as it is, say, for a Jewish student on campus or for a Palestinian in Gaza or for an Israeli in a kibbutz. But a nightmare because I thought that the fever was dying a bit and we were returning to a world in which we could see human affairs in more complex terms and talk about them more freely and rationally. And now it feels like the summer of 2020 again and everyone is looking over their shoulder and walking on tiptoe, which is not a, it's not a healthy way to deal. where the problem is fixing is this one.

In April, you wrote a piece called The Campus Left Occupation that broke higher education. I have a few quotes from it, I'd like to read as well. But before I do, out of curiosity, when you wrote it, did you see any connection? Were you thinking at all what you wrote in 2019?

Because it jumps out to me reading pieces back to back that they're so deeply tied together. It's interesting you say that. I did not. What I was thinking about was my own childhood, Jamie. I grew up at Stanford University in the 60s, and my father was a law professor who joined the administration just in time for the student revolution.

And I lived it as a kid, seeing my parents, my father trying to deal with it, being a lightning rod, receiving tremendous criticism from the students. In the end, having a stroke that ended his life, it was the touchdown. event of my childhood. And in, I wrote a book about this called Blood of the Liberals 20-some years ago. And today I had this weird feeling that I am walking in the footsteps that my father walked in and I don't want to end up in the same place. How do I not end up in that place? But I hear myself sounding like him a lot of the time. And when I saw what was happening at Columbia and other universities and the rhetoric and the tactics. It sent me right back to when I was eight years old and sitting at the dinner table kind of worrying about my parents because they

seem so upset all the time. Well, you may not know I had Bill Ayers on last week. So all this is you coming the week after seems a little bit tied together because I think you can speak to this better than, or at least more honestly, that he was. He was, he was my student, if you can believe it. when he was working, yeah, when he was working on his memoir about the weather underground, I taught him at Bennington in their MFA program. So, and we, we got along really well. I liked him. I haven't seen him in a long time, but yeah, we have a weird overlap.

Well, I think it would be important for him to hear this interview. Let me read a quote from this, your April piece. A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the 68 revolt became professors. The German activist Rudy Duchke called this strategy the long march through the institutions, bringing their revisionist thinking back to the university they tried to upend. Our leaders of Columbia takeover return to chair the School of Arts Film Program.

The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next, D.H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the 60s subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, post-colonial studies, and identity politics are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they've become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place and a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity, universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There's nothing to debate. Do you think these protests, but what people are seeing the students at these universities, when they speak about that, to the extent they speak about the protest, because a lot of them refuse to even speak to the media, have kind of devalued the value of some of these Ivy League universities. I mean, it does seem, people in my circle, if you're seeing, you know, I went to Cornell,

but, you know, I'm thinking, I don't want to send my kids to campuses like this. And if this is what they're being taught, and I, you know, I understand the value of going to a place and building to debate it that helped me at Cornell because certainly was not a right of center place. But if this is the type of thought that's being, you know, professors that are teaching students, you know, what is the value of these universities? So you're asking really, which is stronger, the new progressivism or the meritocracy? Because both of those are still incredibly powerful. The meritocracy has not gone away. The desire to, see your kids get every advantage in order to be successes. And by contrast, to not fall out of the professional class and that long fall into the working class, which is a kind of unconscious fear, that's still really strong. So it's a big move to decide I am so disturbed by the orthodoxy that seems have taken hold in the minds of many, not all, many students and teachers

is, would be so bad for my child that I'm going to opt out. I'm going to opt out, not of the standardized test, but of the whole meritocracy. I don't know that that's going to happen. It doesn't start there, I would argue. Doesn't it really start with companies? You know, we've, you know, like him or hate him,

Bill Ackman, for instance, you know, doesn't seem like he's going to go to some of these places to hire people. if more companies start going, you know what? Maybe we'll expand our searches beyond some of these universities because it doesn't look like we're getting the type of student we want anymore, especially before they started bringing back the SATs. Maybe, you know, that was kind of a way to make sure at least you had, you know,

high-scoring people on campus. If companies decide that they're not getting things. I'd be really excited if the IVs stop sending half of their graduates to Wall Street and McKenzie, that for me, that would actually be a really positive thing in our society because that in itself, which is part of the meritocratic stations of the cross,

is a sign of a kind of hollowed-out meritocracy. All of that education is going to what? To making money. And that has become the kind of the default career for the kids who do everything right and get into the right schools. If that gets mixed up a bit, I wouldn't be sorry.

But I really wonder if the Bill Ackmans are going to actually stop recruiting from Princeton. We'll see. Like next year or two years from now, it'll be interesting to see like a survey of the graduating class of 2024 and to find out where they've gone to work. I just think the past,

of an unequal society and economy is so well-worn that it would take more than a springtime of protests to divert people onto another path. I think, I'm again being a bit cynical here, but I think once it's all, once this class has moved on, they are likely to end up in the same places and hired by the same people as their their predecessors. I'd be surprised if that's not the case. The meritocracy, is that why, you know, now that you're saying it, it's interesting, because you mentioned in your previous piece, I don't know if I quoted it, you know, how, actually I did when I was talking about how it felt like you had to be silent about certain things like the opt-out movement. You couldn't really express your view. Is that, you know, the meritocracy, I see that here in D.C.

people sending their kids to the most elite preschool because that's the most elite preschool and as you mentioned the piece, you think that's going to get you all the way up to Harvard. And they're not willing to criticize what might be some crazy things that they're teaching because they don't want to alienate the administrators there who won't write that recommendation to the next school.

Is the meritocracy why people aren't standing up and saying, like, hold on a second here. This seems a little wacky that what you're teaching my child. Yeah, I think so. I think, as you quoted me earlier, announcing your privilege becomes a way to hang on to it. And that's one way it becomes a way to hang on to it by not getting canceled, by not saying something that's going to get you ostracized from that charm free school. And those kids who go to those schools and follow that path upward to the Ivy League, they're kids who know how to do things right and who do.

what they are told is the right thing to do. Some of them obviously are brilliant and free thinkers and so creative and inventive that they just can't be refused by the Ibees. But most of them have just kind of worked hard and been told what they have to do and done it. And if that then becomes, you also have to go to an encampment or you have to chant this slogan or at least you have to avoid criticizing people who are chanting the slogan, then that almost becomes yet another way to make sure that your CV is unblemished. And the meritocracy and progressivism, again, each hand washes the other. They're not at odds. They're not they're not contradictions of each other. And by the way, Jamie, I believe in meritocracy. I think talent should

be reward. I think that a just society is a society in which neither your birth nor corruption is how you achieve. You do it through your talents. Otherwise, where are we? We're in Russia or something. The problem with our meritocracy is it has become corrupt. It has become something passed on from generation to generation with all kinds of advantages bred into it so that it, for someone in the bottom 20% of our socioeconomic ladder to get into an Ivy League school is just as hard now as it was in, you know, 60, 70 years ago before all the efforts that the schools made to diversify. That's what bothers me about meritocracy, not the thing itself, but the fact that we call it that when, in fact, we all know that certain families, certain places, certain

schools have the inside track. In your piece in April, you, you call it. quote a letter from a Columbia student in full. It says, I think the protests do speak to a certain failing on Columbia's part, but it's a failing that's much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies, which have slowly crept into every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience, brave enough to question all of the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in decolonization or what have you, it's genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. After all of this,

one day, the university, the university, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they've been taught to do from the second they walk through the gates as a freshman. I guess it goes back to my last question is, why aren't people, you know, you might call it silent majority in some ways. I think you quote in your first piece we talked about from 2019 that even among minorities, you know, they find, you find polls that they don't, you know, agree with kind of this, this worldview that supposedly is supposed to benefit them. But yet the minority that has this worldview of this dogma, this new progressivism seems

to be winning the day and, you know, shaping the curriculum. and have the power, have the win at their backs. Why, why, why can't the majority stop the minority in this case, the ideological minority from winning? Social media plays a pretty big role. As I said, it's pushed people into herds, and all the incentives are to go for the extreme position and to rouse love and hate rather than the thought.

thought, and also it's because culture is powerful and good deal of our culture. At least the culture, and there's always a danger that we're exaggerating here because we are members of those groups. We swim in those waters of media, universities, cities, and we see it all the time. And so maybe I was accused in my school's piece of grossly exaggerating the effect of progressivism, education because I live in Brooklyn. That was true. I was exaggerating and it was because I live in Brooklyn, but I also was anticipating something that a lot of people then began to see elsewhere because it was going to spread because culture is powerful. And those who control the levers of cultural institutions have extraordinary power. They don't have nearly as much political power

as they would like. And in a way, I think they are handmaidens of MAGA. And MAGA, in a way, needs them. They need MAGA. But MAGA is a more effective political movement. It's taken an entire political party, whereas progressivism has a piece of the Democratic Party. It certainly doesn't have the entire Democratic Party. There's still far more room for centrist, liberals, moderates, et cetera, never Trump conservatives, whereas MAGA is a sort of totalitarian movement that Brooks absolutely no dissent. But they gin each other up. The dynamic requires each of them to play a part.

And so politically, I think it's a disaster because it nourishes MAGA and makes true reform at the creation of a majority for true reform harder and harder, since it's so much with us or against us. And the with us is it such a small extreme of our political spectrum. But in culture, in schools, in universities, ideas are. powerful. And the new progressivism has ideas. I think they're bad ideas, but they have ideas, and that is an advantage over people who just think they're getting through their life, getting, trying to get their kids educated into good jobs. Last quote from your piece,

the muscle of independent thinking and open debate, the ability to earn authority that Daniel Bell described as essential to a university's survival has long since atrophy. So when after October 7th, Hamas attacked on, Hamas' attack on Israel, Jewish students found themselves subjected to the kind of hostile atmosphere that, if directed at another minority group, would have brought down high-level rebukes, online cancellations, and maybe administrative punishments. Can you imagine a pro-life movement being allowed to have an encampment on campus

and making demands of the university and not being swept away within 24 hours? I think we might find out there's now a precedent. that's been set in the spring of 2024 for student politics to essentially coerce universities to make them stop. Some universities went too far too fast. I think Colombia was wrong to send the cops on April 18th or whenever the first shutdown happened. Others are passive and just watch it happen. Others appease their impulses simply to say, what do you want? We'll try to give it to you. The universities are in an impossible position, and the students know that, because as I wrote in that piece, universities really fundamentally depend on rational debate, on argument, on inquiry, on freedom. And once one constituency stops playing that game and says, we're going to take over this part of campus, make us stop, then all the rules are off. And the university asks and decide, are we going to enforce

rules with coercion, with counter coercion. They're being coerced. They're going to counter coerce. If they do that, they're not really acting like universities anymore. But sometimes they have no choice, or at least they don't think they do. And the students are aware that they are pushing them in that direction. It's called escalation as a tactic. It's been incredibly successful for the pro-Palestinian movement. It's brought it worldwide recognition. Why wouldn't an anti-abortion group or a pro-second amendment group see that as an opportunity to make their own position, one that everyone on campus has to think about all the time? I don't think they will because those students are probably keeping their heads down at Ivy League campuses. It might happen at state universities, might happen at community colleges.

It's just, it has set a precedent that, again, goes back to 68 and that is one that universities don't know how to handle because it doesn't have room for debate. Unfortunately, the students don't want to debate. What they want is for the university to do what they say. And that's a kind of either or with us or against us. It is pretty much destructive of the spirit that universities need. That Daniel Bell quote, criticizing Columbia for sending in the cops, he was saying you can't just force legitimacy

on students. You have to earn it. And the way you earn it is by going in and talking to them. But talk seems to be the one thing that universities are no good at anymore. Talk between students of different views, talk within classrooms, talk between faculty and students, faculty and administrators. Instead, everyone is striking a position. taking a stance and forcing others to react to that stance, which is not the same thing as as dialogue. And that's, I think, a long time coming. I think 2024 on campus has been a very long time coming. Let me ask you just a few closing questions. Do you see the tide as turning it all since October? It seems October 7th to me. The problems that were happening that you

described in your 2019 piece and then your April piece, it came to the forefront of people that maybe weren't paying attention and exposed kind of the whole in this ideology as it pertain to Jews. So it kind of exposed that and made some people who might have just been indifferent and not willing to speak up say, hey, something's going on here. And we need, we need to get back to the university that you described, a university where debate is welcome and accepted. I think it's doing that in my own personal experience to some Jewish progressives who are beginning to think that progressivism is hostile to them personal, that it's actually either doesn't care about the suffering of Jews or is actively hostile. And so for some

Jewish Americans, I do think this is a watershed, it's a turning point, whether it becomes a kind of repetition of what happened after the 60s where a whole cohort of Jewish intellectuals became the neo-conservatives who had been leftists and liberals before. Is something like that going to happen again? I don't think it'll happen in the same way because the issues about economics and about crime, et cetera, just don't play in the same way. This is really about Israel, Palestine, and the fate of American Jews. But I do think for many people I know, yeah, this has been a turning point.

Not that they were so diluted before, but that it's just been shocking how a protest movement has become a tool of what feels like hatred, certainly hatred for Zionists. And as we both know, there's a pretty slippery slope from Zionism, from anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism. It's not, it's not always there, but it seems to happen all too often. So, yeah, I think, I think it's people who thought in 2020 that they were on the side of social justice and were saying

the right things. I know of cases of those same people who are saying, how are you able to use a slogan like settler colonialists. It's completely inappropriate here. That slogan might have passed muster in 2020 applied to some different category of people. But now it's a finger pointed at them and how can they not feel antagonized, isolated, threatened by it? My final question is your piece in 2019 was titled, When the Culture War Comes for to kids. Culture wars are often dismissed in a lot of media these days,

oh, this is a culture war issue. Conservatives are obsessed with a culture war issue. It seems from your piece then in the piece we just were discussing, the culture wars are rather important. How do you view culture wars? Do you think it is a minor issue or do you think this is a fundamental issue

to be debated and discussed? I mean, look, race, religion, gender, speech, dialogue, education. These are hugely important, unavoidably important. They're at the heart of the matter, the heart of democracy. So in that sense, culture wars are important and necessary. But the way we fight them, I got to say elites in politics and media stoking them, benefiting from stoking, turning Americans against each other, dividing them in ways that makes it

impossible to solve collective problems, and who suffers? It's the half-nots who suffer. The elites themselves are doing okay. Some of them are actually making a living off the culture wars. This is what I find repellent about the culture wars. Not that these are not things to fight over, but that the way we have embraced them, wallowed in them becomes a way to destroy what's left of the social fabric

and of our common identity as Americans. And so when I use the term culture war these days I have to admit it's pejorative, it's dismissive, doesn't mean I think

the categories themselves are irrelevant. Of course they're hugely relevant. But They have led to a politics that is, it's so destructive. Where is the room for a middle ground or for an open dialogue or for us not to demonize each other while we talk about these things? So it's become really, really difficult. And I worry about that world being the world my kids are being educated into and are growing

up into. I'm doing what I can to give them the tools to avoid being co-opted by it because it wants them. It's coming for them too, as the title of that piece said. George Packard, thank you for joining the Dispatch Podcast. Thanks for having me, James. You know,