Fredrik deBoer

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik deBoer presents ideas that many on the left have thought in one form or another but have not been able to put into a coherent whole. deBoer forms them into a whole that is somewhat coherent but at times seems to wander a bit.

What I think some careless readers might read into the text is a call to ignore or not touch upon various aspects of identity politics. Some might even try to correct one historical wrong (the silencing or at least de-centering of many voices) by not wanting to hear good ideas from a white male. I fully understand that inclination, but a better approach is listening and gaining insight from all voices, even when some of what we glean may not have been what they intended, such as unintended or overlooked privilege from a writer, or even a reader (such as a white woman who might minimize her white privilege in posturing for other groups). What I understood here is that if we understand that using class as an additional identity, even perhaps the unifying identity, we can lift more people than if we stubbornly stick to only one of our identities. So we don't ignore race or gender, we don't pretend to be colorblind. Instead, we bring people together under a larger umbrella that will benefit all of our identities, all while demonstrating how doing so will benefit specific identities.

Even with the analyses and suggestions offered here, no single book and no group of suggestions focusing on one area will solve everything we are facing. Gal Beckerman, in The Quiet Before, suggests that space for genuine discussion, debate, and argument is largely what is missing from our current social justice movements. Citing movements from the past, we are shown how small groups might wrestle with ideas, formulate and reformulate arguments before a movement might even get started. This can't easily be done in a large, public, mostly open space because, as social media has demonstrated, it deteriorates into name-calling, all-or-nothing arguments, and splintering of groups when they could have worked together toward a solution rather than a slogan.

One of the hardest things for me in the past has been having to always vote for a party that is only partially in alignment with my ideals and have no interest in working to make big changes. But to make "statement" votes is like hollering into the abyss, it does nothing. Statement votes that put Trump in office caused many people their lives. If we believe, and I do, that we need a multi-party system, then start locally where you might have a few wins, then keep growing until the national candidate will have a chance of winning. In a de facto two-party system, casting a national vote for a third party is supporting the major party that is furthest away from where you believe. This is true on the left and the right, but in our current environment it is the left that is acting like a petulant child and letting the right maintain power while we whine. As deBoer makes clear, if we keep letting the right win because we are playing word games rather than keeping power away from those most likely to abuse it, we are to blame for what is happening.

Don't hold my views and takeaways against the book, some of my views align, some don't, and they all come from my own life experiences and activism. You may well come away with different ideas, which is what we need, more ideas and we need to share them, not shut them down because a word might have been uttered that we can then use as a pedestal on which to pose.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (altro)

Basically, I liked the book a lot. Schools will be a mess until this kind of thinking is taken seriously. The author is a Marxist, I’m not, but there are great ideas here that everyone who cares about education should read and ponder.

(If you’re prejudiced about marxists, rest assured that this one is smart, humane, and well educated about the genetics of intelligence - maybe not what you expected?)

This is a better review than I could write, by Andrew Sullivan who is certainly no marxist:

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-logic-of-bell-curve-leftism… (altro)

I was planning to write a comprehensive critique of Mr. DeBoer's work, but coincidently he published an essay a few days ago railing, correctly, against twitter-style reviews of complex books, so I'll give him a laugh and make a few comments anyway.
Mr. DeBoer, a self-described proud Marxist, sounds more like a classical liberal with his thesis condemning the existing education system. His arguments are sound, as his is writing (even though I disagree with most of his leanings), but they all emanate from a fallacy - that our capitalist system is inherently flawed due to its societal pressure to succeed - and that education is the route to this success. He believe moving toward a classical socialist society would cure many of these ills - a naive view that reminds me of Churchill's famous quote, "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
He is correct that intelligence has a genetic component (see Charles Murray, The Bell Curve), and gives a nod to environmental factors which can either accelerate or slow a child's intellectual development, but complete ignores the effect of culture on intellect. One need only to look at 18th century Scotland or eastern european Jewry in the US since the 1880's to realize how much a society's focus on intellectual improvement can move a civilization forward.
I agree with him that college is not for everyone, as well as his realization that some topics just don't resonate with a particular person is not cause for alarm (calculus, for example). He should study a movement called giftedness, which believes in the unique abilities that resonate within each individual, Identifying the types of activities that each individual responds to and developing those talents.… (altro)

This appears to be a book about our education system, and mainly it is. But I purchased it for the intra-left political argument that runs through several chapters and culminates in the seventh, entitled "Before the Veil of Ignorance." There you are there invited to enter the leftwing holy of holies, to open up the political-philosophical ark of the covenant, and gaze on a radical egalitarianism that will melt your face off.

Accidents of birth mostly explain smarts, and smarts tend to afford a person greater life opportunities. To assess whether this kind of inequality is just, we can consider a basic questions like: is it fair for a person to have a lower income just because they were exposed to lead or drugs in utero? If it is not, and you generalize the point to cover other accidents of birth and circumstance, many of the alleged problems with the education system are revealed to actually be symptoms of a deeply unjust economic system.… (altro)