I also find it interesting how this rhetoric is now so common among people who have absolutely zero public profile. Not to get all my-uncle-at-Thanksgiving, but my aunt was recently complaining about all the things she's not "allowed" to say. I pushed back a little on what she meant by that - she owns her own business, she's not online at all, her social circle is pretty aligned with her politically. Who exactly is not allowing her to say things? Basically what she conceded she means is her kids get mad at her (and I should be clear, they still have a close relationship and see her often). But there's this broader language out there about cancellation that allows her to put an age-old phenomenon of kids disagreeing with their parents politically in this language of persecution and fear.
I am not a psychologist so take this with a grain of salt, but grievance politics seem pretty seductive regardless of political affiliation. People seem to sleep better at night thinking they're targets than to think they do any targeting themselves.
100%. I see it in all kinds of areas of life too. People like to complain that their lives/jobs/relationships/etc. are all awful, as if it's some kind of competition of badness. When I hang out in my social circle, it's almost like everyone is working extremely hard to prove that THEIR job is the one that sucks the most or that THEIR struggle is the greatest. And this is amongst incredibly successful young professionals (competing or achieving partner at large law firms, etc.) who are actively choosing to have these jobs that require all these hours, and whose resumes mean that they could incredibly easily find other jobs that don't come with all downsides that they're currently competing to prove are so oppressive. I just find it bizarre how people in America in 2023 can spend so much time acting like life is so terrible and struggle so mightily to recognize that we're living at inarguably the greatest time to exist in the history of humanity. It's an odd quirk of human psychology.
My facebook feed is full of college acquaintances with two working parents with six figure jobs, massive exurban houses, and one kid complaining about how torturous and awful being a parent is. Its wild watching people who have by an metric "won" the American Dream publicly beg for pity.
You couldn't get me to publicly complain about my kids at gunpoint.
And then people wonder why so many women want to forego having kids! If you give the impression that having kids is a big life-ruining bummer, then you don’t get to be surprised Pikachu when the general reaction is “not for me, thanks!”
I’m childfree, but I chose to be childfree long before social media was a gleam in Zuck’s eye, and for personal reasons. I don’t get people who actually plan to have kids, and want to have kids, and then complain that they are miserable because they got what they wanted. (Sometimes it’s because the child is difficult or they have a spouse who is not helpful, but other times I think they just like to complain.)
I wonder how the kids feel knowing that they are a millstone around their parents’ necks? It can’t be good for the ol’ self esteem.
Absolutely. My wife and I had our first kid early relative to our social cohort of college educated urban libs, so I luckily missed seeing all that when we decided to start trying, otherwise it might have scared me off of it for a while!
And the bummer is that you can't really counter those posts without coming across like an asshole. If you talk about how great having kids is, it gets perceived as bragging to people who struggle with infertility, or a value judgement against childfree people, or you come off like that freak "pro-natalist" couple that have invaded my twitter feed.
I wish there was a way to tell people that contrary to the popular posts you may see about "mommy needs more wine because my uncontrollable little shits have ruined my life", actually having kids is pretty great if it's something you may want to do, especially if you're in a double income, high-ish earning and stable household.
I think having money and stability - as well as both partners being “all in” - are important to having a happy family. Not in a “the poors should not have kids” sense but “when you are exhausted, it can make all the difference to be able to get DoorDash rather than have to cook from scratch” or “Being able to pay for a dog walker means we can keep our dog rather than rehome him” sense. Being able to throw at least some money at problems helps. As does knowing you can afford to pay for a decent daycare rather than some unlicensed under-the-table one. And the stable relationship goes without saying.
A lot of the instances where mommy really DOES need more wine because she truly IS miserable come from some combination of threadbare finances, an absent or unsupportive partner, no family or other outside help (aka “village”) whatsoever, not treating mental health issues before having that kid, and, unfortunately, having a very high-needs child.
The clear majority of child-related posts that I see are from people showing off how cute their kids are, or describing cute things they said or did. Only a little bit about complaining. That includes a lot of professionals, but not all. I guess we're just in different subcultures.
It's the modern American version of the hair shirt. Your suffering sanctifies you, justifies your current rewards, and ensures your future entrance into the holy kingdom.
if only we added Nietszsche to the high school curriculum, normies could reject slave morality and channel their inner ubermensh. your mileage may vary.
For sure. Everyone is constantly looking for reasons why they good and valuable. Left, right and everything in between. Grievance politics signals all your problems are external, not internal.
I think on the right especially, there is a massive reluctance to face up to policy failures like the Bush Doctrine, wholesale opposition to Obamacare, over reliance on supply side ideology. Politicians on the right for the most part don’t want to change their actual policy positions, so focusing on cancel culture and grievance politics becomes appealing. Its not failed policy, its your domestic political partners ruining everything. What is more problematic is that in our free society, there is precious little acceptable use of government power to dominate domestic opponents or force changes in culture. So once right wingers win on culture war campaigns, their base expects them to then dominate factions within the USA. And we get things like Jan 6 and retribution against Disney for legitimate policy dissent
A lot of Boomers and older people in general think that their ideas should be given great deference by younger people. A lot of younger people disagree. It doesn't help the Boomer case that they are quite wealthy and yet seem (as an aggregate) to be miserly and ungracious towards their own children.
I’m not sure how to assess that statement in the interpersonal sense, but it is true that Boomers (on aggregate) have consistently voted for baskets of policy preferences that enhanced their own wealth while leaving their children worse off (capital gains and income tax cuts, erroneously austere response to 2008 financial crisis, defunding public universities, NIMBY opposition to home and transit construction, infrastructure underinvestment, refusing to use state power to bring healthcare costs to heel, dilatory response to rising CO2 emissions, etc).
My guess is that the average Boomer parent is reasonably generous toward their children in the ordinary interpersonal sense but voted for policies that were bad for their material interests without fully understanding that that’s what they were doing.
There were no referenda on these in which Boomers could state their explicit preference, so we can't say for sure that Boomers support capital gains and income tax cuts etc.
What we do know is that the Boomer generation voted almost 50/50 Biden vs Trump (maybe a tad bit more for Trump), so when we claim things like "Boomers support X" we're at most about half right, because half of Boomers likely support "not X."
Younger generations tend to identify more as "independent" than older ones, though I really have no idea what that means. Putting the independents aside, we see these breakdowns for %R/%D (with % independent in parentheses):
Gen X: 30%/27% (44%)
Boomer: 35%/32% (33%)
Silent: 39%/35% (26%)
In terms of actual party identification, there's not really a significant difference among these generations, basically a three percentage point advantage to the Republicans. Millenials and Gen Z do tilt more Democratic though (yay!) but are 52% "independent."
I suspect the Boomers were just as Democratic/liberal as the Millenials/Gen Z when they were that age. Getting somewhat more conservative when you get older, though, is not really a feature of the Boomer generation per se.
I was referring to an interpersonal sense. I see what you mean in the aggregate, but a) pinning all of that on Boomers feels a bit overly simplistic, and b) employing the phrase "miserly and ungracious" in a political sense feels so tangential as to be functionally meaningless. That's just not how people think about politics.
Re: point b-- I find your response here interesting, because it feels perfectly natural to me to think about politics in those terms. (Indeed, I would predict that a Likert personality scale measuring general miserliness and ungraciousness-- especially toward those outside one's immediate ingroup-- would strongly correlate with preferences for the policies I listed above. Indeed dark triad personality trait assessments and low honesty-humility factor scores, which capture similar psychometric variables, have been found to pretty strongly correlate with conservative beliefs.)
Genuinely curious about where that difference in intuitions comes from.
(Also, researchers found these assessments way back in 2010. Would suspect that the rise of Trump-- who practices a sort of identity politics for assholes-- just further intensified the relevant set of correlations. Politics is personality writ large.)
Do boomers think their ideas should be given deference to a greater degree than recent college graduates do? Hard to settle empirically and probably a lot of variation among individuals.
Yeah, it seems to me that EVERYONE wants deference to their views. If anything, Boomers are more accustomed to live-and-let-live approach. My boomer parents have friends and associates across the political spectrum in a way that would be very unusual for my social set.
The thing about Boomers is that there's a lot of 'em. They've been part of the dominant cultural/economic/political force their whole lives, they certainly aren't used to not being given deference.
A lot of Boomers seem to feel like they like hierarchical structures and respect for the old now that they are old, but probably didn't show it as much when they were young.
I've heard it said that the reputation for Boomers being a "never trust authority" generation was set by a few long-haired outliers and that actually the cohort was as well-behaved as any other.
Most boomers were boring suburbanites like everyone else. Even the ones who were or are alleged “hippies turned conservative yuppies” might have been “hippies” in the sense that they grew out their hair, wore paisley velvet pants, and saw Jefferson Airplane live while smoking a joint. Hardly indicative of core beliefs.
I’d agree with this for myself. I regularly “self-censor” on Twitter and real life about trans issues. I consider myself extremely supportive of important rights, like workplace protections, etc. But as a cis woman, I do not want to share a locker room with someone who has a penis. I feel strongly about this, and I also don’t think it’s important enough to trans rights that it should be a front-and-center issue.
But the thing is, I am totally free to express these opinions anywhere. I choose not to, not because I fear for my job, but because I think it would hurt some people’s feelings and they might decide not to be friends with me anymore. Which of course, would also be their right. They aren’t obligated to respect my opinions. If they came out as Trump supporters, I would probably stop being friends with them.
"I choose not to…because I think it would hurt some people’s feelings and they might decide not to be friends with me anymore.... If they came out as Trump supporters, I would probably stop being friends with them. "
Yikes! Can I encourage you, maybe, to not make your extension of friendship so conditional on political views?
You can do whatever you want, but the reality is you have standards for your friendship, even if they are different from mine. That’s my whole point. I spend a significant amount of my free time and money on Democratic causes, and that’s only because of Trump. This is a core value for me, and completely my prerogative. I chose only to associate myself with knitters, that would be valid as well.
I live in one of the bluest areas of the country. Maybe if I didn’t, I would have more conservative friends, and the choice would be more difficult. But happily for me, it’s not.
It absolutely is. The ability to constructively disagree, hold your own ideas up to criticism, dispassionately argue from different sides, etc. etc. are 100% trainable skills we need to do vastly more to cultivate. Instead, in our zero-tolerance, anti-fighting/anti-bullying/conflict averse/maximum fragility paradigm, the only conflict resolution skill we teach is how to make appeals to authority.
Don't forget how often disagreement was physical in the past. It's a net benefit that strong emotions are now more often left in the verbal domain (though the are plenty of people who lament it).
I think we also more charitable to our past selves since we understood our intentions, something we can't afford to others. Our lashing out at our parents probably looked pretty bad from the outside.
I'm not sure if 2000s family political fights were less psychotic than the late 2010s, but they were definitely less all-encompassing. Most of all, the word I'd use to describe the latter is "exhausting". Wake up every morning, pick up your Dread Screen to scroll some doom and see what latest stupid shit we needed to start paying attention to. Every damn day for years and years.
Oh my gosh yes. When Biden won, or at least when he was inaugurated, I made a conscious decision to not start (and continue) my day paying attention to what the latest outrage was --- and I'm much happier and saner for it.
I have a couple relatives who just kept on keeping on, and their constant sense of urgency and angst about every bad act by every batshit crazy right winger everywhere is just dragging on them.
On the other side, my wife's parents are the only close family I have truly on the other side of the political spectrum, and they too can't seem to turn the volume down. It has really had a negative affect on our relationship because my wife and I just don't want to engage with it
For the love of God, could we ever considering ending our habit of such absurd over-emphasis on these generational labels as if they explain anything? All things equal, a Millennial born in 1992 is going to have more in common with an early Gen Z person than they are with a fellow millennial born in 1982 (three years vs. ten years). And yet the shorthand society uses to describe age cohorts would imply otherwise. I get that shared generational experiences count for something. Probably a lot! But the particular way we've decided to slice and dice these generations is meaninglessly vague and often flat out innaccurate. They're just too broad. We'd be better of saying "Us early 80s babies blah blah blah" or "We late 60s babies blah blah blah." These synthetic generation boundaries (Boomer, Xer, Millennial, etc) are a sloppy intellectual scam for the vast majority of discussions.
Took the words right out of my mouth. I swear every time I see someone like Michael Wilbon yell about "Millennials", my first thought is "old man yells at a cloud".
I feel like there's two parallel phenomenon involved here, there's the kind of direct, whipped up outrage people like Matt experience regularly on Twitter that I think this article is right on about. Twitter is not really life. 99.9% of the time, online outrage can simply be ignored as the impotent whining of an overamplified minority.
The second version is more pernicious. This is the one where your personal ability to disregard bad faith criticism is secondary to the whims of the middle management/hr/dei/administrative drones that have real power over your employment prospects. A growing subset of corporate, government and non-profit institutions maintain fully ideologically captured layers of bureaucracy who's entire purpose seems to be to sheild the entity from criticism on Twitter. Some of these people are academically inflected true believers, a larger subset are simply cowards looking for easy answers, but none have the incentive to stand up for an individual's attempts at boldness.
Most people can't make more money by ditching the HR department and moving to substack
I don’t know I think the old fashioned don’t talk about politics, sex, money or religion in mixed company shields people from this incredibly well. I’m sort of woke and I don’t know many people who share my convictions about a lot of stuff and they have no problem keeping a job and privately referring to kids as retards or saying trans people have fear of better options.
I work in teaching and it seems to me we’re much more vulnerable to attack from the right than the left. Even before the current round of culture war stuff we heard how parents will scour your social media for drinking or swimsuit pictures and how these private expressions of self off hours are harmful to youths for uhhh reasons.
Yes, the phenomenon where people live in fear for their careers if they fail to aggressively sanitize their private life as it appears on social media is a seriously problematic manifestation of "cancel culture"/HR brain.
I'm inclined to wonder, though, of perhaps, in order to re-establish and once again have the benefits of a public national mass culture, with broad consensus and more unity on many issues like we have in the pre-internet mass media days that we haven't seen since the 90s, we need to stuff the social media genie back in its bottle a bit, and and find a way to articulate and enforce public consensus on big issues, as was done then (there was still plenty of alternative culture, it just wasn't always in everyone else's face). Things seemed to work better that way, than in our current excessively fragmented culture -- the pendulum may have swung too far.
Of course, there's no going back in a literal or reactionary way, but rather, instructive lessons we might be able to learn from what worked in our past that could be useful in shaping the future.
I think you’re right about the first bit, the need to seriously gut social media, but I think the answer is that the internet doesn’t need a town square at all. This place is fine and would be better without Twitter. There will be other places for other folks, which will be more comfortable without Twitter, and that’s fine. I struggle to find anything Twitter has made better.
We simply aren’t built/evolved to stare at irritating or disturbing “wrong” opinions from others all day long and remain equanimous about them. The answer isn’t a monoculture, IMO, so much as some room to breathe.
"I struggle to find anything Twitter has made better."
I'm always sort of amazed at how people say that Twitter has made them miserable. Why would you read things that make you miserable? Just read things that you want to read. I find Matt's tweets fun and often educational; I enjoy reading them and ignore the replies. I learn *tons* of things from smart people on Twitter. Jason Furman on fighting inflation. Mick Ryan on how to assess the coming Ukrainian offensive. Eric Topol on COVID and medical research in general. Etc a thousand times.
Maybe if Twitter didn't exist they would spread their thinking through an equally accessible format but for now that's what they use and I'm grateful for it.
What suggests to you that I'm on Twitter? I read occasional Tweets from about 5 people without an account and that's it.
Without Twitter and all of its downsides, they would absolutely use something else, and that something else would likely work better if there were a regulatory bar to recreating Twitter.
My inclination is that that's an impossibility. Short of a Butlerian Jihad the trend in technology is towards greater and greater visibility into the private lives of our neighbors and greater documentation of our past behaviors. The imperative needs to be a culture that is less punitive towards disparate cultural values and behaviors.
The one possibility I see is this. (I think I saw this idea first from Lars Doucet.) with the rise of generative AI, social media will become flooded with bots. Everyone will be so sick of bots that they will retreat from social media to locations where it is clear that everyone is a real person you know (eg, group texts among friends).
The Internet is also about to get flooded with ai generated porn of every attractive human on earth that is indistinguishable from an actual recording.
Not going to happen if we can all see everything. Better to inflict enough anti-trust action on the big boys to shatter the web into a million little communities. The ideologues will infiltrate one another and scream about what they see like they always have, but the bulk of humanity won’t have to give a damn as it does now.
I think the evidence is very strong that the public has great appetite for people who go into other communities and highlight their "crazy." E.g. Libs of TikTok and such.
I don't think you can create different online communities that are really separate from each other.
The problem is that network effects are a huge factor in the internet. If you shut down Twitter, another new site will take its place and you’ll have to shut down that new site too.
A huge perk of social media sites is the idea that most people you know have an account on it. So people will naturally consolidate into large platforms.
I don't think I disagree, so much as I have to retreat to my libertarian priors about whether the state can actually force people back into their silos by taking a sledgehammer to the bullhorns of twitter/facebook/tiktok.
I want the system to be sufficiently liberal/pluralistic for people to feel comfortable self selecting into the cultures/discourses that actually impact their lives directly, which means reducing the power of the state imposed monoculture, not empowering it to smash it's competitors.
Like there’s something about Twitter that’s inherently conflict oriented. My other social platforms are just like recipes, running, dogs and Taylor Swift and then there’s Twitter which is oriented around outrage and scorched earth.
Back to work in a moment but I want to distill my point down to one thing:
What you're describing is the status quo for all of human history, completely innate to what we are. It cannot be done away with, hopes for a "cultural solution" of some kind are sheerest fantasy with no empirical support whatsoever. We are barely-evolved clan primates, the vast majority of us need a clan and will craft one for ourselves if denied the real thing.
Pluralism and democracy put this particular facet of human nature on the back burner; it became possible to segment political and social views from the rest of one's life, aided significantly by a publicly-supported monoculture. As that monoculture has died out under the influence of leveling technological progress, the ability of our pluralistic institutions to prevent us from reverting to the mean has come under stress.
The American 1940/s-1990's monoculture is not really desirable for most folks now that we've had a taste of freedom from it, and could not be recreated even if it were, so I am firmly convinced that the only way out is to reengineer the digital public square into a bunch of discrete meeting rooms and give us all some breathing room in which the issues over which we're bickering can fade and become less salient.
What you seem to expect is that people are going to change their very nature in response to technological change, to become more tolerant and accepting. I would argue that expecting such change to happen in the span of less than a generation is unrealistic and we need a policy solution that will take the pressure off.
To a certain extent, “try to avoid arguing about politics at work” is a social norm that gets you most of the way there in a lot of for-profit private sector workplaces.
I work with a mixed-political affiliations team at my current job and try to restrict my commentary on politics to work-relevant and relatively value-neutral descriptions and predictions of events. My colleagues aren’t always quite as good about it, but they lean in that direction too. All of us know that we’re unlikely to change each other’s deep fundamental assumptions by arguing at work, and we all have strong economic incentives to communicate and cooperate well; feuding or even just being rude to each other would just be a dumb waste of time.
Of course, this works because our financial incentives are well-aligned, we’re all reasonably smart, and we all take a fairly mercenary approach to our work. This is probably much harder at more mission-focused orgs or among teams of workers not well set up to catch upside from good performance.
First of all. Thank you for teaching. (I’m a veteran and people always say this to me… But honestly, I think there’s a lot of occupations, including teach him, which deserves this respect. So I acknowledge it is awkward and kind of nerdy to say, but thank you anyway.)
I pay attention to my local Idaho news. And Idaho being Idaho is probably a outlier, but you are definitely right that you’re more likely to be tempted to be canceled for being woke on the left. Then you are on the right as a teacher.
I’m not sure what grade do you teach, but do other students try and cancel their fellow students? This is something that I sort of seen. I don’t know if cancellation is the right term, but out shouting and out crying their fellow students.
I think one Idaho case is pretty emblematic of what happens on the normie people side, and its the one that got a freshman diversity class literally cancelled.
The rumor was that a professor had mistreated a student for disagreeing. The actual story was that a student had (inelegantly) disagreed and the other students jumped down her throat. The professor stopped class early and them called the student to make sure she was fine.
I know a lot of professors. Its a career enriched with crotchety assholes who love to argue, but even the rest will see usually disagreement as engagement, not a threat. But other students... they are a lot less flexible and students care way more how they think. Its awful to be on the receiving end of group opprobrium from your peers, and knowing the loudmouths may be a minority does not help.
I’ve taught mostly 2&3 and people are weird when it comes to what they think is racist.
Bullying has always occurred and we haven’t cured it but I don’t think they have the ability to really play that up anymore than they did 20 years ago.
which direction you're vulnerable from is entirely a product of where you live. teachers unions in blue cities don't give a flying piece of fudge what right of center parents think, but in the suburbs those folks have much more cultural cachet.
I don’t know I live in a D+20 city and basically I’ve never once felt pressure from the left.
I’ve been teaching for 10 years so well before the current round of culture wars and my whole career from teacher prep onwards I’ve always felt pressure to be as ‘Apple pie’ as possible.
HR/middle management/administrative drones being incredibly small "c' conservative is a pretty long standing practice. HR is there to protect the company, not the employee. What you're describing is not now, what's new is the social media component.
I really don't think you can talk about the phenomenon of HR/middle management being overly afraid of Twitter mobs without acknowledging that a whole lot of these same people/parts of companies are implicated in some pretty gross cover ups of awful behavior. Those NDAs that Weinstein made his victims sign, heck the NDAs Trump has made basically all his employees sign all had to be stamped with approval by some HR flack. Heck we're likely to see many more shoes drop in this JPMorgan/Epstein story.
The easy "c" conservative thing to do has always been "sweep under the rug and hope no one notices". With social media that's much more difficult and likely has meant some overreaction the other way (I saw a troubling racially insensitive Facebook post from 12 years ago and it should be taken into consideration when contemplating renewing your contract).
It's a bit wild how you took something you don't like and just labeled it conservative. Not everything falls in categories of liberal/conservative. I think your other points were quite valid. But just like Bari Weiss isn't a small "p" progressive for being a bit of an iconoclast, neither are HR groups conservative for taking the easy way out. Otherwise your describing almost every liberal org in the country as being conservative for taking the easy way out and having liberal beliefs.
When I see the phrase "small-c conservative", I assume that the comment refers to personal or institutional behavior. If I run a business the conservative approach to any scandal is to downplay it, buy off a victim behind closed doors, and sweep it under the rug. Not because it's politically conservative but because it's the most likely to avoid or mitigate major negative outcomes, which is the dictionary definition of conservative in this context.
Let me suggest an analogy from the opposite direction to illustrate my point. The Intercept had an article about progressive groups struggle to overcome internal group dynamics that distract from their core mission. You might say that was little "p" progressive because instead of sweeping it under the table, they are constantly trying to address issues. But I wouldn't call it progressive, because to me, its almost the exact same kind of "purity" search as what I see in "real conservatives" in kicking out "RINOs." If I came in and described the Freedom caucus as being "little p" progressive when they are trash talking RINOs about not adhering to the true vision of conservatism, you'd (correctly) say that was nonsense. I see the same thing here.
This is an extraordinarily common turn of phrase, used by a huge number of people I know.
My (politically conservative) father refers to his attitude on a bunch of personal issues as "small-c conservative," my right-leaning mom describes herself as a "conservative driver," my very, very liberal sister says she has a very "conservative teaching philosophy." I was talking with some similarly liberal/center-left friends and referred to my wife's and my saving habits as "maybe even overly conservative" literally last Monday evening without a scrap of misunderstanding, and another buddy who's pretty much a circa-2016 Bernie-head has said he's "very conservative" in managing his direct reports at work.
None of these uses have anything to do with or imply anything about politics.
I would agree with this! I think the difference is that you read his description the way he wrote it below "as risk averse" while I read it as sweep it under the rug. Those are very different things (to me) and I agree the first is "small c" conservative, I wouldn't say the latter is for the reasons I laid out above. Quite possible that I'm reading it wrong though.
I think you're misunderstanding my usage of small "c" conservative. This I guess is the problem of using the term conservative interchangeably as a political term and a term about human behavior. I was definitely going for the latter. If you want me to say that HR/administrative/middle management is very risk adverse, I'm fine with saying that instead.
Now that large "C" Conservatives aren't at all small "c" conservative and are instead trying to end small "l" liberal democracy, they get mad when you remind them of the origin of their name.
As I replied to David R., I didn't read it as "risk averse," I read it as "sweep it under the rug." To me those are different and the former is "small 'c' conservative," while the latter is not. Or perhaps I just misunderstood and read more into your comment than was there - that happens too.
In general, I'm definitely on the side of "let's not over punish kids for being kids". And yes I include college "kids" in this discourse. And I extend this to the criminal justice system as well. A 14 year old saying something extremely stupid, not well thought out and impulsive to another 14 year old is...very 14 year old. It's like adults don't seem to remember that teens will say intentionally needling things to each other (and on social media) just because they know they aren't supposed to. I'm thinking specifically that incident with the Frat bros from Oklahoma State who were caught singing a song that included the N word. Given (I think correctly) we've made uttering the N word something extremely touchy, some sort of punishment I feel like was warranted. But expulsion? Punishment did not fit the crime.
I'll say too, this is why I eye roll a bit about college kids trying to shut down or cancel free speech. It's not that I don't think this isn't a real thing. But college kids trying to be this sort of thing has been a thing since the 60s. I know, because I remember protesting the Iraq War. I did it because I truly believed it in it, but if I'm real with myself there was a bit of a rush to think I'm able to be a 60s protestor. There is a romanticism now attached to this period (somewhat correctly in my view) that I think informs a lot of this stuff. In other words, a lot of student protest trying to "cancel" speech is in part a bit cosplaying and looking for 15 minutes of fame. As Matt pointed out or sort noted noted in his post, the real issue is that too many college administrations overreacted in 2019/2020 and seem to be self-correcting and trying not to bow to a "Heckler's veto".
Part of this seems to be the growing resistance to vulnerability. Vulnerability is risk and risk is dangerous. When the social media ecosystem overweights risk for everything for clicks you get a feedback loop where people are on hyper alert for “toxic” behavior that they need to separate themselves from or risk bing challenged or hurt.
I think this is also why relationships are suffering from friendships to romantic relationships. People are encouraged to prioritize “mental health” over “toxicity”. While both of these things are important, I think they have become politically and socially coded to an almost farcical extreme.
I don’t have any solutions here but it’s not a good situation we find ourselves in at the moment.
As someone who participated in a few of the 60s protest against the Vietnam war, I'd say you deserve more credit for protesting the Iraq war. One, the latter was a lot more popular than the Vietnam war (especially later on). Two, unlike the 60s kids, you weren't at risk of being drafted and going over there yourself. Once the draft ended, it's amazing how much the protests against Vietnam dried up.
To be fair, the war itself was kind of winding down as the draft was winding down...if it was simply the prospect of getting drafted that motivated opposition to war, you’d think there’d have been a lot more protests against WWII and Korea.
When someone can be selective, they'll nitpick. Right now the feds are loosening the rules on past drug use to fill positions. A decade ago it seemed like you needed a degree to work as a barista but that's changed.
For the most part it's just not going to be worth scouring someone's entire social media history* (even if AI made it possible), especially if it makes your job harder.
I'm curious about "middle management/hr/dei/administrative drones" in the private sector. They are made out to be incredibly harmful, why are they not either getting removed or seeing their companies out-competed by rivals who don't have these practices...perhaps something to do with monopoly power, where these folks protect some of America's hyper-profitable corporations from greater regulatory scrutiny?
Looking at say, social media companies, regulatory appeasement has clearly been a major factor in their moderation policies. And then at the small business end of things you get stuff like the state harassing the shit out of that guy who doesn't want to bake cakes for gay weddings.
The challenge you get to particularly with the cake thing, is that you really do start intersecting with civil rights law. There's a legitimate corporate need to police discrimination. The problem is that basically all of the incentives and the academic ideology of the people in the HR industry tilt the scales towards these incredibly vast, all encompassing interpretations of what might be discriminatory, with almost no regard for the value of maintaining a wide range of acceptable thought.
For most f500 companies I’m familiar with, they are mostly a checkbox in terms of compliance. They run internal trainings that are annoying similar to things like security training to not click on links in suspicious emails. They might get involved in general hiring practices and the like, but on average are just overhead on the side. They get to produce reports and track metrics and the company maybe behaves slightly more inclusively on the margin (probably a good thing) but doesn’t usually substantially change anything. There are outliers, but from what I gather pretty much everyone goes about doing their own thing unless there is a top-down managment incentive.
I don't know if it's monopoly power as much as really high margins. You don't hear about any of this stuff coming from grocery stores. Or I haven't. High margins allow bad managers to hide.
HR and DEI at most large private firms are pretty economically rational as regulatory compliance and reputation management measures. Most companies want to avoid anti-discrimination lawsuits and maintain a public image that their customers and employees (weighted by how much they care about particular issues) like.
The higher your company’s visibility is, the more you’ll care about reputational issues; the higher your average employee comp and profits, the higher the potential payouts from lawsuits are. Overall, the size and activeness of HR and DEI functions tends to scale with those variables.
I also find it interesting how this rhetoric is now so common among people who have absolutely zero public profile. Not to get all my-uncle-at-Thanksgiving, but my aunt was recently complaining about all the things she's not "allowed" to say. I pushed back a little on what she meant by that - she owns her own business, she's not online at all, her social circle is pretty aligned with her politically. Who exactly is not allowing her to say things? Basically what she conceded she means is her kids get mad at her (and I should be clear, they still have a close relationship and see her often). But there's this broader language out there about cancellation that allows her to put an age-old phenomenon of kids disagreeing with their parents politically in this language of persecution and fear.
I am not a psychologist so take this with a grain of salt, but grievance politics seem pretty seductive regardless of political affiliation. People seem to sleep better at night thinking they're targets than to think they do any targeting themselves.
100%. I see it in all kinds of areas of life too. People like to complain that their lives/jobs/relationships/etc. are all awful, as if it's some kind of competition of badness. When I hang out in my social circle, it's almost like everyone is working extremely hard to prove that THEIR job is the one that sucks the most or that THEIR struggle is the greatest. And this is amongst incredibly successful young professionals (competing or achieving partner at large law firms, etc.) who are actively choosing to have these jobs that require all these hours, and whose resumes mean that they could incredibly easily find other jobs that don't come with all downsides that they're currently competing to prove are so oppressive. I just find it bizarre how people in America in 2023 can spend so much time acting like life is so terrible and struggle so mightily to recognize that we're living at inarguably the greatest time to exist in the history of humanity. It's an odd quirk of human psychology.
My facebook feed is full of college acquaintances with two working parents with six figure jobs, massive exurban houses, and one kid complaining about how torturous and awful being a parent is. Its wild watching people who have by an metric "won" the American Dream publicly beg for pity.
You couldn't get me to publicly complain about my kids at gunpoint.
And then people wonder why so many women want to forego having kids! If you give the impression that having kids is a big life-ruining bummer, then you don’t get to be surprised Pikachu when the general reaction is “not for me, thanks!”
I’m childfree, but I chose to be childfree long before social media was a gleam in Zuck’s eye, and for personal reasons. I don’t get people who actually plan to have kids, and want to have kids, and then complain that they are miserable because they got what they wanted. (Sometimes it’s because the child is difficult or they have a spouse who is not helpful, but other times I think they just like to complain.)
I wonder how the kids feel knowing that they are a millstone around their parents’ necks? It can’t be good for the ol’ self esteem.
Absolutely. My wife and I had our first kid early relative to our social cohort of college educated urban libs, so I luckily missed seeing all that when we decided to start trying, otherwise it might have scared me off of it for a while!
And the bummer is that you can't really counter those posts without coming across like an asshole. If you talk about how great having kids is, it gets perceived as bragging to people who struggle with infertility, or a value judgement against childfree people, or you come off like that freak "pro-natalist" couple that have invaded my twitter feed.
I wish there was a way to tell people that contrary to the popular posts you may see about "mommy needs more wine because my uncontrollable little shits have ruined my life", actually having kids is pretty great if it's something you may want to do, especially if you're in a double income, high-ish earning and stable household.
I think having money and stability - as well as both partners being “all in” - are important to having a happy family. Not in a “the poors should not have kids” sense but “when you are exhausted, it can make all the difference to be able to get DoorDash rather than have to cook from scratch” or “Being able to pay for a dog walker means we can keep our dog rather than rehome him” sense. Being able to throw at least some money at problems helps. As does knowing you can afford to pay for a decent daycare rather than some unlicensed under-the-table one. And the stable relationship goes without saying.
A lot of the instances where mommy really DOES need more wine because she truly IS miserable come from some combination of threadbare finances, an absent or unsupportive partner, no family or other outside help (aka “village”) whatsoever, not treating mental health issues before having that kid, and, unfortunately, having a very high-needs child.
The clear majority of child-related posts that I see are from people showing off how cute their kids are, or describing cute things they said or did. Only a little bit about complaining. That includes a lot of professionals, but not all. I guess we're just in different subcultures.
It's the modern American version of the hair shirt. Your suffering sanctifies you, justifies your current rewards, and ensures your future entrance into the holy kingdom.
I'm so glad that I've aged out of/self-selected out of social circles like this. Being performatively miserable is exhausting!
As Ezra says: "Everyone is the victim of their own story"
Truly! Just look at the average lawn now compared to the most expensive of lawns in the 1700s. The wealth disparity will start to look very obvious.
"In the future, everyone will be a victim for 15 minutes."
Ok that made me laugh
So it will be cut down to 15 minutes instead of all the time?
if only we added Nietszsche to the high school curriculum, normies could reject slave morality and channel their inner ubermensh. your mileage may vary.
IMHO, high school curricula don't have enough philosophy, period.
For sure. Everyone is constantly looking for reasons why they good and valuable. Left, right and everything in between. Grievance politics signals all your problems are external, not internal.
I think on the right especially, there is a massive reluctance to face up to policy failures like the Bush Doctrine, wholesale opposition to Obamacare, over reliance on supply side ideology. Politicians on the right for the most part don’t want to change their actual policy positions, so focusing on cancel culture and grievance politics becomes appealing. Its not failed policy, its your domestic political partners ruining everything. What is more problematic is that in our free society, there is precious little acceptable use of government power to dominate domestic opponents or force changes in culture. So once right wingers win on culture war campaigns, their base expects them to then dominate factions within the USA. And we get things like Jan 6 and retribution against Disney for legitimate policy dissent
A lot of Boomers and older people in general think that their ideas should be given great deference by younger people. A lot of younger people disagree. It doesn't help the Boomer case that they are quite wealthy and yet seem (as an aggregate) to be miserly and ungracious towards their own children.
Do you have any reason to believe the latter? Pretty much every Boomer parent I know seems pretty generous with their (adult) children, within reason.
I’m not sure how to assess that statement in the interpersonal sense, but it is true that Boomers (on aggregate) have consistently voted for baskets of policy preferences that enhanced their own wealth while leaving their children worse off (capital gains and income tax cuts, erroneously austere response to 2008 financial crisis, defunding public universities, NIMBY opposition to home and transit construction, infrastructure underinvestment, refusing to use state power to bring healthcare costs to heel, dilatory response to rising CO2 emissions, etc).
My guess is that the average Boomer parent is reasonably generous toward their children in the ordinary interpersonal sense but voted for policies that were bad for their material interests without fully understanding that that’s what they were doing.
There were no referenda on these in which Boomers could state their explicit preference, so we can't say for sure that Boomers support capital gains and income tax cuts etc.
What we do know is that the Boomer generation voted almost 50/50 Biden vs Trump (maybe a tad bit more for Trump), so when we claim things like "Boomers support X" we're at most about half right, because half of Boomers likely support "not X."
The Boomers are more Republican than their parents and their children.
Younger generations tend to identify more as "independent" than older ones, though I really have no idea what that means. Putting the independents aside, we see these breakdowns for %R/%D (with % independent in parentheses):
Gen X: 30%/27% (44%)
Boomer: 35%/32% (33%)
Silent: 39%/35% (26%)
In terms of actual party identification, there's not really a significant difference among these generations, basically a three percentage point advantage to the Republicans. Millenials and Gen Z do tilt more Democratic though (yay!) but are 52% "independent."
I suspect the Boomers were just as Democratic/liberal as the Millenials/Gen Z when they were that age. Getting somewhat more conservative when you get older, though, is not really a feature of the Boomer generation per se.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/319068/party-identification-in-the-united-states-by-generation/
I was referring to an interpersonal sense. I see what you mean in the aggregate, but a) pinning all of that on Boomers feels a bit overly simplistic, and b) employing the phrase "miserly and ungracious" in a political sense feels so tangential as to be functionally meaningless. That's just not how people think about politics.
Re: point a-- to be clear, #NotAllBoomers, etc
Re: point b-- I find your response here interesting, because it feels perfectly natural to me to think about politics in those terms. (Indeed, I would predict that a Likert personality scale measuring general miserliness and ungraciousness-- especially toward those outside one's immediate ingroup-- would strongly correlate with preferences for the policies I listed above. Indeed dark triad personality trait assessments and low honesty-humility factor scores, which capture similar psychometric variables, have been found to pretty strongly correlate with conservative beliefs.)
Genuinely curious about where that difference in intuitions comes from.
(Also, researchers found these assessments way back in 2010. Would suspect that the rise of Trump-- who practices a sort of identity politics for assholes-- just further intensified the relevant set of correlations. Politics is personality writ large.)
Do boomers think their ideas should be given deference to a greater degree than recent college graduates do? Hard to settle empirically and probably a lot of variation among individuals.
Yeah, it seems to me that EVERYONE wants deference to their views. If anything, Boomers are more accustomed to live-and-let-live approach. My boomer parents have friends and associates across the political spectrum in a way that would be very unusual for my social set.
The thing about Boomers is that there's a lot of 'em. They've been part of the dominant cultural/economic/political force their whole lives, they certainly aren't used to not being given deference.
Generally, the rule was you give some deference to your elders because they've been through stuff you haven't. That's deference though, not obedience.
Not sure when we moved to generation cohorts though. That seems weird.
A lot of Boomers seem to feel like they like hierarchical structures and respect for the old now that they are old, but probably didn't show it as much when they were young.
I've heard it said that the reputation for Boomers being a "never trust authority" generation was set by a few long-haired outliers and that actually the cohort was as well-behaved as any other.
Most boomers were boring suburbanites like everyone else. Even the ones who were or are alleged “hippies turned conservative yuppies” might have been “hippies” in the sense that they grew out their hair, wore paisley velvet pants, and saw Jefferson Airplane live while smoking a joint. Hardly indicative of core beliefs.
I’d agree with this for myself. I regularly “self-censor” on Twitter and real life about trans issues. I consider myself extremely supportive of important rights, like workplace protections, etc. But as a cis woman, I do not want to share a locker room with someone who has a penis. I feel strongly about this, and I also don’t think it’s important enough to trans rights that it should be a front-and-center issue.
But the thing is, I am totally free to express these opinions anywhere. I choose not to, not because I fear for my job, but because I think it would hurt some people’s feelings and they might decide not to be friends with me anymore. Which of course, would also be their right. They aren’t obligated to respect my opinions. If they came out as Trump supporters, I would probably stop being friends with them.
"I choose not to…because I think it would hurt some people’s feelings and they might decide not to be friends with me anymore.... If they came out as Trump supporters, I would probably stop being friends with them. "
Yikes! Can I encourage you, maybe, to not make your extension of friendship so conditional on political views?
You can do whatever you want, but the reality is you have standards for your friendship, even if they are different from mine. That’s my whole point. I spend a significant amount of my free time and money on Democratic causes, and that’s only because of Trump. This is a core value for me, and completely my prerogative. I chose only to associate myself with knitters, that would be valid as well.
I live in one of the bluest areas of the country. Maybe if I didn’t, I would have more conservative friends, and the choice would be more difficult. But happily for me, it’s not.
It's weird to think of disagreement as a *skill*, but... maybe it kind of is?
It absolutely is. The ability to constructively disagree, hold your own ideas up to criticism, dispassionately argue from different sides, etc. etc. are 100% trainable skills we need to do vastly more to cultivate. Instead, in our zero-tolerance, anti-fighting/anti-bullying/conflict averse/maximum fragility paradigm, the only conflict resolution skill we teach is how to make appeals to authority.
You wrote: "some Gen Z and younger Millennial folks think anyone who disagrees with them is truly evil."
As a boomer, I was taught: "Do not blame on evil intent that which is more likely due to mere ignorance or incompetence."
Hanlon's razor
Don't forget how often disagreement was physical in the past. It's a net benefit that strong emotions are now more often left in the verbal domain (though the are plenty of people who lament it).
I think we also more charitable to our past selves since we understood our intentions, something we can't afford to others. Our lashing out at our parents probably looked pretty bad from the outside.
I'm not sure if 2000s family political fights were less psychotic than the late 2010s, but they were definitely less all-encompassing. Most of all, the word I'd use to describe the latter is "exhausting". Wake up every morning, pick up your Dread Screen to scroll some doom and see what latest stupid shit we needed to start paying attention to. Every damn day for years and years.
Oh my gosh yes. When Biden won, or at least when he was inaugurated, I made a conscious decision to not start (and continue) my day paying attention to what the latest outrage was --- and I'm much happier and saner for it.
I have a couple relatives who just kept on keeping on, and their constant sense of urgency and angst about every bad act by every batshit crazy right winger everywhere is just dragging on them.
On the other side, my wife's parents are the only close family I have truly on the other side of the political spectrum, and they too can't seem to turn the volume down. It has really had a negative affect on our relationship because my wife and I just don't want to engage with it
For the love of God, could we ever considering ending our habit of such absurd over-emphasis on these generational labels as if they explain anything? All things equal, a Millennial born in 1992 is going to have more in common with an early Gen Z person than they are with a fellow millennial born in 1982 (three years vs. ten years). And yet the shorthand society uses to describe age cohorts would imply otherwise. I get that shared generational experiences count for something. Probably a lot! But the particular way we've decided to slice and dice these generations is meaninglessly vague and often flat out innaccurate. They're just too broad. We'd be better of saying "Us early 80s babies blah blah blah" or "We late 60s babies blah blah blah." These synthetic generation boundaries (Boomer, Xer, Millennial, etc) are a sloppy intellectual scam for the vast majority of discussions.
Rant over.
Strauss and Howe have a lot to answer for.
You just made me google. Damn. Even more made-out-of-whole-cloth than I realized.
Took the words right out of my mouth. I swear every time I see someone like Michael Wilbon yell about "Millennials", my first thought is "old man yells at a cloud".
Super like
I feel like there's two parallel phenomenon involved here, there's the kind of direct, whipped up outrage people like Matt experience regularly on Twitter that I think this article is right on about. Twitter is not really life. 99.9% of the time, online outrage can simply be ignored as the impotent whining of an overamplified minority.
The second version is more pernicious. This is the one where your personal ability to disregard bad faith criticism is secondary to the whims of the middle management/hr/dei/administrative drones that have real power over your employment prospects. A growing subset of corporate, government and non-profit institutions maintain fully ideologically captured layers of bureaucracy who's entire purpose seems to be to sheild the entity from criticism on Twitter. Some of these people are academically inflected true believers, a larger subset are simply cowards looking for easy answers, but none have the incentive to stand up for an individual's attempts at boldness.
Most people can't make more money by ditching the HR department and moving to substack
I don’t know I think the old fashioned don’t talk about politics, sex, money or religion in mixed company shields people from this incredibly well. I’m sort of woke and I don’t know many people who share my convictions about a lot of stuff and they have no problem keeping a job and privately referring to kids as retards or saying trans people have fear of better options.
I work in teaching and it seems to me we’re much more vulnerable to attack from the right than the left. Even before the current round of culture war stuff we heard how parents will scour your social media for drinking or swimsuit pictures and how these private expressions of self off hours are harmful to youths for uhhh reasons.
Yes, the phenomenon where people live in fear for their careers if they fail to aggressively sanitize their private life as it appears on social media is a seriously problematic manifestation of "cancel culture"/HR brain.
I'm inclined to wonder, though, of perhaps, in order to re-establish and once again have the benefits of a public national mass culture, with broad consensus and more unity on many issues like we have in the pre-internet mass media days that we haven't seen since the 90s, we need to stuff the social media genie back in its bottle a bit, and and find a way to articulate and enforce public consensus on big issues, as was done then (there was still plenty of alternative culture, it just wasn't always in everyone else's face). Things seemed to work better that way, than in our current excessively fragmented culture -- the pendulum may have swung too far.
Of course, there's no going back in a literal or reactionary way, but rather, instructive lessons we might be able to learn from what worked in our past that could be useful in shaping the future.
I think you’re right about the first bit, the need to seriously gut social media, but I think the answer is that the internet doesn’t need a town square at all. This place is fine and would be better without Twitter. There will be other places for other folks, which will be more comfortable without Twitter, and that’s fine. I struggle to find anything Twitter has made better.
We simply aren’t built/evolved to stare at irritating or disturbing “wrong” opinions from others all day long and remain equanimous about them. The answer isn’t a monoculture, IMO, so much as some room to breathe.
"I struggle to find anything Twitter has made better."
I'm always sort of amazed at how people say that Twitter has made them miserable. Why would you read things that make you miserable? Just read things that you want to read. I find Matt's tweets fun and often educational; I enjoy reading them and ignore the replies. I learn *tons* of things from smart people on Twitter. Jason Furman on fighting inflation. Mick Ryan on how to assess the coming Ukrainian offensive. Eric Topol on COVID and medical research in general. Etc a thousand times.
Maybe if Twitter didn't exist they would spread their thinking through an equally accessible format but for now that's what they use and I'm grateful for it.
What suggests to you that I'm on Twitter? I read occasional Tweets from about 5 people without an account and that's it.
Without Twitter and all of its downsides, they would absolutely use something else, and that something else would likely work better if there were a regulatory bar to recreating Twitter.
My inclination is that that's an impossibility. Short of a Butlerian Jihad the trend in technology is towards greater and greater visibility into the private lives of our neighbors and greater documentation of our past behaviors. The imperative needs to be a culture that is less punitive towards disparate cultural values and behaviors.
The one possibility I see is this. (I think I saw this idea first from Lars Doucet.) with the rise of generative AI, social media will become flooded with bots. Everyone will be so sick of bots that they will retreat from social media to locations where it is clear that everyone is a real person you know (eg, group texts among friends).
The Internet is also about to get flooded with ai generated porn of every attractive human on earth that is indistinguishable from an actual recording.
Not going to happen if we can all see everything. Better to inflict enough anti-trust action on the big boys to shatter the web into a million little communities. The ideologues will infiltrate one another and scream about what they see like they always have, but the bulk of humanity won’t have to give a damn as it does now.
I think the evidence is very strong that the public has great appetite for people who go into other communities and highlight their "crazy." E.g. Libs of TikTok and such.
I don't think you can create different online communities that are really separate from each other.
The problem is that network effects are a huge factor in the internet. If you shut down Twitter, another new site will take its place and you’ll have to shut down that new site too.
A huge perk of social media sites is the idea that most people you know have an account on it. So people will naturally consolidate into large platforms.
I don't think I disagree, so much as I have to retreat to my libertarian priors about whether the state can actually force people back into their silos by taking a sledgehammer to the bullhorns of twitter/facebook/tiktok.
I want the system to be sufficiently liberal/pluralistic for people to feel comfortable self selecting into the cultures/discourses that actually impact their lives directly, which means reducing the power of the state imposed monoculture, not empowering it to smash it's competitors.
I don’t really think that’s so much the case.
Like there’s something about Twitter that’s inherently conflict oriented. My other social platforms are just like recipes, running, dogs and Taylor Swift and then there’s Twitter which is oriented around outrage and scorched earth.
Back to work in a moment but I want to distill my point down to one thing:
What you're describing is the status quo for all of human history, completely innate to what we are. It cannot be done away with, hopes for a "cultural solution" of some kind are sheerest fantasy with no empirical support whatsoever. We are barely-evolved clan primates, the vast majority of us need a clan and will craft one for ourselves if denied the real thing.
Pluralism and democracy put this particular facet of human nature on the back burner; it became possible to segment political and social views from the rest of one's life, aided significantly by a publicly-supported monoculture. As that monoculture has died out under the influence of leveling technological progress, the ability of our pluralistic institutions to prevent us from reverting to the mean has come under stress.
The American 1940/s-1990's monoculture is not really desirable for most folks now that we've had a taste of freedom from it, and could not be recreated even if it were, so I am firmly convinced that the only way out is to reengineer the digital public square into a bunch of discrete meeting rooms and give us all some breathing room in which the issues over which we're bickering can fade and become less salient.
What you seem to expect is that people are going to change their very nature in response to technological change, to become more tolerant and accepting. I would argue that expecting such change to happen in the span of less than a generation is unrealistic and we need a policy solution that will take the pressure off.
To a certain extent, “try to avoid arguing about politics at work” is a social norm that gets you most of the way there in a lot of for-profit private sector workplaces.
I work with a mixed-political affiliations team at my current job and try to restrict my commentary on politics to work-relevant and relatively value-neutral descriptions and predictions of events. My colleagues aren’t always quite as good about it, but they lean in that direction too. All of us know that we’re unlikely to change each other’s deep fundamental assumptions by arguing at work, and we all have strong economic incentives to communicate and cooperate well; feuding or even just being rude to each other would just be a dumb waste of time.
Of course, this works because our financial incentives are well-aligned, we’re all reasonably smart, and we all take a fairly mercenary approach to our work. This is probably much harder at more mission-focused orgs or among teams of workers not well set up to catch upside from good performance.
First of all. Thank you for teaching. (I’m a veteran and people always say this to me… But honestly, I think there’s a lot of occupations, including teach him, which deserves this respect. So I acknowledge it is awkward and kind of nerdy to say, but thank you anyway.)
I pay attention to my local Idaho news. And Idaho being Idaho is probably a outlier, but you are definitely right that you’re more likely to be tempted to be canceled for being woke on the left. Then you are on the right as a teacher.
I’m not sure what grade do you teach, but do other students try and cancel their fellow students? This is something that I sort of seen. I don’t know if cancellation is the right term, but out shouting and out crying their fellow students.
I think one Idaho case is pretty emblematic of what happens on the normie people side, and its the one that got a freshman diversity class literally cancelled.
The rumor was that a professor had mistreated a student for disagreeing. The actual story was that a student had (inelegantly) disagreed and the other students jumped down her throat. The professor stopped class early and them called the student to make sure she was fine.
I know a lot of professors. Its a career enriched with crotchety assholes who love to argue, but even the rest will see usually disagreement as engagement, not a threat. But other students... they are a lot less flexible and students care way more how they think. Its awful to be on the receiving end of group opprobrium from your peers, and knowing the loudmouths may be a minority does not help.
I’ve taught mostly 2&3 and people are weird when it comes to what they think is racist.
Bullying has always occurred and we haven’t cured it but I don’t think they have the ability to really play that up anymore than they did 20 years ago.
which direction you're vulnerable from is entirely a product of where you live. teachers unions in blue cities don't give a flying piece of fudge what right of center parents think, but in the suburbs those folks have much more cultural cachet.
I don’t know I live in a D+20 city and basically I’ve never once felt pressure from the left.
I’ve been teaching for 10 years so well before the current round of culture wars and my whole career from teacher prep onwards I’ve always felt pressure to be as ‘Apple pie’ as possible.
Interesting. That's definitely not the case in Chicago where the CTU is openly hostile to parents on the right.
HR/middle management/administrative drones being incredibly small "c' conservative is a pretty long standing practice. HR is there to protect the company, not the employee. What you're describing is not now, what's new is the social media component.
I really don't think you can talk about the phenomenon of HR/middle management being overly afraid of Twitter mobs without acknowledging that a whole lot of these same people/parts of companies are implicated in some pretty gross cover ups of awful behavior. Those NDAs that Weinstein made his victims sign, heck the NDAs Trump has made basically all his employees sign all had to be stamped with approval by some HR flack. Heck we're likely to see many more shoes drop in this JPMorgan/Epstein story.
The easy "c" conservative thing to do has always been "sweep under the rug and hope no one notices". With social media that's much more difficult and likely has meant some overreaction the other way (I saw a troubling racially insensitive Facebook post from 12 years ago and it should be taken into consideration when contemplating renewing your contract).
It's a bit wild how you took something you don't like and just labeled it conservative. Not everything falls in categories of liberal/conservative. I think your other points were quite valid. But just like Bari Weiss isn't a small "p" progressive for being a bit of an iconoclast, neither are HR groups conservative for taking the easy way out. Otherwise your describing almost every liberal org in the country as being conservative for taking the easy way out and having liberal beliefs.
When I see the phrase "small-c conservative", I assume that the comment refers to personal or institutional behavior. If I run a business the conservative approach to any scandal is to downplay it, buy off a victim behind closed doors, and sweep it under the rug. Not because it's politically conservative but because it's the most likely to avoid or mitigate major negative outcomes, which is the dictionary definition of conservative in this context.
I don't think that its a good descriptor.
Let me suggest an analogy from the opposite direction to illustrate my point. The Intercept had an article about progressive groups struggle to overcome internal group dynamics that distract from their core mission. You might say that was little "p" progressive because instead of sweeping it under the table, they are constantly trying to address issues. But I wouldn't call it progressive, because to me, its almost the exact same kind of "purity" search as what I see in "real conservatives" in kicking out "RINOs." If I came in and described the Freedom caucus as being "little p" progressive when they are trash talking RINOs about not adhering to the true vision of conservatism, you'd (correctly) say that was nonsense. I see the same thing here.
Hard, hard disagree.
This is an extraordinarily common turn of phrase, used by a huge number of people I know.
My (politically conservative) father refers to his attitude on a bunch of personal issues as "small-c conservative," my right-leaning mom describes herself as a "conservative driver," my very, very liberal sister says she has a very "conservative teaching philosophy." I was talking with some similarly liberal/center-left friends and referred to my wife's and my saving habits as "maybe even overly conservative" literally last Monday evening without a scrap of misunderstanding, and another buddy who's pretty much a circa-2016 Bernie-head has said he's "very conservative" in managing his direct reports at work.
None of these uses have anything to do with or imply anything about politics.
I would agree with this! I think the difference is that you read his description the way he wrote it below "as risk averse" while I read it as sweep it under the rug. Those are very different things (to me) and I agree the first is "small c" conservative, I wouldn't say the latter is for the reasons I laid out above. Quite possible that I'm reading it wrong though.
I think you're misunderstanding my usage of small "c" conservative. This I guess is the problem of using the term conservative interchangeably as a political term and a term about human behavior. I was definitely going for the latter. If you want me to say that HR/administrative/middle management is very risk adverse, I'm fine with saying that instead.
Now that large "C" Conservatives aren't at all small "c" conservative and are instead trying to end small "l" liberal democracy, they get mad when you remind them of the origin of their name.
As I replied to David R., I didn't read it as "risk averse," I read it as "sweep it under the rug." To me those are different and the former is "small 'c' conservative," while the latter is not. Or perhaps I just misunderstood and read more into your comment than was there - that happens too.
damn tho posting racist stuff on fb at 3 years old might be a red flag tho
Exactly. I thought it was a bit sketchy that she is going to casting sessions at 13, but posting racist stuff on Facebook at age 3 is even worse.
In general, I'm definitely on the side of "let's not over punish kids for being kids". And yes I include college "kids" in this discourse. And I extend this to the criminal justice system as well. A 14 year old saying something extremely stupid, not well thought out and impulsive to another 14 year old is...very 14 year old. It's like adults don't seem to remember that teens will say intentionally needling things to each other (and on social media) just because they know they aren't supposed to. I'm thinking specifically that incident with the Frat bros from Oklahoma State who were caught singing a song that included the N word. Given (I think correctly) we've made uttering the N word something extremely touchy, some sort of punishment I feel like was warranted. But expulsion? Punishment did not fit the crime.
I'll say too, this is why I eye roll a bit about college kids trying to shut down or cancel free speech. It's not that I don't think this isn't a real thing. But college kids trying to be this sort of thing has been a thing since the 60s. I know, because I remember protesting the Iraq War. I did it because I truly believed it in it, but if I'm real with myself there was a bit of a rush to think I'm able to be a 60s protestor. There is a romanticism now attached to this period (somewhat correctly in my view) that I think informs a lot of this stuff. In other words, a lot of student protest trying to "cancel" speech is in part a bit cosplaying and looking for 15 minutes of fame. As Matt pointed out or sort noted noted in his post, the real issue is that too many college administrations overreacted in 2019/2020 and seem to be self-correcting and trying not to bow to a "Heckler's veto".
Part of this seems to be the growing resistance to vulnerability. Vulnerability is risk and risk is dangerous. When the social media ecosystem overweights risk for everything for clicks you get a feedback loop where people are on hyper alert for “toxic” behavior that they need to separate themselves from or risk bing challenged or hurt.
I think this is also why relationships are suffering from friendships to romantic relationships. People are encouraged to prioritize “mental health” over “toxicity”. While both of these things are important, I think they have become politically and socially coded to an almost farcical extreme.
I don’t have any solutions here but it’s not a good situation we find ourselves in at the moment.
It's amazing how much of undergrad student culture basically boils down to cosplaying the 60s.
As someone who participated in a few of the 60s protest against the Vietnam war, I'd say you deserve more credit for protesting the Iraq war. One, the latter was a lot more popular than the Vietnam war (especially later on). Two, unlike the 60s kids, you weren't at risk of being drafted and going over there yourself. Once the draft ended, it's amazing how much the protests against Vietnam dried up.
To be fair, the war itself was kind of winding down as the draft was winding down...if it was simply the prospect of getting drafted that motivated opposition to war, you’d think there’d have been a lot more protests against WWII and Korea.
When someone can be selective, they'll nitpick. Right now the feds are loosening the rules on past drug use to fill positions. A decade ago it seemed like you needed a degree to work as a barista but that's changed.
For the most part it's just not going to be worth scouring someone's entire social media history* (even if AI made it possible), especially if it makes your job harder.
*Not applicable to authoritarian governments.
I'm curious about "middle management/hr/dei/administrative drones" in the private sector. They are made out to be incredibly harmful, why are they not either getting removed or seeing their companies out-competed by rivals who don't have these practices...perhaps something to do with monopoly power, where these folks protect some of America's hyper-profitable corporations from greater regulatory scrutiny?
Looking at say, social media companies, regulatory appeasement has clearly been a major factor in their moderation policies. And then at the small business end of things you get stuff like the state harassing the shit out of that guy who doesn't want to bake cakes for gay weddings.
The challenge you get to particularly with the cake thing, is that you really do start intersecting with civil rights law. There's a legitimate corporate need to police discrimination. The problem is that basically all of the incentives and the academic ideology of the people in the HR industry tilt the scales towards these incredibly vast, all encompassing interpretations of what might be discriminatory, with almost no regard for the value of maintaining a wide range of acceptable thought.
For most f500 companies I’m familiar with, they are mostly a checkbox in terms of compliance. They run internal trainings that are annoying similar to things like security training to not click on links in suspicious emails. They might get involved in general hiring practices and the like, but on average are just overhead on the side. They get to produce reports and track metrics and the company maybe behaves slightly more inclusively on the margin (probably a good thing) but doesn’t usually substantially change anything. There are outliers, but from what I gather pretty much everyone goes about doing their own thing unless there is a top-down managment incentive.
I don't know if it's monopoly power as much as really high margins. You don't hear about any of this stuff coming from grocery stores. Or I haven't. High margins allow bad managers to hide.
High margins or (more commonly) a funding environment that allows for heavy losses.
I think it's a very open question whether these sorts of resource sinks will survive the end of the VC money cannon era.
I would not lament their demise.
HR and DEI at most large private firms are pretty economically rational as regulatory compliance and reputation management measures. Most companies want to avoid anti-discrimination lawsuits and maintain a public image that their customers and employees (weighted by how much they care about particular issues) like.
The higher your company’s visibility is, the more you’ll care about reputational issues; the higher your average employee comp and profits, the higher the potential payouts from lawsuits are. Overall, the size and activeness of HR and DEI functions tends to scale with those variables.