Establishment Mandarin Class blinders

Fascinating blinders.  From Democracies Don’t Try to Make Everyone Agree: Marxist literary scholars and popularizers of critical race theory have one thing in common with certain GOP commentators: a tendency to see their own view of the world as the only valid one. by Anne Applebaum.  While I no longer read her all that much, I have been reading her for decades since she wrote for the English Spectator.

She is very bright and credentialed but also entirely a product of the Establishment Mandarin Class.  She has markedly critical views of Russia for a member of that class but has entirely predictable, baselessly apocalyptic, and derisory views of Donald Trump and for the non-Establishment Mandarin Class public.  

Back in the 1980s, comparative-literature majors at my university had to take a required course in literary theory. This course—Lit 130, if memory serves—offered prospective scholars a series of frames and theories that could be applied to the reading of books. This was the heyday of deconstructionism—essentially a form of highly pretentious close reading, imported from France—and so we read quite a few texts looking for things that interested deconstructionists. But we also read Freudians, Marxists, feminists, and others.

We suffered through a lot of turgid academic writing, but the class had its uses. I learned, among other things, that one can read the same text from multiple points of view and therefore see different themes in it. When a Marxist reads Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for example, he might become interested in the way in which wealth, power, and the determination to have both shapes the lives of all of the characters. When a feminist reads the same book, she might discover that patriarchal attitudes toward women, who are judged and valued for their marriageability, shape the lives of the characters too. The Freudians, as you might surmise, would notice a whole different set of motifs.

Because Austen herself was very interested in capitalism, patriarchy, and psychology—though she wouldn’t have used any of those terms—these varied ways of reading could reveal new aspects to the story. Still, one also learned how to maintain some distance from all of the theorists, especially those who claimed unique access to truth. It was important to stay well away from bad Marxist scholars, for example, the kind who insisted that their way of reading Pride and Prejudice was the only way to read Pride and Prejudice. That attitude led to many dead ends: In the Soviet Union (where bad Marxist scholars were eventually the only scholars allowed to publish anything at all) literary scholarship, like scholarship more generally, became not just dull and boring but actually dangerous for anyone with a different point of view.

The challenge is that outside the luxury beliefs class, no one has the time for the very marginal value of perspective shifting in terms of reading, i.e. reading as a racist (Critical Race Theory), reading as a Communist (Social Justice Theory), reading as a feminist, reading as a Freudian, etc.  Yes, there are insights, but they are few and far between.  

Far easier to read normally and if you are going to frame shift, use ancient Roman/economist frame - cui bono, who benefits.  

She then goes on to defend Critical Race Theory as just another thing people should not be worried about.  She lambasts Republicans and others for opposing racism.  She finds one professor who seemingly defends the greatest development in human history - Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberalism against the rising intolerance of CRT/SJT etc.  

She tries to draw a parallel between Republicans and American citizens objecting to the racism of CRT to Marxists with the facile argument  "Liberal democracies don’t try, as Soviet Marxism once did, to make everybody agree about everything, all the time."

Those opposing CRT aren't trying to make everyone agree about everything, all the time.  They are opposed to an imposed ideology based on race and which explicitly argues that there is no room in society for anyone who does not conform to CRT.

With her background, it is an extraordinary contortion to make.

Her true Establishment Mandarin Class stripes are revealed in the final paragraph.

But to maintain that flexibility, a liberal-democratic society absolutely requires that its citizens experience a liberal education, one that teaches students, scholars, readers, and voters to keep looking at books, history, society, and politics from different points of view. If one of our two great political parties no longer believes in this principle—and if some of our scholars don’t either—then how much longer can we expect our democracy to last?

Those opposed to the marxist derived CRT are making the very point that our Classical Liberal democratic society needs a liberal education.  They are seeking to ensure that Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberal ways of viewing the world are still equally available and welcomed in education as they have been.  

It is simply Establishment Mandarin Class blinders which could argue that Republicans are Marxist repressors and do not support Classical Liberal values.  It is a remarkable intellectual performance facilitated by a very thick bubble.