By Professor
Doom
Hey, how about that last election? It’s so
funny how many people are still puzzling over how the polls could all be so
wrong, for so long, so consistently. I mean, Hillary was presented as way
ahead, and after every debate, the mainstream media was only too happy to tell
us that Hillary’s lead extended after yet another amazing debate performance by
Hillary.
For me, it’s not much of a puzzle, because
I know a little math. The answer is simple: we were lied to. Those weren’t
polls, they were propaganda…it’s not mathematically possible in any real sense
for so many legitimate polls to be consistently wrong, and so the simpler
explanation, “they are lying” takes over. Every time some independent/legitimate
poll said something different from the propaganda, it was shouted down as racist,
or something similar, and discounted by mainstream media.
Academics, for all their supposed
education, really aren’t that different in their confusion here. A recent post
at Inside Higher Ed has a liberal deigning to tell other liberals what they
don’t get:
A big issue for, well, some folks is they
live in a bubble. Thus it doesn’t matter what’s said, it’s ignored or
“discredited” by being called racist. The above academic tries to penetrate
that bubble by being very, very, gentle. It doesn’t help that he doesn’t
understand much himself, but let’s look at a few things:
“…care about them enough to listen to
them with respect, you come away with a much clearer appreciation for the emotions that propelled Donald
Trump to victory than you do by listening to NPR, scanning your friends’
Twitter feeds, or sitting at a table in a university cafeteria with like-minded
colleagues…”
--emphasis added.
Part of what propelled Trump to victory
was the patronizing (at best) attitude Clinton had (see also, “Deplorables”)
and this liberal professor has much the same. At no point does he allow for the
possibility that one could rationally choose Trump over Hillary, citing instead
“emotions.”
“…take the easy route and brand his
supporters — overwhelmingly white men — as racist or misogynist….Certainly some
of the people who voted for Trump are racists and bigots. Surely we’re within
our rights to think of the white supremacists, KKK sympathizers, and
woman-haters…”
It’s so weird how these arguments always
go one direction. If you vote against Hillary because she’s a woman, you’re
misogynist. But how is it not possible for someone to be a man-hater and vote
against Trump because he’s a man? A similar argument could be made about voting
for Hillary’s party based on race…but I digress, the point is there’s no
significant consideration of legitimate reasons for not voting for Hillary.
Even if I’m wrong about the “obviously we
were lied to” conclusion, we’ll never get any better answers until the
“thinkers” in higher education start opening up their minds to other
possibilities than the crap being provided by the same fake media that told us
Trump could never win.
The liberal then talks about a friend
who’s very, very, poor:
I have a close friend who supports
his family on a yearly salary of $48,000…
Wow, how much in a bubble do you have to
be in to sneer at that salary as a small amount of pay? That’s quite a bit more than the
median pay in the US, so the close friend is doing well…I know I have no hope of
ever making that much salary. And yet the Liberal thinks his friend is
basically impoverished. Our institutions of higher education are overrun with
Liberal-leaning academics, and until they get out of the bubble enough to know
that most people in this country
would LOVE to make $48k a year, there’s not much hope here.
By some bizarre alchemy, Trump the
billionaire knew how to speak to these people.
I really want to emphasize how clueless
this guy is: he’s a liberal, he’s going to explain to liberals what they don’t
get, and his explanation for Trump’s success, and I’m quoting here, is “bizarre
alchemy”…he’s basically explaining that Trump’s success is due to magic. Once again we're looking at a refusal to consider any rational reason for Trump's success. Seriously, this is what passes
for legitimate explanation? The article itself is irrelevant.
The comments section, on the other hand,
has much of interest.
There are the predictable “Trump sucks”
type comments, but each such comment gets a “But Hillary is far worse.”
Ignoring such things, allow me to
highlight a few more interesting comments:
You are exactly right, and I also
have a Ph.D. As do many of my colleagues who, with furtive glances and hushed
voices, spoke with me about their support of Trump.
The culture of fear in academia means few
will speak out loud about a great many things, and not just supporting Trump. I
don’t think people are terrified enough to lie to pollsters (at least in enough
numbers to turn Hillary’s “landslide” into defeat), but I concede plenty of
people in academia were terrified enough of the repercussions of not supporting
Hillary that they lied about it while on campus, at the very least.
It’s not just academia, of course. There
were numerous examples of other people who found their career stymied after
coming out for Trump (hi Scott Adams!). I can’t help but suspect the reason
Trump couldn’t get celebrities to support him (beyond Scott Baio) is because
the celebrities knew their Hollywood career would be jeopardized by doing so.
Back to the point, rather than tell Trump
voters they’re racists and misogynists, shouldn’t academia consider the culture
of fear that makes people afraid to give an honest answer to an anonymous
pollster? That just seems a more productive mode of inquiry to me, because the clear
retribution against people who say the wrong thing has an obvious chilling
effect.
Here comes a biggie from another comment:
“TIME FOR BLUE COLLAR STUDIES”
What an incredible, obvious idea. Instead
of breaking us up into groups based on identity politics (Afro-American
Studies, Gender Studies, and such), why not start to consider the class warfare
that’s a big part of today’s economy. “The rich get richer, while the poor get
poorer” has never been more true than today, where it’s very clear much of the
wealth is being funneled upward to the topmost tiers of the economic ladder.
Ok, it has improved a tiny bit in the last few
years. Still most
people know they’re much poorer now after 8 years of economic policies that
Hillary never came close to promising to change. I’m not saying Trump will
necessarily change such policies…but at least he’s aware of what our government
has been doing to its citizens.
Another poster is quick to explain why my
excitement over Blue Collar Studies is misplaced:
Of course there are faculty who have
a fundamental concern with the working class: Marxists.
Yeah, ok, maybe that was a bad idea after all, since having way too many
Marxists on campus is part of what got us into this mess.
Anyway, I could go on, but the real
takeaway in reading the well-over-100 comments
here is how little
this thread differs from threads I’ve seen on boards not populated with Ph.D.s.
And so, I encourage any reader who goes to other forums to come here and see
with his own eyes how academics are little different than any other group on
the internet.
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