[TazeTSchnitzel]

As the American right-wing moves further right and further way from participating in consensus reality, it should be no surprise they are increasingly less welcome in spaces dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge.

If you reject not only the politics of your opponents, but the value of fact itself, why should they listen to or accommodate you?

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16588964/a...

[confuseddesi]

Perhaps it is the American right-wing moving further right, but I am more inclined to believe the American left is moving farther left: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/why-ame...

Take for example this speech by Bill Clinton in 1995: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4654597/bill-clinton-illegal-...: "That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens."

To think that this was a speech by a Democrat president about 20 years ago is unfathomable to the left today.

[mikeash]

In the 90s, the Democrats were trying to enact a single-payer health care system, and the Republican response to it was similar to what we now know as the ACA. Now, the Democrats fight for the Republican plan and the Republicans want to do away with it altogether.

Democrats in the late 60s wanted a national gun registry and ban handguns for anyone who can't demonstrate a need, with household self-protection not considered sufficient need. Any existing guns that didn't qualify would be confiscated. Republicans only wanted to ban things like assault weapons, ownership by felons, and carrying loaded weapons in public. Now, Democrats struggle to ban assault weapons, and Republicans oppose almost all forms of gun control.

FDR enacted a top marginal income tax rate of 94%. Republicans wanted taxes reduced, after the war, to a level that would pay for postwar government spending. Now, the top marginal income tax rate is 39.6%, with Democrats proposing little tweaks like increasing it a bit or increasing the payroll tax cap, and Republicans wanting to slash tax rates (I saw one the other day saying that we should aim for 1-2%) and not caring in the least about the increased deficits this would bring.

Seems to me that the American left is moving sharply right, to the point where the Democratic Party would be considered centrist or mildly right-wing by most standards, while the American right is also moving sharply right and is teetering on the precipice of going all-in on racist nationalism.

[LyndsySimon]

> Republicans only wanted to ban things like assault weapons, ownership by felons, and carrying loaded weapons in public.

Citation needed.

[mikeash]

Check out the Gun Control Act of 1968 which was greatly shaped by the NRA (cut down from a stricter version, but they were OK with banning gun ownership by felons), the Mulford Act which prohibited carrying loaded weapons in public in California and passed with bipartisan support (signed into law by none other than Ronald Reagan), and the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons ban (which didn't have Republican support in Congress but did have support from both Reagan and Gerald Ford).

[dragonwriter]

> In the 90s, the Democrats were trying to enact a single-payer health care system

Well, there was grassroots pressure for that and majority support in public polling, but what actually got pushed by the Clinton White House was very much not single-payer.

[ZeroGravitas]

The Clintons are famous for a strategy called "triangulation" where they move as far to the right as necessary to get enough votes to win an election. With a voting base, and voting system that skews as far right as America's that leads to them taking some right-wing positions.

I've always thought this was a clever strategy, but apparently enough people live in their own social bubbles that many progressive types don't realise how unprogressive a lot of older, rural voters are (and you could argue they've been misled by their news providers into positions that are contrary to their own values and desires) and can't understand why compromise is necessasary to actually win elections.

Some have argued that this is bad because you need to inspire people, like Obama did, but Obama is another triangulator, so I'm not sure how that makes sense.

[gizmo686]

The problem is that this is a short term strategy. You might win this election, but move the overton window to the right.

The other problem is the risk of alienating your base.

[bbctol]

Left here, not unfathomable or particularly surprising. You don't need to go back to Clinton to find a Democratic president who expanded border security and cracked down harshly on illegal immigration; Obama did the same thing, despite all the rhetoric that the Democrats want open borders and lawlessness. What's weird is how negative a reaction things like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals got, seeing as it's just a milder form of H. W. Bush and Reagan's executive orders to prevent ICE from breaking up families in the 80s and 90s.

[dragonwriter]

> Perhaps it is the American right-wing moving further right, but I am more inclined to believe the American left is moving farther left.

The Republican Party is clearly moving further right over a long time scale; the Democratic Party is also moving further left. Whether those things are true of the “American right” and “American left” is a little more complex question (from where I sit, it seems that the American Right is moving to the right more clearly and across the board, while the American left is moving left on social issues but not so much on economic issues, but that the economic left is starting to regain power in the Democratic Party, which if you mistake the Democratic Party for the American left looks like the left moving farther left on economic issues.)

> Take for example this speech by Bill Clinton in 1995

Bill Clinton is not, and never was, part of the American left. He is a moderate economic and social conservative—all the prominent liberal figures in the Democratic Party took a pass on the 1992 primary expecting Bush to be unbeatable. Paul Tsongas was probably the closest thing to a left candidate in a major party primary in 1992 (he was at least a solid social liberal), but his campaign was hampered by health concerns regarding his cancer (which turned out to be not entirely misplaced.)

> To think that this was a speech by a Democrat president about 20 years ago is unfathomable to the left today.

Not any more than it was at the time; the left disliked Clinton during the primary in 1992, mostly saw him as the lesser of three evils in the general (though Perot’s anti-NAFTA stand got him some support from the left even though he was not in any way a left candidate), and attacked him mercilessly from 1993 on when it came to policy as most of his gestures toward the left in the campaign turned out to be hollow, and his health care reform foundered on exactly the grounds the left challenged it earlier: it was overly complex in pursuit of buy-in that wouldn't come anyway from corporate interests, when there was a strong public majority support for simple single-payer.

[vannevar]

Not all that unfathomable, Obama deported record numbers of criminal illegals.

[confuseddesi]

Here's another snippet from President Clinton:

"I have long opposed governmental recognition of same-gender marriages and this legislation is consistent with that position."

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/scotts/ftp/wpaf2mc/clinton....

[vannevar]

That's a general social trend, not unique to the left. Steadily increasing numbers of Republicans also support gay marriage, currently around 40%. (http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay...)

[ZeroGravitas]

The same source shows a roughly similar shift on immigration, with older people being less keen and the average opinion changing as they age out:

http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/4-race-immigration-an...

[ZoeZoeBee]

Deportations took a dramatic downfall in his second term and most of the "deportations" took place at the border, not in the way you think they did https://www.ice.gov/removal-statistics/2016

Always love the reflexive downvoting on the site, when facts don't match your view of reality

[namlem]

Bill Clinton was fairly right wing for a Democrat. He was certainly to the right of Carter and Johnson on many issues.

[jtbayly]

Congratulations on being the straw man.

But seriously, this is exactly the sort of attitude and comment that gave us Trump as president. The idea that truth is relative was taught to the America public by the academy. Now you say that the academy is a place dedicated to the pursuit of "knowledge" and speak of the "value of fact" as if these are absolutes. But you do so just after talking about "consensus reality." Make up your mind. Either reality is defined by consensus or not.

If "consensus reality" isn't able to convince me that it will benefit me, why would I pursue it? And if "consensus reality" isn't even able to get enough consensus to keep Trump out of the White House, then you'll have to pardon me for laughing your "reality" right out the door.

You made your bed. Now you're lying in it and complaining that others won't join you.

[throwaway648fus]

Yes, yes, we all know the narrative that quite literally everything liberals do in modern society were the straw that broke the camels back and forced millions of Americans to vote for Trump. Everything from elite colleges' safe spaces to shopping at Whole Foods.

Or perhaps it's simpler than that: a large swath of Americans unimpressed Hillary Clinton's largely uninteresting business-as-usual policies matching her husband's mildde-of-the-road governance with no real winners or interesting nuggets, up against the usual conservative base that will vote for just about anybody who claims loyalty with the Elephant (even if they don't really fit the profile, as Trump certainly did not).

How about everybody just stop coming up with hot takes on the election for five seconds. Your nitpick about the liberals in your life or sensationalized in the newspaper really did not matter. Sorry.

[jtbayly]

Remove the first sentence where I mentioned Trump and my point still stands. My comment wasn't primarily about the election. It was about the absurdity of claiming to be the champion of facts in the same breath as you complain about people not believing in your "consensus reality."

That isn't a "nitpick about the liberals in my life." It's just responding to the parent comment.

[ThrowawayR2]

> If you reject not only the politics of your opponents, but the value of fact itself, why should they listen to or accommodate you?

Because "you" (i.e. the right wing, in your analogy) can muster more votes from the political center than "they" can and can put into place governmental and economic policy that can disrupt or damage said "spaces dedicated dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge" greatly.

The ivory tower doesn't exist in a vacuum. Its gates can be besieged by the populace and it can fall to its besiegers.

[vannevar]

It can, but the notion that ignorance can triumph by force is not the fault of the universities. What is their alternative? To pander to people who believe that Islamic terrorists are a greater threat to them than the ladder in their garage, that being gay is a conscious moral choice, and that tax cuts stimulate economic growth? Conservative backlash against science and mathematics is a consequence of the increasing availability of data directly contradicting most of their core intuitive beliefs. That they're choosing to shoot the messenger is not the messenger's fault.

[creaghpatr]

>To pander to people who believe that Islamic terrorists are a greater threat to them than the ladder in their garage

A poor straw man argument, and it's telling that you need untruthful hyperbole to make your point.

[vannevar]

In what sense is it a straw man argument? Republicans favor spending enormous amounts of money fighting Islamic terrorists, while ignoring much more probable threats. That is not hyperbole, it is sad truth.

[carry_bit]

Compare the rate for both of those aggregated over the last 5 years to the previous 5 years.

[vannevar]

Or you can simply look at the probability of various causes of death: http://www.businessinsider.com/death-risk-statistics-terrori.... They don't specifically have ladder deaths, but at about 300/year, it would rank between heat waves and electricity on the list.

[thecatwentup]

What's interesting is that this is the exact attitude that the article is critical of. One persons perceived closed mindedness should not preclude them from sharing and refining their ideas in an academic setting, and being accepted as a member of the academic society.

[lordCarbonFiber]

The difference is that to participate in an acedemic setting you need to come with facts first.

This, extremely low, bar "elitist" as it may be is necessary to provide at least the bare minimum of protection against bad actors. People unwilling to change their view poison the space for all participants. The pursuit of an unmoderated ideal is a false one.

[jtbayly]

Is it "facts" or "consensus reality" as the OP said? I'm very interested in facts. Consensus reality? Not so much.

[juliangoldsmith]

>As the American right-wing moves further right and further way from participating in consensus reality, it should be no surprise they are increasingly less welcome in spaces dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge.

The problem is the gap between consensus reality and objective reality.

A lot of what the American left has been preaching recently (the Russia-Trump story, for instance) has no basis in objective reality, but people believe it because everyone else believes it. When a small number of large companies control almost the entirety of the media, it's not difficult to change consensus reality.

[dragonwriter]

> A lot of what the American left has been preaching recently (the Russia-Trump story, for instance) has no basis in objective reality

This claim has no basis in objective reality.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> A lot of what the American left has been preaching recently (the Russia-Trump story, for instance) has no basis in objective reality,

Collusion by Trump campaign with the Russian government is not an issue brought up by the left specifically (if anything, it's catnip for centrists; the left have bigger fish to fry), and that you're framing it as such makes me think you're using it as an excuse to ignore it.

[chowchowchow]

That's way overstating it -- people may jump to conclusions that don't match objective reality, but the string of suspicious meetings, consistent omissions from security clearance forms and testomonies, peculiar behaviors by advisors and campaign managers, are all things that did happen in reality.

Things like 3 million illegal aliens voted in California, or Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or John Podesta running a sex ring in the basement of a pizza parlor, are better examples of ideas fully divorced from objective reality.

[juliangoldsmith]

If something being suspicious is cause to believe it, then we can believe that the Clintons had something to do with the large number of politically convenient accidents and suicides surrounding them.

Objective reality doesn't seem to be enough to cast a shadow on the Clintons. How many people on the left know much about the scandal surrounding the Uranium One deal that Hillary Clinton approved, after taking large amounts of Russian money [0]?

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton...

[tensor]

It's suspicious enough for a formal investigation. Hopefully the investigation is allowed to run it's course so that we can learn what happened. At this point you can neither say there is no connection nor that there is one.

That there are a very large number of very suspicious circumstances is fact. It also appears to be fact that Russia did try to meddle in the election. I don't see any problems with these claims.

[juliangoldsmith]

A formal investigation isn't unreasonable. The issue is that the investigator (Robert Mueller) has ties to President Trump's political opponents (the Clintons, through James Comey).

As far as Russia meddling in the election, I don't doubt that. What I would dispute is the usual media narrative, that Russia was responsible for releasing the emails from the DNC.

[chowchowchow]

> If something being suspicious is cause to believe it,

That's not what I said at all, I was talking about the reality of the suspicious acts, not the reality of their implications. But the immediate refocus to the Clintons, when nobody was talking about them, is plenty illuminating about where this will go if we keep discussing.

[juliangoldsmith]

I don't think discussing President Trump's main political opponent during the election is too large of a jump.

Are the Clintons off-limits, or do you just not want to consider the possibility that they might be up to no good?

[chowchowchow]

> Are the Clintons off-limits

Umm, no. Not off limits. But also not relevant, for the same reason I didn't bring up George W. Bush and his administration. Your pivoting of this discussion into one of my personal opinions about the Clintons is super revealing.

I truly don't know what it has to do with anything, but it appears you're trying to catch me personally in some kind of contradiction? Even if I were holding contradictory views about these matters (I don't think I am), what relevance does that have to the factuality of there being enough suspicion around the 2016 election and actors within Trump's campagin to warrant an investigation?

[ConceptJunkie]

> +As the American right-wing moves further right and further way from participating in consensus reality, it should be no surprise they are increasingly less welcome in spaces dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge.

The two clauses in this sentence are contradictory. You are claiming that conservatives are stupid because they reject the herd mentality.

Think about that.

[mmierz]

Did you read the article in the post you're replying to? I don't think "herd mentality" is what the US far-right rejects.

[ConceptJunkie]

Perhaps the right believes that the "consensus reality" which is just another word for what the herd thinks, is moving further and further from the truth. That kind of thing happens all the time.

[lj3]

> further way from participating in consensus reality

> increasingly less welcome in spaces dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge.

Consensus reality is the opposite of the pursuit of knowledge. This is readily demonstrated by the decaying social trust in higher education.

[sremani]

Yes, that "truth" research papers with 50% failure to reproduce. No Thanks!

[jtbayly]

Exactly. They taught the world that truth was relative and then they have the gall to demand that everybody has to take the academy's truth as the absolute truth. No thanks, I'll keep my own truth. I like it better.

[junkscience2017]

> As the American right-wing moves further right and further way from participating in consensus reality

the "consensus" gave them the Presidency, House and Senate

[youdontknowtho]

I know. There's been an organized project on the right to undermine universities since the 60's. Any accommodation made to them is a small victory.

[dsfyu404ed]

The programs you're talking about have more to do with the FBI than any particular party.

Edit: they were in place during Johnson's administration

[youdontknowtho]

No. There were specific conservative groups that had specific recommendations about how to make universities less radical.