Youth sentiment is a notoriously hard thing to track. Polling is a fraught enough enterprise without having to deal with flaky kids, occasionally impenetrable survey questions, and the real possibility that words such as “confidence” or “satisfied” might not mean the same thing from one generation to the next.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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The institutions that are fostering supposedly egalitarian politics limit upward mobility as much as they facilitate it. This has encouraged a type of blinkered and oftentimes unambitious style of activism among young people, which asks for many changes but does not challenge the system that provides them with their own lofty status.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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As long as the university is mostly a vehicle for class reproduction, the morality that it produces will be tailored for an audience of fellow college graduates. Is it any wonder that years of liberal theorizing on how to reach non-college-educated voters have failed?
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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In the past thirty or so years, the academy has replaced the church as the center of the liberal moral imagination, providing the sense of a community bound by ethics, a firmament of texts and knowledge that should inform action, and a meeting space for like-minded people.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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As progressive Americans have become more secular, the academy has become their primary moral training ground. The results have not been good.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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