Context

Let me begin by saying that I grew up in a small midwestern town, that I finished a Ph.D. at a prominent, very left-leaning research university, and that for the past five years or so I have considered myself to be an independent. I stand neither on the left nor on the right, believing with Hegel that they are both “one-sided,” and yet because the left has a near monopoly on intellectuals, I address them most often. In this post, I try to show how the relationship between the university and a particular conception of society furthered by the university has been rejected in the American Presidential Election held on November 8, 2016.

There are, of course, many ways of interpreting the election. Some say that the election of Donald Trump represents a rejection of neoliberalism, others of the liberal democratic order. These as well as other reasonable interpretations I have no truck with, and I have no reason to believe that they don’t get some things right. Nonetheless, I am choosing another target to aim at: the left’s conception of the good society. It is this that rural folks have rejected.

The First Part: The Inclusive Society

And what is that conception? For starters, we should note in general what the leftist project has been. The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton nicely suggests that it’s two-fold according to Alan Jacobs in a recent book review: a commitment, Jacob writes, “to liberation of individuals from oppressive existing structures, especially political, familial, and religious; and [a commitment to] to social justice, usually conceived as requiring the elimination of political and economic systems that create inequality.” In my view, the first has been largely lost in the developed world or at least in the US while the second commitment has become much more prominent.

Now, since the New Left movements of the 1960s, political activists have slowly been shifting their attention (in Nancy Fraser’s terms) toward recognition. It seems to me that the major aim is this: to achieve equality is to have one’s identity or identities recognized by the social order. Perhaps it would be good to call this, following the work of Charles Taylor, an expressive conception of equality: I am equal just in case I am able to freely express my most salient identities, provided that these fall within a particular suite of sociologically determined categories.

What sort of society, then, is it in which each person is equal just to the degree that he or she is free to express his or her most salient identities? This would be what I’ll here call the inclusive society. A society is inclusive, on this view, if each person feels safe to express his or her chosen identity or identities and if each of those identities is recognized by the larger public.

I believe this is the first part of the picture, and it would help to point out how over time there has been a proliferation of identities. Initially, the salient sociologically construed categories were religion (?), nationality (?), race, class, and gender. Then came sexuality or sexual orientation. Then came some identity associated with ableness. More have been added since. To say that some concatenation of these is my identity is just to say that I belong to the groups that recognize these identities and that I am recognized in some more abstract sense by members of the inclusive society who do not themselves claim the identity or identities that I do. In this society, one feels “seen” or feels “invisible.”

The Second Part: The Creative Class

To see the second part, we need to refer to Richard Florida’s work, specifically his The Rise of the Creative Class. Originally published in 2002, the book sought to show that the class driving the new economy would not be agriculture or manufacturing or service but rather the creative types working in “creative industries” such as Internet Technology, finance, entertainment, advertising, branding, academia, social innovation, the arts, entrepreneurship, and design. Its further claim, consistent with the seminal work of Jane Jacobs, was that these creative types operated, and would continue to operate, in the heart of cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Copenhagen, living in close proximity with one another. The proximity made serendipity possible and allowed new ideas to take shape and spread.

It shouldn’t be surprising to hear that those working in the creative industries are college-educated, often at our elite public and private universities, and therefore that many of them have adopted the inclusive society as their living political philosophy.

My proposal, born not just of my training in the humanities spanning two decades but also of my experience working at several organizations, is that we can put these two together. The creative class is largely concerned with, while being made up of, those already committed to the goal of greater inclusiveness (or the twin goals of inclusiveness and creativity). Hence, the sort of society that is brought into focus, and is deemed to be desirable, is what I’m here terming the creative, inclusive society.

Rejection of The University

I argue that those predominantly rural folks, the ones who largely voted for Trump, were rejecting this vision of the creative, inclusive society. To say that they were rejecting this vision of a good society is not to say yet that they were, or are, bigoted, racist, sexist, and so forth for having rejected such a vision. Some may be, but that’s beside the point. To say no to something or to negate something is not necessarily to claim that the contrary is true. Rather, it can mean claiming that something else, something heterodoxically different from what’s on offer is to be endorsed, and this is what occurred.

I take it that, given that these ideas about the creative, inclusive society flowed from and continue to flow from the humanities and social sciences in the university, this should be regarded as impugning much of what goes on at a university today. It’s just not the case that the university’s values are those of the rural folk living throughout the plain states.

For them, other virtues such as self-sufficiency, industriousness, and proper pride as well as other values such as self-respect, admiration, and the opportunity to generally lead a dignified, as opposed to a degraded, life surely play a far greater role in the everyday lives and aspirations of small town people. A dignified life set among family members and neighbors who respect them would at least move us in the right direction of understanding a competing inchoate conception of a good society, one no doubt based on human excellence and on getting what one deserves. On this score, hear Michael Moore speak in their voice about the horrors of neoliberalism:

They’ve lost their jobs, the banks foreclosed, next came the divorce and now the wife and kids are gone, the car’s been repoed. They haven’t had a vacation in years, they’re stuck with the sh***y bronze plan where you can’t even get a f***ing Percocet. They’ve essentially lost everything they have except one thing […]: the right to vote. They might be penniless, they might be homeless, they might be f**ked over and f**ked up – it doesn’t matter because it’s equalised on that day.

To confirm my claim that the university’s commitment to propagating its vision of the creative, inclusive society is not at all what rural folks would themselves espouse, consider the #NotMyPresident demonstrations, the unthinking moral indignation of them all. Where have these taken place? Predictably, in Austin, Texas; in Boulder, Colorado; in Berkeley, California; in Storrs, Connecticut: in short, in the very college cities whose outlook has summarily, swiftly, and forcibly been rejected.

Our Socratic Moment

Socrates is my hero because, with greater determination than anyone else, he insisted that those in power and those claiming to have knowledge don’t actually know what they’re talking about. Those in the media who have been university-educated should swallow Socrates’s medicine. They don’t know what they’re talking about, and during what I’ve elsewhere called The Great Muddle nor do we; we don’t really know how to live today. Just muddling through, we have no reason to act in a knee-jerk way, claiming some moral high ground, calling foul, or assuming that red state denizens are fools or rubes. It is rather, on this interpretation, that they rejected the very conception of the good society that the university continues, without deep self-examination, to advance. It is high time that we called that picture of a good society into question, holding it up so that we might examine it as well as ourselves.