GEORGE PACKER GETS MUGGED BY REALITY:
Few journalists are as respected by, and respectable to, liberals as The Atlantic’s George Packer. The author of The Assassin’s Gate (2005), The Unwinding (2013), and a recently published biography of Richard Holbrooke, Our Man, Packer has written for bastions of liberal thought from the New York Times Magazine to The New Yorker in a distinguished, decades-long career. His latest piece for The Atlantic, “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids,” is essential reading.
Why? Because it relates, in Packer’s haunted and sympathetic style, the experience of having a child enrolled in a New York City school system corrupted by politics. For anyone who believes in individualism, the freedoms of speech and conscience, and the equal dignity of human beings, the experience sounds like a nightmare.
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Packer’s family was distraught by Donald Trump’s election. He found, however, that the school had deprived his son of a vocabulary to understand and oppose Trump on the basis of liberal principles: “By age 10 he had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic.” Packer notes that Richard Carranza, the far-left chancellor of New York City schools, mandated anti-bias instruction for school employees that categorized “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity,” and “worship of the written word” as hallmarks of “white supremacy culture.”
Packer’s article vividly describes the “progress” critical race theory has made as it percolates through American public education. He is a man of the left disturbed by a rising generation of left-wing ideology and activism. It has happened before. When the New Left politics of Tom Hayden began appearing on university campuses in the 1960s, social democrats and anti-Communist liberals found themselves appalled. Irving Howe debated Hayden for hours. Norman Podhoretz, shocked by the anti-Americanism of “the Movement,” moved right. “A neoconservative,” Irving Kristol quipped, “is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.”
Read the whole thing.
Earlier: Does the Left Suffer from ODS (Obama Disappointment Syndrome)?