December 29, 2023 - 5:45pm
Why are conservatives disappearing from the professions? One explanation is that Left-modernist cultural sensibilities once confined to academics and bohemians have diffused more widely among the elite.
Academic Kevin Bass this week drew attention to the fact that just 3.4% of American journalists described themselves as Republican in 2022. Among academics, the figure was just 6%. Even among medics, nine in 10 political donations go to the Democrats.
The figure below examines trends within a broader range of American professions. Higher scores on the database‘s scoring system signify a pro-Republican bias, with lower ones revealing a Democratic tilt. Notice that professionals in almost all sectors, even engineers, now trend Democratic. The George W. Bush (post-2000) and Donald Trump (post-2016) eras were accelerants, but the trend is a steady one. While we don’t have similar data for the UK over time, the share of journalists and academics who lean Left in Canada and Britain is largely similar to the US.
These shifts reflect wider ideological changes among the highly-educated. The American National Election Study reveals little change in the political ideology of US university graduates between 1980 and 2000, then a shift from 41-26 conservative-over-liberal in 2000 to 40-33 liberal-over-conservative by 2020.
These changes occurred earlier and faster among Americans with a graduate degree (Masters or PhD). This group went from 40% liberal and 47% conservative in 1980 to a 35-28 liberal advantage in 2000 and then to a 46-31 liberal advantage by 2020. Data on first-year college students shows that the Leftward shift occurred entirely among women after 2004, with the gender gap growing steadily to 14 points by 2017. The entry of women into the professions thus accounts for some of the change.
My research strongly suggests that what is occurring is an international phenomenon, not something specific to Trump or even the US. And donations data, which measures those who are politically active, indicates that professions like law and medicine are becoming more similar to academia and the media.
This is because the Left-modernist zeitgeist views white people, men and conservatives negatively, and minority groups positively. Due to the realignment of Western parties away from a Left-Right economic axis towards a multiculturalist-nationalist cleavage, cultural attitudes now predict voting and ideology much more than in 1980.
As a result most professionals, especially if young, now vote for the Left. Initially this Left-modernist culture was confined to the professoriate, activists and bohemian creative types. Since the Great Awokening of the mid-2010s, however, social media and the clickbait model of journalism has served as a conveyor belt for it to spread into the wider youth and professional elite milieus.
Those who are younger or attend elite schools are closer to this culture and therefore tend to be more Left-wing. The figure below shows that among American first-year students, 67% of those attending highly selective colleges are liberal or Left-wing, compared to under half from medium-selective colleges and just 27% attending low-selective colleges (where conservatives are almost as numerous as liberals).
Age is a key dividing line, even among the highly educated, with young elites much more influenced by Left-modernist culture than their elders. In YouGov Profiles data based on 165,000 people being asked whether they are in favour of political correctness, I find academics to be 70–80% PC, at all ages. Among PhD holders who are not academics, those under 40 are as PC as their professors; but barely 30% of PhDs over 60 describe themselves as PC. Those who leave campus to enter the real world move away from this influence to converge with the rest of society.
Or at least they used to. Given that “we all live on campus now” there is an increasingly progressive atmosphere in most professional spaces. Left-modernism has, since the early 2010s, metastasised into woke extremism, boding ill for the future of our institutions.
Eric Kaufmann is Professor at the University of Buckingham, and author of Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities. He is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange.
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Subscribe“there is an increasingly progressive atmosphere in most professional spaces”
That’s because HR is dominated by female, liberal arts graduates whose recruitment bias is increasingly ‘woke’ left-wing.
Along with the obsession with ‘safety’ and non challenging behaviour etc.
All unforeseen consequences of the fabulous, feminist future when women ruled the world.
Just look at the trouble THEY are currently causing in HM Submarines and elsewhere.
“Up periscope “ indeed.
Our problem is our Navy, despite being the smallest ever, can’t recruit and retain sufficient without extending who it takes. Same with the Army.
Now no doubt you’d bring back the ‘press-gang’ but actually modern Subs need highly trained crews. I know of submariner nuclear reactor engineers desperately being asked to stay on where we just aren’t attracting qualified replacements. Now if the replacement happens to be a highly trained and intelligent female don’t we sooner that than risk our Subs be tied up in Port?
Perhaps we should reduce the number of subs if we can’t man them?
Stuffing three or four women into a rather cramped, sweaty ‘cigar tube’ for a 60 day patrol with 80 odd ‘tars’ does present serious problems and is undoubtedly prejudicial to good order and military discipline.
Then there is the small matter of all that sanitary equipment which takes up space that could/should be used for military purposes.
However I would be quite happy with a submarine entirely crewed by women, HMS Goldilocks if you like. It would certainly bring new meaning to that old saying “Hello sailor “.
I don’t think that women need quite as much specialized sanitary equipment as you seem to think. In my experience lots of women in active service environments avoid getting a period at all, in any case.
By taking the PILL?
Yes, all that ‘sanitary equipment’ would occupy half the living space in the submarine. And WHERE WOULD THEY STORE THEIR BREASTS?
Amusing, but I think we both know the Admiralty won’t mind a few boxes of tampons being wedged somewhere if it means they can still maintain critical deployments.
It’s already been done: watch Operation Petticoat.*
* starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis.
They are a greater threat to the integrity of a submarine than a fleet of Russian warships.
Ever since 1945 those running our our education system have been reducing the physical and intellectual toughness.
If one looks at school gym for boys pre WW2 it comprised ropes for climbing, boxes and horses for gymnastics and benches were used to form a boxing ring. Most boys were given boxing gloves at the age of five or six. A PT class consisting of 25 minutes of gymnastics including climbing ropes ( left over of sailing ships ) and three rounds of boxing produced fit boys. Add in cross country runs and swimming in the local baths produces fit boys with very few resources.
If the RN had any imagination they would re-introduce HMS Conway and HMS Worcester.
HMS Conway (school ship) – Wikipedia
Thames Nautical Training College – Wikipedia
HMS Worcester (1843) – Wikipedia
Home – Dyson Institute
Organisations could learn from Dyson but that would require a level of imagination, initiative and ingenuity which they probably lack.
… which, on itself, is a symptom of a deeper problem: the state devotes so many resources to activities in which it shouldn’t be involved at all that it can no longer fulfil its traditional functions.
I imagine that “Nuclear Reactor Engineer” is quite a specialist profession.
I think blaming “feminism” for this cultural revolution is simplistic. Feminists are starting to notice that this new ideology puts the interests of women way down the pecking order.
Feminism came up with the batty idea that there are no intrinsic psychological differences between human males and females – only social conditioning. The woke revolutionaries picked up this idea and ran with it, so to speak.
True, but early feminists never claimed that there are no psychological differences, and they certainly never maintained that there are no biological ones. Quite the contrary. My paternal great-grandmother, born in the 1880s, was a suffragette, who believed that women deserved the right to vote and to be educated, but I am certain she would have been appalled at all this nonsense happening right now.
Feminists ignored the sayings of Spartan women
Plutarch • Sayings of Spartan Women (uchicago.edu)
Gyrtias, when on a time Acrotatus, her grandson, in a fight with other boys received many blows, and was brought home for dead, and the family and friends were all wailing, said, “Will you not stop your noise? He has shown from what blood he was sprung.” And she said that people who were good for anything should not scream, but should try to find some remedy.9 p459 2 file:///C:/Users/Charlie/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image002.png When a messenger came from Crete bringing the news of the death of Acrotatus,10 she said, “When he had come to the enemy, was he not bound either to be slain by them or to slay them? It is more pleasing to hear that he died in a manner worthy of myself, his country, and his ancestors than if he had lived for all time a coward.”11One woman sent forth her sons, five in number, to war, and, standing in the outskirts of the city, she awaited anxiously the outcome of the battle. And when someone arrived and, in answer to her inquiry, reported that all her sons had met death, she said, p463 “I did not inquire about that, you vile varlet, but how fares our country?” And when he declared that it was victorious, “Then,” she said, “I accept gladly also the death of my sons
Being asked by a woman from Attica, “Why is it that you Spartan women are the only women that lord it over your men,” she said, “Because we are the only women that are mothers of men.”7Spartan women underwent very tough physical trining including wrestling and if they died in child birth were given the honours of a warrior fallen in battle.
Is it not women who decide on the social mores of a society ?If women decide fargility, cowardice and treachery are the the acceptable mores, then they will become the norm?
Sadly, the degrading of academic standards can be disproptionately associated with the entrance of so many women into higher education. I can mention one tiny anecdote, when I was in a class where the discussion focused on homelessness; the male students focused on structural causes while the female students’ contributions were along the line of “I can’t imagine being homeless.” In other words, the issue only resonated with them when it could be related to on the personal level.
Several factors are driving this. First, patronage. Having infiltrated and then dominated the professions, by means of twisted recruitment, perverted law and social pressure, the left is driving out the last remaining contrarians.
Meanwhile, because conservative parties – as distinct from ideologically neo-liberal or nationalist outfits – are essentially pessimistic and cowardly, (not to mention infiltrated themselves), they do nothing – but nothing! – to fix the recruitment, repeal the perversions of law and relieve the social pressure.
Result? middle class graduates in quest of status and wealth naturally conform. Think of the legions of former shopkeepers, dentists, foremen, teachers etcetera who moved from independent and / or private status in Tsarist Russia to serving the Bolshevik murder-state as bureaucrats after 17 – not that doing so saved them, of course; it merely tainted them whilst they awaited liquidation.
When there is no alternative, you see, there is no alternative; and conformism, like acting, is easier when you “believe” in the part you are playing.
The same probably applied to those areas of the later Roman empire overwhelmed by Islam – people toed the line outwardly until – hey presto! – they found they were toeing it inwardly as well.
The whole of post-45 morality, with its celebration of minority resisters and lucky non-conformists in occupied Europe, was a lie. Individual heroism counts for absolutely nothing – in a worldly sense. And now, the new occupiers, the new illegitimate force, the red authoritarian jackboots of “woke” are in the positions of the former gauleiters, whilst the roles of Petain and Quisling are reserved to the bought-up, intimidated politicos who ape the forms of democracy.
Who knows if anything beyond an asteroid can save us now.
Like every Socialist movement that tries to overthrow the Status Quo, Socialists don’t know what to do when they’ve seized power except act like the people they seized power from are the reason their own policies are failing.
They bank on people being so demoralized by their failed policies that people will just reflexively demand a more “ambitious and generous” Central Planner that waives the debts of preferred groups and tries to print it’s way out of immediate recession.
Take a look at all the “revolutions” going back to 1848. They’re all the same concept. Different tactics but same objective…to divide people into good and bad groups and rebel with the goal of establishing an administered bureacracy that claims to center the economy around the “historically marginalized” but in reality just creates a larger peasant class with little freedom.
If as these people claim that Socialism is an economic system and not a Theology than advocates need to start proving that redistributionary economics within a command economy produces abundance. If so, what are the examples?
The progressive ideology isn’t “socialism” however, in any meaningful sense of the word. As a glance at the huge inequality levels in the most progressive western countries would demonstrate
That famous Fabian, socialist (and Irish) windbag GB Shaw said in a defeatist mood: The poor will always be with us. He really should have said: Inequality will always be with us and only idealistic fools imagine it can be eradicated.
Precisely.
Wasn’t it Jesus who said the bit about the poor always being with us?
Inequality is the usual result of socialism! Do you think Stalin or Pol Pot for all that they paraded their adipose carcases in boiler suits lived the life of the poor? And do you imagine for one second that societies which function on labour camps are not exploitative? No doubt you will bleat “But that’s communism not socialism” – when ultimately they are the same thing. Heavy levels of welfare, the slow western path to the gulag, notoriously depress and pauperise their recipients, leading to worse levels of impoverishment over time. So “progressivism” and socialism are one and the same – even down to the dress codes – think of the old, well dressed elites of Liberal and Conservative eras and now compare them with the under-dressed louts and slatterns who stagger from the back end of a limousine today. Like Stalin, they are pretending – by dressing like slobs – to be one of “the people”. The identity of progressivism and socialism can be summed up as follows: a parasite-bureaucratic class, churned out of corrupt academies, infiltrates, bloats and leeches off the state; and by means of state power hold opposition down.
Correct the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” They tell you all this in their writing despite calling it “conspiracy theory.” Socialism is projection. The Expert or Vanguard Class are doing the things they publicly signal about and producing more inequality to increase the demand for redistribution while elevating themselves on the Hierarchical Pyramid Scheme.
Socialists views of Right and Left are constantly shifting to the Left. Once Socialist groups overthrow the Status Quo they become the Status Quo and the new Status Quo immediately becomes defined as “Right Wing” unless the New Status Quo engages in rampant de-capitalization.
However if a New Status Quo group decapitalizes before the entire system is decapitalized, it puts itself at a disadvantage. By decapitalizing in a Capital system, it loses power and limits it’s ability to advocate slow progressive change.
Socialism isn’t the opposite of Capitalism. Progressivism is a form of Fabian Socialism or gradualism…as was nicely put by others in this thread.
The philosophy is socialism. The huge inequality levels in the most progressive Western countries prove the point. Socialism has always resulted in grotesque inequalities because it forces people into unrealistic modes.
But they had not gone twenty yards when they stopped short. An uproar of voices was coming from the farmhouse. They rushed back and looked through the window again. Yes, a violent quarrel was in progress. There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials. The source of the trouble appeared to be that Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously. Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Are you implying that Animal Farm is an excellent book that everyone should read?
Almost all of the change. One of the reasons I find K12 and higher education thoroughly unbearable (even though I myself am a teacher and academic) is the wholesale incorporation of female values and sensibilities. Women* often put feelings ahead of painful facts and furiously silence speech that is considered ‘not nice’, which is why these two fields have become increasingly orthopedic rather than educational. Children’s feelings matter more than their learning or socialization which is why bad behavior often goes unchallenged. Any male educator with a dissenting opinion is going to find themselves unwelcome or frustrated working in such environments, hence the reason why many men are fleeing the teaching profession (myself included). Medicine, journalism, and politics are also going the same way.
This does indeed bode ill for our institutions, because women seem to be rubbish at upholding cultural values, preferring to capitulate to mawkish cry-bullies rather than tell them to shut the f**k up, which is the very reason why trans-ideology has taken allowed to take such a strong hold on our culture. If women are incapable of defending their own sex, how on earth can they be expected to lead and defend our nations and their institutions?
We seriously need to revisit the role of Western men and women in society and realign these so that they bring about a much-needed cultural and spiritual reformation.
Ten Lies of Feminism
Young Western Men Are Being Destroyed
Hear, hear. Women are group-oriented and much less likely to go their own way. Often dominated by an alpha b*tch and her mean girl pack, the woman who deviates from the approved activity/notion is immediately ostracized and alienated.
A world without men would be worse than any dystopia imagined, but at least it wouldn’t last more than a few weeks.
*not all women, of course. There are many noteworthy exceptions.
I’m relieved that you mentioned that. You have a rather bleak opinion of women. I detest the pressure to be nice rather than honest, but is it really only coming from women? Maybe it’s more of a generational thing.
Men are most certainly to blame too. We let ourselves too easily be swayed by the mantra ‘happy wife, happy life’.
I think we ignore the mssive decline in dangerous jobs- logging, mining,oil drilling, fishing, the ending of National Service etc where a mistake kills or cripples and precision engineering where parts are manufactured to an accuracy of 0.01mm or less.
We have moved from a world which is factual and objective to office work which highly subjective and influenced by feelings. Undertaking skilled hard manual work out of doors in winter requires skilled teams where the members trust each other with their lives and any slackness is punished otherwise people are killed or crippled. Parts are made to an adequate precision and if they are not, the person is fired.
Women are always ready to wear a burqa and force others to wear it. Sad but true
Not this woman! And I can assure you that the outcome for any woman trying to force me into wearing such a rag will be less than favourable for said female.
That sumps up rather nicely why I have few female friends, and prefer to be around men. I have never been group-focused, I don’t silence speech, and I love giving contra. I will always challenge bad behaviour, and am much more focused on analysis, logic, and rational explanations than I am on feelings.
To get ahead on campus one must parrot the official ideology.
If I wanted to hang around a bunch of parrots, I would have become a pirate.
I still might become a pirate. I’m not stealthy enough to be a ninja.
At least Somalia would be warm in the winter
Parrots are lovely. Piracy has never appealed to me, but I have had small to medium-sized parrots since I was a little girl. They are intelligent, quite independent, and very entertaining. Most importantly, my dogs and the parrots get along quite nicely.
Bleak or what?!
Ok at risk of being cast out….
There are well documented behaviours and biological imperatives at play. Exclusively WRT women.
It is essential for young, high / mid status women to remain within the Overton window in order to avoid social ostracism and secure a mate and most importantly to secure social position for rearing children
These women also act as ‘Orthodoxy enforcers’ for the same reason. To create a partisan environment that they might zealously uphold.
As women increasingly become policy makers and executives this form of biologically driven safety-ism manifests in a type of mass conformism
No undergraduate female wants the Right wing nasty label. Fascist, Nazi. That cannot be permitted and so she will forego all rationale in order to be on the right side of (breeding) history. So this is instinctive and not ideological – All dressed as caring altruism
I sense also that high / mid status young men prefer to cleave away from the traditional male model esp association with lower status /working class and so take their cues from elite female taste makers.
(These men understand they need to mirror, not be pioneers, to get one’s leg over.)
And so become embodiments of the new social order as prescribed by their ‘Caring , seen to care, female counterparts’. Male.as females with penises essentially.
We’re chimpanzees who like to pretend otherwise.
“Left-modernism has, since the early 2010s, metastasised into woke extremism, boding ill for the future of our institutions.”
Like many Unherd contributors, the author identifies the problem of wokeism and its likely consequences, but offers no solution, or even a path toward the beginning of a solution. (Yes, I know that probably wasn’t within the remit of this short article).
It’s such a strange phenomenon, at least to me. There’s endless, excellent analysis on Unherd, Triggernometry, The Spectator, etc, regarding wokeism, its conquest of the institutions, and the consequences of that conquest, but so very little discussion of what to do about this ideological invasion.
If these authors are all diagnosis and no cure then eventually they’ll become the pub bore.
Well, we need a health check on left wing journalism. The NYT and Wapo fell for Culture War and went DEI. Now they are afraid to report honestly on Culture War topics. It’s bad for everyone that the NYT is no longer a moderate paper.
Left journalism is mostly coastal, except not the Gulf Coast. NYT needs a smart op Ed writer from TX to give their Blue Bubble readership a realistic view of the SW Border. They got John MacWhorter to give balance on race, but right now they are geographically imbalanced because they ignore red states. They only really have coastal writers and are weak on the Border and Center.
I have witnessed corrupt censorship at NYT, in stories avoided and especially in comments censored. I would so love a writer to expose their dei censorship and help force a course correction.
Because media does matter in politics. For example, if NYT would interview detrans, cancelled medical people and Riley Gaines and call out the lies of Rachel Levine, then I think the cult would collapse. There is no good journalistic reasons for not interviewing the women Lia Thomas competed against and got dressed with.
So what I would prescribe is thorough analysis of NYT coverage of trans issue. And then a public calling out for their censorship. Really focus on the institution and on the publisher Sulzberger 4. Demand reasons and clarification for their rules of censorship. This could be done on triggernometry unherd, fox and wherever. You could do this on other issues too. Confront the NYT for being censorious, with good evidence. I think there is an audience for a good critique of NYT. It lost its moderate voice, no longer Grey lady. But it still has big influence.
In fairness to the author of the current article, I should note that today I stumbled across The New Culture Forum website which advertises their latest book called “Fighting Back” which includes articles from several contributors suggesting ways to push back against wokeism. Prof. Kaufmann is one of the contributors. Maybe Unherd could interview him, or Peter Whittle of the New Culture Forum, about fighting back.
https://www.newcultureforum.org.uk/publications
There are centres of non-woke journalism in the UK such as GB News. The problem is monetising a fairly popular product given the boycott by major advertisers where the feminist and left wing influences in companies prevent a commercial supportive response. That a so-called Conservative MP like Caroline Noakes can call for GB news to be closed down highlights the problem of leftist bias in institutions that in theory should be supportive of free enquiry and freedom of expression.
Excellent idea for some UnHerd interveiws!
Not available on Amazon, or anywhere else as far as I can see. Any explanation other than the obvious one?
John McWhorter? The guy who still thinks George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin? His intellect is driveway puddle deep. If Thomas Sowell were writing for the NYTimes, they would have a genuine scholar to provide “balance on race”. McWhorter is there because he’s a simple-minded man with fashionable pigmentation.
Watch his videos with Glenn Loury. They actually watched The Fall of Minneapolis and know the truth. McWhorter has gone against the NYT grain numerous times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ffv4IUxkDU&t=586s
The guy who
stillused to thinksGeorge Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin?A large part of the problem is ‘Woke’ is too imprecise a label and it’s banded around too loosely. The author refers to ‘woke extremism’ – so ok majority will concur some ‘woke’ stuff is nonsense (and even sometimes dangerous), but the Author doesn’t define which bits he sees as extreme and nor do you.
Some elements that you/anti-wokers might deem ‘woke’ others may seem as sensible, ‘about-time’ changes long overdue.
I think differentiating and defining the ‘woke’ elements vast majority of us would coalesce around as nonsense what needs to happen. The insult of labelling something ‘woke’ about as helpful as silly far Leftists chucking the phrase ‘Facist’ around about anything that upsets them.
One can recognise woke when they see it. It is anything so gallingly absurd and hyper progressive a 60s hippie would blush.
I completely agree that woke is used by the right as loosely as fascist by the left. Your question, though, is a very big one.
I hold the belief that modern west is the safest, wealthiest, healthiest, most tolerant set of societies that have ever existed in human history. The story of its rise contains many negatives, some of which have been self corrected over time. Slavery and its abolition being a classic example. My mindset acknowledges bad things were and still are done but they are overwhelmingly outweighed by the results.
As an aside, it is a simple historical fact that these societies were created primarily by white men.
The woke mindset focusses to a much greater degree on the negatives. It adopts the Marxist oppressor/oppressed binary. Whatever sins there were (and still are), are exaggerated, become the primary focus and, to them, must be fought. The tools of Marxism are then deployed, the most visibly successful being the long march through the institutions and entryism.
These are paradigms of thinking and interacting with the world. To tie them down to a list of specifics is difficult if not impossible. At the extremes of right and left they become the same – a conviction in one’s own rectitude and absolute right to tell everyone else what to do.
People like me are waking up to the level of success the ‘woke’ tactics have had and are concerned about how this will develop. We see evidence of top down social engineering all around us, from TV ads to the ongoing inability to address the Trans nonsense. The historical precedents for where that ends make the concerns legitimate in my view.
Do we live in an even more tolerant society than, say, the 70’s? Serious question. You will say “look at the difference in the way gay people, POC and women are treated.” You would be right and I would agree, it’s a positive. What tolerance is there for a white working class lad’s beefs, or somebody sceptical about climate change, or vaccines or whatever? Tolerance of viewpoint diversity in the echelons of society that decide our future, is low and getting lower. Tolerance has not increased, it’s simply changed those things that are tolerated.
I’m not stalking you. I find debate more satisfying than an echo chamber and your posts challenge me to clarify my own thinking.
Excellent comment.
“Tolerance of viewpoint diversity in the echelons of society that decide our future, is low and getting lower.”
First they came for the Fox Hunters…
Wokism is just the latest evolution of the virus of Cultural marxism started by the Frankfurt School in 1919 and further developed by Gramsci.
CH is attractive to urban middle class people who have a grudge against their fellow man and civilisation because their unrealistic sense of entitlement far exceeds the reality of their life. As the university arts educated middle class expands, employed mainly in the academic/public sector, due to massive decline in entry standards, so will the numbers attracted to Cultural Marxism. When an unfit person with a degree in say, media studies thinks they should have the same career opportunities as someone with a First in Classics, STEM subjects and colours for sport ( rugby, rowing, hockey, cricket, boxing , athletics, etc ) they are delusional and likely converts to Cultural Marxism.
Tried a long answer. Now, inevitably, waiting approval
What is this thing of always leaving out the verb? It means we have to read all your posts twice. Stop it.
An affluent society means peoples mettle is not tested. The more comfortable and secure a society, the less a person is tempered by adversity so develop less fortitude and the pain threshold is lowered. Therefore people are less capable of coping, let alone thriving in the rough and tumble of life.
Arthur Bryant, the historian, pointed out the British gentry up to WW2 would have had an affluent life but education was based upon Latin, Greek and Maths they were expected to take part in sports- bare knuckle boxing, rugby, rowing cricket, cross country runs, swimming etc and were sent off to boarding schools by the age of thirteen years. For girls, ballet, gymnastics, hockey, lacross, cross country runs, tennis and swimming. All sports compulsory for all pupils. Until the mid 1850s boys could become Midshipmen as young as twelve years of age, Nelson did.
The syllabus would be restricted to classical and modern languages, maths, sciences, geography, economics, classical music, classical art, history and would have the rigour of the pre 1988 education system ( before GSCEs lowered standards and there were still entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge and Scholarship exams to other universities.) GSCEs have extended degree level education by at least one if not two years.
A reintroduction of the rigours of boarding schools for boys and girls of the 1930s would produce physically and mentally tough adults. Pupils received an Athenian training of the mind and Spartan one of the body.
A hostage held by S Hussein in 1990 was interviewed by the BBC and was ked by the BBC how he was treated . ” It was preferable to my prep school, we were not beaten and the food was better.”
Education standards today is like judging a persons fitness on how much they pay for gym membership and how long they spend within it. It should be judged on results. Mohammad Ali, the boxer is one of the greatest sportsman of all time yet his training gym would be considered very inadequate today. I Newton developed his theories and changed our understanding of the World by working in a 17th century farmhouse.
As they say in boxing “Train hard, fight easy “. Education should be a preparation for adulthood and the trials and tribulations that come with it.
I agree with you – i.e. plenty of articles that bemoan the universal grip of the Woking Class on every aspect of our modern existence: but no proffered solutions.
However, I fear that we are suffering the irreversible consequences of having opened the political Pandora’s Box by unleashing Marxist doctrine, led by militant feminism, into the mainstream. There’s no way all of that ‘progressive’ material can ever be put back into the box, let alone to close the lid on it all. Inevitably, humans will simply adapt to the new order, eschew the principles of democracy and learn how to survive in a Woke tyranny that will be the controlling social force for the next millennia. In other words, there are no solutions – that is the grim reality.
I have become convinced that generative AI will replace almost all white collar work in short order. I think by the end of 2024 most people will know people whose job was replaced by AI and by 2030, almost no one will work in an office. Firms with 1000 staff will shrink to 50 FTE, maximising productivity. Supporting “professional” teams like Legal, HR, Finance and Marketing will disappear overnight.
This will have a number of impacts but chief among them will be that skilled manual workers will become the high paid, high status societal cohort while professional, managerial and administrative workers will see their pay and status plummet.
Women will be particularly affected as they dominate this latter group. Perhaps this will lead to more traditional family groups emerging with men earning the money and women looking after the home and kids and maybe working part time. Funnily enough, AI could solve the birth gap!
Yes.
Historically almost all jobs / trades gradually lost status when they became feminised – secretary, typist, etc were all originally male roles.
Its not clear whether this will apply to “professions” but it seems inevitable that many if not most managerial and admin jobs will go that way.
Skilled jobs that cannot be done remotely will increase in salience. In the long term, insisting on “working from home” is probably a recipe for making yourself unemployed – replaced by AI or cheaper staff elsewhere.
Selfishly, I’m so glad I am retired and on a decent final salary pension.
So who will be doing the actual thinking and the hard work? Because if there’s one thing that’s been made even more obvious in recent years, it’s that woke attitudes are an effective means of sabotaging the ability to think straight.
Heavens! I find myself agreeing with you.
The current bloat and waste as well as inefficiency cannot last very long within societies major institutions. Interest rates are going up and inflation are going up, and the breakdown of globalization is adversely affecting supply lines and making things more expensive, and banks are getting more cautious when it comes to offering loans. As a result of this corporations will soon be cutting the fat from themselves and will be less generous to nonprofits as a result who depend on their generosity. As a result of this the parasitic magical class that benefits for the currency of affairs is going to get savaged eventually, the money is running out. The various bureaucratic systems and empires that people have carved out for themselves will be great reduced if not outright eliminated from job cuts budget trimming. A lot of DEI jobs have been getting a lot of cuts as of late due to the economic contractions happening on Wall Street as well as simply people realizing how worthless those positions really are and actually create nothing more than problems. and ESG investing is suffering huge losses as late because people are realizing that they’re being sold a load of feel good bull just to extract more fees from customers. It’s going to get worse once artificial intelligence and automation start in Ernest, and even more amped up once remote work continues to considerate, running a lot of staff and budget redundant. Which then the real carnage of employment of professional managerial class begins, a lot of people will be rendered unemployed and their power wealth and prestige they once had will be history. If you think the loss of position by these people we’ll force them to see the truth of the reality of things, that’s not going to happen, there will be no new solidarity between the now dispossessed professional mangeral class members and working class, of which they have long since been dismissive of or Hold in contempt. What will probably happen is that the majority of them will just double down on their radicalization in a desperate attempt both to get back their former places on the packing order as well as the strike back at those who took away in revenge, as well as maintain there false image of themselves being members of the elite. The long running alliance between the oligarchs and plutocrats and the want to be elites that make up the professional manager class will finally die and that’s when things will get extremely ugly. It will be like antifa, but times a thousand. Reason why I use anti falls as an example is at antifa consist of failed members of the professional manager class who who failed to make it into a proper position within the corporations or governments or who did but somehow fell out of it. The origins of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union came out of conditions like this, from desperate or dispossessed members of the wannabe elites who who felt that their place on the social order was being threatened.
The salaries of professionals are largely insulated from immigration, few of the immigrants are lawyers or architects and where they are prevalent in ptofessions like medicine there is close to zero downward pressure on incomes and the immigrants themselves are .educated , westernised and socially liberal.
The poorer immigrants are only briefly visible when they cut their lawns of clean their lavatories.
The endless characterization in advertising, media, schools, television, movies, and literature of conservatives as either Archie Bunker or simpleminded “deplorables” has had an effect. Even people with basically conservative views are afraid to let them be known, because those on the Left will do their best to destroy them.
God help us.
The words “liberal” and “progressive” do not apply to the left, and never have.
“This is because the Left-modernist zeitgeist views white people, men and conservatives negatively, and minority groups positively.”
Taking the population of a pluralistic, multi-ethic, multi-cultural republic and slicing it along racial lines, enforcing disparate treatment to different racial groups in law, can never end well.
The fact that the highly educated see neither the moral or practical problems with this is a sign of how broken our elite credentialing system is.
It’s a demonstration of O’Sullivan’s Law, which states that ‘all institutions not expressly right wing will become left wing over time.’ This is because of the influence of left wing intolerance and right wing tolerance in selecting senior employees.
Those from the right tend to feel that those from the left are mistaken in some areas but might still be good at a particular job. Those from the left think right wingers are not merely misguided but actively evil through and through.
So a person with some right wing opinion might employ a competent left winger. But never the other way round.
There are no competent right wingers.
Looking at the timing, you seem to have written that at 3am (if you live in the U.K.). Either way, I think you would benefit from more sleep.
I’m happy being an amateur.
The problem with this argument is right wing parties are doing well in elections at the moment, Italy, Germany, The Netherlands etc.
You can’t always believe the polls and opinion pieces. We call them “shy tories” in the UK. In public they express views they believe people asking want to hear, but in private they vote the way they actually think.
NB: The present situation in the UK excepted where we have a tired and incompetent so called Tory government, so expect a swing to the left… although the emergence of a new properly right party from the ashes can not be discounted
Happily I’m in the building trade where the opinion is still what it should be: Do you job well and don’t complain or we’ll take the piss out of you.
I work in the medical field, and I’ve noticed that many younger doctors are hypocrites. They openly support liberal values like abortion but become uncomfortable when discussions about taxes or doctor salaries arise.
The greatest irony is that most of my residency class is considering leaving the Northeast to move to either Texas or Florida. You can’t make this up, lol
The less well educated vastly out number the university educated. (I use the term educated loosely) .
There is no case in recorded history of a revolution where the elite won power. None. The greater number always wins.
Revolutions are never carried out and won by the masses.
Revolutionaries are always members of the elite class who are just outside of the ruling party, trying to overthrown and take over from those inside it.
The French Revolution was line this.
The Russian Revolution – the second part – the Bolshevik coup. The Bolshevik leadership were, like Lenin, all from the minor aristocracy or upper middle class.
And are often lawyers ….. when you think of what Blair did to the UK “constitution” you wonder what Starmer could do next.
As John Gray says woke will win because of “careerism”.
Democracy: rule by the rabble (Voltaire).
Democracy: two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
I’ll be honest I quite like being a right leaning professional. You get an incredible ego hit by dint of the fact you understand the majority of the cultural and political issues better than your peers simply because you are exposed to both sides of the argument. And this is before you consider the forbidden knowledge topics that most couldn’t even bring themselves to consider let alone accept (e.g. autogynephilia, consanguinity, heritability etc).
This clown proves my point that right wingers have no place in the professions – you are simply too stupid.
I’m not sure who you are trying to impress with these comments of yours. I just hope the person is of age. Cheers
You don’t know what those big words at the end are alluding to, do you?
I know exactly what they mean – and I know that you don’t…
The wokenes is self limiting, because it’s incompatible with modern civilization.
The problem comes when ideology becomes superior to truth. DEI and anti-racism have become paramount. Truth, observations, in fact anything that contradicts woke ideology, is forbidden. Further, teaching the methods of math, science, technology and engineering has already been declared racist by some. Anti-racist discrimination against whites and Asians is increasing. Educating straight white and Asian males is already being discouraged. This ideological stew is a direct threat to modern civilization.
The fact is that you can’t build a modern engineering project, like a sewer system, based on anti-racist principles with no math or real engineering. With our academic institutions indoctrinating rather than educating, we won’t be able to run a modern economy.Given that we’re indoctrinating instead of educating already, things can get bad really fast. We will replace our current competent technical people with indoctrinated incompetents.
We also can have political governmental edicts, like net zero, that make no sense. Where’s the test of net zero on a small scale to show feasibility? Sri Lanka? There isn’t one, because wind and solar are intermittent sources of energy. Without long term energy storage for times when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, you freeze on cold winter nights. At the moment, there’s no technical solution for long term energy storage. You need fossil fuels.
Mandated all electric cars and light trucks is another failure of common sense. Where is all the new electrical generating and grid capacity going to come from for the new cars and trucks? No new capacity is planned. Where are all the minerals for all the car batteries going to be mined and refined? There are no plans for the massive expansion necessary to build the electric cars and trucks.
Why aren’t these common sense objections to net zero and all electric vehicles part of the discussion? Woke ideology forbids it! Doubting net zero or mandated EVs is heresy, punishable by censorship, removal from your job and total social ostracism.
Standard right wing nonsense – completely fact-free and based on what you “feel” is happening or whatever Tucker Carlson or Andrew Tate told you.
I was always amused by Sam Bankman-Fried’s admission that he has donated approximately equal amounts to the Republicans and the Democrats, but while he donated to the Democrats openly, he donated to the Republicans secretly. His reasoning was that he would be pilloried in the press for donating to the Republicans.
Herr Goebbels said “Tell a lie often enough and people will believe it.” The left wing propaganda has now entirely infected the the younger generation. Heaven help the Democracies for allowing this to take effect. We have replaced our meritocracies with the Diversity, Inclusion and equity (DIE) philosophy. Why work hard if there is no reward?
I wonder how many professionals switched from republican to democrat as a result of Roe v Wade being overturned, and its aftermath?
Aftermath? You mean returning the decision back to state legislatures and reversing an illegal edict? I would guess that those professionals desiring abortions would have brains enough to know at what stage of gestation they can kill their babies, and in what states.
So with more education folks become more Progressive – whatever ‘progressive’ actually means. It’s not actually a new theme at all. It’s a trend that goes back centuries.
The graphs quite useful – it’s not just Academics (the bete-noire of so many) but good grief engineers too! What is the world coming to. I jest. It just shows good sense and a belief in social solidarity.
The conflation, and ‘con’ it is, is to equate this trend with some extreme woke-ism plague. Undefined as ever so the Paper Monster can made be as big as poss.
There are some cobblers that can fall under extreme woke-ism. They don’t last long once the general mass of folks take an interest. But in the cyberspace bedroom that is something like Unherd they can be made to appear larger than they actually are. It is of course partly a strategy to deflect away from the utter failure of Neo-Liberalism since at least 2008.
Stupid people become more “progressive” the more indoctrination they are subject to.
I don’t believe these polls. Lots of people might not like the GOP and often don’t vote or like many engineers are libertarian and don’t fit in these statistics. My son is a Mechanical Engineer and worked for 5 years in the Mid West, now in the South. Most of his fellow engineers aren’t woke or leaning left. Elon Musk is also this kind of independent thinking engineer. He supposedly used to be a Democrat, but had enough of their woke philosophy and I could see him voting for the GOP at the next election.
As another commentator said, the HR departments at many big (engineering) companies are woke. For example most firms during the Covid period, tried to force everybody to wear masks. My son and many of his colleagues refused to wear masks, as they often worked for 10 or more hours a day, and over time half his department quit, including his boss,
I’m sure your anecdote from personal experience has some validity, and I also would be sceptical about just one set of surveys.
But I think also you’ve fallen into the assumption that left leaning means ‘woke believer/supporter’. The two are not one and the same. For example one can support more redistributive health policies without supporting slavery reparations.
And for those more on the Right they should have faith the ‘market’ will self correct – companies ‘too’ woke won’t get the business, academic institutions the applicants etc.
The problem is that the market is not self-correcting. Film and TV studios continue to churn out movies and shows that score high on messaging but low on ratings. When these films bomb at the box office, directors blame the fans rather than the low quality of their films.
https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2023/11/15/1002vzmq5l6gnfwlp8akmt3896vhn5
We are witnessing the same at Harvard with its president not getting fired despite having committed numerous occasions of plagiarism and allowing antisemitism to run rampant on campus. For the first time ever Harvard is seeing a drop in enrollment.
The problem here is that the very rich seem to have become immune to market forces. Much of this is because by claiming to support DEI and other woke initiatives they are better able to receive government subsidies paid for by tax dollars.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/03/16/if-youre-woke-and-go-broke-should-taxpayers-pay-your-bills/
In effect a self-perpetuating system has been created in which people like myself are paying taxes that go toward causes that threaten their quality of life.
Not sure why anyone would be surprised by this?
Conservatives are brain dead morons suitable only for menial labour. Anyone who votes for the likes of Trump or Johnson has no business in high status professional occupations which require significant intellectual capacity.
Oik.