Today, Yascha Mounk and Christopher Rufo debate the origins of DEI and the right way to fight the illiberal orthodoxy that has consumed our schools and institutions.
Christopher is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a board member at New College of Florida, and maybe the country’s most influential conservative activist. He thinks that using the power of the law to stop DEI is essential.
Yascha is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an international affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University. He thinks that while DEI—and woke ideology more broadly—is concerning, he doesn’t think the answer to its illiberalism should come in the form of bans and legislation.
They both recently published books that investigate the changing cultural trends of the American left. Yascha is the author of The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. And Christopher’s book is America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
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This was great and informative debate. I'm with Rufo on this one. Having spent a large chunk of my career in what we here in Canada call post-secondary education, it is abundantly clear the foxes are fully in charge of the henhouses. To expect them to self-critique and self-regulate seems naive, almost delusional. The only way to combat the DEI/Woke ideology is to starve it of money. And since in the public education system a lot of that money comes from taxpayers, it hardly seems undemocratic to me to do just that if that's what people vote for. Sadly, we are usually a decade behind you in social trends so I am not optimistic about the ideological situation up here.
I see that some people were upset that Rufo seemed to go ad hominem. I don't think he had much choice as Mounk was pursuing the dual strategies of misrepresentation and talking non-stop till someone dies of old age.
This was one of the best podcasts I have ever heard. Both make strong points, so much so, I listened to it a number of times. I think the identity trap (that yasha refers to) is the notion that the source of one's problems are some other group, some other person, some other political part, they guy down the hall, anybody but NOT ME. One never gets elected by telling a group they are the source of their own problems. It's important to recognize bias and discrimination. it's important that we work toward equality. But at some point we have to recognize it's not just the cards, it's the way you play them.