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The writing styles of Yuval Levin and David Brooks have converged over the past few years, and alas, that's much for the worse. (Ironically perhaps, Levin, while also drowning him in praise, once gently criticized Brooks for this overgeneralizing tendency, and nb - even as far back as 14 years ago, before Trump and even before Obama, Brooks' take on mainstream conservative thought - i.e., "Not my center-left True Scotsman Conservatism like it should be" - had exactly the same tone as his more recent articles. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose: https://www.nationalreview.com/2007/10/conservatives-and-creeds-yuval-levin/ )

But over-generalized is putting it mildly with regard to Levin's recent output. Who is going to argue with unobjectionable and inane platitudes? Is one really going out on a limb and inviting criticism with appeals regarding the importance of inculcating good character, public spiritedness, humility, self-restraint, noblesse oblige, and that elites ought to take care to maintain the public's good-will and bolster their opinion of the system's legitimacy?

Question: Is it coherent to say that the good thing about yesterday's elites was their diversity of perspective, ideas, and experiences and that the problem with today's elites is that they are all becoming little mind-clones of each other, while at the same time, to say that we should all be teaching the next generation of elites to have ... the same virtues and attitudes about the importance of character and what it means to be public-spirited. Teach them what about it exactly, one correct set of things? That doesn't sound very diverse. And, um, isn't that exactly what's going on right now, just with a different constellation of values, and part of how we got into this mess? If diversity is the problem, because the universities are doing exactly what Levin recommends now (just not with the *content* he would like them to), then isn't the logical conclusion that universities should *stop* teaching new students what to believe?

Here's the really funny thing: he makes one mild and oblique swipe at ideological-singularity virtue signaling, "... increasingly intense displays of its ideal of social justice," but notice, that's not at all criticizing that principle, and indeed, wouldn't any university respond that their relentless indoctrination and insertion of the "ideal of social justice" into everything they do is *precisely* the correct answer to all of Levin's concerns and recommendations?

For example, wouldn't universities say that it's pretty obvious that they *don't* select students on strictly on the basis of intellect, GPA, test-scores, and so forth, and that - to much public and especially conservative complaint! - they specifically deviate from those measures, sometimes quite substantially, in order to both "demographically diversity" their student body (note again, something Levin applauds) and to try and identify those young people with the best character, values, and commitments?

If Levin's complaint is only that he would prefer that universities teach elites a different faith to the woke one they are currently preaching, then it wouldn't be so incoherent and would gain a lot of clarity for him to be specific and come out and say so. Come on man, just spell it out, if you dare.

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“Khan uses Kushner as the symbol of privilege over merit. Certainly fair, but I might have gone in a different direction and used Kamala Harris.”

I often wonder whether Kamala Harris is an intellectual mediocrity out of lack of talent or lack of interest. Her father is a Stanford economist and her mother was a biomedical scientist who appears to have made significant advances in our understanding of breast cancer. Yet from a very early age Kamala Harris appears to have employed every political stratagem in the book to route around developing genuine merit and obtain political power instead.

Could she have done a BA at Berkeley (like her sister) but instead chose Howard University to bolster her legitimacy as a member of the black community? I want to say that level of cynicism is too extreme and welcome contradiction to this but I have a hard time imagining she couldn’t have placed higher on the strength of good genes, Affirmative Action, and her parents’ pedigree.

As an aside, it seems the status afforded to activism is vastly disproportionate to that given other endeavors. Two successful minority intellectuals have two children in the 1960s and both devote their lives to activism instead. Even Kamala and Maya’s mother appears to have received more plaudits in her role as activist for her scientific contributions as such. See this obituary from 2009:

“An activist to the end, in lieu of flowers, Harris requested that donations be made to Breast Cancer Action. We remain forever grateful for her generosity.”

https://www.bcaction.org/in-memoriam-dr-shyamala-g-harris/

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"Environmentalists don’t hate nuclear because it’s dangerous, they hate nuclear because it works. Almost religiously, the environmentalist’s belief is people should use less, do less, be less."

Just not true unless that mind-set is your definition of "environmentalist." Now even one is one too many, but that does not make the idea a majority. Many people are genuinely if mistakenly afraid of nuclear power and nuclear waste.

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Levin writes "it was frequently a significant (if always imperfect) constraint on the

abuse of privilege", but Arnold writes "I don’t credit the 'discomfort with privilege' as genuine."

Arnold has it right here. The has been no *significant* constraint on the abuse of privilege in at least the last few decades, since the critiques of e.g. Allan Bloom and C. Paglia were successfully marginalized.

Since then, the PC crowd has, virtually w/o constraint, been able to totally enslave academia, and has brought Wokeness so far into the MSM, that now the whole culture is besieged, by orgies of unconstrained propaganda, most of this implicit demonization of the middle classes.

There's nothing genuine about any of this.

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All the coal we have burned since the Industrial Age began can fit inside a football field. Great example of 2 dimensional thinking. Interesting that someone on here believes a degree from Howard confers as much status as a degree from Harvard.

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