profjslewis.bsky.social
Associate Prof. at Washington State University. Research focuses on African politics, political psychology, conflict processes, and antisemitism.
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Roger that - well, my mistake. I couldn't quite parse what you wrote. I'll put it down to newborn fatigue.
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The assault on gov't institutions and higher ed may hide behind a smokescreen of 'efficiency' and improving systems that need to be improved. But anyone with 1/2 a brain can see that the thoughtless chainsawing and personalization of it is simply vindictive retribution by the Arendtian mob.
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But when I read the NYT article, all I came away with was: well, that was a stupid stunt by someone who likely is more interested in the performance of 'DOGE-ing' staff members rather than actually understanding the thing he claims to want to understand. It's in poor taste and likely bad faith.
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As I stated, I am of the view that universities are way overstuffed with administrators. And that administrators are paid unreasonably high salaries and generally fall outside any real lines of accountability. They are, in some ways, the "deep state" of universities. I'm not singing them any paeans.
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Delayed response: parenting and life got in the way!
I mean, my reading of your post in which you said "if the best that can be said about their jobs ..." was that you really don't put much stock in the value of their jobs, despite not knowing about their actual jobs. Did I misunderstand?
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Is that the vest can be said about the value of their jobs? Are people not entitled to feel miffed when they receive a random email from a student demanding for them to justify their employment?
I mean, this analysis is embarrassingly shallow.
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Universities ARE bloated and full of administrators who get paid way too much. And anyone at Brown who is concerned about cost might consider transferring to one of the many excellent public R1s in the area for a fraction of the price. Did they not know the price when they enrolled? 🙄
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Brown’s response was overkill, but this seems to speak deeper to the absence of substance in how we think and do politics and journalism. It’s performance and outrage all the way down, apparently.
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It struck me as more performative than anything. Anyone truly interested in understanding the ballooning costs of university could instead conduct thoughtful research rather than email blasting everyone and asking whether they actually do anything. It’s rude and in bad taste.
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This is one of the huge ironies of affective polarization. The people who care about the hostages are also the people who want to stop the war. Netanyahu doesn't care about the hostages, and their families are a thorn in his side.
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This is a major budget point for my synagogue, which is small. All events have police security, and we have frequent debriefs with the FBI on active threats to the congregation. In 2021, we were targeted by the local skinheads who desecrated our Holocaust memorial and synagogue with swastikas.
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None of this is an endorsement of the authoritarian actions of Trump or the right. The lawlessness, shredding of institutions and norms, and persecution of minorities - these all far outweigh the left's overreach. Nor is it an endorsement of the actually racist and transphobic views of the right.
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The move that I see over and over is to label anyone who dissents as a 'hack' or as acting in 'bad faith,' as if the only reason someone might have questions or concerns is that they are a malevolent actor or is guilty of being racist/transphobic/whatever. It's anathema to democratic discourse.
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*Part* of the challenge is many on the left are unwilling to acknowledge the scope of their overreach. As a result, the Dems have a toxic brand. Whether it's lying about Joe Biden's fitness or shutting down reasonable conversation about social issues, it's a bad way to build coalitions.
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I think we agree, at least in spirit, on a lot of things here. And perspective definitely is important. The authoritarian actions of the Trump administration massively outweigh the overreach of the left. But I think it's incorrect to assume that it didn't play a role in bringing us to where we are.
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The problem with denying that this happened - or that it was a problem - is that it cedes the entire conversation to the political and social right, who approach it in bad faith and often for explicitly racist ends. Plenty of people documented it in major outlets, so I'm not sure what you mean.
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Top-down policies and "guidance" abounded. Required diversity statements and trainings, blog posts from think tanks decrying objectivity and rigor as white supremacy, conferences judging research panels on whether they were anti-racist enough. Institutions caved quickly to bottom-up pressures often.
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I mean, It feels like we're just living in different worlds. Plenty of firings. David Shor was fired after retweeting @owasow.bsky.social's APSR piece, as I recall. Erika Hamline fired for showing artwork w/ Mohamed. Josh Katz at Princeton. Don McNeil and J. Bennet at NYTimes. Times were wild.
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This stuff was all quite well documented over the past decade. People lost jobs for being out of step with liberal orthodoxies and minor infractions, institutions released language guidance documents, etc. Plenty of pieces on The Chronicle, The Atlantic, etc.
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They are when they become policies at institutions, obviously.
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A lot of the intense social pressures and emergent norms related to racial and gender identities as well as immigration coupled with the knee jerk reactions that anyone who might have questions or disagree *must* be a bigot or ignorant.
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Biden intransigence and his team’s dishonesty burned a lot of bridges. So did a decade of top-down illiberal progressive social policies. So does the general perception that the Dem leadership is feckless and opportunistic. We can keep denying reality, but it is to our own detriment.
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I’m totally confused by what I perceive to be an unwillingness of Dems to recognize how unpopular they are or that perhaps their policies, insofar as they have any coherent party policies, are not as universally loved as they’d like to think. I just don’t get it.
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A core problem is that there were two years of calls for Biden to announce he wouldn’t run again, and instead he had a team of surrogates who lied to the public about his cognitive competency. That destroys trust and confidence that the Dems will be honest with voters.
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There is an understandable, yet dangerous, impulse for many to hand-wave away the core problems facing the Dems. They are wildly unpopular, in part because they are perceived as a party of know-it-alls who are supremely convinced of their superiority while alienating huge parts of the country.
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The complaint is not that, approaching the election, Dems circled the wagons around Biden to fend off nitpicks. Instead, there was a concerted effort to lie to voters about whether he could do the job.
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But it wasn't just criticism - it was a fundamental concern about Biden's cognitive capacity to do the job. A group of Biden's advisers spent years lying about his fitness, even after his disastrous debate, asking us to ignore what was before our own eyes.
That's a huge violation of trust.
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I think a lot of people underestimate how much trust the Dems shredded by pretending that Biden was okay when he obviously wasn’t. Noticing that he was unfit for the job was treated as if you were somehow campaigning for Trump.
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Calling @carolyneholmes.bsky.social
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The Dems just lost two of the past three presidential elections to the worst candidate in history. It might be worth listening to someone with whom they have slight disagreements.
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I can't believe that this podcast named "this guy sucked" is all about talking about how historical figured sucked.
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There is a deep dysfunction that needs to be addressed on the left and in the Democratic party. I'd rather we fix that now, rebuild a brand that isn't toxic, and move forward with defeating right wing authoritarianism than simply sweeping it under the rug.
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Is it the only cause? Obviously not. But it is frustrating that the response by so many on the left is to shut down reasonable discussion of important issues.
Centrists like myself were told to shut up about Biden's age and cognition, as if noticing the obvious was actually an effort to help Trump.
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The unwillingness of much of the left to engage in any meaningful critique of Biden or the extreme excesses of the left over the past decade (WRT identity politics, cancel culture, etc.) has undoubtedly contributed to the re-election of the current anti-democratic authoritarian regime.
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I agree with many of the critiques of the media WRT coverage of politics. But I also find it frustrating that any time the coverage shifts to Biden / Dems, there is an immediate outcry as if the media is simply facilitating fascism and authoritarianism by talking about something other than Trump.
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Oh, I wasn't aware that it was SCIENTIFIC. Nevermind - this seems totally great.
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I'm so glad that society spent thirty years heaping Silicon Valley with money and praise so that they could fully bring us back to 1933 Germany.
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No! What? No! Can't be.