Gonna be an awesome convo. One angle I think about a lot:
Don DeLillo described the Kennedy assassination as “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.”
And he did so because after that Americans lost conviction in capital-T Truth, in a fundamental coherence of the universe. After all if we can’t even determine who committed the most famous murder since Franz Ferdinand, if we have to fall back on “magic bullet” theories, does anything mean anything? Is there something behind the curtain?
This, coupled with Vietnam, creates the perfect backdrop for the intellectual revolution that is postmodernism and all its tributaries and outgrowths.
Postmodernism takes over college campuses. Critical theorists like Derrida and Foucault and de Man become rockstars. Academia becomes almost a competitive game to see who can formulate the most radical understanding of the world.
We go off gold in 1971, and inflation ensues. For the next 50 years everything gets more expensive, especially higher education. So at the same time post-structuralists and post-colonialists et al are saturating the academy, the number of folks who can actually afford to go to the academy is decreasing.
So now we have elite schools increasingly captured by what is essentially an evolved viral (almost Darwinian) Marxism, teaching increasingly wealthy and well-connected kids. This is where we are now. With the country’s most affluent, privileged, educated kids becoming the most politically radical, and it’s all occurring in a way and in places more and more detached from the lived reality of normal people. And these kids of course grow up to take powerful positions in society (because they’re wealthy and well connected).
So a schism between “the Left” and the constituents it purports to care most about, “the working class,” emerges and grows.
Most regular people are basically just like what the actual fuck are you guys talking about.
And so the Left becomes utterly detached from its target demographic and becomes instead like an eternal regress of theoretical nonsense.
Like the bird in an early David Foster Wallace story (the title escapes me at the moment) that flies in increasingly narrower circles until it actually flies up its own ass.
Voila here we are. nostr:note1vysmayhv5xa3hsj42vfs8jt0ze6kzf7vqpqn766yy0yrlk63vjnq8t05lw
