By David Pan · Wednesday, October 18, 2023 Telos 204 (Fall 2023): Quandaries of Race and Gender Theory is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 Old-style leftists have puzzled over how today’s left-liberals have abandoned traditional left-wing goals such as reducing class inequality and improving working-class standards of living. A key reason lies with the shifting of the politics of class. As Paul Piccone and Fred Siegel argued over thirty years ago in these pages, the problem of class is no longer a question of capitalists against workers. According to a recent Gallup poll, 61 percent of U.S. adults own stock, and such capitalist ownership, while a good way to increase wealth, is no longer the preserve of the ruling class and does not by itself confer much power. Rather, the ruling class that exercises real power consists not of owners but primarily of a bureaucratic class of managers in corporations, government, non-profits, universities, and the media. In spite of this shift, theories developed over a century ago continue to shape current leftist perspectives. Dominated by a socialist perspective, left-wing social policy fails to recognize and address the new contours of class division. As a result, it continues to employ a framework that is based on an anti-capitalist and anti-market agenda that tries to manipulate outcomes to promote socialist goals, precisely the methods of a managerial class.
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By John Croce-Renard · Monday, March 13, 2023 When the Supreme Court rules in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, it will surely declare that the use of racial preferences in higher education admissions violates the U.S. Constitution. There is some uncertainty about the precise shape its arguments will take, and their scope, but the basic outcome is clear enough. Here are seven reasons to welcome it from the standpoint of some traditional concerns of Telos.
First, a ruling against race-based affirmative action will diminish the material interests at stake in racial identity politics. It will thereby undercut the racialism that lies at the ideological heart of the liberal managerial establishment. Individual good intentions notwithstanding, the Tories of the managerial class use this insidious set of principles and rhetorical moves to justify their power and to bludgeon the working- and private sector middle classes.
Second, the ruling may enable colleges and universities to overcome the morally degrading culture of lies that the existence of racial preferences has spread throughout higher education, beginning in the elaborate charade that all applicants for admission or employment are judged by common criteria. It will help individual members of those communities to live in truth.
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By Florindo Volpacchio · Tuesday, November 15, 2022 Characterizing a concept as a goal is a misleading way to approach a critique. At best, it tries to imply a teleological argument. (I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether that is a play on words.) In actuality here, it subsumes the normative argument under its instrumental implementation. As I noted in my previous commentary, the real story is being lost within the prism of an abstract liberalism that refracts the spectrum of colors back into a singular light. So let’s look at that light.
What is the goal of affirmative action? That isn’t really made clear by its critics. Like most cases in these situations, it becomes an all-encompassing buzzword to connote some kind of progressive agenda that they believe infringes on civil liberties. What is made clear is that they don’t like what is alleged to be its methods, in the case before us, racial classifications. But is this really what’s it all about, Alfie? There lies the rub. Those advocates who are prosecuting affirmative action before the Court, and those who cheer them on, are arguing for a decision that allows the justifiable use of racial profiles to infiltrate the admissions game. But before we let loose the dialectic of enlightenment, let’s get the story straight.
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By David Pan · Tuesday, November 8, 2022 In his response to my post last week on affirmative action, Florindo Volpacchio emphasizes that the goal of affirmative action is “to recognize the social pathology of discrimination and inequality that privileged race and sexual identity to begin with.” It is certainly important to remember this history and its effects on present conditions, and Volpacchio rightly points out past injustices, including slavery and segregation. Yet those injustices are also clearly in the past. There are no longer any legally enforced forms of segregation and discrimination against Blacks, and the United States can be proud of the progress that has been made. But while Volpacchio seeks to judge affirmative action based on its symbolic intent, its practical effects cannot be ignored, especially as they perpetuate the type of discrimination based on race that they are meant to oppose. Since the history of racial injustice involved the categorization and differential treatment of people based on their race, the resistance to this history must reject such differential treatment and affirm the principle of equality before the law. Yet affirmative action re-establishes racial discrimination as a valid policy for college admissions and hiring. Though this policy favors Blacks today, this can only be done at the cost of disfavoring others, to the point where it disfavors Asian Americans in comparison to both Blacks and Whites. As Thomas Sowell has demonstrated through his careful and extensive research, the track record of worldwide attempts to engineer equality through a set of reverse discriminatory practices is in fact dismal, leading consistently to a skewing of benefits to the wealthier members of the groups they are meant to assist as well as to growing identity-based polarization and even civil war.
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By David Pan · Wednesday, November 2, 2022 After decades of contention, most observers agree that affirmative action in the form of racial preferences in college admissions will be declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. There are indeed few arguments left to support it. A supermajority of Americans opposes it, with 74 percent of Americans, including 58 percent of Blacks, indicating in the most recent Pew Research poll that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions. Racial preferences do not help the disadvantaged. As even a supporter of affirmative action writes: “Seventy-one percent of Harvard’s Black and Hispanic students come from wealthy backgrounds. A tiny fraction attended underperforming public high schools. First- and second-generation African immigrants, despite constituting only about 10 percent of the U.S. Black population, make up about 41 percent of all Black students in the Ivy League, and Black immigrants are wealthier and better educated than many native-born Black Americans.” As these statistics indicate, the racial categories do not correlate with disadvantaged status. They are even more problematic as a proxy for diversity. It is not clear why some markers of identity such as race and ethnicity should be considered significant for viewpoint diversity while others, such as religion, should not. Politically, university faculty have become much less diverse in terms of party affiliation over the last several decades of affirmative action policy, with a documented 11.5 to 1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans at leading universities in 2016. Moreover, because the defense of affirmative action has become a marker of anti-racism, the university support for the policy has suppressed opposing viewpoints by branding them as racist or sexist and not worthy of discussion, thus further reducing viewpoint diversity by encouraging pervasive self-censorship.
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By Telos Press · Thursday, May 13, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Jay Gupta, Mark G.E. Kelly, and Timothy W. Luke about the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Their discussion covers a range of topics, including the main causes of the riot, the cultic character of Trump’s supporters, whether the breach of the Capitol was more about symbolism or substance, the declining legitimacy of U.S. political institutions and the loss of faith in the Constitution, the rhetoric of democracy, populism as a rebellion against the administrative deep state and managerial capitalism, the changing politics of race and racial divides, and the realignment of Democratic and Republican coalitions in the wake of Trump. Telos 194 (Spring 2021) features a group of essays on the U.S. Capitol riot, excerpts of which appear here. Click through to read the full articles at the Telos Online website (subscription required). To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 194 are available for purchase in our store.
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