Rod Dreher's Blog, page 518

Living Under Punches

A reader writes:

My classmates and professor were crying in class yesterday morning. Even sobbing. My Prof was so shook up (her words) she opens class with this: “I cannot give the lecture this morning. We all need to have a talk about the election from last night cause I know you all are in mourning like I am.” So they circled their desks (I did too, cause I’m compliant in the face of liberals looking for a scapegoat), and they all had a cry-fest.

I just sat there, astonished: “If all this was flipped–Hillary won, Trump lost–would she be letting the Trump voters have–what literally felt like–a wake in memorial of their fallen candidate?! Absolutely not!” It was astonishing. So I had to sit through two hours of this veiled “discussion” on the wayward “direction of our country” and pretend like I was sad. Because if I said WORD ONE that I wasn’t sad, I guarantee you my classmates would never look at me the same again. A few students said they ended a number of friendships because they found out their friends supported Trump.

Then, a girl in class says, “I just feel like there are so many uneducated voters that don’t represent me that voted and changed this whole election.” Implication: You should only be able to vote if you have a college degree. Question: When’s the last time we as America based voting on the citizen’s education level? Jim Crow/Reconstruction era, when you had to be able to write you name to vote, and, as emancipated slaves could not do that, they were denied voting. So she says this, and EVERYONE in class nodded their headed in full agreement with her. She prefers a return to education-based voting a la Jim Crow Era… Yet Trump is the racist?

A liberal reader sends in this link to a post by a Pennsylvania college student named Cassie Hewlett. It reads:

I am not racist. I am not homophobic. I am not sexist. I am not a misogynist. I am for free market. I am for stronger foreign policy. I am for small business. I am for my family. I am Republican.

With the results of the presidential election stirring up a vast amount of emotions, I think it is important to clarify something: just because I am Republican does not mean I am heartless. The point of this is not to debate political policies. It is to highlight what it felt like to be a Republican college student the day after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.

On November 9th, I went to class and in every single one there was a somber attitude. Pre-lecture discussions were filled with phrases like “I am scared for our future”, “I am scared to be gay”, “How did this happen?”, and, by far the most bothersome, “People that voted for Trump are racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic selfish red necks”. Even my professors opened class with the assumption that everyone was sad about the result of the election by saying things like, “let’s not talk about last night. Ever.” or “No class on Friday. I’m house hunting in Canada.”

Well, I was not sad. While I understand that many people found the result disheartening, I am happy that the Republican party is in office for the next four years. I am happy that trade and markets will once again be free. I am happy that we are going to attack terrorism more aggressively instead of being walked all over. I am happy that jobs will be brought back into the United States. I am happy that small business owners will finally be able to reap the benefits of hard work and dedication. I am happy that I voted in my first presidential election as a Republican.

With that said, I am not racist, sexist, misogynistic, or homophobic. My parents decided to raise my siblings and me closer to the city so that we did not grow up sheltered and ignorant of the diverse world around us. I have never once felt that I could not date or befriend someone because of their race, ethnicity, or gender identity. For that, I am forever grateful to my parents for the way they raised me.

The response to this election has made me, and many other college students who voted Republican, feel that we need to hide or downplay our satisfaction over our victory because of the fear that our opposing peers will label us. That is not right. The controversy surrounding both candidates during this election took voting based on character out of the question. In my opinion, neither candidate has outstanding character.

Silencing those who simply exercised their right to vote in our free nation violates the core principles for which our country stands. I am by no means saying that those who were not happy with the results of the election do not have the right to mourn. They absolutely do. However, I am saying that those who are content with the results should feel safe in expressing their joy and optimism for the future of this country without the fear of being ostracized.

I am a Republican. I still care. I am not heartless.

I received a wonderful e-mail tonight from an African-American reader who told me she lives in a very white area of the Northeast, and is not a Trump supporter. There’s a young conservative in her workplace who is not a Trump supporter either, but she said that he is not being listened to because it’s known that he’s a Republican, so everybody has shut him out and shut him down. She feels empathy for him, being an outsider herself because of her race. I thought reading this, wow, what a human moment. Good for her.

I also got an e-mail tonight from a Muslim reader who expressed how hard it is for him and his wife to understand how a neighbor of theirs whom they really like, and who likes them, voted for Trump — a candidate who wants to police innocent Muslims like them. I’ve asked him for permission to publish a version of his letter, edited to protect privacy. It was important for me to read his e-mail, and to put myself in his position. He’s not freaking out and saying that Triple-Hitler is upon us. He’s genuinely troubled, mystified, and worried for the future; if conservatives like me can’t empathize with that at some level, something is wrong with us. (I’ll write more about this if he gives me permission to post a modified version of his letter.)

And if liberals can’t empathize with what it’s like to be that young conservative in the workplace, or these conservative students on campus right now, something is wrong with them.

We should all be like that African-American reader who wrote me. It doesn’t mean you’ve abandoned your principles if you try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes.

The Word From The Ivory Tower

Here’s an insight into how batsh-t insane academia is. This, from the American Association of University Professors:

Dear Colleague,

The American Association of University Professors and the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress have never endorsed or supported a candidate for president of the United States or otherwise engaged in partisan political activity on the national level. For over one hundred years the AAUP has vigilantly defended the professional rights and the academic freedom of all those who teach in higher education, irrespective of their political or other views, popular or unpopular, leftist or rightist. It would be foolish, however, to deny that most college and university faculty members did not support the election of Donald Trump. Many no doubt fear that his election threatens some of the core institutions of our democracy and may be the greatest threat to academic freedom since the McCarthy period.

Certainly, Trump’s campaign has already threatened academic freedom. His remarks about minorities, immigrants, and women have on some campuses had a chilling effect on the rights of students and faculty members to speak out. At some events Trump held on university campuses, students who opposed him said they were harassed or threatened. His call for an “ideological screening test” for admission to the United States could make it difficult for universities to attract students and scholars from other countries and to engage in the international exchange of ideas so vital to academic freedom. In addition, Trump has vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia, who would cripple public employee unions by overturning their established right to collect fees from the nonmembers they must serve. With more than half the faculty now barred from the protections of tenure, unionization may be the only remaining protection for academic freedom available to those instructors. Lastly, Trump’s denial of climate change and, indeed, of the validity of science itself assaults the very core of higher education’s search for knowledge.

But the problems facing higher education today and the growing assault on the professionalism and freedoms of faculty members over the past several decades can hardly be attributed to the results of a single election. Many of these problems stem from ill-conceived policies developed and implemented on a bipartisan basis. As a candidate, Donald Trump did not propound clear and detailed policy proposals for higher education. We therefore urge him and his supporters in the Congress to listen to the voices of all faculty members and other educational leaders and endorse policies aimed at restoring our great higher education system as a common good for all Americans, while protecting the academic freedom and shared governance that made our colleges and universities the envy of the world.

We in the AAUP and AAUP-CBC pledge to redouble our efforts to

•      Oppose the privatization of our public higher education system and fight for higher education as a common good, accessible and affordable to all.

•      Oppose discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or national origin and fight for an equitable and welcoming educational environment in which all can freely and safely learn, discuss, differ, debate, and grow.

•      Oppose attacks on unions and the economic security of college and university faculty and staff and fight for expanding and strengthening the rights of all faculty members–tenure-track, contingent, and graduate employees–to organize and bargain collectively.

•      Oppose violations of academic freedom and of the broader rights to free expression in the academic community and fight for strengthened protections for and renewed commitment to the principles of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. 

We recognize that faculty members are divided by discipline, by institutional type, by employment status, as well as by race, religion, gender, and politics. But now is the time for us to unite, organize, and fight, not only for ourselves but for the common good, not only by ourselves but with allies both inside and outside of academia.

The future is still in our hands. There is nothing to be gained and much to be lost from resignation or despair. Join the AAUP.

Rudy Fichtenbaum, AAUP president
Howard Bunsis, AAUP-CBC chair
Henry Reichman, chair of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure

An actual university professor friend, a scholar of national distinction and a conservative who was not a Trump supporter, sent that to me, and added, furiously:

After all these bastards have done to try to silence conservative voices by their diversity policies, speech codes, and safe spaces, they have the nerve to write this s–t. Of course, the clueless, tone-deaf, left, will follow like zombies, and call it “independent critical thinking.” These people are truly insane.

This idiot thinks that coercing people to join a union and/or having the state confiscate fees (when they don’t want to join) is academic FREEDOM. Got that.

I was no Trump supporter, as you know, but these people will drive me into his arms soon enough.

It really is breathtaking. This is the same class that drove the Christakises out of Yale, severely damaged the University of Missouri by kowtowing the the left-wing mob, that has thrown Christian ministries off campus (e.g., Vanderbilt) for not conforming to their standards, and that allows p.c. mobs to run roughshod over free speech — now they find that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to academic freedom since McCarthy?!

I’d wager that the membership of the AAUP is a greater threat to true academic freedom than Donald J. Trump could ever be. And they, in their self-righteousness, their arrogance, and their self-imposed blindness, can’t even begin to understand this.

They should read the post-election thoughts of the liberal Swarthmore professor Timothy Burke, especially this part:

The kind of understanding that is possible if we’re far from home, in Bali or Botswana, or deep in the past, in the Civil War or the Punic War, closes sharply the closer we are to where we live.

Not just academics, but well-meaning liberals of many kinds in many jobs. People who could make you a wonderfully authentic taco or show you how to kill your own urban artisanal chicken, people who volunteer in the soup kitchen or minister to the sick, people who could explain the finest details of Game of Thrones or do a great play-by-play of the last drive in a football game. We are or have been a lot of kinds of people with a lot of complicated social histories, but we’re also increasingly made over into the same kinds of people, with an increasingly predictable relationship to the economy, living in an increasingly small (if densely populated) number of places, holding to an increasingly constrained range of conventional sentiments. We are locked into who we are, and yet understand so little of what that is relative to others, despite our liberal arts educations and our unworldly worldliness. We have a long list of things we believe in and fight for and yet it’s not a list we can explain well in any deep sense, much of the time. We decry “neoliberalism” (often not knowing quite what we mean by that) and yet perform many of its operations as if they are the sun rising in the east. We explain things to each other as an affirmation of our mutual virtue and signal our virtue in the face of wickedness, in coded language and shorthand. We didactically explain our politics with the lonely desperate intensity of a missionary any time we think we’re in a crowd of heathens. We lecture about allyship without having an even minimally fleshed out conception of the social structure of possible alliances that we might be making. As our social worlds have become smaller and more specific, our lived sense of our own sociality has been fading into abstraction and vagueness, into us-and-them.

Which has become, perhaps, self-fulfilling prophecy: we may have been dialectically producing the generalized social antagonism we have so long invoked. 2016 may be the last stop on a journey that began in 1968, when any number of legitimately righteous crusades to change the world for the better, to make good on the promise of American freedom, began almost from their beginnings to curdle ever-so-slightly (and then faster and deeper for a few) into messianism. When the laws changed, that didn’t save everyone. The American promise went unfulfilled, injustice still sat on its throne. So policy–because it wasn’t enough to think that in the fullness of time, a change in the laws might produce a change in the society. When policy didn’t do it, civil society, culture, consciousness, speech. And each of those moves mobilized a countering constituency, often people who might have let the last move slide but who felt intruded upon by the next one. They learned the same routes for social change: law, policy, civil society, culture, consciousness, speech. But the more messianic the sentiment among those who felt born to change the world for the better, the less able they were to comprehend where they might have trespassed, where they were accidentally recruiting their own opposition. If I tell that story about something else–say, American military and diplomatic action in the world during the Cold War and after–progressives are well able to understand the basic sociopolitical engine involved. When you even tentatively tell that story here, about us, it’s hard even to get to a point where you might have an actual disagreement about the specific facts involved in that account. We absolve ourselves both of actually having social power and of aspiring to have it.

The AAUP is like the College of Cardinals in 1517, receiving news of an obstreperous rebellion in Wittenberg, and reacting with perfect disinterest in attempting to understand the nature of events, and their own complicity in them.

Trump, Empathy & Epistemic Closure

Have to say that despite the post-election spasm of caterwauling from the left, there are some very good, reflective thinkpieces on the meaning of Trump coming from liberals. What you might have missed if you don’t read the conservative media is that a lot of this sort of self-critical piece appeared earlier this year after it became clear that Trump was taking over the GOP. The verdict was usually some version of “we were too much in thrall to our own free-trade ideology, and didn’t stop to think about the people in our own base hurt by it.”

Anyway, here’s a long piece by the Swarthmore liberal professor Timothy Burke. Excerpt:

Not just academics, but well-meaning liberals of many kinds in many jobs. People who could make you a wonderfully authentic taco or show you how to kill your own urban artisanal chicken, people who volunteer in the soup kitchen or minister to the sick, people who could explain the finest details of Game of Thrones or do a great play-by-play of the last drive in a football game. We are or have been a lot of kinds of people with a lot of complicated social histories, but we’re also increasingly made over into the same kinds of people, with an increasingly predictable relationship to the economy, living in an increasingly small (if densely populated) number of places, holding to an increasingly constrained range of conventional sentiments. We are locked into who we are, and yet understand so little of what that is relative to others, despite our liberal arts educations and our unworldly worldliness. We have a long list of things we believe in and fight for and yet it’s not a list we can explain well in any deep sense, much of the time. We decry “neoliberalism” (often not knowing quite what we mean by that) and yet perform many of its operations as if they are the sun rising in the east. We explain things to each other as an affirmation of our mutual virtue and signal our virtue in the face of wickedness, in coded language and shorthand. We didactically explain our politics with the lonely desperate intensity of a missionary any time we think we’re in a crowd of heathens. We lecture about allyship without having an even minimally fleshed out conception of the social structure of possible alliances that we might be making. As our social worlds have become smaller and more specific, our lived sense of our own sociality has been fading into abstraction and vagueness, into us-and-them.

Which has become, perhaps, self-fulfilling prophecy: we may have been dialectically producing the generalized social antagonism we have so long invoked. 2016 may be the last stop on a journey that began in 1968, when any number of legitimately righteous crusades to change the world for the better, to make good on the promise of American freedom, began almost from their beginnings to curdle ever-so-slightly (and then faster and deeper for a few) into messianism. When the laws changed, that didn’t save everyone. The American promise went unfulfilled, injustice still sat on its throne. So policy–because it wasn’t enough to think that in the fullness of time, a change in the laws might produce a change in the society. When policy didn’t do it, civil society, culture, consciousness, speech. And each of those moves mobilized a countering constituency, often people who might have let the last move slide but who felt intruded upon by the next one. They learned the same routes for social change: law, policy, civil society, culture, consciousness, speech. But the more messianic the sentiment among those who felt born to change the world for the better, the less able they were to comprehend where they might have trespassed, where they were accidentally recruiting their own opposition. If I tell that story about something else–say, American military and diplomatic action in the world during the Cold War and after–progressives are well able to understand the basic sociopolitical engine involved. When you even tentatively tell that story here, about us, it’s hard even to get to a point where you might have an actual disagreement about the specific facts involved in that account. We absolve ourselves both of actually having social power and of aspiring to have it.

That’s actually a long-winded way of saying “the Trump election has a lot to do with blowback from the sort of things we advocate, and we are so cut off from the rest of the world in our own bubble that we didn’t see this coming.”

Liberal Damon Linker is basically in the same place, but far more succinct. He says that “self-righteous liberals” who believe that History Is On Their Side, had better get some empathy and imagination, fast:

Imagine for a moment what your life might be like as a unemployed middle-aged white woman in a small town in a rural part of a Midwestern state. Your quality of life has been declining since the biggest employers in town closed up shop after the passage of NAFTA. Things got far worse after the financial crash hit in 2008. You voted for Obama and hoped he might change things, making your life marginally better. But instead, things have only gotten worse. Job losses have continued. Family and friends are unemployed, living off of disability checks, purchasing groceries with food stamps. Some are addicted to pain killers, with an old high school friend recently dying in an overdose. Bills, including for health insurance under ObamaCare, keep going up and up.

Meanwhile, Obama has spent his second term enforcing environmental regulations that could close the coal mine in the next county over, working on another trade deal that you fear will only decimate your town even more than it already has been, and circumventing Congress to admit more low-skilled labor into the workforce, where these immigrants will compete with long-time residents for the very few entry-level jobs that can still be found in your corner of the state. And now Hillary Clinton has doubled down on Obama’s immigration goals and offered very little by way of policy that gives you hope for improvement.

Instead, Clinton keeps ranting about the racism, sexism, and bigotry of Donald Trump — and now she’s been caught on tape calling his supporters “deplorable.” You’d been tempted by parts of his message, like when he promised at the Republican convention to be your voice, bring back good jobs, and improve your lot in life. But you didn’t seriously consider supporting him until Hillary Clinton talked that way about your Trump-supporting parents, brother, and neighbors. They’d always said that things would never get better as long as the elitists out East spit in your faces. Maybe they were right after all.

Is this woman on the losing side of history? If she occasionally uses crass, insensitive language to talk about members of minority groups (with whom she rarely interacts), does that make her deplorable?

You will note that Trump won a number of counties that previously voted for Obama.  The idea that racism is what motivated those Trump voters is self-serving and false. Note too that 29 percent of Hispanic voters went for Mr. Build A Wall. Think about that.

Glenn Greenwald is on fire, blasting his fellow liberals for refusing to learn the lesson of Brexit. Excerpt:

Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.

But that’s just basic blame shifting and self-preservation. Far more significant is what this shows about the mentality of the Democratic Party. Just think about who they nominated: someone who — when she wasn’t dining with Saudi monarchs and being feted in Davos by tyrants who gave million-dollar checks — spent the last several years piggishly running around to Wall Street banks and major corporations cashing in with $250,000 fees for 45-minute secret speeches even though she had already become unimaginably rich with book advances while her husband already made tens of millions playing these same games. She did all that without the slightest apparent concern for how that would feed into all the perceptions and resentments of her and the Democratic Party as corrupt, status quo-protecting, aristocratic tools of the rich and powerful: exactly the worst possible behavior for this post-2008-economic-crisis era of globalism and destroyed industries.

It goes without saying that Trump is a sociopathic con artist obsessed with personal enrichment: the opposite of a genuine warrior for the downtrodden. That’s too obvious to debate. But, just as Obama did so powerfully in 2008, he could credibly run as an enemy of the D.C. and Wall Street system that has steamrolled over so many people, while Hillary Clinton is its loyal guardian, its consummate beneficiary.

Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently. That, as Matt Stoller’s indispensable article in The Atlantic three weeks ago documented, is the conniving choice the Democratic Party made decades ago: to abandon populism and become the party of technocratically proficient, mildly benevolent managers of elite power. Those are the cynical, self-interested seeds they planted, and now the crop has sprouted.

Of course there are fundamental differences between Obama’s version of “change” and Trump’s. But at a high level of generality — which is where these messages are often ingested — both were perceived as outside forces on a mission to tear down corrupt elite structures, while Clinton was perceived as devoted to their fortification. That is the choice made by Democrats — largely happy with status quo authorities, believing in their basic goodness — and any honest attempt by Democrats to find the prime author of last night’s debacle will begin with a large mirror.

Charlie Camosy, a politically liberal Fordham theologian, has one of the smartest takes I’ve yet seen, focusing on the out-of-touch quality of the college educated. Excerpts:

As a college professor, I know that there are many ways in which college graduates simply know more about the world than those who do not have such degrees. This is especially true — with some exceptions, of course — when it comes to “hard facts” learned in science, history and sociology courses.

But I also know that that those with college degrees — again, with some significant exceptions — don’t necessarily know philosophy or theology. And they have especially paltry knowledge about the foundational role that different philosophical or theological claims play in public thought compared with what is common to college campuses. In my experience, many professors and college students don’t even realize that their views on political issues rely on a particular philosophical or theological stance.

Higher education in the United States, after all, is woefully monolithic in its range of worldviews. In 2014, some 60 percent of college professors identified as either “liberal” or “far-left,” an increase from 42 percent identifying as such in 1990. And while liberal college professors outnumber conservatives 5-to-1, conservatives are considerably more common within the general public. The world of academia is, therefore, different in terms of political temperature than the rest of society, and what is common knowledge and conventional wisdom among America’s campus dwellers can’t be taken for granted outside the campus gates.

Right. Right! More:

Think about the sets of issues that are often at the core of the identity of the working-class folks who elected Trump: religion, personal liberty’s relationship with government, gender, marriage, sexuality, prenatal life and gun rights. Intuition and stories guide most working-class communities on these issues. With some exceptions, those professorial sorts who form the cultures of our colleges and universities have very different intuition and stories. And the result of this divide has been to produce an educated class with an isolated, insular political culture.

Religion in most secular institutions, for instance, is at best thought of as an important sociological phenomenon to understand — but is very often criticized as an inherently violent, backward force in our culture, akin to belief in fairies and dragons. Professors are less religious than the population as a whole. Most campus cultures have strictly (if not formally) enforced dogmatic views about the nature of gender, sexual orientation, a woman’s right to choose abortion, guns and the role of the state as primary agent of social change. If anyone disagrees with these dogmatic positions they risk being marginalized as ignorant, bigoted, fanatical or some other dismissive label.

Read the whole thing.  Camosy’s speech spoke deeply to me, and I’ll tell you why. As regular readers know, religious liberty has become the political issue that most motivates me. Over the past 20 years, the nation has undergone an incredible — as in, scarcely believable — sea change on the meaning of marriage and sexuality. A secular liberal friend of mine who was a civil rights and antiwar protester in the 1960s told me (approvingly!) that she had not lived through a greater revolution than the one that produced same-sex marriage. This is simply a sociological and political fact.

One of the reasons the movement triumphed so quickly and so completely, as I have written often in this space, is that ordinary Americans lost the narrative of what marriage means from a traditional, and from a Christian, perspective. The SSM revolution happened because the Sexual Revolution happened first. What gay folks demanded was based on the model of marriage and sexuality that the overwhelming number of straight people already hold. And gay marriage is now a popular belief. That’s not going to change, and any Christian conservatives who think Donald Trump, of all people, is going to reverse that are out of their minds.

But here’s the thing. There are quite a few people who are willing to live with the new marriage regime, but who deeply, deeply resent the way gay rights activists and their allies in big business, the media, law, and elsewhere, are bullying and demonizing ordinary people whose convictions cannot allow them to affirm the revolution. When you have the federal government in Washington ordering local public schools around the country to allow teenage boys who think they are girls into the girls’ locker rooms, you would have to be insane to think that that kind of thing won’t produce a backlash — this, even if the people offended by it cannot articulate precisely what they’re opposed to.

This, I feel pretty sure, is why Trump’s rage against political correctness hit a sweet spot within people who otherwise found him to be crude and objectionable. None of the usual Republican suspects could muster the courage to speak out in defense of these ordinary people and their ordinary views, which all of a sudden, virtually overnight, turned into the worst sort of bigotry in the eyes of academia, the media, and all the bien-pensants of the left.

To this point, note this story from 2014, about John Podesta’s outfit:

A top liberal group has temporarily abandoned plans for a new project designed to court white working class voters after it could not marshal the necessary financial support for the project, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The Center for American Progress planned to roll out a new effort last year called the Bobby Kennedy Project. However, insufficient funding for the project forced the group to postpone its launch until 2016.

The stated need for the project suggests potential pitfalls for Democrats in its eventual delay: In a midterm election year expected to heavily favor Republicans, CAP has apparently abandoned, for the time being, an effort to reach out to a constituency that it acknowledges could determine the viability of the Democrats’ voting coalition going forward.

Of course. Because the kind of people who fund the Democratic Party care more about gay marriage than they do about the Rust Belt. And now they know what that means.

UCLA’s Sham Diversity Event

Today at UCLA, there will a post-election event that promises to feature a “range of perspectives.” Prof. Bainbridge, who teaches law at UCLA, observes that the range of perspectives covers the gamut from A to B. Excerpt:

Who on this panel will speak to–let alone for–students who have “earnest excitement about our new President-elect”? Nobody is the answer.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, this is happening at universities all over the country. What the people putting these programs together don’t seem to get is that it is not every student or faculty member shares their world view. As such, while they worry a lot about people being alienated, they are blind to the sense of alienation felt by students or faculty who don’t share their PC orthodoxy. Of course, they also don’t seem to get that the election result is, in some small–but not, I think insignificant–part, a reaction to the pervasive left-liberal hegemony on college campuses.

Emphasis mine. Listen, academy, Jonathan Haidt and his Heterodox Academy colleagues keep trying to tell y’all that you are digging your own grave with this stuff, but you won’t listen. This UCLA event is precisely the kind of sham diversity that leaves liberals blind to the world around them. You can see it clearly when it’s Liberty University chancellor Jerry Falwell compelling students there to listen to right-wing hacks at chapel. But it’s gospel when it comes from ideologues who tell you what you want to hear.

David Dayen, a liberal writing in The New Republic, engages in some admirable soul-searching. Excerpts:

No, this was a rage election: a rage built up over many years, among people who’d decided they were disrespected, abandoned, and voiceless.

Liberals weren’t completely caught unawares. We recognized the rage—how could we not? We saw it in our social-media feeds all year. We read (and wrote) endless articles featuring reporters edging out to Red America, armed with a notebook and a pretense of empathy, to see what Trumpism was all about, why the fever seemed to be running so high among these people.

And what did that produce? The daily filling of a basket of deplorables. I sometimes refer to it as “point-and-laugh” liberalism. Our relentless mockery of Trump and his followers helped fuel the backlash and make it spread.

More:

The rage in the country isn’t limited to the stereotypical rural white American of the liberal imagination. We know that now. Trump didn’t just win in small towns, though he galvanized communities there. He surged in the aspirational exurbs where conservatives rule culturally. He also surged in Rust Belt communities that voted for Barack Obama twice. Places like Scranton, Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; Janesville, Wisconsin; Orange County, Florida—places that have trended Democratic in some cases for decades—moved away from the Democratic candidate. Hillary Clinton either lost or battled to a draw in those regions, which had made up margins of victories for past Democratic presidents. Even union households voted in high numbers for Trump.

Liberal Democrats knowingly snickered at Trump’s lack of campaign offices or ground game. Built reams of evidence out of polls. Never missed the stray comment from the craziest conservative or Trump surrogate in the country, and offered it up for mockery. We turned “economic anxiety” into a meme that implicitly belittled anyone who didn’t find their life wonderful.

Read the whole thing. I hope to read something from the left as good at ripping apart the kind of liberalism that led to Trump as was Tucker Carlson’s epic piece in January eviscerating the kind of conservatism that led to Trump.

America In Uncharted Waters

What did you do last night? Not this, I hope. Excerpts:

Most of the major demonstrations took place in urban centers in blue states Clinton won Tuesday — highlighting the demographic divide that shaped the election results.

The former secretary of state’s narrow victory in the popular vote spurred demonstrators in New York to chant “She got more votes!” as thousands amassed in front of Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan. The crowd stretched several blocks down Fifth Avenue.

Earlier, the protesters had marched from Union Square to Trump’s building, chanting “Donald Trump, go away! Sexist, racist, anti-gay!”

At one point, demonstrators lit an American flag on fire. Later, amid a cacophony of loud chants, a glowing “Love Trumps Hate” banner was held aloft under the iconic Trump Tower sign. The singer Cher mingled in the crowd, doling out hugs.

Hugs from Cher. We live in the best of all possible worlds. More:

Tensions flared particularly high on college campuses. At American University in Washington, students burned American flags and some shouted “F— white America!”

In Austin, students at the University of Texas led a march for hours through the city Wednesday afternoon. As hundreds of protesters wove into traffic, bus drivers high-fived the students. Some in their vehicles got out and hugged them, tears streaming down their faces.

“Seeing this is everything,” said Jennifer Rowsey, 47, as the march passed by a coffee shop next to Austin City Hall where she is the human resource manager. “I felt so isolated,” she said. “I don’t feel so alone now.”

Austin City Council member Greg Casar, the son of Mexican immigrants and a community organizer, joined up with the protesters when they passed by an interview he was giving with local media.

“A lot of people are calling for healing,” he said. “I think we should reject that.”

“A lot of people are calling for healing. I think we should reject that.” And yet a couple of weeks ago, everybody (including me) were worried about Trump and his supporters not accepting the results of the election. Now it’s many on the Left.

More:

Warning Graphic Language: Anti-Trump protest at Lee Circle in New Orleans burns effigy of Donald Trump in New Orleans @theadvocateno pic.twitter.com/dvZo8lQrjM

— Matthew Hinton (@MattHintonPhoto) November 10, 2016

Awful. Protestors hanging Trump effigies in New York tonight. If they were Trump supporters, imagine the outrage? pic.twitter.com/Y7yN1iyKqM

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) November 10, 2016

So this is now happening. pic.twitter.com/kfapVoNIB7

— William J. Upton (@wupton) November 10, 2016

Yeah, because hanging in effigy the man half the country just chose as its next president, and burning the American flag, is going to be real good for America.

I don’t believe this is going to be a passing spasm. I believe this comment on the identity politics thread by a graduate student at a major state university describes our future:

They have no intention of waking up to the damage that identity politics are doing to the country. A large proportion of my friends on Facebook are graduate students in the humanities at a major public university. So, as you can gather, they are fully committed to the IP agenda. Today I have been treated to a torrent of self-obsessed whinging about how they could barely manage to get out of bed today, so crippling was the sorrow and fear. Several wondered how they were even going to teach, one comparing today to teaching on the day after 9/11. Several others accused Trump voters of voting against them *personally*. (One wrote, “Each one of of you voted not to protect me….Each one of you cast that vote and said to a living, breathing, human being, ‘I don’t care.’ I want you to know that.”) Others have claimed that “LGBT lives are in danger.” One posted the number for a suicide hotline.

One professor (“Dr. Drew”) in the ecology department at Columbia sent this to his class: https://labroides.org/2016/11/09/an-open-letter-to-my-class/

Imagine if you were a Trump sympathizer in his class, and you received a letter pontificating about how “Last night we saw a refutation of the values that this, and many other, universities hold dear – equality, thoughtfulness, scholarship, and a belief that sound decision making will triumph over the noise and clamor of demagoguery. Unfortunately we also saw that the historical legacies of racism, sexism, and ignorance, still run deep within large swaths of our country.” Would you feel like you were in a position to speak openly about your political positions in class? Would you feel that the ‘equality’ Dr. Drew mentions applies to you?

This isn’t going away. The intense personalization of politics–the belief that if you disagree with me, you reject *me personally*–is not going away. Reading what my colleagues have written over the past 24 hours reveals to me that it is literally unfathomable to them that anyone other than the very worst sort of person could conceivably vote for Donald Trump. It’s easy to write off this hysterical, hyperventilating hand-wringing as a ludicrous overreaction, which it is. But they believe it to their very cores. The prospect of someone’s voting for Donald Trump is so unthinkable to them that they believe that people may actually be contemplating suicide rather than face a world in which Trump has been elected. It’s nihilistic and melodramatic. But they’re teaching your kids, and this is what they’re teaching them, both covertly and overtly.

What scares me most about a Trump presidency isn’t the man himself. What scares me is the coming backlash from the left that has turned identity politics into so deeply personal an ideology. (They have, after all, convinced themselves that identity politics is a matter of personal survival.) Look, with Hillary Clinton, we knew what we were getting. We steeled ourselves to endure increased curtailments of religious liberty, endless war, etc. etc. Trump will perhaps fight a few rear-guard actions on our behalf, and he may even win a few victories for us on SCOTUS and elsewhere. But the backlash from this New Left that brooks no disagreement is going to be unimaginably fiercer than it would have been otherwise.

We’ve purchased two to four years to get our house in order. That work needs to start today. I’ve worked with and know personally the people who are prepared to destroy us. I don’t doubt for a second that they will not hesitate when they have the chance. What little toleration as may previously have existed is gone now. Get ready.

Yesterday, a few readers e-mailed or commented here to say that the Trump win will probably depress sales of The Benedict Option.  I guess it might, but if conservative Christians and fellow travelers believe that Trump is going to arrest the long historical process of desacralization and fragmentation, they’re out of their minds. If they think that the left is going to behave in any way other than what the grad student predicts, they’re deluded. And if they think Trump is going to be anything other than a provocateur and chaos agent, they have not been paying attention.

The great mistake that religious conservatives have made since 1980 is in thinking that all they had to do was get the politics right (and therefore the judiciary), and the culture would take care of itself. How, for example, can any Christian believe in anno Domini 2016 that the election of Donald Freaking Trump is going to turn around the ongoing collapse in the church’s numbers among Millennials, to say nothing of all the other signs of cultural decline.

Trump’s election may — may — have been preferable to Hillary’s, but from a traditional conservative and Christian view, it is still bad news. Peter Hitchens nails it, hard. Excerpts:

Today , for the second time in five months, a left-wing elite paid the price of ignoring, for many years, the warnings of civilised and tolerant conservatives. I cannot tell you how frustrating it has been, when trying to debate politics with readers of the Guardian and the New York Times.

To suggest to them that mass immigration is risky and destabilising; to urge that the married family needs to be supported, not dissolved; to say that education needs more rigour, discipline and selection; to advocate the deterrent punishment of crime rather than its indulgence; to suggest that pornography and swearing may damage civility; to object to attempts to abolish national borders and sovereignty;  to say that violent liberal intervention in foreign countries is dangerous and wrong… any or all of these things has earned me a patronising sneer, a lofty glance, a dismissal as if I am some sort of troglodyte who has got into the room by mistake.

I said (as I recorded here a few weeks ago) to such people that they should listen to me while they could. I was content if they would only listen to me and moderate their policies. I did not even seek to wrest power from them, if they would only moderate their dogmatic revolutionary drive.  I believed (and still believe) that they had made a mistake even on their own terms, that they could not possibly want the consequences of what they were doing.  In the end, this was the Weimar Republic and they were courting a grave risk that they would eventually drive people too far. The response was sometimes personal abused, sometimes total, frozen indifference, very, very occasionally a brief, fairly uncomprehending attempt to see my point which came to nothing.

Well, now we have what I warned of.

More:

Disaster? Hillary’s war policy in Syria would certainly have been one. Mr Trump’s economic policy, such as it is, which we don’t really know, and his general lack of respect for the rule of law and the separation of powers, threaten a different sort of catastrophe. I cannot see this ending happily.

And:

Someone has cut the ropes, and we are adrift on a strange, sinister, powerful current  towards an unknown destination which it might be better never to reach at all.  The liberal democracies have exhausted their form of government, which is increasingly using democracy to reject liberalism, but in an angry and impatient way. This, no doubt, is due to the policies pursued by our existing rulers for 50 years.  But I do not think that will make the experience any more comfortable.  Anger  and contempt for your opponents are poor foundations for civilised government.

Read the whole thing. If you’re a conservative, especially a religious conservative, this is not the time to relax, or to gloat, but rather to prepare. We are no less Weimar America today than we were on the day before the election, when most of us thought Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president. If you are a Christian and/or a conservative true to your convictions, chances are you are going to find yourself having to resist the Trump administration at some point. I wish our incoming president well, because he is our president, but on many, perhaps most, issues, I expect to be in opposition to him, as I would have been with President Hillary Clinton. The fact that Trump has a lot of the right enemies does not make him a good man or a capable president.

One thing I agree with many on the left about: we are in uncharted waters. We don’t need weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, nor do we need complacency. We need to get busy building the flotilla of arks.

Dispatch From The Real World

A reader writes:

Just read your pieces regarding the reaction to President Trump of the snowflakes on campus, and please rest assured that these reactions are not contained to those spaces. I work at [deleted for privacy], so I interact and work with “elites” every day, both in the professional and educational worlds.

My office, which is largely staffed by people who are graduates of prestigious universities (Ivy League, public Ivies, etc.) is like a graveyard today. People legitimately look like they are holding back tears. One of my co-workers said she is “seriously depressed.” Another, who was certain of and quite cocky regarding HRC’s chances just yesterday afternoon somberly declared today “time for deep reflection for a lot of people.” A third refused to learn from the left’s mistakes and declared that Bush, McCain, and Romney were “slightly better, but really just as bigoted” as Trump. Yet another had to leave work early because she simply could not process what was happening (I’m not exaggerating). Finally, one stated that “I’m just glad that I don’t have a young child who I’m trying to teach that bullying is bad.” Funny enough, I don’t recall him reacting that way to the pizza place in Indiana that was brutally attacked in the most mean-spirited way possible during the Indiana RFRA, but hey, who’s keeping track?

I’m not that much older than all of these people, but I just cannot fathom this reaction or this way of life. It must truly be a miserable existence. I was bitterly disappointed by the elections of Barack Obama in ’08 and ’12, but I IMMEDIATELY WENT ON WITH MY LIFE. I went to classes, I did my job, and realized that, while the elections hadn’t gone my way, life goes on and neither this election nor any other is the end of history or politics. But I think that the self-absorption of millenials and their imbuing of every single political issue with maximum moral weight leads them to react the way they do. It is sad, dangerous, and ultimately destructive of the political fabric of the nation.

Let me just wrap this by saying that I am no Trump fan. I did not vote for him either in the primaries or in the general (I wrote in). I find him boorish, amoral, and woefully unprepared to assume the presidency. That being said, I am allowing myself a few days of schadenfreude at HRC’s loss and the ensuing pearl clutching by the left broadly and SJWs in particular before I return to the realization that, in the broader culture anyway, not all that much has changed and politics will not save us. I will react to this election the same way I did to the past two: I’ll go on with my life.

Good for you! I expected to wake up this morning to the reality of a coming Clinton presidency. Regular readers know that I dreaded it, primarily because of what I expected President Clinton II to do to religious liberty, via her executive orders and court appointments. But I was planning to get on with my life and my work. Well, now that we’re going to have President Trump, I’m feeling much less distressed about religious liberty, but I’m worried about other things — including the fear that conservative Christians will grow complacent about our place in post-Christian America, and fall victim to the delusion that all will be well now that a Republican is going to be the next president.

The decline continues, no matter who is in the White House. In some ways it has probably been slowed, in other ways, perhaps it has been accelerated. We will see. Whatever the case, life goes on, and we have work to do.

The Perils of Identity Politics

How to think about this election: white working class voters just decided to vote like a minority group. They’re >40% of the electorate.

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 9, 2016

Somebody as consistently wrong about Trump as I was doesn’t really have the right to say “I told you so,” but I’m going to do it anyway, with respect to something I’ve been saying for a long time to liberals.

Let us examine a characteristic liberal reaction this morning, this one courtesy of Miss L.V. Anderson, a white, female editor at Slate. Excerpt:

According to CNN, 53 percent of white female voters voted for Donald Trump. Fifty-three percent. More than half of white women voted for the man who bragged about committing sexual assault on tape, who said he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, who has promised to undo legislation that has afforded health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans, whose parental leave plan is a joke, who has spent his campaign dehumanizing nonwhite people, who has spent 30-plus years in the public eye reducing women to their sexual attributes. More than half of white women looked at the first viable female candidate for the presidency, a wildly competent and overqualified career public servant, and said, “Trump that bitch.”

What leads a woman to vote for a man who has made it very clear that he believes she is subhuman? Self-loathing. Hypocrisy. And, of course, a racist view of the world that privileges white supremacy over every other issue.

If you want to know one reason why Trump won, look no further than the analysis of Miss L.V. Anderson, though not for the reason that she thinks. Miss Anderson does not trouble herself to understand why 53 percent of white female voters would choose Trump over Clinton. For her, the explanation of self-hatred, hypocrisy, and racism suffice. They always do with trite liberals like her (for a much more realistic explanation, read liberal Thomas Frank).

Notice, though, that Miss Anderson does not fault these white women for voting according to identity politics. She only faults them for choosing the “wrong” identity: their race, not their sex.

Joan Walsh of The Nation, echoing Nate Cohn of the NYT’s data analysis unit, writes:

Here is the scary truth: This is the election in which a vocal minority of white people began to see themselves as a minority, and to act as a self-conscious minority group, with interests that are separate from those of other ethnicities. White Republicans have voted that way before, but with more subtlety. Trump traded the party’s dog whistles for a bullhorn. The white nationalists who emerged to cheer him on were just a fraction of his support, but the worldview they articulate resonated with many Trump voters, even if they weren’t quite ready to articulate it.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that this is true (and it may well be, I dunno). If so, on what grounds do liberals argue against it? It is they who for decades have made a fetish of identity politics, of arguing that identity inheres in groups, not in individuals and their ideas. Identity politics are liberal politics. It usually passes itself off under the sham euphemism “diversity,” but it’s almost entirely about privileging females, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, and other members of the Non-Deplorable-American community, and calling it virtue. It’s the kind of thing that convinces a black female Yale student from a privileged background that she is a victim because of the color of her skin, and that some toothless white Appalachian man on disability is an oppressor, because of his. When you give yourself and your political party over entirely to left-wing identity politics, issues of class become invisible to you, and you end up forgetting that you ever knew people like the white working-class and rural people of the Rust Belt. You lose elections that way.

I do not like identity politics. I believe it is dangerous, especially in a pluralistic democracy like ours. But look, if that’s how the left is going to rig the system, then it should not be surprised when white people get tired of it, and decide to play by the same hardball rules.

Look at this:

How precious. These academic liberals are opening a self-pleasure “self-care and dialogue space” for the multicultural (read: not white), the queer and trans folks, and the women, all for them to come together and gripe. Now, do you think the University of Minnesota would in a million years create a “self-care and dialogue” space for poor or working class non-gay white kids, or for conservative Christian students feeling upset over the election results? Please. For one, they shouldn’t; it ought to be humiliating that a university coddles its adult students like this, whatever their politics. But for another, these white kids aren’t even on their radar — and if they are, it’s as the Enemy. Because of identity politics.

I got a lot wrong in the Trump campaign, but I got this, from November 6, 2015, quite right, in a post called “Why Trump Matters.” Excerpts, this first one from a NYT report at the time:

Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.

That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.

The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.

The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.

“It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” wrote two Dartmouth economists, Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner, in a commentary to the Deaton-Case analysis to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I commented on the findings, in part:

Now, there is one more aspect to white working-class despair: dispossession. It does not take a sociologist to grasp that the tectonic social changes in American life since the 1960s have been at the very least disorienting to whites. The point to grasp here is not that we shouldn’t have had those changes; many of them were just and necessary, others, not so much. The point to grasp is that the experience of those changes may have been psychologically traumatic to certain whites who expected the world to work in a different way — a way that favored them.

Perhaps there is a comparison to be made with Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union — which was, of course, a vastly more severe phenomenon, but I think there may be some comparison to be made, re: a people who assumed that the world was a certain way, and woke up rudely to the fact that it was not. Add to that the fact that among elites in our culture — especially academic and media elites — white working-class people are the bungholes of the universe, and, well, here we are.

And, one year and three days later, here we all are, with President-elect Donald Trump.

The American left had better wake up and realize what its obsession with identity politics is doing to it, and to the country. Many of you think the white Trump voters were motivated by nothing more than racism, because that’s how you have come to see the world. This ideological obliviousness has blinded you, as much as a related ideological obliviousness blinded the GOP establishment to the changes in its own base that prepared the way for Trump. You have no grounds on which to oppose Trump’s brand of identity politics if you insist on practicing identity politics of your own.

The Trump voters may not understand much about Leninist theory, but they can spot the “Who? Whom?” principle at work a mile away — that is, the idea that the only really important question is who will be the dominator of whom. What is fascinating is that Joan Walsh really does seem to believe that left-wing identity politics are somehow universalist. It’s the craziest thing.

Trumpophobia Melts SJW Snowflakes

A reader at Muhlenberg College passes along this letter from the president of the school to faculty and students:

 

To the Muhlenberg Campus Community:

While the final results of the national election are not yet finally in, it is clear this is one of the most historic elections in our nation’s history.  Many members of my senior staff and I have received several emails from students requesting that we cancel classes today, Nov. 9.  We have also received emails from other students urging that we not cancel classes.

I am sensitive to the arguments of these students, both pro and con, on this issue.  As Muhlenberg is, at our core, an educational institution, I am persuaded we should not cancel classes; at least not today, in the immediate wake of this election.  Rather, I encourage our faculty to hold classes as scheduled but to be sensitive to the understandable feelings many members of our community — particularly our students — will be feeling in the wake of this historic election.

In the days ahead, we need to make space for reflection, discussion and consideration of what has happened and the variety of thoughts and feelings that this election will have stimulated in our community, in various communities throughout our nation and, indeed, in communities around the world.

There is already a session scheduled at 12:30pm in Seegers 111-112, with a faculty panel planning to discuss what happened in this election and why.  We will explore with the faculty organizers how we might open this meeting up to the entire campus and/or hold other meetings in the days ahead.

I encourage students who feel the need for support and counsel regarding the election to avail themselves of our counseling center, who will make room in their busy schedule to accommodate such sessions.  Also, our chaplain will be available in Egner Chapel for the bulk of the day for students who want to reflect in that space and/or seek her counsel.  I’m sure Rabbi Simon will also be available to our students.

We are a strong and mutually-supportive community.  We need to support one another in every way possible, and address our future in the most thoughtful and constructive ways possible.

Thanks to all members of our community for the support we will provide one another in the days, weeks and months ahead.

Sincerely,

John

Oh for heaven’s sake … really? These snowflakes wanted classes cancelled because the wrong guy won the presidential election? These grown men and women need counseling to face the headlines? Are the SJWs and their coddlers trying to make me happy that Trump won, or what?

By the way, I just ran into a working-class Hispanic immigrant friend. He’s not worried. He said, “A lot of Latino people, we know that Trump was really just saying that the immigration should be done the right way. We know he’s not really against us. Who hired all the Latinos to build his buildings? Trump. It’s not such a bad thing that he wants immigration by the rules.” For what that’s worth.

UPDATE: A reader at Rhodes College says this was emailed out from the administration:

Dear Colleagues,

As many, if not all of you may already know, the results of the presidential election have generated uncertainties, confusion, fear, anxiety, and anger about what the election might mean for our community members. You can expect encountering these responses along with excitement and celebration over the coming days and weeks.

During the election season, specific groups were targeted and we have particular concern for those experiencing trauma and fear around the potential impact on themselves, their families, and loved ones. We invite you to think and strategize with us how best to support our students and community during this time. We appreciate the important role of faculty – particularly at a liberal arts institution. We hope and encourage all to use your influence in supportive, responsible and responsive ways.

You can anticipate that conversations, some of them difficult, will occur in your classroom, office hours, and in non-structured spaces. Please be prepared to offer space and time for these conversations.

As leaders in this community we are in a position to respond to the concerns that will be expressed. While there are support structures in place in general ways for students and community members, consider yourself a viable resource.

The Office of Academic Affairs is prepared to offer ongoing support to you in any way possible around these conversations with your students.

UPDATE.2: Now, Stanford:

Dear Stanford Community:

At this historic moment, we have heard from students, faculty and staff, who have expressed uncertainty, anger, anxiety and/or fear following yesterday’s election. We write to reaffirm the university’s commitment to support every member of our community.

The most important thing to do is to take care of yourselves and to give support to those who need it. If you want to talk, need support or have short- or long-term concerns you wish to discuss, the university has resources available to you, including our undergraduate and graduate residential staffs, Counseling & Psychological Services, Faculty/Staff Help Center, the Office for Religious Life and our community centers.

There are a couple of scheduled programs today, including:

“What Matters to Me and Why” – a post-election reflection,

Nicole Taylor, Associate Vice Provost for Student Affairs,

Noon – 1 p.m. in the Common Room, Old Union 3rd floor

Contemplative Skills for Post-Election Reflection,

Dereca Blackmon, Associate Dean, Student Affairs

5:30 p.m. – 6:45 p.m. Bldg. 320, Room 105

Throughout the day, our community centers will be having conversations that are open to all. In the days and weeks ahead, we expect the community to come together in additional programs, events and other gatherings that provide an opportunity to reflect on ways in which we can help shape our future.

UPDATE.3: Melting snowflakes at University of Michigan:

To All Members of the University Community:

As I’m sure many of you did, I watched the election coverage late into the night, and had the opportunity to visit with students and staff at a results-watching event sponsored by the Ginsberg Center at the Michigan Union.

It will take quite some time to completely absorb the results from yesterday’s election, understand the full implications, and discern the long-term impact on our university and our nation. More immediately, in the aftermath of a close and highly contentious election we continue to embrace our most important responsibility as a university community.

Our responsibility is to remain committed to education, discovery and intellectual honesty – and to diversity, equity and inclusion. We are at our best when we come together to engage respectfully across our ideological differences; to support ALL who feel marginalized, threatened or unwelcome; and to pursue knowledge and understanding, as we always have, as the students, faculty and staff of the University of Michigan.

There are reports of members of our community offering support to one another. Students are planning a vigil tonight on the Diag at 6 p.m. Our Center for Research on Teaching and Learning also has numerous resources available for faculty seeking help in cultivating classroom environments that are responsive to national issues.

I also want to make everyone aware of some of the plans and events we have had in place for today and beyond.

·      Our Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy is holding a Post-Election Analysis from 4 to 5:30 p.m. today in the Weill Hall’s Annenberg Auditorium. Speakers include former U.S. Congressman John Dingell, former Ambassador Ron Weiser, and faculty members Mara Ostfeld, Betsey Stevenson and Marina Whitman.

·      Our History Department has organized a community discussion led by faculty and students to include historical perspectives at 6 p.m. tonight in 1014 Tisch Hall.

·      The Office of Student Life will provide resources and referrals for support on campus to students, faculty and staff at a location in the Michigan Union’s Willis Ward Lounge. It will be open today from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

·      Our Office of Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs is offering an open space of support to help members of our community connect during open hours today. MESA’s office is in the Michigan Union, Room 2202.

·      Tomorrow, our Ginsberg Center and Counseling and Psychological Services office is facilitating a Post-election Dialogue: Impact, Perspective-taking, and Moving Forward. This event is part of the Student Life Professional Development Conference at 1 – 2 p.m. in the Michigan League’s Henderson Room.

I know that other schools, colleges and offices across our campus are planning events as well. I thank everyone who is helping us come together and ask anyone scheduling a post election event post it on the University of Michigan Events Calendar.

I hope all of us will continue to proudly embrace the opportunities before us as the students, faculty and staff of a great public research university governed by the people. Elections are often times of great change, but the values we stand for at U-M have been shaped over the course of nearly 200 years.

Our mission remains as essential for society as ever: “…to serve the people of Michigan and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.”

I look forward to working together with all of you to advance the work we do in service of the public – and to ensure that the University of Michigan will always be a welcoming place for all members of society.

UPDATE.4: Milk and cookies for the traumatized of Vanderbilt:

Dear Vanderbilt Community,

Over the past year, we have discussed the commitment of the institution to support our students, faculty, and staff during situations that may be emotionally challenging. As part of the Vanderbilt family, we see this as a very important and valuable role that we must continue to play. Events may sometimes challenge your wellbeing and sense of being respected.

It is very important you are aware that all of our leaders here at Vanderbilt University strongly value the many aspects of inclusion, respect, and diversity, and that we welcome the opportunity to create spaces where you can be supported. Many services and organizations play this supportive role. Ongoing discussions continue on additional steps that can be taken.

The Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion remains committed to identifying ways in which we can work together to increase our awareness, our role in creating solutions, and our voice in a dialogue for greater understanding. It is important that we stand together, recognize the progress that has been made towards equality, and affirm our unwavering commitment to continued social justice.

If you need affirmation and support, or just a space to experience fellowship and warmth, we encourage you to take advantage of the outstanding mental health support the university offers. For students, the new Center for Student Wellbeing (615-322-0480; https://www.vanderbilt.edu/healthydores) gives students access to a variety of special resources, and the Psychological and Counseling Center (PCC) offers triage walk-in appointments for immediate crisis from 9:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. Tuesday through Friday (Mondays it opens at 8:00 A.M.), and can be reached at (615) 322-2571 or at https://medschool.vanderbilt.edu/pcc. Additionally, the Dean of Students has set up space for reflection and support on the 3rd floor of Sarratt, and in other locations such as the Black Cultural Center, International Student and Scholar Services (Student Life Center), Religious Life (located behind Branscomb), LGBTQI Life/KCPC, Women’s Center, and Project Safe.

For faculty and staff, the Work/Life Connections – Employee Assistance Program is available by calling (615) 936-1327 or visiting http://healthandwellness.vanderbilt.e.... Other forms of support can be found on our website (https://www.vanderbilt.edu/equity-div...) under “Resources”, as well at https://www.vanderbilt.edu/healthydor....

Let us reinforce the Vanderbilt spirit of unity, inclusion and support at this time. Continue to care and work for ideas, principles, and beliefs that you feel are important!

Sincerely,

George C. Hill, Ph.D.

Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and

Chief Diversity Officer

Vanderbilt University

November 9, 2016

The Dean of Harvard — the most prestigious university in the world — wants you to know you can stop by for a hug:

Dear Harvard College Students,

In the time I have been a member of the Harvard College community, what I have come to most value—both in times of agreement and discord—is our capacity to work together, reason together, and empathize with each other.

I know that many of you are processing the election results in different ways. While each election has winners and losers, this election has been particularly difficult and divisive. I don’t know the full spectrum of our community’s political views, but I know there are students who are worried about what this election means for themselves, their families, and their friends. I also know there are others who genuinely see this election as a moment of positive change for our country. In spite of our differences, we can only move forward as friends, neighbors, and classmates if we develop the capacity to understand and empathize with each other, and if we learn how to find common ground.

Now that the election is over, I want to encourage our community to look ahead and ask ourselves what part we want to play in our country’s next chapter. I hope we will take this opportunity to come together as a community and focus on our strengths and aspirations—and how we can best support each other. Already, I have heard from colleagues that many of you are engaging in thoughtful conversations about the election results and your hopes for Harvard’s and our nation’s future.

As you reflect on the results of the election, I would like to hear your thoughts. On Friday, I will be hosting an open Dean’s Office from 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. for any member of our student community to come speak with me. The lower door of the Tercentenary entrance of University Hall will remain open to students who wish to attend these office hours. Additionally, I am always reachable at deankhurana@fas.harvard.edu. Others from the College are already reaching out to our student community and convening student groups and discussions.

I look forward to hearing from you in the coming days.

Warmly,

Dean Khurana

Being Harvard, they can’t let it rest with one dean giving out warm chocolate chip cookies. They have a second one distributing muffins:

Dear Harvard College Students,

I write this note to you today following Dean Khurana’s community message. We are hearing student reactions and responses on all sides of this election.

We acknowledge the diversity of opinions that exist in our community, and know that many of you feel particularly vulnerable after an election cycle where the rhetoric has been so divisive. In the days to come, we encourage you to reach out to each other to help bring our community together. The staff in the Office of Student Life are here to listen, support, and provide resources and opportunities for you to connect with each other. There are many post-election events and conversations going on in your Houses or Yards that will occur this week, starting tonight.

Here are some of the events, programs, and resources available to you tonight, Wednesday, November 9:

What Does the Election Mean for US(A) – Hosted by the Harvard Foundation, 5:00 p.m.-6:30 p.m., Quincy Hall, JCR

A Conversation – Hosted by Women and Gender Studies, 7:00 p.m., Boylston Hall Basement

When is it more than just a Bad Day? – Hosted by Student Mental Health Liaisons, 8:00 p.m., Sever Hall 113

Black Lives Matter/Election Conversation – Hosted by Diversity Peer Educator Program, 7:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m., Harvard Hall 201

Dark and Stormy: Reflections on Election Panel – Hosted by the Mahindra Humanities, 6:00 p.m., Emerson Hall 105

Open office hours tomorrow, Thursday, November 10:

BGLTQ Office – 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., 7 Linden Street

Women’s Center – 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., Canaday Hall

Office of Student Involvement – 10:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m., University Hall Basement

Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion – 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., 7 Linden Street

I encourage you to connect with each other, with your Faculty and Resident Deans, House/Yard staff, or with those who you feel most comfortable including friends, families, the Chaplains, or a counselor in Counseling and Mental Health Services (CAMHS).

Best regards,

Dean Katie O’Dair

At Berkeley — where else? — its one big group hug:

Dear Cal Students, Staff, and Faculty,

We know that the results of yesterday’s election have sparked fear and concern among many in our community; in particular our immigrant and undocumented communities, Muslim, African American, Chicanx/Latinx, LGBTQ+, Asian and Pacific Islander communities, survivors of sexual assault, people with disabilities, women, and many others. We are reaching out to you with a message of support. UC Berkeley leadership remains steadfast in our values and committed to the safety and well-being of all of our students, faculty, and staff. We condemn bigotry and hatred in all forms, and hold steadfast in our commitment to equity, access, and a campus that is safe, inclusive, and welcoming to all.

Various communities have organized the following community spaces and resources:

A community space for undocumented students tonight at 6:30pm in Chavez Room 105.

CLSD and CLPR are hosting space at the Shorb House, 2547 Channing Way from 12pm-5pm for students to come by. Faculty and staff will be there in community with our students for support.

MCC is holding a safe space for POC/Black students from 8pm-10pm this evening.

QTAP is hosting a QTOPC dinner in Anthony Hall at 6pm.

The Gender Equity Resource Center is open today, until 5pm, for those who wish for a quiet space for contemplation and community. GenEq is also hosting the following healing spaces:

Women’s Healing Space – Today, November 9th, 1pm-2:30pm

LGBTQ+ Healing Space – Today, November 9th, 2:30pm-4pm

Be gentle with yourselves and take care of each other.

Carol Christ, Interim Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost

Na’ilah Suad Nasir, Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion

Harry LeGrande, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs

Cathy Koshland, Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education

Joseph Greenwell, Dean of Students

William Morrow, President of the ASUC

Kena Hazelwood-Carter, President of the Graduate Assembly

“Be gentle with yourselves and take care of each other.” A UNIVERSITY IS NOT A DAY CARE CENTER! While they all sit around Free Speech Plaza singing “Lesbian Seagull,” I am thisclose to opening the window and screaming, Howard Beale-like, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Word comes in from University of Colorado at Boulder that the pot brownies aren’t working:

Dear CU Boulder community:

As a nation, we have just finished a particularly stressful national election cycle. I want to acknowledge that our campus is not alone in experiencing and witnessing a wide range of reactions today, from joy, to fear, to sadness, to sheer exhaustion. I’d like to share how proud I am of our entire campus community for hosting political speakers and events as well as engaging in respectful dialogue across campus during this election cycle. While we are not perfect or error-free, as a community we must remain committed to the values contained in our Colorado Creed.

You may find yourself with friends, classmates or colleagues who do not share the same reactions as you. These interactions may evoke strong emotions that can quickly intensify. In some cases, you, or others close to you, may feel you are experiencing or witnessing negative treatment or more subtle forms of oppression, perhaps related to the election or perhaps because of your race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation, country of origin, political thought or other aspect of your identity. At CU Boulder, we respect and protect all of these expressions of identity on our campus.

In every case, we are here to listen, engage and support one another. If you are struggling with the personal impact of this stressful time in any way, we have resources available to you. The campus provides safe spaces for discussions on identity, empowerment, intercultural competency and the impact of the election.

This is a highly stressful time of year on the campus and for the nation at the end of this election. We recommend several strategies to care for yourself and to help you remain productive throughout the semester, including:

Acknowledge your feelings — check your emotional state before you engage in conversations. Are you in a space to dialogue?

Focus on tasks or events that are in your control.

Connect with friends, family, a community or a safe space to ground and support you.

Focus on the present and shift away from the future.

Monitor your social media use — check your reactions before and after taking in information and set time limits.

Opt out of unproductive conversations — pay attention to whether the discussion is going to benefit anyone or just increase stress levels.

Take care of basic needs such as eating, sleeping and drinking water. Incorporate activities that recharge and relax you.

Thank you for your engagement and investment in our national election process, and thank you for being part of our vibrant campus community,

Sincerely,

Philip P. DiStefano

Chancellor

UPDATE.5: Johns Hopkins University:

Dear Students,

We are mindful that for many the election may have caused a great deal of distress and anxiety. I have received numerous emails calling for community gathering spaces for some students wanting to connect with each other. We have identified the spaces below for gathering throughout the day. In addition, at 7pm in the Interfaith Center, The Centers for Community, Diversity, and Inclusion, and Student Leadership & Involvement will be hosting a Restorative Justice (RJ) Healing Circle, which is an opportunity to come together and share feelings, while acknowledge the importance of healing as a community.

It is important that we find time to take care of ourselves, too. Self-care may include being aware of and acknowledging our thoughts and feelings; reaching out for support from friends, family, and university resources such as the Counseling Center; taking care of ourselves physically by eating well and getting sleep; taking a break from politics and media by unplugging for a while; and engaging in healthy outlets such as exercise.

I look forward to the days ahead when we come together and find ways to move forward. Until then, please to take care of yourself and each other.

All my best,

Terry Martinez

Terry Martinez

Associate Vice Provost/Dean of Students

From the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to his vulnerable young family:

I stayed up late last night to watch the outcome of the presidential election, as I suspect many of you did. As in every election, there were winners and losers. But regardless of your political affiliation, I think all Americans agree that we would like to see America thrive in the future as a vibrant democracy and a world leader.

Here in our campus community, we will continue to strive to be a lively intellectual environment that is also a welcoming and inclusive place for our students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends. It is only in an environment that is safe and free from harassment that our primary mission of teaching, learning, research and service can take place.

We aim to express these values in practice every day. Many of our campus governance groups also recently affirmed a Campus Statement on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. I want to share it here:

“Diversity is a source of strength, creativity, and innovation for UW-Madison. We value the contributions of each person and respect the profound ways their identity, culture, background, experience, status, abilities, and opinion enrich the university community. We commit ourselves to the pursuit of excellence in teaching, research, outreach, and diversity as inextricably linked goals.

“The University of Wisconsin-Madison fulfills its public mission by creating a welcoming and inclusive community for people from every background—people who as students, faculty, and staff serve Wisconsin and the world.”

These are ideals that we aspire to, but sometimes fail to meet. While we are taking a variety of steps to address campus climate concerns, we are a long way from becoming the community we want to be.

But there is reason for hope. Nothing happens until people get involved, and we’re seeing that:

Student leaders are active, working for change and raising awareness.
Faculty are more engaged than ever in campus climate issues
Our staff has implemented innovative programs to support our community.

We have done much in recent years, via our Diversity Framework, and newer efforts chronicled on our campus climate site.

We must continue our efforts to build a stronger, more inclusive and interconnected community here at UW that can support one another and contribute to a path forward for the nation.

Close elections like we’ve just experienced can result in a range of reactions. In the coming days, I ask that people engage respectfully in debate over current events. We’re providing space for community discussions with staff on hand to listen and provide support:

Thursday 9 a.m. to noon, Our Wisconsin Room B/C, Red Gym
Thursday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Landmark Room, Union South
Friday 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., Northwoods Room, Union South

Resources are also available through University Health Services, the Multicultural Student Center, and the LGBT Campus Center.

The more inclusive, interconnected and engaged we are as a community, the stronger and more resilient we become. These efforts are a work in process. Each of us is always in the process of becoming more aware and more understanding of other perspectives. This work is never finished. But more than ever, it is vital to our campus, nation and world.

Look, I don’t care if Trump makes America great again. I would be satisfied if he simply made Americans grown-ups again.

President Donald J. Trump

BREAKING: Donald Trump is elected president of the United States. pic.twitter.com/yJpgfsAbc6

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 9, 2016

CNN reports that Hillary Clinton has called Trump to concede. This thing is over.

Jim Acosta at Trump HQ says that even Trump campaign insiders are shocked.

UPDATE: I gotta hand it to Trump and his team, and their supporters. I did not think they could pull this off. I did not vote for him (or Hillary Clinton), and I do not think he will be a good president. I hope I am wrong, for the sake of our country. Ross Douthat speaks for me. Excerpt:

On the global stage Trump’s populism and nationalism makes him very much a man of his times, with parallels to figures as diverse as Marine Le Pen, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and of course Vladimir Putin. But in the American context he is like nothing we have seen before — a shatterer of all norms and conventional assumptions, a man more likely to fail catastrophically than other presidents, more constitutionally dangerous than other presidents, but also more likely to carry us into a different political era, a post-neoliberal, post-end-of-history politics, than any other imaginable president.

I retract none of the warnings that I issued about the likelihood of catastrophe and crisis on his watch. I fear the risks of a Trump presidency as I have feared nothing in our politics before. But he will be the president, thanks to a crude genius that identified all the weak spots in our parties and our political system and that spoke to a host of voters for whom that system promised at best a sustainable stagnation under the tutelage of a distant and self-satisfied elite. So we must hope that he has the wit to be more than a wrecker, more than a demagogue, and that his crude genius can actually be turned, somehow, to the common good.

I don’t think Trump has it in him, but again, I hope I am wrong. The good of our nation and indeed of the world depends on it. Trump has achieved something that is of world-historical importance, and that cannot be taken away from him. He knew how weak the system was, if few others did. He pushed, and it came down.

I was wrong about his prospects for victory, but I still take pleasure in the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the elites of both parties, and especially of the media. That pleasure, though, is sharply curtailed by a fear of what this means for the future of the nation and the world. I do not believe for one second that the left will reconcile itself to a Trump victory. I believe there will be violence. I hope I am as wrong about that as I was about the possibility that Trump would be elected. But I remember the thugs who beat Trump supporters outside California rallies, and I believe those people will come out of the woodwork now. And I fear that Trump will handle the crisis they force very badly.

One solace: with a Republican president and a Republican Senate, the Supreme Court is safe for four years. Trump will name Scalia’s replacement, and may well get to name Ginsburg’s, Kennedy’s, and Breyer’s.

Some people are already asking me what this means for the Benedict Option. Answer: nothing different. I’ve said all along that politics can’t fix what ails us. I believe that the erosion of our religious liberties will probably cease for the time being under Trump (and for that, thanks be to God), but the deep currents in society and culture are towards atomization and the abandonment of religious belief and tradition. There are a lot of conservative Christians who have faith that Trump can turn this around. They hope in vain. They forget that we are not to put our trust in princes. This would be true even if the princes were good, which is not the case here.

Last night was the end of the beginning. Now comes the troubles.

Jaw, Dropped

9:24pm Central:

Uncle Chuckie called it.

UPDATE: 9:37 Central:

UPDATE.1: Oh my God:

UPDATE.2: One good thing if Trump wins: the agony of fatheads like this:

UPDATE.3: You know I didn’t vote for the guy, and I think the country is screwed six ways to Sunday, but … imagining the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the NYT newsroom makes me happy: