How America Works... and Why It Doesn't: A Brief Guide to the U.S. Political System

by William Cooper

Examples of this “cancel culture” involving three of America’s most influential institutions underscore the problem. Shortly after I left UCLA in 2005, Larry Summers was forced to resign as Harvard’s president. During his rocky tenure, Summers alienated numerous factions within the Harvard faculty. The last straw was a speech Summers gave in which he suggested that women’s underrepresentation in science may be due, in part, to “issues of intrinsic aptitude.” Summers posited that the very upper end of science aptitude (comprising

In case you weren’t sure, he’s saying women just aren’t as good as men.

the extreme outliers) was disproportionately male. About his theory, Summers noted: “I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.” Setting aside whether Summers’ argument was correct or not, his thesis was rooted in hard data and sober analysis. It wasn’t discriminatory; no matter how you define various groups of people (by race, class, gender, or otherwise), you will always find minor differences at the margins. Groups of people are different. Men are better, on average, than women at some things. And vice versa. That’s the truth. And that’s okay. It all washes out in the aggregate.

The idea that “it all washes out in the aggregate” is not only dismissive — it’s deeply dehumanizing. It erases lived experience, shrugs off systemic exclusion, and suggests that if injustice averages out in a spreadsheet, it’s no longer worth examining. This isn’t objectivity. It’s statistical gaslighting.