James thought there was a naive assumption among some of his liberal classmates that the world was a fair marketplace of information, in which the best ideas naturally won out. But ideas didn’t fight political battles; people fought them, and in James’s experience people who were systematically oppressed—by gender, by class, by race—always had to work harder to get their ideas heard. The concept of civil discourse was the creation of a privileged class that didn’t want their lives disrupted by protests or emotional arguments. “Revolutions don’t happen at polite dinner parties,” James wrote,
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
