Civics: on the US “ideological rot”

Zoe Strimpel:

Weiss stresses that the battle will be long. When her friends complain to her in secret that there isn’t “a single university left where I would send my child”, she asks: “what are you going to do to fix it? Are you going to keep your mouth shut and just shove them off to the prep school circuit that will ultimately get them into Yale, where they’re going to be surrounded by this world-view that you say you hate?”. 

Weiss has no children yet, but if she does: “I don’t want my child to go to Yale or Harvard”. Should they shun university altogether she’d be “thrilled… I have never felt further removed in my life from the pedigreed, prestigious, elitist universe. I think it is actively damaging the country.”

Weiss says that too many people still seem content to label the woke Left a lunatic fringe, or simply call for a return to “classical liberalism”. But yodelling for a liberal consensus – just the sort of thing my friends and I do in north London kitchens – is “insufficient for the present moment… you need to understand how that failed and how that failed so many people,” she says. Failure to do so is what got Trump elected, and has allowed extremes on both sides to balloon.