Tag: Woke

The Urge to Purge

Mike Coté1 Comment

The Revolution always eats its own.

Wokeness, identitarianism, anti-racism, progressivism – whatever label one chooses to affix – has become an integral aspect of modern politics and the academy. Universities, high schools, and extracurricular activities have been especially prone to infection by this novel crusading ideology. There has been a panoply of these stories over the course of the past few years, with professors being defenestrated for speaking Chinese, a brouhaha over whether the entire field of Classics is racist, administrators looking at banning ‘offensive’ words like “American,” and more. One such story, published last week by the online outlet Compact Magazine, has received a great deal of attention. (Disclaimer: I am not a fan of Compact nor its New Right ideology, but even a broken clock can be right occasionally.)

The piece, titled “A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell,” is written by Vincent Lloyd, a professor at Villanova University. He tells the story of his time as seminar leader for the prestigious Telluride Association summer program for high schoolers and how it descended into a dystopia of progressivism run amok, eventually turning its fire on the professor himself. The tale is not itself novel – there have been myriad such pieces across the media environment – but aspects of it are especially interesting given the professor’s own unabashed left-wing ideology.

The piece is worth reading in full, but there are some quotes that stand out, both in understanding the truly cult-like dynamics on display among the students and in the professor’s complicity in his own cancellation.

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It Belongs in a Museum!

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A brief polemic against widespread artifact repatriation.

Museums, especially large institutions in wealthy, stable Western countries, are bastions of cultural exploration, education, and fascination. They inspire awe in the minds of millions of visitors each year, transporting them back in time and across the full breadth of the world. These wonderful institutions hold a special place in my heart, as they are one of the factors that got me interested in history in the first place. I distinctly recall gazing in wonderment as a child at art and relics from the past, hoping to gain a glimpse into a far off time and place. Just by visiting a major museum, I could travel to ancient Rome, Ming China, Ptolemaic Egypt, and Medieval Europe. I could see cultural artifacts from regions as far afield as Africa and Southeast Asia, or explore the heritage of American Natives. I could view beautiful art from 2000 years ago, 200 years ago, or 20 years ago. All of this could be accomplished in an afternoon.

Now, there has been a major push to denude these museums of their globally-sourced artifacts in order to right supposed past wrongs. Activists and governments want Western museums to return foreign relics, regardless of whether those exhibits were acquired fairly. This is a profoundly wrongheaded move that will only hamper cultural exchange and knowledge, reduce the salience and usefulness of physical museums, and undermine the ability of people to understand our shared human past.

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The New Appeasement

Mike Coté2 Comments

Prioritizing domestic audiences in foreign policy speaks of a strategy doomed to failure.

“Politics stops at the water’s edge.” This statement – on the necessity of presenting a united front with respect to key national interests – was the accepted wisdom in American foreign policy for quite a long time. There have always been dissenters and partisan infighting in America’s approach to foreign affairs, but for the most part domestic political debates have been subordinated to important international considerations when determining foreign policy. Recently, that seems to have shifted a full 180 degrees; now domestic political concerns and debates drive foreign policy, even at the expense of broad-based American interests globally. Domestic movements and debates have been internationalized and global events and geopolitics are now being viewed almost entirely through the lens of internal American issues. Gone is the single-issue organization or lobby, now replaced with groups who universalize their missions under the theory that all politics is intersectional and intrinsically linked. That’s why, for instance, we see groups ostensibly dedicated to raising awareness of police brutality against African-Americans also making strong declarations on entirely unrelated issues like the Israel-Palestinian conflict. As a result of this universalizing approach, the Biden administration has put the concerns of domestic lobbies ahead of real national interests time and time again. Nothing has made that clearer than three events which have unfolded over the past week.

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