Top 5: Explaining culture wars
Plus: the origins of CRT
The Top 5 articles for your week:
“The Long, Withdrawing Roar” (The Hedgehog Review)
Because scholar Philip Gorski zeroes in on the role that the “devaluation of religious capital” has played in shaping the course of religious political engagement (he focuses here mostly on evangelicals, but this kind of analysis would be useful across the board):
The devaluation of religious capital also plays a role. It had two main causes: the exit of highly educated liberal Protestants from the religious field (and their cultural capital with them) and the diminished exchange value of the new currency (evangelical capital) within the cultural and economic fields. This devaluation of theological education and denominational offices led some religious entrepreneurs to pursue more hybrid strategies of capital accumulation: a radio show instead of a divinity degree, church growth instead of church office, real estate instead of the revival circuit, political access instead of spiritual inspiration, and so on. Of course, celebrity pastors are as old a tradition as the Great Awakenings in the United States. What is new is the lack of serious competition from “settled clergy” and the degree to which celebrity is based on success in business, party politics, and media as opposed to prominence in preaching, pastoring, and church politics. One result of these shifts has been a trend in which power has moved away from the likes of Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell to people like Paula White and Eric Metaxas, a change that was accelerated by the Trump presidency. Another result is the increasing heteronomy of the religious sphere, which is to say, the growing influence of nonreligious values such as wealth, health, and well-being, and of theological alchemists who try to recast these attributes as “biblical,” “traditional,” or “orthodox.” Those who would defend “the church” against “the culture” seem not to realize that they have not only lost the battle but joined the other side.
“What Is Political Writing For?” (Columbia Journalism Review)
Because Osita’s in our top 5 again for this anaysis of how the incentives of our current political media environment actually undermine the potential influence of political writing.
“But at the federal level, where most of our energy and attention is spent, national political commentators have succeeded mostly in encouraging an impressive share of Democratic political elites, activists, and policy professionals to engage with important policy ideas— Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, the addition of new states, the expansion of the Supreme Court, and so on—that are unlikely to pass Congress. And the successes progressives have seen so far during the Biden administration—including the size and scope of the recovery and infrastructure packages, a new commitment to aggressive antitrust enforcement, and other policy pushes—can probably be credited less to posts and tweets than to the work of progressive policy researchers, academics, and advocacy groups, which policymakers can access directly, without journalists and their explainers as intermediaries.”
“The Man Behind Critical Race Theory” (New Yorker)
Because Jelani Cobb is masterful here in this profile of Derrick Bell, who was hired by Thurgood Marshall early in his career (I did not know that!), and went on to be one of the principal architects of what would become Critical Race Theory.
Bell spent the second half of his career as an academic and, over time, he came to recognize that other decisions in landmark civil-rights cases were of limited practical impact. He drew an unsettling conclusion: racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it. Racism, he began to argue, is permanent. His ideas proved foundational to a body of thought that, in the nineteen-eighties, came to be known as critical race theory.
“Why Democrats Are Losing Texas Latinos” (Texas Monthly)
Because this is the best analysis we’ve seen on why Democrats’ margins among Hispanic voters are shrinking in key areas of the country, a trend that continued in CA this past week.
“But so much more than just ideology—whether one is conservative or moderate or liberal—determines how a person votes. Cultural factors matter too. While ideology has been strongly predictive of whether white voters opt for Republicans or Democrats since the late eighties, that had not been true of the state’s Hispanic voters. David Shor, an iconoclastic data scientist who has polled South Texas extensively, explains that about 40 percent of American voters are conservative, 40 percent are moderate, and 20 percent are liberal. Those numbers don’t vary much by race or ethnicity, whereas party loyalty does. And for decade after decade, part of being Hispanic in South Texas, just like wrapping tamales on Christmas Eve or listening to Selena at family reunions, meant voting Democratic, even as the party became less welcoming to those with conservative views. What changed in 2020 is that conservative Hispanic South Texans voted like their non-Hispanic white neighbors. Ideology suddenly became polarizing for the group in a way it never had been before.”
“Apple and Facebook Are Coming for Your Face Next” (NYT)
Because face computers are the next logical step in tech development, but as we’ve barely grasped how smartphones and social media affect our lives, Farhad Manjoo asks if we’ll completely miss the mark on this development, too.
Here’s the thing about face computers: With the right design, when their components inevitably become small and powerful enough, these machines could make computing much more visceral and accessible, which most likely means more irresistible, too. I worry about the sudden inevitability of face computers — that, as happened with smartphones, they could become ubiquitous before society begins to appreciate the way they might be altering everything.