Earlier this evening I took this Matt Yglesias post and made it the featured post at TPMCafe.
It’s about Larry Summers’ resignation at Harvard and specifically the Washington Post’s fatuous column decrying his departure.
I went to two of what the Post editorial calls “elite coastal campuses.” And I spent the better part of my twenties at Brown, a very liberal college campus in what is probably the most Democratic state in the country. Nobody needs to tell me about campus liberalism with its foibles and insularities or its frothiness and escapism.
Believe me, I’ve seen it.
But there’s just nothing more precious than seeing the faux-populist poseur Post editorial writers standing tough against an entrenched “establishment” of thirty-something, tenure-desperate semioticians and lit geeks in defense of “mainstream American values”, a well of mores and beliefs with which the Post is no doubt deeply in touch. (Peel away the Fred Hiatt mask and underneath it’s Bruce Springsteen; cut a little deeper and he’s an Iowa farmer.) This is especially so when, as Matt, with a light touch, points out, they seem to know little about what actually happened beyond what you could crib from a studious reading of the 2005 edition of the Collected Transcripts of the O’Reilly Factor.
In their ability to be so completely out of touch with who they are, the Posties have finally accomplished what so many campus lefties struggled so long in vain to do: give real meaning to the phrase ‘false consciousness’.
