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In other worlds : essays in cultural politics

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In Other Worlds

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In this classic work, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the leading and most influential cultural theorists working today, analyzes the relationship between language, women and culture in both Western and non-Western contexts. Developing an original integration of powerful contemporary methodologies – deconstruction, Marxism and feminism – Spivak turns this new model on major debates in the study of literature and culture, thus ensuring that In Other Worlds has become a valuable tool for studying our own and other worlds of culture.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part 1 | 124  pages, chapter 1 | 17  pages, the letter as cutting edge, chapter 2 | 21  pages, finding feminist readings, chapter 3 | 22  pages, unmaking and making in to the lighthouse, chapter 4 | 39  pages, sex and history in the prelude (1805), chapter 5 | 23  pages, feminism and critical theory, part 2 | 118  pages, into the world, chapter 6 | 12  pages, reading the world: literary studies in the eighties, chapter 7 | 22  pages, explanation and culture: marginalia, chapter 8 | 23  pages, the politics of interpretations, chapter 9 | 28  pages, french feminism in an international frame, chapter 10 | 31  pages, scattered speculations on the question of value 1, part | 128  pages, entering the third world, chapter 11 | 25  pages, chapter 12 | 35  pages, subaltern studies, chapter 13 | 27  pages, breast-giver, chapter 14 | 39  pages, a literary representation of the subaltern.

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In Other Worlds Essays In Cultural Politics

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In this classic work, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the leading and most influential cultural theorists working today, analyzes the relationship between language, women and culture in both Western and non-Western contexts. Developing an original integration of powerful contemporary methodologies – deconstruction, Marxism and feminism – Spivak turns this new model on major debates in the study of literature and culture, thus ensuring that In Other Worlds has become a valuable tool for studying our own and other worlds of culture.

Table of Contents

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (b. 1942) Regarded to be one of the most important figureheads of postcolonial studies. Born in India, she is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York.

Critics' Reviews

'A celebrity in academia . . . [Spivak] creates a stir wherever she goes.' - The New York Times

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In other worlds: Essays in cultural politics

• Published 1987
• History, Political Science

1,422 Citations

Third world women representation in western feminist discourse: a critical study, a history of feminist literary criticism: postcolonial feminist criticism, feminist hebrew literary criticism: the political unconscious, methodology of the oppressed, arab soecity of english language studies from the selectedworks of awej for translation, “in vain i tried to tell you”: crossreading strategies in global literatures, stories of women, the criticism of culture and the culture of criticism: at the intersection of postcolonialism and globalization theory, a feminist scholarship you can bring home to dad, was there ever a “female gothic”, related papers.

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How the Diploma Divide Is Remaking American Politics

Education is at the heart of this country’s many divisions..

Blue America is an increasingly wealthy and well-educated place.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Americans without college degrees were more likely than university graduates to vote Democratic. But that gap began narrowing in the late 1960s before finally flipping in 2004 .

John F. Kennedy lost college-educated voters by a two-to-one margin yet won the presidency thanks to overwhelming support among white voters without a degree. Sixty years later, our second Catholic president charted a much different path to the White House, losing non-college-educated whites by a two-to-one margin while securing 60 percent of the college-educated vote. The latest New York Times /Siena poll of the 2022 midterms showed this pattern holding firm, with Democrats winning 55 percent of voters with bachelor’s degrees but only 39 percent of those without.

A more educated Democratic coalition is, naturally, a more affluent one. In every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, white voters in the top 5 percent of America’s income distribution were more Republican than those in the bottom 95 percent. Now, the opposite is true: Among America’s white majority, the rich voted to the left of the middle class and the poor in 2016 and 2020, while the poor voted to the right of the middle class and the rich.

In political-science parlance, the collapse of the New Deal–era alignment — in which voters’ income levels strongly predicted their partisan preference — is often referred to as “class dealignment.” The increasing tendency for politics to divide voters along educational lines, meanwhile, is known as “education polarization.”

There are worse things for a political coalition to be than affluent or educated. Professionals vote and donate at higher rates than blue-collar workers. But college graduates also comprise a minority of the electorate — and an underrepresented minority at that. America’s electoral institutions all give disproportionate influence to parts of the country with low levels of educational attainment. And this is especially true of the Senate . Therefore, if the coalitional trends of the past half-century continue unabated — and Democrats keep gaining college-educated votes at the expense of working-class ones — the party will find itself locked out of federal power. Put differently, such a development would put an increasingly authoritarian GOP on the glide path to political dominance.

And unless education polarization is substantially reversed , progressives are likely to continue seeing their reform ambitions pared back sharply by Congress’s upper chamber, even when Democrats manage to control it.

These realities have generated a lively intra-Democratic debate over the causes and implications of class dealignment. To some pundits , consultants, and data journalists , the phenomenon’s fundamental cause is the cultural divide between educated professionals and the working class. In their telling, college graduates in general — and Democratic college graduates in particular — tend to have different social values, cultural sensibilities, and issue priorities than the median non-college-educated voter. As the New York Times ’s Nate Cohn puts the point, college graduates tend to be more cosmopolitan and culturally liberal, report higher levels of social trust, and are more likely to “attribute racial inequality, crime, and poverty to complex structural and systemic problems” rather than “individualist and parochial explanations.”

What’s more, since blue America’s journalists, politicians, and activists are overwhelmingly college graduates, highly educated liberals exert disproportionate influence over their party’s actions and identity. Therefore, as the Democrats’ well-credentialed wing has swelled, the party’s image and ideological positioning have grown more reflective of the professional class’s distinct tastes — and thus less appealing to the electorate’s working-class majority.

This theory does not sit well with all Democratic journalists, politicians, and activists. Some deny the existence of a diploma divide on cultural values, while others insist on its limited political salience. Many progressives attribute class dealignment to America’s pathological racial politics and/or the Democrats’ failures of economic governance . In this account, the New Deal coalition was unmade by a combination of a backlash to Black Americans’ growing prominence in Democratic politics and the Democratic Party’s failures to prevent its former working-class base from suffering decades of stagnant living standards and declining life expectancy .

An appreciation of these developments is surely indispensable for understanding class dealignment in the United States. But they don’t tell the whole story. Education polarization is not merely an American phenomenon; it is a defining feature of contemporary politics in nearly every western democracy . It is therefore unlikely that our nation’s white-supremacist history can fully explain the development. And though center-left parties throughout the West have shared some common failings, these inadequacies cannot tell us why many working-class voters have not merely dropped out of politics but rather begun voting for parties even more indifferent to their material interests.

In my view, education polarization cannot be understood without a recognition of the values divide between educated professionals and working people in the aggregate. That divide is rooted in each class’s disparate ways of life, economic imperatives, socialization experiences, and levels of material security. By itself, the emergence of this gap might not have been sufficient to trigger class dealignment, but its adverse political implications have been greatly exacerbated by the past half-century of inequitable growth, civic decline, and media fragmentation.

The college-educated population has distinct ideological tendencies and psychological sensibilities.

Educated professionals tend to be more socially liberal than the general public. In fact, the correlation between high levels of educational attainment and social liberalism is among the most robust in political science. As early as the 1950s, researchers documented the tendency of college graduates to espouse more progressive views than the general public on civil liberties and gender roles. In the decades since, as the political scientist Elizabeth Simon writes , this correlation has held up with “remarkable geographical and temporal consistency.” Across national boundaries and generations, voters with college degrees have been more likely than those without to support legal abortion, LGBTQ+ causes, the rights of racial minorities, and expansive immigration. They are also more likely to hold “post-material” policy priorities — which is to say, to prioritize issues concerning individual autonomy, cultural values, and big-picture social goals above those concerning one’s immediate material and physical security. This penchant is perhaps best illustrated by the highly educated’s distinctively strong support for environmental causes, even in cases when ecological preservation comes at a cost to economic growth.

Underlying these disparate policy preferences are distinct psychological profiles. The college educated are more likely to espouse moral values and attitudes associated with the personality trait “ openness to experience .” High “openness” individuals are attracted to novelty, skeptical of traditional authority, and prize personal freedom and cultural diversity. “Closed” individuals, by contrast, have an aversion to the unfamiliar and are therefore attracted to moral principles that promote certainty, order, and security. Virtually all human beings fall somewhere between these two ideal types. But the college educated as a whole are closer to the “open” end of the continuum than the general public is.

All of these distinctions between more- and less-educated voters are probabilistic, not absolute. There are Catholic theocrats with Harvard Ph.D.’s and anarchists who dropped out of high school. A nation the size of the U.S. is surely home to many millions of working-class social liberals and well-educated reactionaries. Political attitudes do not proceed automatically from any demographic characteristic, class position, or psychological trait. At the individual level, ideology is shaped by myriad historical inheritances and social experiences.

And yet, if people can come by socially liberal, “high openness” politics from any walk of life, they are much more likely to do so if that walk cuts across a college campus. (And, of course, they are even more likely to harbor this distinct psychological and ideological profile if they graduate from college and then choose to become professionally involved in Democratic politics.)

The path to the professional class veers left.

There are a few theoretical explanations for this. One holds that spending your late adolescence on a college campus tends to socialize you into cultural liberalism: Through some combination of increased exposure to people from a variety of geographic backgrounds, or the iconoclastic ethos of a liberal-arts education, or the predominantly left-of-center university faculty , or the substantive content of curricula, people tend to leave college with a more cosmopolitan and “open” worldview than they had upon entering.

Proving this theory is difficult since doing so requires controlling for selection effects. Who goes to college is not determined by random chance. The subset of young people who have the interests, aptitudes, and opportunities necessary for pursuing higher education have distinct characteristics long before they show up on campus. Some social scientists contend that such “selection effects” entirely explain the distinct political tendencies of college graduates. After all, the “high openness” personality trait is associated with higher IQs and more interest in academics. So perhaps attending college doesn’t lead people to develop culturally liberal sensibilities so much as developing culturally liberal sensibilities leads people to go to college.

Some research has tried to account for this possibility. Political scientists in the United Kingdom have managed to control for the preadult views and backgrounds of college graduates by exploiting surveys that tracked the same respondents through adolescence and into adulthood. Two recent analyses of such data have found that the college experience does seem to directly increase a person’s likelihood of becoming more socially liberal in their 20s than they were in their teens.

A separate study from the U.S. sought to control for the effects of familial background and childhood experiences by examining the disparate “sociopolitical” attitudes of sibling pairs in which one went to college while the other did not. It found that attending college was associated with greater “support for civil liberties and egalitarian gender-role beliefs.”

Other recent research , however, suggests that even these study designs may fail to control for all of the background factors that bias college attendees toward liberal views before they arrive on campus. So we have some good evidence that attending college directly makes people more culturally liberal, but that evidence is not entirely conclusive.

Yet if one posits that higher education does not produce social liberals but merely attracts them, a big theoretical problem remains: Why has the population of social liberals increased in tandem with that of college graduates?

The proportion of millennials who endorse left-wing views on issues of race, gender, immigration , and the environment is higher than the proportion of boomers who do so. And such views are more prevalent within the baby-boom generation than they were among the Silent Generation. This cannot be explained merely as a consequence of America’s burgeoning racial diversity, since similar generational patterns have been observed in European nations with lower rates of ethnic change. But the trend is consistent with another component of demographic drift: Each successive generation has had a higher proportion of college graduates than its predecessor. Between 1950 and 2019, the percentage of U.S. adults with bachelor’s degrees increased from 4 percent to 33 percent.  

Perhaps rising college attendance did not directly cause the “high-openness,” post-material, culturally progressive proportion of the population to swell. But then, what did?

One possibility is that, even if mass college attendance does not directly promote the development of “high openness” values, the mass white-collar economy does. If socially liberal values are well suited to the demands and lifeways inherent to professional employment in a globally integrated economy, then, as such employment expands, we would expect a larger share of the population to adopt socially liberal values. And there is indeed reason to think the professional vocation lends itself to social liberalism.

Entering the professional class often requires not only a four-year degree, but also, a stint in graduate school or a protracted period of overwork and undercompensation at the lowest ranks of one’s field. This gives the class’s aspirants a greater incentive to postpone procreation until later in life than the median worker. That in turn may give them a heightened incentive to favor abortion rights and liberal sexual mores.

The demands of the professional career may influence value formation in other ways. As a team of political scientists from Harvard and the University of Bonn argued in a 2020 paper , underlying the ideological divide between social liberals and conservatives may be a divergence in degrees of “moral universalism,” i.e., “the extent to which people’s altruism and trust remain constant as social distance increases.” Conservatives tend to feel stronger obligations than liberals to their own kin and neighbors and their religious, ethnic, and racial groups. Liberals, by contrast, tend to spread their altruism and trust thinner across a wider sphere of humanity; they are less compelled by the particularist obligations of inherited group loyalties and more apt to espouse a universalist ethos in which all individuals are of equal moral concern, irrespective of their group attachments.

Given that pursuing a professional career often requires leaving one’s native community and entering meritocratic institutions that are ideologically and legally committed to the principle that group identities matter less than individual aptitudes, the professional vocation may favor the development of a morally universalistic outlook — and thus more progressive views on questions of anti-discrimination and weaker identification with inherited group identities.

Further, in a globalized era, white-collar workers will often need to work with colleagues on other continents and contemplate social and economic developments in far-flung places. This may encourage both existing and aspiring professionals to develop more cosmopolitan outlooks.

Critically, parents who are themselves professionals — or who aspire for their children to secure a place in the educated, white-collar labor force — may seek to inculcate these values in their kids from a young age. For example, my own parents sent me to a magnet elementary school where students were taught Japanese starting in kindergarten. This curriculum was designed to appeal to parents concerned with their children’s capacity to thrive in the increasingly interconnected (and, in the early 1990s American imagination, increasingly Japanese-dominated) economy of tomorrow.

In this way, the expansion of the white-collar sector may increase the prevalence of “high-openness” cosmopolitan traits and values among rising generations long before they arrive on campus.

More material security, more social liberalism.

Ronald Inglehart’s theory of “ cultural evolution ” provides a third, complementary explanation for both the growing prevalence of social liberalism over the past half-century and for that ideology’s disproportionate popularity among the college educated.

In Inglehart’s account, people who experience material security in youth tend to develop distinctive values and preferences from those who do not: If childhood teaches you to take your basic material needs for granted, you’re more likely to develop culturally progressive values and post-material policy priorities.

Inglehart first formulated this theory in 1971 to explain the emerging cultural gap between the baby boomers and their parents. He noted that among western generations born before World War II, very large percentages had known hunger at some point in their formative years. The Silent Generation, for its part, had come of age in an era of economic depression and world wars. Inglehart argued that such pervasive material and physical insecurity was unfavorable soil for social liberalism: Under conditions of scarcity, human beings have a strong inclination to defer to established authority and tradition, to distrust out-groups, and to prize order and material security above self-expression and individual autonomy.

But westerners born into the postwar boom encountered a very different world from the Depression-wracked, war-torn one of their parents, let alone the cruel and unforgiving one encountered by common agriculturalists since time immemorial. Their world was one of rapid and widespread income growth. And these unprecedentedly prosperous conditions engendered a shift in the postwar generation’s values: When the boomers reached maturity, an exceptionally large share of the cohort evinced post-material priorities and espoused tolerance for out-groups, support for gender equality, concern for the environment, and antipathy for social hierarchies.

Since this transformation in values wasn’t rooted merely in the passage of time — but rather in the experience of abundance — it did not impact all social classes equally. Educated professionals are disproportionately likely to have had stable, middle-class childhoods. Thus, across the West, the post-material minority was disproportionately composed of college graduates in general and elite ones in particular. As Inglehart reported in 1981 , “among those less than 35 years old with jobs that lead to top management and top civil-service posts, Post-Materialists outnumber Materialists decisively: their numerical preponderance here is even greater than it is among students.”  

As with most big-picture models of political development, Inglehart’s theory is reductive and vulnerable to myriad objections. But his core premise — that, all else being equal, material abundance favors social liberalism while scarcity favors the opposite — has much to recommend it. As the World Values Survey has demonstrated, a nation’s degree of social liberalism (a.k.a. “self-expression values”) tightly correlates with its per-capita income. Meanwhile, as nations become wealthier, each successive generation tends to become more socially liberal than the previous one.

Critically, the World Values Survey data does not show an ineluctable movement toward ever-greater levels of social liberalism. Rather, when nations backslide economically, their populations’ progressivism declines. In the West, recessions have tended to reduce the prevalence of post-material values and increase support for xenophobic parties. But the relationship between material security and cultural liberalism is demonstrated most starkly by the experience of ex-communist states, many of which suffered a devastating collapse in living standards following the Soviet Union’s fall. In Russia and much of Eastern Europe, popular support for culturally progressive values plummeted around 1990 and has remained depressed ever since.

Inglehart’s theory offers real insights. As an account of education polarization, however, it presents a bit of a puzzle: If material security is the key driver of social liberalism, why have culture wars bifurcated electorates along lines of education instead of income? Put differently: Despite the material security provided by a high salary, when one controls for educational attainment, having a high income remains strongly associated with voting for conservatives.

One way to resolve this tension is to stipulate that the first two theories of education polarization we examined are also right: While material security is conducive to social liberalism, the college experience and demands of professional-class vocations are perhaps even more so. Thus, high-income voters who did not go to college will tend to be less socially liberal than those who did.

Separately, earning a high income is strongly associated with holding conservative views on fiscal policy. Therefore, even if the experience of material security biases high-income voters toward left-of-center views on cultural issues, their interest in low taxes may nevertheless compel them to vote for right-wing parties.

Voters with high levels of education but low incomes, meanwhile, are very often children of the middle class who made dumb career choices like, say, going into journalism. Such voters’ class backgrounds would theoretically bias them toward a socially liberal orientation, while their meager earnings would give them little reason to value conservative fiscal policy. Perhaps for this reason, “ high-education low-income voters ” are among the most reliably left-wing throughout the western world.

In any case, whatever qualifications and revisions we would wish to make to Inglehart’s theory, one can’t deny its prescience. In 1971, Inglehart forecast that intergenerational value change would redraw the lines of political conflict throughout the West. In his telling, the emergence of a novel value orientation that was disproportionately popular with influential elites would naturally shift the terrain of political conflict. And it would do so in a manner that undermined materialist, class-based voting: If conventional debates over income distribution pulled at the affluent right and the working-class left, the emerging cultural disputes pulled each in the opposite direction.

This proved to be, in the words of Gabriel Almond, “one of the few examples of successful prediction in political science.”

When the culture wars moved to the center of politics, the college educated moved left.

Whether we attribute the social liberalism of college graduates to their experiences on campus, their class’s incentive structures, their relative material security, or a combination of all three, a common set of predictions about western political development follows.

First, we would expect to see the political salience of cultural conflicts start to increase in the 1960s and ’70s as educated professionals became a mass force in western politics. Second, relatedly, we would expect that the historic correlation between having a college degree and voting for the right would start gradually eroding around the same time, owing to the heightened prominence of social issues.

Finally, we would expect education polarization to be most pronounced in countries where (1) economic development is most advanced (and thus the professional sector is most expansive) and (2) left-wing and right-wing parties are most sharply divided on cultural questions.

In their paper “Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,” Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty confirm all of these expectations.

The paper analyzes nearly every manifesto (a.k.a. “platform”) put forward by left-wing and right-wing parties in the past 300 elections. As anticipated by Inglehart, the researchers found that right-wing and left-wing parties began to develop distinct positions on “sociocultural” issues in the 1970s and that these distinctions grew steadily more profound over the ensuing 50 years. Thus, the salience of cultural issues did indeed increase just as college graduates became an electorally significant demographic.

As cultural conflict became more prominent, educated professionals became more left-wing. Controlling for other variables, in the mid-20th century, having a college diploma made one more likely to vote for parties of the right. By 2020, in virtually all of the western democracies, this relationship had inverted.

Some popular narratives attribute this realignment to discrete historical events, such as the Cold War’s end, China’s entry into the WTO, or the 2008 crash. But the data show no sudden reversal in education’s political significance. Instead, the authors write, the West saw “a very progressive, continuous reversal of educational divides, which unfolded decades before any of these events took place and has carried on uninterruptedly until today.” This finding is consistent with the notion that class dealignment is driven by gradual changes in western societies’ demographic and economic characteristics, such as the steady expansion of the professional class.

The paper provides further support for the notion that education polarization is a by-product of economic development: The three democracies where college-educated voters have not moved sharply to the left in recent decades — Ireland, Portugal, and Spain — are all relative latecomers to industrialization.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the authors established a strong correlation between “sociocultural polarization” — the degree to which right-wing and left-wing parties emphasize sharply divergent cultural positions — and education polarization. In other words: Countries where parties are highly polarized on social issues tend to have electorates that are highly polarized along educational lines.

It seems reasonable then to conclude (1) that there really is a cultural divide between educated professionals and the working class in the aggregate and (2) that this gap has been a key driver of class dealignment. Indeed, if we accept the reality of the diploma divide, then an increase of education-based voting over the past 50 years would seem almost inevitable: If you have two social groups with distinct cultural values and one group goes from being 4 percent of the electorate to 35 percent of it, debates about those values will probably become more politically prominent.

And of course, mass higher education wasn’t the only force increasing the salience of social conflict in the West over the past half-century. If economic development increased the popularity of “post-material” values, it also made it easier for marginalized groups to contest traditional hierarchies. As job opportunities for women expanded, they became less dependent on the patriarchal family for material security and thus were more liable to challenge it. As racial minorities secured a foothold in the middle class, they had more resources with which to fight discrimination.

And yet, if an increase in sociocultural polarization — and thus in education polarization — is a foregone conclusion, the magnitude of these shifts can’t be attributed to the existence of cultural divides alone.

Rather, transformations in the economic, civic, and media landscapes of western society since the 1970s have increased the salience and severity of the diploma divide.

When the postwar bargain collapsed, the center-left failed to secure workers a new deal.

To polarize an electorate around cultural conflicts rooted in education, you don’t just need to increase the salience of social issues. You also need to reduce the salience of material disputes rooted in class. Alas, the economic developments of the past 50 years managed to do both.

The class-based alignment that defined western politics in the mid-20th century emerged from a particular set of economic conditions. In the early stages of industrialization, various factors had heightened the class consciousness of wage laborers. Such workers frequently lived in densely settled, class-segregated neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of large labor-intensive plants. This close proximity cultivated solidarity, as divisions between the laborer’s working and social worlds were few. And the vast scale of industrial enterprises abetted organizing drives, as trade unions could rapidly gain scale by winning over a single shop.

By encouraging their members to view politics through the lens of class and forcing political elites to reckon with workers’ demands, strong trade unions helped to keep questions of income distribution and workers’ rights at the center of political debate and the forefront of voters’ minds. In so doing, they also helped to win western workers in general — and white male ones in particular — unprecedented shares of national income.

But this bargain between business and labor had always been contingent on robust growth. In the postwar era of rising productivity, it was possible for profits and wages to increase in tandem. But in the 1970s, western economies came under stress. Rising energy costs and global competition thinned profit margins, rendering business owners more hostile to labor’s demands both within the shop and in politics. Stagflation — the simultaneous appearance of high unemployment and high inflation — gave an opening to right-wing critics of the postwar order, who argued that the welfare state and pro-labor macroeconomic policies had sapped productivity.

Meanwhile, various long-term economic trends began undermining industrial unionism. Automation inevitably reduced the labor intensity of factories in the West. The advent of the shipping container eased the logistical burdens of globalizing production, while the industrialization of low-wage developing countries increased the incentives for doing so. Separately, as western consumers grew more affluent, they began spending less of their income on durable goods and more on services like health care (one needs only so many toasters, but the human desire for greater longevity and physical well-being is nigh-insatiable). These developments reduced both the economic leverage and the political weight of industrial workers. And since western service sectors had lower rates of unionization, deindustrialization weakened organized labor.

All this presented center-left parties with a difficult challenge. In the face of deindustrialization, an increasingly anti-labor corporate sector, an increasingly conservative economic discourse, an embattled union movement, and a globalizing economy, such parties needed to formulate new models for achieving shared prosperity. And they had to do so while managing rising cultural tensions within their coalitions.

They largely failed.

Countering the postindustrial economy’s tendencies toward inequality would have required radical reforms. Absent policies promoting the unionization of the service sector, deindustrialization inevitably weakened labor. Absent drastic changes in the allocation of posttax income, automation and globalization redistributed economic gains away from “low skill” workers and toward the most productive — or well-situated — professionals, executives, and entrepreneurs.

The United States had more power than any western nation to standardize such reforms and establish a relatively egalitarian postindustrial model. Yet the Democratic Party could muster neither the political will nor the imagination to do so. Instead, under Jimmy Carter, it acquiesced to various policies that reinforced the postindustrial economy’s tendencies toward inequality, while outsourcing key questions of economic management to financial markets and the Federal Reserve. The Reagan administration took this inegalitarian and depoliticized model of economic governance to new extremes. And to highly varying degrees, its inequitable and market-fundamentalist creed influenced the policies of future U.S. administrations and other western governments.

As a result, the past five decades witnessed a great divergence in the economic fortunes of workers with and without college diplomas, while the western working class (a.k.a. the “lower middle class”) became the primary “losers” of globalization .

The center-left parties’ failures to avert a decline in the economic security and status of ordinary workers discredited them with much of their traditional base. And their failure to reinvigorate organized labor undermined the primary institutions that politicize workers into a progressive worldview. These shortcomings, combined with the market’s increasingly dominant role in economic management, reduced the political salience of left-right divides on economic policy. This in turn gave socially conservative working-class voters fewer reasons to vote for center-left parties and gave affluent social liberals fewer reasons to oppose them. In western nations where organized labor remains relatively strong (such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland), education polarization has been relatively mild, while in those countries where it is exceptionally weak (such as the United States), the phenomenon has been especially pronounced.

Finally, the divergent economic fortunes of workers and professionals might have abetted education polarization in one other way: Given that experiencing abundance encourages social liberalism — while experiencing scarcity discourages it — the past half-century of inequitable growth might have deepened cultural divisions between workers with degrees and those without.

The professionalization of civil society estranged the left from its working-class base.

While the evolution of western economies increased the class distance between college graduates and other workers, the evolution of western civil societies increased the social distance between each group.

Back in the mid-20th century, the college educated still constituted a tiny minority of western populations, while mass-membership institutions — from trade unions to fraternal organizations to political parties — still dominated civic life. In that context, an educated professional who wished to exercise political influence often needed to join a local chapter of a cross-class civic association or political party and win election to a leadership position within that organization by securing the confidence of its membership.

That changed once educated professionals became a mass constituency in their own right. As the college-educated population ballooned and concentrated itself within urban centers, it became easier for interest groups to swing elections and pressure lawmakers without securing working-class support. At the same time, the proliferation of “knowledge workers” set off an arms race between interest and advocacy groups looking to influence national legislation and election outcomes. Job opportunities for civic-minded professionals in think tanks, nonprofits, and foundations proliferated. And thanks to growing pools of philanthropic money and the advent of direct-mail fundraising, these organizations could sustain themselves without recruiting an active mass membership.

Thus, the professional’s path to political influence dramatically changed. Instead of working one’s way up through close-knit local groups — and bending them toward one’s political goals through persuasion — professionals could join (or donate to) nationally oriented advocacy groups already aligned with their preferences, which could then advance their policy aims by providing legislators with expert guidance and influencing public opinion through media debates.

As the political scientist Theda Skocpol demonstrates in her book Diminished Democracy , college graduates began defecting from mass-membership civic organizations in the 1970s, in an exodus that helped precipitate their broader decline.

Combined with the descent of organized labor, the collapse of mass participation in civic groups and political parties untethered the broad left from working-class constituencies. As foundation-funded NGOs displaced trade unions in the progressive firmament, left-wing parties became less directly accountable to their less-educated supporters. This made such parties more liable to embrace the preferences and priorities of educated professionals over those of the median working-class voter.

Meanwhile, in the absence of a thriving civic culture, voters became increasingly reliant on the mass media for their political information.

Today’s media landscape is fertile terrain for right-wing populism.

The dominant media technology of the mid-20th century — broadcast television — favored oligopoly. Given the exorbitant costs of mounting a national television network in that era, the medium was dominated by a small number of networks, each with an incentive to appeal to a broad audience. This discouraged news networks from cultivating cultural controversy while empowering them to establish a broadly shared information environment.

Cable and the internet have molded a radically different media landscape. Today, news outlets compete in a hypersaturated attentional market that encourages both audience specialization and sensationalism. In a world where consumers have abundant infotainment options, voters who read at a graduate-school level and those who read at an eighth-grade level are unlikely to favor the same content. And the same is true of voters with liberal and conservative sensibilities — especially since the collapse of a common media ecosystem leads ideologues to occupy disparate factual universes. The extraordinary nature of today’s media ecology is well illustrated by this chart from Martin Gurri’s book, The Revolt of the Public :

This information explosion abets education polarization for straightforward reasons: Since the college educated and non-college educated have distinct tastes in media, in a highly competitive attentional market, they will patronize different outlets and accept divergent facts.

Further, in the specific economic and social context we’ve been examining, the modern media environment is fertile terrain for reactionary entrepreneurs who wish to cultivate grievance against the professional elite. After all, as we’ve seen, that elite (1) subscribes to some values that most working-class people reject, (2) commandeers a wildly disproportionate share of national income and economic status, and (3) dominates the leadership of major political parties and civic groups to an unprecedented degree.

The political efficacy of such right-wing “populist” programming has been repeatedly demonstrated. Studies have found that exposure to Fox News increases Republican vote share and that the expansion of broadband internet into rural areas leads to higher levels of partisan hostility and lower levels of ticket splitting (i.e., more ideologically consistent voting) as culturally conservative voters gain access to more ideologically oriented national news reporting, commentary, and forums.

What is to be done?

The idea that education polarization arises from deep structural tendencies in western society may inspire a sense of powerlessness. And the notion that it emerges in part from a cultural divide between professionals and working people may invite ideological discomfort, at least among well-educated liberals.

But the fact that some center-left parties have managed to retain more working-class support than others suggests that the Democrats have the capacity to broaden (or narrow) their coalition. Separately, the fact that college-educated liberals have distinct social values does not require us to forfeit them.

The commentators most keen to acknowledge the class dimensions of the culture wars typically aim to discredit the left by doing so. Right-wing polemicists often suggest that progressives’ supposedly compassionate social preferences are mere alibis for advancing the professional class’s material interests. But such arguments are almost invariably weak. Progressive social views may be consonant with professional-class interests, but they typically represent attempts to universalize widely held ideals of freedom and equality. The college educated’s cosmopolitan inclinations are also adaptive for a world that is unprecedentedly interconnected and interdependent and in which population asymmetries between the rich and developing worlds create opportunities for mutual gain through migration , if only xenophobia can be overcome. And of course, in an era of climate change, the professional class’s strong concern for the environment is more than justified.

Nevertheless, professional-class progressives must recognize that our social values are not entirely unrelated to our class position. They are not an automatic by-product of affluence and erudition, nor the exclusive property of the privileged. But humans living in rich, industrialized nations are considerably more likely to harbor these values than those in poor, agrarian ones. And Americans who had the privilege of spending their late adolescence at institutions of higher learning are more likely to embrace social liberalism than those who did not.

The practical implications of this insight are debatable. It is plausible that Democrats may be able to gain working-class vote share by moderating on some social issues. But the precise electoral payoff of any single concession to popular opinion is deeply uncertain. Voters’ conceptions of each party’s ideological positioning are often informed less by policy details than by partisan stereotypes. And the substantive costs of moderation — both for the welfare of vulnerable constituencies and the long-term health of the progressive project — can be profound. At various points in the past half-century, it might have been tactically wise for Democrats to distance themselves from the demands of organized labor. But strategically, sacrificing the health of a key partisan institution to the exigencies of a single election cycle is deeply unwise. Meanwhile, in the U.S. context, the “mainstream” right has staked out some cultural positions that are profoundly unpopular with all social classes . In 2022, it is very much in the Democratic Party’s interest to increase the political salience of abortion rights.

In any case, exactly how Democrats should balance the necessity of keeping the GOP out of power with the imperative to advocate for progressive issue positions is something on which earnest liberals can disagree.

The case for progressives to be more cognizant of the diploma divide when formulating our messaging and policy priorities, however, seems clearer.

Education polarization can be self-reinforcing. As left-wing civic life has drifted away from mass-membership institutions and toward the ideologically self-selecting circles of academia, nonprofits, and the media, the left’s sensitivity to the imperatives of majoritarian politics has dulled. In some respects, the incentives for gaining status and esteem within left-wing subcultures are diametrically opposed to the requirements of coalition building. In the realm of social media, it can be advantageous to make one’s policy ideas sound more radical and/or threatening to popular values than they actually are. Thus, proposals for drastically reforming flawed yet popular institutions are marketed as plans for their “abolition,” while some advocates for reproductive rights insist that they are not merely “pro-choice” but “ pro-abortion ” (as though their objective were not to maximize bodily autonomy but rather the incidence of abortion itself, a cause that would seemingly require limiting access to contraception).

Meanwhile, the rhetoric necessary for cogently theorizing social problems within academia — and that fit for effectively selling policy reforms to a mass audience — is quite different. Political-science research indicates that theoretical abstractions tend to leave most voters cold. Even an abstraction as accessible as “inequality” resonates less with ordinary people than simply saying that the rich have too much money . Yet Democratic politicians have nevertheless taken to peppering their speeches with abstract academic terms such as structural racism .

Relatedly, in the world of nonprofits, policy wonks are often encouraged to foreground the racial implications of race-neutral redistributive policies that disproportionately benefit nonwhite constituencies. Although it is important for policy design to account for any latent racial biases in universal programs, there is reason to believe that, in a democracy with a 70 percent white electorate and widespread racial resentment, it is unwise for Democratic politicians to suggest that broadly beneficial programs primarily aid minority groups.

On the level of priority setting, it seems important for college-educated liberals to be conscious of the fact that “post-material” concerns resonate more with us than with the general public. This is especially relevant for climate strategy. Poll results and election outcomes both indicate that working-class voters are far more sensitive to the threat of rising energy prices than to that of climate change. Given that reality, the most politically viable approach to reducing emissions is likely to expedite the development and deployment of clean-energy technologies rather than deterring energy consumption through higher prices. In practice, this means prioritizing the build-out of green infrastructure over the obstruction of fossil-fuel extraction.

Of course, narrowing the social distance between college-educated liberals and working people would be even better than merely finessing it. The burgeoning unionization of white-collar professions and the growing prominence of downwardly mobile college graduates in working-class labor struggles are both encouraging developments on this front. Whatever Democrats can do to facilitate labor organizing and increase access to higher education will simultaneously advance social justice and improve the party’s long-term electoral prospects.

Finally, the correlation between material security and social liberalism underscores the urgency of progressive economic reform. Shared prosperity can be restored only by increasing the social wage of ordinary workers through some combination of unionization, sectoral bargaining, wage subsidies, and social-welfare expansion. To some extent, this represents a chicken-and-egg problem: Radical economic reforms may be a necessary precondition for the emergence of a broad progressive majority, yet a broad progressive majority is itself a precondition for radical reform.

Nevertheless, in wealthy, deep-blue states such as New York and California, Democrats have the majorities necessary for establishing a progressive economic model. At the moment, artificial constraints on the housing supply , clean-energy production, and other forms of development are sapping blue states’ economic potential . If such constraints could be overcome, the resulting economic gains would simultaneously increase working people’s living standards and render state-level social-welfare programs easier to finance. Perhaps the starting point for such a political revolution is for more-affluent social liberals to recognize that their affinity for exclusionary housing policies and aversion to taxation undermines their cultural values.

Our understanding of education polarization remains provisional. And all proposals for addressing it remain open to debate. The laws of political science are more conjectural than those of physics, and even perfect insight into political reality cannot settle disputes rooted in ideology.

But effective political engagement requires unblinkered vision. The Democratic Party’s declining support among working-class voters is a serious problem. If Democrats consider only ideologically convenient explanations for that problem, our intellectual comfort may come at the price of political power.

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With the DNC underway, a historian explains how 'The Stadium' became a public square

Tonya Mosley

President Biden speaks during the Democratic National Convention on Monday in Chicago's United Center Stadium. J. Scott Applewhite/AP hide caption

The NPR Network will be reporting live from Chicago throughout the week bringing you  the latest on the Democratic National Convention .

On Monday night, tens of thousands of people filled the Chicago United Center as President Joe Biden addressed the Democratic National Convention . Columbia University historian Frank Andre Guridy says these massive monuments to sports, entertainment and politics serve as public squares in American culture.

In his book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protests, and Play , Guridy chronicles the role that arenas have played in American history and culture. From a 1920s pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, to Colin Kaepernick taking a knee in 2016 to protest police brutality, Guridy says that stadiums are where Americans battle over race, class, gender and sexual inequities.

"We fight our political battles in stadiums," Guridy says. "Because they're large, because they can accommodate all sorts of people, ... they become ideal places to stake your claims on what you want the United States to be."

Guridy says the country's first "stadiums" — which took the form of circus tents or wooden ballparks — arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and were typically funded by entrepreneurs. In recent decades, however, there's been a trend toward taxpayer-funded stadiums — though Guridy notes: "This notion that stadiums are places that help generate economic development ... [has] been debunked over and over and over again."

Take A Pilgrimage To America's Sport Sanctuaries In 'The Arena'

Guridy adds that as more stadiums are built or replaced, they are becoming increasingly generic, with corporate names and a cookie-cutter-style. "I would argue that most of these facilities feel like no place, because they all have the same sort of arrangement of ads and same types of scoreboards, same sorts of rituals," he says. "They all look the same."

Interview Highlights

The Stadium Porchlight Books hide caption

On how it came to be that taxpayers pay for new stadiums

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal helps begin the process by which public funds are building stadiums. … But it isn't until after World War II, when we see the exploding growth of both the sport and the entertainment industry. When the United States really becomes a nationally sports-crazed nation, where sports franchises start to make the case to politicians that ... if you want to have a team in your city, you need to build a stadium for us. And politicians discover that they can gain a lot of political capital by bringing a major league team to the city. And that accounts for the exploding growth of publicly financed stadiums in the 1960s and ‘70s, and really, until this day. …

Because sports leagues are de facto — and also legislatively — monopolies in the United States, they can command that sort of power. It's become this kind of convergence between aspiring politicians and sports leagues that have been able to make the case that, in fact, the stadium is something that should be funded by taxpayer public funds.

On the role stadiums played in the country's desegregation

Ballparks like Ebbets Field [in Brooklyn] become places of this enormous cultural and social and political transformation. Now, it's not just because Jackie Robinson shows up in a Brooklyn Dodger uniform. It's because people have been agitating for the desegregation and the elimination of Jim Crow for decades. … And we see this all across the country, particularly in the South when … the college football stadium becomes this kind of shrine, this temple, that is designed in part to not just stage football games, but to actually exemplify and celebrate the Jim Crow South and its imagined legacy in the Confederacy and slavery.

Stadiums up until the mid 20th century, particularly in the South, were all-white affairs, or certainly designed to sort of exclude people of African descent and non-white people. But because of the impact of the freedom movements across the South and in other parts of the country, we see this major shift playing out in public at stadiums across the country. So Americans are able to experience that, live, at your local facility.

On how the American national anthem and flag became part of stadium culture

Opinion: No taxpayer handouts for pro stadiums

It starts in the early 20th century, where we start to see performances of Francis Scott Key’s anthem in public places. But it isn't till 1931 when it becomes the national anthem, and it really isn't till the 1940s, where we start to see the kind of regular performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" before sporting events ... not coincidentally, in the aftermath of wars, in the aftermath of World War I, in the aftermath of World War II. And then later on, we start to see the proliferation anthems like "America the Beautiful" and others performed after 9/11, in moments, not coincidentally, where the United States is at war, when the U.S. government really has to make the case of national loyalty to its citizens, and the ballpark and the stadium and the arena becomes one of those places where that loyalty is cultivated.

On the militarized nationalism of stadium culture, and Colin Kaepernick's protest of police brutality in 2016

Code Switch

My father stood for the anthem, for the same reason that colin kaepernick sits.

By the time Kaepernick takes his knee at Qualcomm Stadium [in San Diego] in August 2016, eight years ago, you, at that point, had 15 years of jet flyovers. Fifteen years of honoring the military and law enforcement. And that's the thing that's interesting after 9/11: The ways in which these, you know, celebrations of the military become celebrations of law enforcement, which [happens] almost immediately, partly because of those who died among the first responders at the Twin Towers, but it's more than that. It becomes a policy of pushing pro-police politics, I would argue, across the country. By the time Kaepernick does what he does, it's now 15 years of that in which patriotic expression is narrowed and dissent is less tolerated in public.

Those Raised Fists Still Resonate, 50 Years Later

Certainly athletes have been persecuted before Colin Kaepernick — most famously Tommie Smith and John Carlos when they make their Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. … But you do see the absolute intolerance and the vilification of Colin Kaepernick, which I would argue was unprecedented, and I think it's because we have converted the stadium into a pep rally for the military and for law enforcement. Just the questioning of any sort of police action becomes intolerable, especially when a Black athlete does it. …I think that that's why the stadium becomes this interesting theater, to look at the way in which we make sense of our world and of American politics. And I definitely think that there's a much more repressive political culture that ensues after 9/11 than what existed before.

On the “Gay Games,” in part as a response to homophobia within stadiums

July 12, 1979: 'The Night Disco Died' — Or Didn't

One of the most famous cases or infamous cases of [homophobia in a stadium] was the 1979 Disco Demolition event that happened at Chicago's Comiskey Park, in which a local disc jockey, Steve Dahl, decided to create the ceremony in the middle of a baseball doubleheader to blow up disco records. And this is at a moment when the kind of anti-disco movement was emerging in the United States and [it] was very much an anti-gay movement. It was very much fueled by homophobia and racism. … That event turns into a riot where literally people charged the field and the games are canceled. The second game of the doubleheader was canceled on that evening in 1979 in Chicago.

So the ballpark becomes this battleground, and ... gay activists take their struggle to the stadium, and they do that in San Francisco with the advent of the Gay Games movement, which is created by Tom Waddell, among a host of other organizers, who decide to create kind of an anti-Olympics ... athletic competition that showcased the athletic talents of gays and lesbians. And that's what they do in San Francisco in the early 1980s. And their first Gay Games happens in Kezar Stadium, another public controlled stadium, in the summer of 1982.

On how the prevalence of VIP sections negates what stadiums were designed to do

The Coronavirus Crisis

Baseball stadiums may be empty, but you can still hear the crowds.

Seating capacity is much smaller now, so you have large parts of the stadium real estate devoted to the VIP crowd, to the corporate crowd. And you have less space devoted to the average sports fan. And this is something that sports fans lament over and over again. And you could say, well, people could just watch sports or watch whatever they want to watch on their device. But what we discovered in 2020 is that the fan really matters. ... There were people actually writing articles before 2020 like: Do we really need fans in stadiums anymore? And the 2020 showed we do need them. And that the athletes want them there and that the public wants to be there. .... Think of stadiums as institutions. Think of them as places where, you know, people want to go and congregate, with good reason. And I think that, that's the stadium at its best when we actually use it for that purpose. So why not open it up to a wider swath of people?

Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.

Correction Aug. 21, 2024

A previous version of this web story estimated the crowd for President Biden's speech at the DNC numbered 50,000. In fact, the crowd size was closer to 20,000.

Rachel Scott named chair of the Department of Religion and Culture

• Kelsey Bartlett

22 Aug 2024

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Rachel Scott isn’t interested in changing her students’ minds about a particular religion or political stance. But she is intent on providing them with the context they need to make informed decisions.

Scott, professor of Islamic studies, was named the new chair of the Department of Religion and Culture in July. Scott said she has always been fascinated by the relationship between religion and politics, but her passion for the subject solidified when she took a year-long trip to Egypt as an undergraduate student.

“I was inspired by that,” Scott said. “I knew it was a place where religion really had an influence in politics. My interests continued to develop from there.”

Scott has been a member of the Virginia Tech community since 2005. Her research largely focuses on Islamic law, modern Islamic political thought, and religion and secularism. Her work delves into topics such as constitutions, personal status law, and Muslim-Christian relations. Through her classes, she also explores concepts such as death and mourning and women and gender in Islam.

In her new role, Scott hopes to highlight the regional and international expertise of the department. Through exploration of topics such as moral culpability and what it means to be human in an everchanging world, she hopes the department can help students engage in ethical debates about hot button issues. Advancements in technology and artificial intelligence have the potential to reshape numerous aspects of the world, such as warfare and economics.

“But it isn’t just about technology,” she said. “The world is changing in quite profound ways, and I want our department to really be at the forefront of providing students with a really deep understanding of the religious and cultural contexts that underpin societies around the globe.”

Scott said she is looking forward to representing the department, which she said is a “diverse faculty with diverse interests.” She said one of her main goals is to raise awareness about what the department does.

“Our department is about giving students religious and cultural context and knowledge,” Scott said. “We’re an open umbrella. We want them to come to our department and take courses that enrich their understanding of not only their own religious tradition but of others.”

Scott recalls a class that two faculty members taught that focused on examining friendship from different religious perspectives. She was invited to share and discuss a text about friendship written from a Muslim perspective.

“What’s so interesting is that it was not just about religion and faith,” she said. “It was about all that, but it was also about how to advise people about how to be a true friend and a better friend. And it was so rich and amazing. You don’t have to be a member of a particular religion to appreciate some of the lessons.”

She follows Matthew Gabriele , a professor of medieval studies, who served in the role since 2018.

Scott is also a core faculty member of  ASPECT , the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought, a Ph.D. program that focuses on interdisciplinary theoretical research and fosters engagement between social sciences, the humanities, and the arts.

In addition to numerous book chapters and articles, Scott has authored two books. They are “ The Challenge of Political Islam: Non-Muslims and the Egyptian State ," and “ Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making ," which is being translated into Russian for the Russian-language series, “ Contemporary Religious and Theological Studies ."

Among her honors, Scott received a certificate of teaching excellence from the college for the 2014-15 academic year. She also was a university nominee for the Carnegie fellowship in 2015, and she received the Dean’s Faculty Fellowship in 2016.

She served as co-chair of the religion and politics section for the American Academy of Religion – the world's largest association of religious studies scholars.  

Scott earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Oxford and her doctoral degree from the University of London.

“Dr. Scott is a brilliant scholar who will be a great asset on the college’s executive council,” said Laura Belmonte, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. “I look forward to working closely with her and her colleagues and applaud their many contributions to the college.”

Jenny Kincaid Boone

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The Religion of Antichrist

The Beast from the Earth Killing People and People Receiving the Mark of the Beast (ca. 1255-1260), a 31.9 x 22.5 cm page from an illuminated manuscript by an unknown (likely English) artist, located in the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

• Mark Dooley
• — February 6, 2024

The biggest mistake we make is in believing that we are in a so-called ‘culture war.’ The phrase ‘culture war’ assumes that both sides have rival cultures they are battling to defend and promote. However, the enemies of civilisation, of life, and love, have no culture. If anything, their aim is not only to destroy the great cultural and spiritual achievements of the West, but to lay waste to anything that transcends the diabolical and obscene. Culture presupposes beauty, order, and tranquillity. It assumes those moral and spiritual values upon which harmony and holiness depend. In word, rite, song, and ritual; it idealises what William Blake termed “the human form divine.” In our “brave new world,” however, the human form is considered neither divine nor worthy of reverence or respect. It has been reduced to what Roger Scruton called its “animal essentials”—a purely natural object that can be remade in the image and likeness of anything but God. Put simply, the only ‘culture’ that is on offer is that of death and desecration, of defilement and the demonic.

Therefore, let us avoid talk of a ‘culture war’ when what we are engaged in is nothing less than a lethal spiritual conflict. If you perceive the assault on marriage, the family, innocence, and the very nature of the biological order, as a culture war, you will be at a loss to explain why there is a such a ferocious attack on the sanctity of sexuality. You will struggle to explain to children why heterosexuality is not simply one of many competing options, or why euthanasia is not an act of mercy for the critically ill, or why puberty blockers are not a lifestyle choice but an outrageous violation of natural sexual development. That is why we must see this confrontation for what it is: a spiritual war in which the forces of darkness are seeking to ravage everything that is good, beautiful, and true.

When you observe our current predicament from that standpoint, the prevailing madness makes perfect sense. However, most Christians and conservatives hesitate to use the word “evil” when describing the forces that we face. Having bought into the psychobabble of the age, they often opt to explain it in purely naturalistic or psychological terms. I did so myself for many years until I realised the gravity of what was happening around me, and that it simply could not be explained as an ideological aberration. I did so until I understood that the sacred scriptures do not confuse psychological and spiritual sickness. Christ, in other words, did not mistake clinical depression for diabolical possession.

Similarly, St. Paul knew exactly what we are up against, and he did not flinch when confronting evil. In his letter to the Ephesians, he urges his readers to put on “the whole armour of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day.” Like Christ, he recognised that evil is not simply a state of mind, but a spiritual force intent on wholesale destruction. As Christ Himself put it in the Gospel of John: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” Therefore, as Paul instructs, we must put on the armour of God because “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

Consider the feverish onslaught against children’s innocence from pornography, gender politics, so-called sex education, and all the rest, and you will clearly see that this is something much more than an alternate vision of childhood or an expansion of children’s rights. In my view, it is nothing short of a demonic offensive by the spiritual forces of evil against the most vulnerable and blameless in our society. And only when you see it as such can you begin to credibly protect the “children of light” against what Paul called “the sons of disobedience,” or those who actively take part “in the unfruitful works of darkness.”

Observe, for example, all the pet causes of the progressive Left, and you will notice that they are all directed against the concept of personhood as derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We now assume the place of God, remake ourselves on a whim and according to no conventional criteria. Children are led to believe, not only that they can do what they like, but that they can become—in a perverse twist of Christ’s redeeming work—a “new creation.” Indeed, the very notion of identity, recast by Paul in light of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, is primarily targeted. When Paul writes that there “is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” he is declaring that we are no longer defined by our sexuality, ‘gender,’ or social roles, but instead that our identity is found in Christ. Now, however, we have been reduced to purely sexual beings who can change gender on a whim, and whose dignity depends on nothing more than our social roles. If the glorious message of the New Testament is that “it is no longer I who live but Christ Who lives in me,” the message of our multicoloured utopia is: “It is no longer Christ Who lives but I who live solely for myself.”

The speed and ferocity with which this battle is being waged, and the shameless vulgarity of those who are prosecuting it, proves that this is no confrontation between competing worldviews. To repeat, it is a battle between good and evil, light and darkness, the sacred and the profane. Does this mean that I believe in evil as a metaphysical entity? Not only do I believe it to be so, but I also contend that every Christian ought to believe likewise. If Christ was not healing the sick, He was casting out demonic spirits. Indeed, at the very end of His earthly life, He said that “these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.” That sentence should give every believing Christian some serious pause, for if those signs are not accompanying us, we must question the strength of our belief. Be that as it may, we ought to pay close attention to the first sign that Christ mentions: “In my name they will cast out demons.”

Not only did Christ assume that His disciples would believe in the demonic but that they would also confront it. The irony is, however, that the secular world has much more belief in the demonic realm than its Christian counterpart. Indeed, it is the widespread fascination with demons and the occult among the young that led American exorcist Fr. Carlos Martins to launch his hugely successful podcast The Exorcist Files . Fr. Martins explains why he responded to the Holy See’s invitation to use the podcast medium to offer dramatic reconstructions of exorcisms accompanied by a catechesis on the demonic:

Young persons aged 18 to 29 are increasingly leaving organised religion. A recent Pew survey found that the number of religiously unaffiliated persons in this demographic increased from 15% to almost 20% in just five years. However, another survey published by Public Policy Polling showed that a whopping 63% of the same demographic believe that people can become possessed by demons, a figure higher than any other group. Evidently, in the age group most disinterested in religion, something is occurring in their lives that makes them conclude that demons are real.

The fact that The Exorcist Files has consistently held the No. 1 spot on Spotify’s “Religion & Spirituality” category, proves how pervasive demonic activity is in the lives of many people, even if the secular world dismisses this phenomenon as ‘medieval.’ Concluding his first epistle, St. John writes: “We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” When we understand that we are under assault from what Christ called “the ruler of this world,” when we realise that we are not fighting flesh and blood but “the cosmic powers over this present darkness,” we will be much better placed to prevail. I do not say that the battle we face will be easily won, for it is plainly evident that the “smoke of Satan” has not only seeped into every sphere of society but is also suffocating the Church. For who can deny that the clerical child sex abuse scandal, the vandalization of the liturgy, the relentless attempt to conform the Church to the world, and, in many cases, the complete abandonment of the sacraments by priests unconcerned for the spiritual wellbeing of their parishioners, are all malign manifestations of the forces we face.

Despite all that, however, we are able to offer what the world lacks: grace, beauty, love, and truth. We still possess what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said,” and the more the world partners with the diabolical, the more we should speak the truth with beauty and love. Christ did not answer His adversary with argument or aggression, but, when tempted in the desert, He responded with scripture. He invoked the Word of God, the ancient texts of his spiritual tradition, and the serpent fled. That is why St. John declares that “this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.” It is why Paul writes that we ought to, “Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness put on by the gospel of peace. In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one.” The “gospel of peace” ought to be our answer to the demonic destruction we are witnessing all around us. Neither despair nor hopelessness can withstand the evil day, but only the gospel that “has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints of light” can ultimately overcome the “domain of darkness.”

The victory that will overcome the world begins in recognising that the attack upon our faith and culture, our children and the most vulnerable, is not the birth pangs of what Hegel called a new “form of consciousness.” In the Hegelian dialectic, when one form of consciousness gives way to another, the old is incorporated into the new. The fundamental features of the old paradigm are not only retained but made more explicit as consciousness evolves and expands. What distinguishes our predicament is that there is an attempt, not only to sever all links to the past, but to destroy the very foundations of the dialectic of consciousness. The human condition itself has become the target of what Scruton termed “this impersonal evil” that “is the true legacy of the naturalistic view of man.” In this, there is only a culture of death and destruction, of violence and repudiation. That is why we must be prepared to defend our values to the very end, because their end is what is at stake.

We must do so, however, by letting true beauty manifest through the “gospel of peace”— irrespective of the consequences . That is because, as Scruton perceptively understood, the “machine which is established for the efficient production of Utopia has total licence to kill.” It is, as he says, “the religion of Antichrist, the religion which puts man in God’s place, and yet which sees in man only the mortal organism, the slowly evaporating gobbet of flesh.”

We, on the other hand, possess the liturgy of love—a liturgy that, according to St. John, opposes the “spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.” It is a liturgy based on the belief, according to John, that, “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” Understanding this is the key to victory in a war that will not be won on any cultural battlefield, but on that “darkling plain” so eloquently spoken of by Matthew Arnold—a plain on which the “unfruitful works of darkness” come into the light. Thus exposed, they lose their power for, as Paul reminds us, “the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true.”

This essay appears in the Fall 2023 edition of  The European Conservative , Number 28:127-130.

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Black Myth: Wukong Devs Told Streamers to Avoid Politics in Their Playthroughs. It Backfired

Amid a long list of Twitch streams for Black Myth: Wukong , a new action role-playing game released this week, one stood out: “Covid-19 Isolation Taiwan (Is a Real Country) Feminism Propaganda.” The stream, run by a creator called Moonmoon, did not include anything out of the ordinary for a video game playthrough—just that one cheeky nod to a few topics the Chinese studio Game Science, which developed the game, would rather ignore.

On platforms like Twitch and YouTube , streamers are flipping a metaphorical middle finger to a handful of restrictions given to some creators that were invited to review the game, which takes place in Ming-era China and is based on Chinese mythology. Just days after its launch, it’s already a massively successful game that’s drawn in more than 2.2 million concurrent players. According to market research firm Niko Partners , Black Myth: Wukong ’s success “signals that Chinese studios are ready to compete directly with established Western and Japanese developers in the premium AAA space.”

Shortly before Black Myth: Wukong ’s launch, some streamers were given early codes to create content with the game—along with a few caveats. According to screenshots posted online, streamers who received these instructions were told not to “include politics, violence, nudity, feminist propaganda, fetishization, and other content that instigates negative discourse” in their content, nor “use trigger words such as ‘quarantine’ or ‘isolation’ or ‘Covid-19'.” Furthermore, streamers were asked not to discuss anything about China’s game industry policies, opinions, or news.

These guidelines were not cited as a condition to everyone who was invited to play the game early; Outlets like Polygon and Kotaku were given standard review embargoes without strict rules on what content they could not talk about, aside from spoilers. According to a report from Aftermath , while some streamers do often receive requests to avoid topics like politics, those asks are typically tied to sponsorships or paid contracts. Yet those restrictions—which appear to have come from the game’s publisher, Hero Games —are now backfiring, as even players who were not given any notes thumb their noses at guidelines they find ridiculous.

Rui Zhong, a writer and researcher, streamed herself playing the game while discussing Journey to the West , the novel Black Myth is adapted from, as well as feminism in China and the country’s one-child policy. (Zhong has previously written about Chinese censorship for WIRED.)

“What bothered me was that a lot of the streams pushing back against the game's guidelines were very low-effort and played into stereotypical, surface-level impressions of Chinese politics and society,” Zhong tells WIRED. Misogyny in development, game spaces, and elsewhere are “not a uniquely Chinese problem. It's not the only place where feminists are framed as man haters, as the devs have said.”

An IGN report published last year uncovered a history of sexist and inappropriate comments made by Game Science’s employees and stakeholders. Cofounder Yang Qi has spoken about “how games made for women and men are completely different, due to their biological differences,” IGN reported; other examples include a technical artist discussing the possibility of masturbating to the game’s female snake spirit. Zhong, who was quoted in the IGN piece, told the publication that feminist organization in China was “very uphill,” with “crackdowns after labor organizing efforts, there's been crackdowns over discussing marital problems, there's been definitely crackdowns after people have accused prominent Chinese men of harassment, assault, or sexual misconduct, and the deck has been generally very stacked against them.”

To be clear, Chinese games “are not barred from feminism and have a lot of discretion over which smaller-scale social issues to talk about,” Zhong tells WIRED. “That Game Science put those guidelines out were in part the preferences of the company and not the government.”

Another streamer, linktothepabst , whose playthrough was titled “Black Myth: Wukong Waiting Room for All Feminists, Pro Vaccine, Pro Trans Rights, Woke,” tells WIRED that the guidelines were “bogus.” The streamer used those keywords because, they say, “I’m not going to let a studio/copublisher feel emboldened to send out a guideline like that. No spoilers? Sure. Don’t talk about mechanics? OK! But completely ignoring the culture you created? C’mon.”

Game Science did not respond to a request for comment. The company has also refused to comment to other outlets on reports of the sexist behavior of its employees. Efforts made on the company’s behalf to curb any talk of feminism, politics, or any of the other off-limits topics, however, is having the opposite effect.

“I feel that it only served to bring more attention on Game Science’s culture of sexism,” linktothepabst says. “All they had to do was let the game speak for itself, but it came off, to me, like an own goal, effectively stoking the flames between the people who were using this game as weapon against ‘wokeness in games’ and those who can level-headedly either enjoy the game and criticize GS or just ignore the game altogether.”

It’s the Streisand effect in full force: Try to hide something, and it becomes all the more visible. “Nobody was going to bring up Chinese politics unprompted,” Zhong says, “but the topic was there as soon as they released those guidelines.”

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Gus Walz broke the internet with his tearful love for his dad. Then the bullying began

CHICAGO – A tearful, unscripted moment between Tim Walz and his 17-year-old son, Gus, has unleashed a flood of praise and admiration – but also prompted ugly online bullying.

Gus Walz , who has a nonverbal learning disorder as well as anxiety and ADHD, watched excitedly from the front row of Chicago’s United Center and sobbed openly Wednesday night as his father, the Democratic nominee for vice president, delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.

The Minnesota governor was recounting the difficult fertility treatment he and his wife, Gwen, went through to conceive their daughter, Hope.

More: Tim Walz's son Gus has a learning disorder. Can his visibility help disabled Americans?

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Walz followed up by expressing his love for his family from the stage, saying: "Hope, Gus and Gwen, you are my entire world. And I love you."

Gus Walz jumped up from his seat, tears on his face, pointed his index finger and said, “I love you, Dad,” followed soon after with "That's my dad!"

The touching moment between father and son, captured live by television cameras, went viral and has largely been received adoringly on the internet and the airwaves.

Fox News shared a clip of the viral moment on its TikTok page , writing "Gus Walz steals show during dad's acceptance speech." The comments were overwhelmingly positive.

“I hope to inspire my kids so much that when they see me speak of the dreams and passion I have for my country they are moved to tears like Gus Walz was,” Chasten Buttigieg, husband of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, wrote on X.

“@Tim_Walz has dedicated his life to service and has clearly exceeded in being an excellent, supportive, and loving father every step of the way,” he wrote. “We should all be so lucky to know a love like that.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who spoke before Walz Wednesday night, praised the love between Walz and his children.

More: Who is Gus Walz and what is a non-verbal learning disorder?

“You know you’ve done well as a parent when your kids are as proud of you as Gus and Hope are of Tim Walz,” she wrote on X. “’That’s my dad.’ No three words better describe our next Vice President.”

Actress Mia Farrow added: “Gosh! When young Gus Walz, adorable son of Gwen and Tim Walz, his face streaming tears of pride shouted ‘That’s my dad’ he won my heart.”

Trump supporter and podcaster dismisses Gus Walz as 'puffy beta male'

But the show of affection triggered a swath of snark and ugly comments on social media, many from MAGA supporters of former President Donald Trump, who faces Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Walz in November.

Conservative columnist and right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter mocked the teenager’s tears. “Talk about weird,” she wrote on X. The message has since been deleted.

Mike Crispi, a Trump supporter and podcaster from New Jersey, mocked Walz’s “stupid crying son” on X and added, “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats.”

Alec Lace, a Trump supporter who hosts a podcast about fatherhood, took his own swipe at the teenager: “Get that kid a tampon already,” he wrote, an apparent reference to a Minnesota state law that Walz signed as governor in that required schools to provide free menstrual supplies to students.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Jay Weber, a conservative Milwaukee radio host, made a now-deleted post on X criticizing the Walz family.

"If the Walzs (sic) represent today's American man, this country is screwed: 'Meet my son, Gus. He's a blubbering b---- boy. His mother and I are very proud'."

After removing the post, Weber apologized and claimed he didn't know Gus had a learning disability.

USA TODAY reached out to the Walz campaign, which declined to comment.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung released a statement to USA TODAY that said the campaign "is focused on holding Walz and Harris accountable for their dangerously liberal policies that are bad for America." It didn't address the bullying posts.

Trump came under fire in 2015 after he appeared to mock a New York Times reporter with a disability. Critics said Trump's taunts could encourage others to engage in similar behavior.

Posts reflect bullying kids face constantly, advocates say

Advocates for children with learning disabilities were outraged by the venom directed at the Walz family.

“What we're seeing with the bullying of Gus Walz online isn't just cruel – it's a painful reminder of what kids with disabilities face every single day,” said Katy Neas, chief executive officer of The Arc of the United States , a Washington-based nonprofit advocacy group for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Children with disabilities are two to three times more likely to be bullied than their peers, Neas said.

“That means our society is teaching countless kids with disabilities that they are somehow less than because of factors outside of their control, including emotional expression and disability,” she said. “What's worse is that bullying can have a direct impact on their academic achievement, which in turn means fewer opportunities as adults. We're failing these kids when we don't understand or value their experiences.”

Research shows that bullying behavior often stems from a combination of factors, such as a desire for social dominance, a lack of empathy, or modeling of aggressive behaviors at home, said Kristen Eccleston, a former special education teacher and advocate for children with social-emotional needs.

“Children with learning disabilities are especially vulnerable because bullies may perceive them as ‘easy targets’ due to their struggles with communication or social skills," said Eccleston, who works for the Weinfeld Education Group, which is based in Bethesda, Maryland, and works with parents to ensure that their children have the supports and services they need.

More: 'That's my dad!': Gus Walz has emotional reaction during Tim Walz's DNC speech

“As parents, it's heartbreaking to see our children suffer from such cruelty,” Eccleston said. “In moments like Gus', where a child is being bullied, it's crucial to surround them with love, validate their emotions, and remind them that the hurtful opinions of others do not determine their worth. Families should use these public experiences to foster open dialogue about emotions, with the goal of helping their child develop strong self-advocacy skills and a healthy sense of self.”

Anne Strober, whose son has autism, said the bullying Gus Walz is facing is despicable.

“For me, it just represents how a lot of people have lost their humanity,” she said. “You have a lot of people, now with social media, who feel very emboldened because they’re behind their keyboards and they can just say what they need to say and with a degree of anonymity. It’s still hurtful whether it’s face to face or it’s online. There’s no place for it.”

Public schools often aren’t able to stop acts of bullying, so parents who fear for their children’s safety often pull them out of school or choose to home-school them, said Strober, who lives in North Potomac, Maryland, and works with parents through the Weinfeld Education Group.

"Children should be off limits to bullying, especially by adults, no matter what political party their parents belong to,” she said. "Gus isn't going to see all of their hateful comments, but other kids will. And it will absolutely hurt them and their families.”

Contributing: Brianne Pfannenstiel , Des Moines Register

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In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics 1st Edition

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