Moldering Mind Molds Minds
Tough love from Mark Bauerlein for safe-space-loving, snowflake campus SJWs
Our resident Mark Bauerlein expert — god help him — lays down the law on everyone’s favorite token fringe academic/hypocritical right-wing buffoon/ Professor of English one last time
Mark Bauerlein. Culture warrior, bard of the police-state, parasitic GOP public intellectual — you may have heard that he teaches students The Humanities. While being a seemingly smart, well-educated man who believes in the power of words and language and the canon, he uses his powers in the service of Trump Daddy, justifying right-wing brutality with big-league words.
For his services, Bauerlein gets to pretend he’s in the game, even though he has no effect on policy and no one on the right really cares about him except when they want to scold undergraduates and need someone from the trenches, i.e. those terrorist training camps we call academia.
In return, the right gets to have a token deep thinker around, which means right-wingers get to pretend they care when deep thinkers think deep thoughts about the soul of the Party, even when the soul of the Party is really just a tubercular tax accountant writing health care policy in a rundown sanitarium.
At any rate, Bauerlein is in the interesting position of being a Trump fanboy who also leveraged his position as Professor of English to publish a jeremiad against the intellectual laziness of his own potential students: The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30.
Yes, this book is everything you think it is. But essentially, he supports a leader who embodies everything he claims to hate. I guess it’s different if the person in question is over the age of 30.
Dislike of reading
Here’s a primer: “As of 2008, the intellectual future of the United States looks dim.” Students have developed a “brazen disregard of books and reading.”
That’s right, Trump’s humanities corner man is concerned about people with short attention spans. But here’s this, from The New Yorker two months ago:
According to a report in Tuesday’s Washington Post, [Trump’s] attention span is so short that intelligence briefers are encouraged to keep written presentations to a page and to include a lot of visual aids, such as maps, charts, and photographs. Reuters reported earlier this month that some National Security Council officials, when preparing materials for the President’s review, have strategically included Trump’s name in “as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he’s mentioned.”
Narcissism
Bauerlein writes that “two-thirds of US undergraduates now score above average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, up 30% since 1982.”
Yep. Bauerlein’s also super concerned about narcissists. Once again, from The New Yorker:
Trump . . . reportedly was perturbed by a remark from Emmanuel Macron, the French President, who said he intentionally made a show of forcefully shaking Trump’s hand at the recent G7 summit. Trump also reportedly believed that angering Europe was a “secondary benefit” of pulling out of the accord.
Cool. Future generations sweating it out in the United Badlands of America will be grateful that Trump’s ego concentrated all of its power in his carny hands.
Confirmation bias
Bauerlein’s outraged that students “seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort.”
I would post a link to Trump’s Twitter account, but he doesn’t need the traffic. The fact that Trump literally uses Alex Jones and FoxNews as the sole basis for his half-cocked conspiracy theories instead of the numerous intelligence services he’s got on speed dial is evidence enough of his inability to trust sources that challenge his convenient worldview.
Stultifying cocoons of triviality
Bauerlein: “Today’s digital generation is becoming insulated in its own stultifying cocoon of bad spelling, civic illiteracy and endless postings that hopelessly confuse triviality with transcendence.”
Again, lulz.
So let’s recap. Bauerlein is a cartoonishly out-of-touch, ham-fisted, pompous lackey for the right and its desperate need for public intellectuals whose capacity for self-delusion is borderline heroic. But you already knew that.
At any rate, we can’t just blame Trump for making Bauerlein look like an intellectually lazy hypocrite. Bauerlein finds ways to contort and twist his way out of all kinds of intellectual headlocks.
For someone who claims not to believe in moral relativism, this exchange with Isaac Chotiner is revealing:
Chotiner: OK, but what do you make of the president saying we were no better than Putin’s Russia?
Bauerlein: You know, I was traveling.
Chotiner: He has said this several times. Bill O’Reilly called Putin a killer, and Trump said we were no better. You are someone who talks about American greatness.
Bauerlein: You know, Isaac, I didn’t see this. I’d love to have seen it.
That’s Bauerlein sticking his fingers in his ears. And it’s not a new look for him. The guy’s been stonewalling over Republican legislative plans, allies, and priorities since before the election, like just about every other supposed Republican intellectual that gets trotted out. Once you get past their culture wars anger, they don’t have a point. Anyhow, I point this out not because I think Bauerlein possesses some special insight into these matters that he’s withholding; I point it out because people keep asking him his opinion despite his wheelhouse being fairly small: namely being a scold about identity politics and the damn kids these days.
During Bauerlein’s interview with Kelefa Sanneh for The New Yorker, he made the outrageous claim that Trump and Clinton were similar if you just ignored policy details. Yes, let’s ignore little things like clean water standards no longer being science-based but instead based on a minimum of “economically and technologically achievable standards.” Polluted water and clean water are really similar, it turns out, if you ignore how one ruins your underwear after you drink it.
Bauerlein doesn’t care if poor people no longer have access to clean water, anyway; he claims to support Trump for the most part on economic nationalism and forsaking identity politics. According to Bauerlein, the culture wars are over and he doesn’t want to re-litigate losing arguments. Though one wonders how he might feel about about an actual war with SJWs . . .
I could spend all day pointing out how Bauerlein looks real dumb for making claims that are directly contradicted by evidence and for supporting a candidate (and Party) that exhibits all the qualities that make him resent his students. But the real question is this: why are Trump’s apologists so outlandishly full of bullshit? Did they just decide, fuck it, no one I care about is going to call me out?
Or is it genuine? Maybe he’s just got a white Christian discrimination blind spot. Maybe it’s his media consumption.
It’s tough to say or to guess at his level of self-deception versus his level of self-awareness. Regardless, it’s perverse that Bauerlein holds his students to a higher standard than the grotesque who sits in the White House. Bauerlein supports the literal embodiment of all his stated worst fears. So does this make him a lazy hypocrite or just an opportunistic one?
My sense is that if there is anything about him that may be genuine, it’s that he isn’t all that dissimilar in his sense of aggrievedness than the white working class you keep hearing about with all of their (code word) “cultural anxiety.” Here’s Bauerlein on how to treat people:
And believe me, when you talk to people who live in the Midwest or small towns or rural areas, they feel quite keenly the contempt . . .
One of the problems . . . is that we are living in a society today that is so damn unforgiving. People say dumb things, they make dumb jokes, and we film them and humiliate them and shame them.
You’d almost feel bad for them, if only they didn’t cheer and holler for the degradation of their brown and Muslim fellow citizens, if their outrage weren’t so blatantly hypocritical. Similarly, it’s tough to forget that the guy preaching niceness and forgiveness is the same guy who wrote a book called The Dumbest Generation. It’s a fitting then that the “book’s ultimate doomsday scenario — of a dull and self-absorbed new generation of citizens falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs—” has finally come true.
The so-called verdict:
I just hope that Bauerlein’s next book is as unflinchingly honest: The Dumbest Generation: A Memoir.
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is based in Houston.
