Tag: The American Conservative

Super Bowl season is like the holidays — a celebration shared by people more accustomed to arguing than sitting down together. Meanwhile, advertisers fret that running any ads at all could be read as a statement one way or the other. It’s a normal thing to want a break from arguing. It needed recruits, and it needed a compliant public. To sports fans. A Senate investigation revealed that the military dumped tens of millions of dollars into the NFL and other leagues for PR help. “Consider the display put on at Super Bowl 50,” recalls writer Stephen Beale for The American Conservative: “A flyover by the Blue Angels fighter jets, and 50 representatives of all military branches singing ‘America the Beautiful’ against a backdrop of a giant flag.” Some even speculate that the NFL’s national anthem rules were bought by that Pentagon money. Despite this thoroughly political staging, it was only Kaepernick and his supporters who were attacked for “bringing politics” into football. (In fact, it was veteran Nate Boyer who advised Kaepernick to take a knee in the first place.) That’s no comfort to the beleaguered football fan (or their friend who just watches for the commercials).

It was the week identity politics ate itself. It was the week we learned that US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is between 1/1,024th and 1/64th Native American Indian. It was also the week that Harvard University — universally acknowledged as a bastion of American liberalism — was taken to court for discriminating against Asian-American applicants. Similar calculations were being made by Ivy League admissions offices as they sought ways to increase the diversity of their traditionally very white student bodies. Since the mid-1990s, Unz pointed out, Asians had consistently accounted for around 16 percent of Harvard enrollments. Now the advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions, which opposes affirmative action, is suing Harvard for discriminating against Asian applicants. Ninety-nine percent of “progressive activists” believe that “many white people today don’t recognize the real advantages they have.” But 82 percent of “devoted conservatives” reject this, maintaining that “nowadays white people do not have any real advantages over others.” It’s the same polarized story for the whole suite of identity politics issues: immigration, sexual harassment, Islamophobia, feminism. Eighty percent of all Americans, and an even higher proportion of the exhausted majority, believe that political correctness has gone too far. Only 30 percent of progressive activists agree. Only 40 percent of progressive activists agree.