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Rather famously, we spent and continue to spend a ton of money on the liberal promise of education for everyone, and it turns out that they can't do that; FCFromSSC had a pretty entertaining post on CultureWarRoundup about it when DeBoer finally admitted to the writing on the wall, though given he got modhatted for linking it contemporaneously I'm a little hesitant to link it now.
More broadly, though, there was a short time where people said "live and let live", and even if you couldn't exactly believe they meant it, they at least were willing to put more than a little lip service to the concept. And then theory encountered practice, and it was easier to believe in Santa Claus.
Firing people for their bad speech or associations was so beyond the pale that we built entire structures and train every teenager with stories of how important it is to resist, until it turns out that this was a useful power to have, and then an entire administrative infrastructure was developed to provide corporate liability should sufficiently large businesses not do it fast enough. We've found that protest is the voice of the unheard, until the wrong unheard do it, and then when countries declare martial law and confiscate bank account there's just a bit of a shrug. We've found that political abuses of law enforcement powers were so unacceptable to earn consent decree after consent decree, until it could happen to someone who 'deserved' it. We've found that government pressures to restrict free speech were awful, until they happened in ways people liked and then became a nothingburger. Freedom of religious belief was absolutely vital for two decades, then turned into lacite, and then every so often even the mention of those beliefs becomes its own violation.
And this goes on for even the small stuff, in a thousand different ways, on a thousand different topics. Anything that could be remotely read as celebrating violence was so unacceptable as to result in new reddit rules... and people who should have noticed patterns just keep missing these certain occassions. Taking kids from their own flesh and blood was to be a last-resort, even under violations of some criminal law, the sort of atrocity that left people walked in dazed horror, and also perfectly acceptable as an administratively-designed ad-hoc threat against someone using their constitutional rights. There's been a few places like EFF that at least drop a mention to their principles against their politics every few years, but the fall of the ACLU and other core institutions has been legendary; where they could once at least use a fig leaf and pretend they merely ignored rights that they didn't like because other groups focused on them, they now highlight individual people they don't like.
You're right that dissidents were silenced in the past, but the liberal movement was built, in no small part, about protecting the rights of those dissidents to speak more publicly! And then it turned out, no matter how much we avowed generalized principles that would protect everyone, the people actually making decisions and a worrying number of hangers-on either (charitably) designed their reference classes in such specific ways as to carefully exclude everyone not on their side or (less charitably) just wanted their dissidents freed.
This may not be especially severe by some historic standards -- and I agree we're pretty far from the KKK-era South, at least -- but if you wanted to do a hard comparison to the McCarthy era it's at least within an order of magnitude, and the McCarthy era is far from what the liberal movement considered a best alternative to negotiated agreement.
I'm not. @FCfromSSC's comment was amazing and deserves to be spread. Context.
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Though I disagree with Freddie on a ton of stuff, I do respect him for things like this: he sees and has seen the reality on the ground, and pushes back against the idea that all that is needed for every kid to go to Harvard is moar money. He acknowledges that - gasp! cover your ears from the horrid notion! - there is indeed a range of intellect and intelligence, and not every kid is as bright as the others. That you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
This does not mean ignoring the less academically able kids, but it does mean facing up to the truth: some kids are never going to go to any sort of college at all. That is a truth that can't be accepted, however, because we've constructed society (or are being swept along by the whirlwind of technological progress) where in order to get any kind of decent life you need that degree. Permanent, pensionable jobs have pretty much gone by the wayside as what you expect to do: get a good job, stay with one company for most of your career, retire from there. The world of work is much more fragile, transient, and vulnerable to shocks and upheaval now, and you have to be constantly re-inventing yourself, upskilling, keeping on top of new tech, jumping from company to company to get promotions, and so on. Even the white collar world is not immune to this, and unless you have a good education in the desirable skills that will land you a decent job where you can be fairly sure you can sell your skills for good salaries and have a career, then you are looking at the uncertain world of the gig economy, the temporary contract, the freelancer, and now the threat of being replaced by AI.
So to get on the career ladder, you need a college degree (let's put aside all the Caplan stuff about signalling for the moment). In order to do that, there is the idealistic notion of "everyone can go to college" and the practical realisation that if you admit that not all can or should go, and that merely having a degree is no longer in itself the guarantee of upward mobility and security that once it was, then you are saying "a lot of kids are going to be, for all intents and purposes, on the scrapheap once they are adults, unwanted by society since they can't contribute anything useful to the new knowledge economy".
That last is political suicide and also possibly setting the scene for widespread social upheaval and unrest. So you put pressure on the schools and the education system to pass everybody, to put them all on the college (any kind of college) track and you ignore or bury any evidence to the contrary that yeah, you do need streaming in schools because not everyone is equally able for the subjects and yeah, not everyone is fit for college so how about we tailor their education to what they can do?
That blue-collar work (unless you're a tradesman, and even that is hard work and no guarantee that everyone is going to be an independent small businessman) is diminishing, that we've outsourced it overseas for cheaper labour, and that there aren't the traditional manufacturing industries to soak up labour around anymore means that a lot of people in the lower half of the population are facing a future that is grim; possibly go into service work, which is low-paid, low-status, and biased towards shift work and cutting down hours so that employees don't hit the limits at which legal entitlements kick in. For a section of the upper half of the population, in certain white collar jobs, that future is already there (journalism) or looming with the threat/promise of AI.
Freddie sees this because he's been at the coalface. But there are a lot of people in power in the existing system for whom it is imperative that they turn a blind eye to all that, hence "all kids are equally smart and capable, it's down to grit and growth mindset, and if that doesn't work then it's the fault of systemic racism, and all must have prizes".
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