Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Should Democrats stick with Joe Biden or replace him with a younger presidential nominee in 2024?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

At Brian Beutler’s new Substack, he compares the posture toward coalitional politics that led to Barack Obama’s rise with the less confident posture that characterizes the Democratic Party today:

Fifteen years ago, it seemed natural rather than heretical that new ideas and leaders should challenge older ones, and Democrats had more confidence to confront Republicans directly across a range of liabilities. They correctly identified a “culture of corruption” that had run rampant in the Bush years, and exposed much of it on their march back to power. They didn’t reflexively close ranks around whichever leaders felt most safe—far from it, one of the big reasons Barack Obama challenged Hillary Clinton for the presidency, and was able to win the nomination, is because Nancy Pelosi (who was then House speaker) and Harry Reid (who was then Senate majority leader) encouraged him to run. Liberals argued in a freewheeling way about the candidates they supported, without panicking that they might undermine the cause of change.

That whole spirit is gone.

Today we see a great deal of sorting on the center and left into party-aligned media on the one hand, and more factional progressive media on the other; we see a party that suppresses misgivings about its leaders, too insecure about the relative popularity of its own values to feel comfortable grappling with internal dissent. You’re expected either to rage against Joe Biden for not endorsing all 117 items on a laundry-list agenda nobody's heard of; or you’re supposed to pretend not to understand that an old guy who stutters is a suboptimal spokesperson for a major political party. You’re expected to take it for granted that everything is terrible, or to clap for the Democrats and encourage others to clap along. That doesn’t leave much space for those of us who aim, in the words of a storied old British editor, to see life steady, and see it whole. Who value both consistency and open-mindedness to reason and evidence. Who fully understand the stakes of our elections, but think there’s still plenty of space for and value in vigorous intraparty criticism. In all other realms it’s considered completely normal to grow frustrated with the management of entities (sports teams, businesses, non-profits) we loyally support. It should be acceptable in politics today as well.

Beware the Identity Trap

In The Atlantic, Yascha Mounk shares an excerpt from his important new book, The Identity Trap. It is an attempt to understand the form of identity politics that is ascendant on the left and in many institutions. Mounk calls it “the identity synthesis.” Others call it “wokeness” or “the successor ideology.” In Mounk’s telling, it can be traced back to the ideas of four thinkers: Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Derrick Bell. And Monk argues that at least three of them would reject it.

Mounk writes:

The identity synthesis and far-right populism may at first glance appear to be polar opposites; in political practice, one is the yin to the other’s yang. Many attacks on so-called wokeness are motivated by bad faith. They fundamentally misrepresent its nature. But that is no reason to deny how a new ideology has acquired such power in our society. In fact, it’s imperative to recognize that its founders explicitly saw themselves as rejecting widely held values, such as the core tenets of the civil-rights movement.

The lure of the identity synthesis to so many people is a desire to overcome persistent injustices and create a society of genuine equals. But the likely outcome of uncritically accepting this ideology is a society that places an unremitting emphasis on our differences. The effect is to pit rigidly defined identity groups against one another in a zero-sum battle for resources and recognition. Critics of the identity trap commonly claim that progressive activists are “going too far.” But what is at issue is not having too much of a good thing. The real problem is that, even at its best, this ideology violates the ardent aspirations for a better future to which all of us should remain committed.

I’m optimistic about America’s ability to thrive going forward as history’s most successful multiethnic nation state, where the wonderful diversity of our polity functions as a strength. But I do not think a multiethnic nation can thrive if its politics are organized around raising the salience of group identity and putting different racial factions in zero-sum competition with one another. Nor do I think that any individual can be treated with the dignity all humans possess when reduced to membership in any stereotyped category that rejects or denies their uniqueness.

Revisiting Coleman Hughes on Color-blindness

In a past installment of Up for Debate, we pondered whether racial color-blindness ought to be the ideal in interpersonal relationships. In a future installment, we’re going to ponder color-blindness in public policy. Today, I want to flag the latest from the writer Coleman Hughes, whose TED Talk on color-blindness and subsequent debate with the columnist Jamelle Bouie has served as the peg for our pondering. At The Free Press, Hughes recounts opposition to even releasing his TED Talk to the public:

TED draws a progressive crowd, so I expected that my talk might upset a handful of people. And indeed, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a handful of scowling faces. But the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. The audience applauded; some people even stood up. Throughout the meals and in hallways, people approached me to say they loved it, and those who disagreed with it offered smart and thoughtful criticisms.

But the day after my talk, I heard from Chris Anderson, the head of TED. He told me that a group called “Black@TED”—which TED’s website describes as an “Employee Resource Group that exists to provide a safe space for TED staff who identify as Black”—was “upset” by my talk …

On the final day of the conference, TED held its yearly “town hall”—at which the audience can give feedback on the conference. The event opened with two people denouncing my talk back-to-back. The first woman called my talk “racist” as well as “dangerous and irresponsible”—comments that were met with cheers from the crowd. The second commentator, Otho Kerr, a program director at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, claimed that I was “willing to have us slide back into the days of separate but equal.” (The talk is online, so you can judge for yourself whether those accusations bear any resemblance to reality.)

In response to their comments, Anderson took the mic and thanked them for their remarks. He also reminded the audience that “TED can’t shy away from controversy on issues that matter so much”—a statement I very much agreed with and appreciated. Because he said as much, I left the conference fairly confident that TED would release and promote my talk just like any other, in spite of the staff and audience members who were upset by it.

Two weeks later, Anderson emailed to tell me that there was “blowback” on my talk and that “[s]ome internally are arguing we shouldn’t post it.” In the email, he told me that the “most challenging” blowback had come from a “well-known” social scientist (who I later learned was Adam Grant). He quoted from Grant’s message directly:

Really glad to see TED offering viewpoint diversity—we need more conservative voices—but as a social scientist, was dismayed to see Coleman Hughes deliver an inaccurate message.

His case for color blindness is directly contradicted by an extensive body of rigorous research; for the state of the science, see Leslie, Bono, Kim & Beaver (2020, Journal of Applied Psychology). In a meta-analysis of 296 studies, they found that whereas color-conscious models reduce prejudice and discrimination, color-blind approaches often fail to help and sometimes backfire.

I read the paper that Grant referenced, titled “On Melting Pots and Salad Bowls: A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Identity-Blind and Identity-Conscious Diversity Ideologies,” expecting to find arguments against color blindness. I was shocked to find that the paper largely supported my talk. In the results section, the authors write that “colorblindness is negatively related to stereotyping” and “is also negatively related to prejudice.” They also found that “meritocracy is negatively related to discrimination.”

Chris Anderson, the head of TED, responded on the platform formerly known as Twitter.

For those interested in this subject, the paper Grant referenced is a nuanced and thought-provoking read containing findings that could be coherently invoked by people on either side of this debate. I see why Hughes believes it bolsters his position, as well as how adherents of multiculturalism, the paper’s example of what it calls an “identity-conscious ideology,” would conclude that it supports their position. To invoke it as if it establishes that Hughes’ arguments about color-blindness are factually incorrect strikes me as a misleading overreach.

Provocation of the Week

Many American colleges are effectively lying about their tuition, Dan Currell argues at National Affairs:

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, colleges discovered that the appearance of high tuition was good for marketing. Positioning one’s school as “almost as expensive as Harvard” created a sense of exclusivity and, somewhat contrary to economic theory, resulted in increased applications. It also led to free media coverage, as newspapers found stories about the high cost of college were evergreen.

Of course, almost nobody was willing to pay Harvard-level tuition for a middling college education. Colleges resolved this problem by canceling out their high sticker prices with “institutional scholarships” that had no money behind them; they were simply the discounts a school had to offer to convince students to enroll. The game was easy: It required no fundraising to endow scholarships, just the appearance of a high price paired with the appearance of a scholarship. This “high-sticker, high-discount” practice worked magic for enrolling students—and it was free. It soon spread to institutions nationwide.

In its early years, high-sticker, high-discount pricing was regarded as a harmless white lie. Schools advertised slightly overstated tuition, which they offset using phantom scholarships that were really just discounts. But things got out of hand quickly.

Throughout the 1980s, colleges kept publishing ever-higher tuition numbers. Meanwhile, the tuition students actually paid rose only slightly. A 1992 New York Times article offers a snapshot of college pricing in the early years of the high-sticker-price/high-discount era:

College tuition bills have been skyrocketing for the past decade. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average tuition fee for a private four-year college has exploded to $11,379 last year from $3,811 in 1980; a prestige school like Harvard will charge a whopping $15,870 in tuition for 1992-93....Based on current projections, this year’s tuition of $14,403 for a private school will spiral to about $34,000 by the year 2005.

Controlling for inflation, college tuition had risen about 600% from 1927 (when Mr. Allen’s letter appeared in the Times) to 1992. And, as the article above predicted, published tuition would spiral upward in the decade after 1992. But as few people realized then or now, the apparent rise in tuition after the mid-1990s would be almost entirely illusory.

By 1999, the fundamental dishonesty of college pricing had become clear to anyone willing to take a closer look. That year, American private colleges purported to award scholarships worth more than all the tuition they collected—which is to say, their average discount had exceeded 50%. It would take an endowment worth about 15 times a school's annual budget to fund scholarships at that level. Only a handful of schools have such bulge-bracket endowments; a typical healthy college’s endowment is three or four times its annual budget, and many colleges would be happy to have an endowment equal to a year's operating costs. These scholarships, therefore, could not have been real.

There are a lot more interesting details in the full article. And that’s it for today. See you next week, in October.

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