David:
'Kay um, what was it that made you first be like, "Oh I don't think I like the Democrats"?
Olivia:
... I realized something, I realized on social media, after the election, was that the first people to always attack people and the first people to start being really vile were always Democrats. And Republicans were always throwing out facts it was always an article or you know, oh a statistic, it was always something that you could kind of fall back on. And then, so, I started seeing this and that's really when I started reading different articles and I was like, "Wow like maybe they're onto something". So I started reading these articles that I saw there people posting. I started seeing people fighting and arguing, and then I'd see some really respectful people kind of just giving their opinions and like, "Oh well look at this, well look at this let's compare these" and then I was like "Wow like maybe I was kind of wrong. Maybe these people that I've been around are wrong". I think what first started it was right before the election we actually got into a fight at our job. Like an actual fight, an argument. And I think we were both kind of mean to each other in different ways and then I was like wow and we kind of opened up and talked about it and then one day I was like David you're right there are bigger things to worry about. And so we kind of talked about all these different issues and I started watching TV and videos I was like oh my gosh this is like Who I am now like this is how I have been.
https://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2017/09/15/lilla-after-identity-politics-review/
As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that they are engaged in politics as an X, concerned about other Xs and those issues touching on X-ness. And they are less and less comfortable with debate.
Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X…This is not an anodyne phrase. It sets up a wall against any questions that come from a non-X perspective. Classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. What replaces argument, then, are taboos against unfamiliar ideas and contrary opinions.
https://newbostonpost.com/2017/11/09/undoing-the-dis-education-of-millennials/
I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn. But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors.
They cannot learn until their minds are freed from that prison. This year
in my Foundations of Law course for first-year law students, I found my students especially impervious to the ancient wisdom of foundational texts, such as Plato’s Crito and the Code of Hammurabi. Many of them were quick to dismiss unfamiliar ideas as “classist” and “racist,” and thus unable to engage with those ideas on the merits.