A few odds and ends:
- I wanted to clarify something that I was talking about with ninja last night. I do not use my class to push any sort of ideology or political tactics and strategy. I teach economics and I'd like to believe that my lectures would leave an observer totally oblivious to my political leanings. My political discussions with my students are outside of lecture hours.
There are some professors out there that really do inject their political views into their lectures and that is wrong. It undermines the idea that education is universal and transcendent.
Since almost all of those who inject their views into their lectures are leftist, it also creates an opening for libertarian/conservative rhetoric. When you are an undergrad, the professor is a pretty big authority in your own life and if your professor is overly political and comes off as bias against conservatives students, your conservative student may get radicalized. He may start to really believe the culturally conservative line that Professors, activists, journalists and civil rights lawyers are the real ruling class of this Country and that Hedge Fund Managers and CEO's are beleaguered, billionaire insurgents.
- I love California. It used to be the women and the weather but now I am married and I make most of my money through agriculture so I have to ignore the former and curse the latter. Now I love California for its politics.
The United States and its 50 States are all republics and every republic presents a continuum with democracy on the side and oligarchy on the other. California is now a democratic leaning, multi racial republic while the United States is a white dominated oligarchic republic. The contrast could not be more striking. The United States is sclerotic and California is dynamic.
In the 1990's, when white, salaried, home owners made up a shrinking majority of California's electorate, they went crazy will all sorts of "tough on crime" and white identity politics laws. Now that white, middle class folks are no longer the majority, our politics has to have input from everyone else and the result is that renters get a tax credit (the same as home owners have had for decades) and the carceral State is being dismantled slowly but surely. People, who do not live in gated communities, matter in our State.
To the people in the other 49 States, don't get too unhappy. America's demographics are starting to look like California's and once we hit that tipping point, you will finally start to matter in national politics.
- Black voters need to get out there and vote like they did for Obama. It boogles the mind that black turnout is so low. I know that all sorts of States are maliciously creating hoops for black voters to jump through but that didn't stop black folks from denying Bernie Sanders the nomination. Hillary Clinton is running as a third Obama term, Hillary Clinton did better with black primary voters in 2016 then Barack Obama did in 2008.
It would be as if Bernie Sanders got the nomination and then millennials decided not to vote in the general election.