The elections in Bavaria show that the German political system, which has long seemed reasonably stolid, is in enormous flux at the moment.

A thread with four lessons. (Just wait till you get to Number 4! 😉)

1) Don’t let anyone fool you: The elections show that populist sentiment remains strong. The CSU ran its most hard right campaign in decades. The AfD gained ten percent. And the Free Voters are also deeply conservative, and especially critical of the government’s refugee policy.

Together, this means that strongly right-of-center parties have taken about two thirds of the vote.

Anyone who tries to sell that as a success for the liberal left is kidding themselves.

2) For a long time, it looked as though the troubles of broad social democratic parties that once commanded ~40% of the vote were sui generis.

That narrative is certainly confirmed today, with the SPD in single digits.

But...

...it now also looks as though center-right parties that once commanded ~40% of the vote will keep declining.

This is the CSU’s worst result in history. It comes at a moment when its sister party, Angela Merkel’s CDU, at 26%, polls worse than at any point since the 1950s.

In the common imagination, the deep cultural divide in the United States pits Team Woke (young, female, POC) against Team Resentful (old, male, white).

This is almost entirely

As a great new study by More in Common shows, Americans actually divide into seven tribes:

* Progressive activists
* Traditional liberals
* Passive liberals
* Politically disengaged
* Moderates
* Traditional conservatives
* Devoted

Traditional and devoted conservatives are far outside the American mainstream. The views of progressive activists are even further away from the views of average Americans.

The rest has a lot in common. They form an “exhausted majority.”

One of the most surprising areas on which Americans agree much more than might seem obvious on Twitter, Facebook, and cable news? Political correctness.

80% of Americans—four in five!—now believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.”

Age barely predicts how Americans feel about political correctness.

Even among 24 - 29 year olds, the group most receptive to political correctness, 74% think it’s a problem.

And among the youngest, those below 24, the number goes back up to 79%!

Twelve months ago, I believed that a Supreme Court dominated by conservatives like Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh would never license a full-out power grab by Donald Trump.

In my latest @slate column, I explain why I’ve changed my

When Donald Trump was elected, no serious political scientist predicted that the Republican Party would become a tool of his whim as quickly and thoroughly as it did.

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Optimists claimed that GOP leaders like Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham, who shared few of his views, would rein him in.

Pessimists—like me!—claimed that Trump would slowly take over the Republican Party after a protracted civil war.

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We were all naïve. In reality, some conservatives, like Ryan, abandoned the field. Others, like Graham, reinvented themselves as Trumpist populists.

To be part of the conservative tribe today is to go wherever the resentment—and its leader—takes you.

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That makes it all the more scary that the Kavanaugh confirmation process has eliminated the last doubts about a central fact of American politics.

The Supreme Court is not a nonpartisan court of law. It is a realm to do partisan battle by other means.

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Folks, I know way more important things are going on in the world.

But I honestly find it nuts that so many people in the serious reaches of academia and the thoughtful left are simply dismissing Sokal Squared.

Here’s my response to the main criticisms.

(Thread.)

The main pushback I’ve seen:

1) The journals they pranked aren’t serious
2) No control group
3) Other academic fields are also bad
4) It’s unethical to make people do work under false pretenses
5) They are tools of the right in the culture war

I’ll take these in order.

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1) The canine rape culture paper was published Gender, Place, and Culture. The authors who contributed to the latest issue teach at UCLA, Temple, Penn State, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Manchester, Berlin’s Humboldt University, etc.

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Another paper was accepted for publication in Hypatia. The authors who contributed to the latest issue teach at the University of Michigan, Tulane University, Stockton University, the University of Bristol, and the University of Exeter.

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It’s just not credible to claim that these journals aren't highly influential in areas like feminist philosophy, or that publication in these journals would not make a serious contribution to tenure at many departments in well-known research universities.

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