On Facebook, Todd Gitlin posted a link to the New Yorker’s “TRUMP, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, AND THE COLLAPSE OF PUBLIC LANGUAGE”

He included the following excerpt:

…the language of common values has lost common meaning. It doesn’t help that some students disengage from people who aren’t on their wavelengths. But the reason for that disengagement, some tell me, is that public conversation has begun to seem performative, incapable of producing results.

And added the following comment:

A good piece, but this is a weak link. It’s not that public conversation is “incapable of producing results.” It’s that there’s no consensus on what constitute valuable results. Fox News, the Trump thing, the alt-right, various “left” (not really, but never mind) phenomena like Judith Butler saying that Hamas is part of the “global left,” all vomit on truth. They exchange truth-results for a cheaper currency–grotesque in-group solidarity.

I also found the essay thought-provoking. What struck me was the author’s challenge to the normal use of ideology when he concluded:

Abstraction [can’t] exercise much useful influence on the everyday problems of civic life for a truly pluralistic population.