356. The Deep Anxiety of the Teachers of Today's Voters

I say, "Sometimes it's best not to go for the best education," right after showing you (preceding post) that I will break into pieces if Donald Trump's poll ratings don't go down after that first debate.   Ratings that hold up will show me that education in the best tradition, the Socratic tradition, the academic tradition, the tradition of the enlightened West, the tradition that I and my country-wide colleagues spent our lives teaching in, had been rejected by enough of the people we had taught to swing the polls in his favor. 

And that would be plenty, enough to make us believe that Thomas Jefferson's faith in the common man, that he could be educated in these values — by us, teachers in liberal arts colleges — so as bring him out of the canaille he started in, the canaille (rabble) of Europe, was unjustified.  If Trump's ratings hold up, they're still canaille.

Even as I say that in passion I have to recognize that my statement yesterday is true. And allowably so in my very own tradition.  In describing it (preceding post) I said that in matters of worth, as in matters of fact, the question was, "What stands up against dialectical testing?" That's testing by the reason, the kind we get in forums of discussion, university conferences, parliaments, and journals.  In that dialectic there might well be a voice for the people of the time, arguing, say, that immediate justice to them was worth more not only than long-term, comprehensive justice, but more than any other goal, including that of establishing academic standards.   And that argument might stand up, as it did in the years when departments in African-American Studies and Women's Studies, very dodgily in our tradition, were set up.  

If the argument for immediate justice does stand up a traditional academic has to accept it, and can even proclaim it.  At least he or she has to qualify statements like my earlier one, that "my (Western academic) education is better than any other."  The qualification: "generally better, but not better if another kind of education, as in justice to a particular people, is found, by dialectical test, to be better."

Is Donald Trump speaking for a need for justice for a particular people that now takes a priority his supporters see and I cannot?  Before you can answer you have to take up a lot of prior questions (can any kind of speaking be a voice in the dialectic? is any kind of speaker entitled to a seat in the symposium?) and I don't have time for that.  I just hear a voice that fails to meet the conditions necessary for rational discussion.  Rather than taking part in dialogue it destroys it.

Hence my deep suspense, which I suspect is shared by my colleagues.  It's nearly noon Mountain Time on Thursday, 9-29.  Two post-debate polls are in, according to the Times.  The first one, which showed Clinton ahead by 6% pre-debate, now shows her up by 4%.  The second, which last had her up 5%, now shows her at 4% also.  I'd like to know the state of my colleagues.  Am I just having a mountain freak-out over here?