Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Feb 20, 2024 3:33 pm
To be honest, this sounds at least partly too good to be true to me. So, supposedly, in the 2010s, some schools in the USA had anti-bullying campaigns that not only
worked in the sense that they actually reduced bullying, but even led to serious resentment among bullies or would-be-bullies, to the extent that some people's politics were defined by them?
Could anyone who is more in touch with "those kids these days" than me tell me whether there's anything to that or not?
This sounds like an interpretation on the same thing as the "cancel culture" backlash. If you say something that you think of as normal and acceptable and face severe social sanction for it, you'll experience this as disorienting and radicalizing. You did something normal and everyone got hysterical about it! Why is everyone so aggressive now? So extremist?
Since Sweeney assigns credit entirely to
anti-bullying campaigns from school administrators, and none to the students or the culture at large, the plausiblity of his narrative will depend on the reader's sympathy (or lack thereof) with the managerial idea that culture is entirely the output of incentive gradients maintained by a hierarchy of technocratic experts.
This idea was, as I understand it, markedly conservative until about 2010, and was often combined with the idea that one of the great purposes of capitalism is to discipline the population into acting in accordance with these incentive gradients - see e.g.
David Frum. Now it's something conservatives worry about: there's a popular conservative argument, I think originally popularized by Richard Hanania in
The Origins of Woke, that poorly written anti-discrimination law created an incentive gradient that requires corporations to fire employees for what Chris Rufo calls "the minutiae of thought, behavior, speech, and association", even when such minutiae are entirely off the clock.
(This is not, of course, a problem that only conservatives face - see the
Drupal/Gor fiasco, which caused some conservatives to take up the cause of a
lifestyle BDSM practitioner fired for his relationship practices. I personally think it's a little silly as an explanation - managerial positions are both high-trust, thus requiring a high degree of conformity, and political, thus requiring a high degree of apparent normalcy - but that's neither here nor there.)
It would be possible to construct an argument for this implication of Sweeney's position, citing e.g. the one high-profile rescinding of some Harvard admissions over (IIRC) memes in a leaked group chat, but I wouldn't give anti-bullying initiatives that much credit. When I was in high school, a little before the age bracket he's talking about, the students - the stratum thereof that I interacted with, at least - were substantially to the left of the administration on these cultural issues, and at the time I saw the anti-bullying campaigns as somewhere between universally ignored pablum and officially sanctioned bullying.
Another line common among the conservatives I see on social media, though, is that bullying can't be eliminated, only moved around, and successful protections for certain demographics (here "sexual orientation or race") will just make unprotected demographics the targets instead. If high school students can't bully gays, they'll bully Christians, or Republicans, or whatever the administration and the student body will let them get away with. This seems broadly correct to me, so
this reply seems plausible: changing professional standards applied to teachers and administrators
could cause a rapid change in an incentive gradient that successful bullies follow by definition, and cause formerly successful bullies to rapidly become unsuccessful, if rigorously enforced. The idea of professional standards being rigorously enforced in the context of local politics without support from the local population sounds implausible to me, though.
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