It has been quite a week in America, with basically half the voting public happy that Trump was re-elected and half (my half) wondering how a convicted felon could possibly be elected.
I thought Robert Reich provided an insightful reflection in “The Lesson.” Reich dismissed several conventional interpretations of Trump’s victory over Harris, including claims about Democratic Party repudiation, the need to move right, misinformation’s role, Republican cheating, Harris’s campaign quality, and racism/misogyny as complete explanations.
Instead, Reich argued the real lesson is about economics and class: Americans, particularly those without college degrees, voted based on their economic situation. Despite overall economic improvements in this country, most Americans haven’t seen real wage growth in decades, with gains primarily benefiting the wealthy. As Reich noted, “The real median wage of the bottom 90 percent is stuck nearly where it was in the early 1990s, even though the economy is more than twice as large.”
In Reich’s opinion, Trump successfully channeled working-class anger while Harris did not.
Reich felt that both parties have failed the working class – Democrats through policies favoring corporations and free trade, Republicans through tax cuts for the wealthy and anti-worker policies. He argues Democrats must transform from being the party of college graduates and corporations into an anti-establishment force fighting for working people through policies like Medicare for all, stronger unions, higher wealth taxes, and housing credits. This shift, he suggested, would align democratic principles with economic fairness.
Audrey Watters also had an interesting reflection. In “It’s Mourning in America,” Watters writes from a place of profound grief and anger following the election, weaving together several interrelated themes:
- Personal and Political Grief: She connected her personal loss (her son Isaiah) with broader political grief, rejecting shallow reassurances that “everything will be okay” given the real human costs of political decisions.
- Critique of AI in Education: She noted that AI represents not just technological change but reactionary political ideologies. She felt that it threatens educational institutions by promoting privatization and the “data-fication” of learning, suggesting that it embodies corporate control over knowledge and reinforces existing hierarchies. She sees AI as part of a broader shift toward “productivity culture” in education.
- Technology and Human Connection: She rejected the notion of outsourcing human expression and activism to AI, and criticized the belief that digital technologies automatically create meaningful community. Instead, she argued for prioritizing human agency and relationships over computational autonomy.
- Microsoft’s Influence: She discussed how Microsoft’s “productivity suite” mindset has shaped education – which I considered pretty powerful and spot on! Education in general has adopted the corporate ideology of “growth mindset”. {Guilty as charged!}
Where I disagree some with Watters is in my maybe idealistic view that technology can be useful in teaching and learning. As with any tech, it is a question of how it is used by both faculty and students. But I find her thoughts about the productivity culture and de-humanization compelling. I am all for – as Ethan Molluck has noted in the past – keeping the human in the loop! We do not want future education to resemble this!
Or as Watters noted, from a post by Matthew Kirschenbaum and Rita Raley,
“It is not difficult to see that in the next phase one can eliminate the lectures and discussions and simply start with the summaries (and eventually the summaries of the summaries), streamed on demand.”
No – we DO NOT want that!
{Graphics: AZQuotes, DALL-E}