Naomi Wolf Believes The Children Are the Future

Professional concern troll Naomi Wolf explains why the kids aren’t down with civics these days. The piece is mostly an infomercial for her new something-or-other — the American Freedom Campaign for Freedom and Democracy in a Free and Democratic America — but it also aims to supply yet another grand theory about how leftward intellectuals stabbed the nation in the back by “abandoning” patriotism to the Right during the last quarter of the 20th century. After reviewing the Dumb Things College Students Say About Democracy, Wolf gives the predictable stink-eye to all the hippies and college English professors.

Here she is in medias absurdum:

In the Reagan era, when the Iran-contra scandal showed a disregard for the rule of law, college students were preoccupied with the fashionable theories of post-structuralism and deconstructionism, critical language and psychoanalytic theories developed by French philosophers Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida that were often applied to the political world, with disastrous consequences. These theories were often presented to students as an argument that the state — even in the United States — is only a network of power structures. This also helped confine to the attic of unfashionable ideas the notion that the state could be a platform for freedom; so much for the fusty old Rights of Man.

I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and Derridean literary analysis were actually “applied” to American politics during the 1980s. Moreover, I’m curious to know how Wolf arrives the idea that these theories are to blame for persuading anyone that the state is merely an instrument of power or an on-shore holding corporation for late capitalism. Until the sun rises on that day, I’m going to assume that people who follow this line of argument either (a) haven’t ever read Grapes of Wrath or (b) are simply taking advantage of the opportunity to cheap-shot the French and the English Department in the same breath.

I’ve tried to explain this to skeptical friends and colleagues over the years, but — pass the smelling salts — it was completely possible during the 1980s to receive an English degree without reading a single word of Continental literary theory. No, really. Aside from the point that there’s nothing inherently corrosive about any of the intellectual tendencies Wolf mentions, the fact remains that with the exception of about a dozen or so students enrolled at elite universities, almost no one gave a gingersnap about Of Grammatology during the 1980s. If Wolf wants to understand why young people are supposedly feeling “depressed, cynical and powerless,” I can’t imagine why she’d include the reading list for the Yale English Department’s senior seminar.