Darrell West Discusses New Book “Divided Politics, Divided Nation” and Admissions Favoritism on LIVE
Darrell West Discusses New Book “Divided Politics, Divided Nation” and Admissions Favoritism on LIVE
“Obviously it has been developing over a number of decades but under President Trump has reached new heights,” said West, who noted the book started “partly as a family memoir.”
“Many people live only among liberals or only among conservatives,” said West, who noted his media consumption habits. “I look at liberal. moderate and conservative sites — I watch Fox News from time to time just to understand how the conservatives are feeling — and because half of my family is very conservative.”
“The problem with most people is they practice information segregation, like liberals [who] only want to pay attention to liberal news sites, conservatives are watching conservative news sites and it ends up producing these echo chambers and neither side really understands the other side, trusts the other side,” said West. “Right now liberals and conservatives are really angry with each other, [and] it’s almost reaching a dangerous point where each side has its own facts and its own sources of information.”
“I have a whole chapter where I offer remedies on how we can deal with polarization and what it really comes down to is we have to understand the root causes,” said West.
West, who has authored or co-authored 24 books to date, previously had been the Director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University.
College Admissions
"You know, one of the things that President Trump as talked about is how the system is rigged against the average person — so I have a chapter that kind of looks at that in a lot of different respects [and] college admissions is part of the problem here," said West. "As you know, in the last couple of weeks there have been these terrible stories about people bribing their way into Yale, Georgetown, Stanford, as well as some other institutions so when I saw these stories I started to think about my own experiences at Brown."
"Now I didn’t see anything as brazen as these scandals have indicated but yet, you know, Brown has a lot of children of the rich and famous who attend there and I know when I was at Brown, the university would often reach out to me and other individual faculty members for VIP meetings with these students who had famous parents — so we would meet with these individuals and talk about their interests," said West. "These would be one-on-one meetings with the faculty and then sometimes we’d write letters to the admissions office just summarizing our impressions of these individuals. You know the typical applicant does not get that kind of behavior. They can get a group tour led by a student."
Brookings on Book
The United States is caught in a partisan hyperconflict that divides politicians, communities—and even families. Politicians from the president to state and local office-holders play to strongly-held beliefs and sometimes even pour fuel on the resulting inferno. This polarization has become so intense that many people no longer trust anyone from a differing perspective.
Drawing on his personal story of growing up as a fundamentalist Christian on a dairy farm in rural Ohio, then as an academic in the heart of the liberal East Coast establishment, Darrell West analyzes the economic, cultural, and political aspects of polarization. He takes advantage of his experiences inside both conservative and liberal camps to explain the views of each side and offer insights into why each is angry with the other.