I am surprised by the outpouring of grief engendered by Senator Elizabeth Warren’s exit from the presidential primary among my professional friends and colleagues. I dare not tell them how they ought to feel, but the spectacle of grief makes me wonder whether my friends are selling themselves short: virtually all of them have lived, in my opinion, far more virtuous lives than the senator from Massachusetts.<\/p>\n
First off, none of them have spent most of their professional lives as right-wing activists, as did Warren, a proud Republican until the late ’90s. As recently as 1991, Warren gave a keynote at a meeting of the Federalist Society<\/a>, the shadowy anti-choice legal organization that gave us Justice Brett Kavanaugh and so many other young ultra-conservative judicial appointees.<\/p>\n Secondly, Warren spent decades lying about her Cherokee heritage, presumably for nothing more than professional gain. This is a stunningly racist personal behavior, one that greatly reinforces white supremacy by equating the almost-unimaginable struggles of indigenous peoples with plagiarized recipes and “high cheekbones”. Were any of my friends or colleagues caught lying so blatantly on a job application, they would likely be subject to immediate termination. It is shocking that Warren has not faced greater\u00a0 professional repercussions for this lapse in judgment.<\/p>\n Warren’s more recent history of regulatory tinkering around the most predatory elements of US capitalism, while important, are hardly an appropriate penance for these two monumental personal-professional sins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am surprised by the outpouring of grief engendered by Senator Elizabeth Warren’s exit from the presidential primary among my professional friends and colleagues. I dare not tell them how they ought to feel, but the spectacle of grief makes me wonder whether my friends are selling themselves short: virtually all of them have lived, … Continue reading “Elizabeth Warren and the morality of the professional class”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-presentation-of-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=878"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":885,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions\/885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}