Bryce Harper and conservatism, Part Two

Mark Judge’s piece about Bryce Harper as conservative hero appears to have offended Dan Steinberg, a sports blogger for the Washington Post whose frivolous jottings also spill into the print edition of the sports page (a sign of the times, I guess). Steinberg heaps ridicule (but no analysis; that’s not in his repertoire) on Judge’s thesis. He also quotes Charles Pierce who apparently blogs for Esquire:

Mother of God, there’s something fundamentally dehumanizing in dragooning someone like Bryce Harper into the service of your ideology as though he were nothing more than an action figure in your mental toybox.

I wonder whether Pierce realizes that he has just described the project of a large portion of the left-wing professoriate that is so influential in Literature and other Humanities departments at American colleges and universities. For them, great works of literature often become playthings in service of race theory, feminism or some other form of chic leftism.

There’s nothing wrong — never mind “fundamentally dehumanizing” — about performing these sorts of stunts on the internet. That’s part of what it’s there for. But we shouldn’t build a religion, or an academic department, around them.

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