At Harvard and elsewhere, the cost of college is eroding the idea of a liberal arts education in favor of a pre-professional one.
Trends toward androgyny may have eroded the idea that men must hide a desire to "look good," but the "dandy" can still slide easily into the "fairy".
Recent research has eroded the idea that dreaming only occurs during REM sleep, and that it's a "bottom-up' process", with older parts of the brain activating the more recently evolved ones.
This transference of one good thing to another, unrelated good thing is part of the peculiarly American urge to satisfy all appetites at once and it's eroding the idea of pleasure as context-specific.
Estonia's entry into the euro zone further erodes the idea of an east-west divide (the Estonian and Finnish finance ministers will be part of the EU's inner circle; their Swedish, Danish, Latvian and Lithuanian counterparts will be on the outside).
As globalization erodes the idea that the citizenry represents a natural embodiment of 'the people', we need to search for alternate ways to justify democratic inclusion.
The exposure of the horrors of Stalin's reign and then the USSR's 1956 invasion of Hungary eroded the idea that the Soviets offered a route to far-reaching change.
The fact that this is happening in secret is one issue here, but perhaps more importantly this is also eroding the idea of what lawyers call "equality of arms" – the legal principle that for a fair trial both parties should have equal access to the judge.
But if our leaders are really serious about reversing systemic racism, they must decry and erode the dominant idea of white superiority at every opportunity.
For example, the Chinese leadership, while embracing connectivity for its citizens, views the Internet as a Trojan horse that can be used to channel dangerous ideas from outside the country, ideas that erode the power of the Communist Party.
