Category Archives: Education

Swimming Upstream: The Life of a Conservative Professor in Academia

This article appeared originally in the American Thinker at
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/swimming_upstream_the_life_of.html
I have been a faculty member at a major State University for 40 years. Several years after my arrival, I voted for George McGovern. Eight years later, I voted for Ronald Reagan. In those eight years, my family and I experienced several traumas that caused me to reevaluate — and ultimately, drastically alter — the political, cultural and economic axioms that had governed my life.

 

Within months of buying my first home in an excellent neighborhood, within walking distance to the University and, most importantly, located in a district with an outstanding local public elementary school, my five year old son was forcibly bussed to an inferior school, many miles away, in a horrible neighborhood in order to satisfy the utopian vision of a myopic federal judge. This betrayal of my fundamental rights was undoubtedly the greatest shock to my political psyche.

 

Another was a Sabbatical year spent living and working in Jerusalem, during which time the UN issued the infamous ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution. I was able to observe firsthand that the standard propaganda about Israel and Zionism that was promulgated in America and elsewhere — almost exclusively by those on the Left that I had formerly supported — was nothing more than bald-faced, hateful lies. This and other events in the 1970s caused me to rethink everything that I had taken for granted since adolescence about how the world worked.

 

I emerged from the exercise as an enthusiastic conservative. Thus I was no longer your average faculty member who adhered to the liberal party line, but instead one of a tiny cadre who completely disagreed with the leftist mentality that dominated the thought of campus faculty and administrators.

 

The overwhelmingly liberal atmosphere on campus is well known. In the one place in society at which there should be diversity of thought, exploration of conflicting ideas and a propensity to challenge conventional wisdom, we have instead a mind-numbing conformity of opinion and a complete unwillingness to entertain any thought or idea that deviates from the accepted truth. That conformity encompasses:

 

  • The legitimacy of virtually any program that promotes the interests of minority and female faculty, staff and students, even if the program is blatantly racist or sexist — justified by a belief that America’s past unjust treatment of blacks, American Indians and Japanese-Americans, and its unfair treatment of women render such discrimination necessary and lawful.
  • A multicultural mentality, which preaches that America’s Eurocentric, white, Christian heritage is responsible for colonialism, imperialism, racism and sexism, and that its replacement by a culture that ‘celebrates diversity’ will transform the US into a more just and humane society.
  • A distrust of free markets and democratic capitalism, and its severe limitation in favor of a centralized, government-controlled economy that will redistribute the wealth of America more fairly.
  • A denigration of religious belief and its replacement by the ‘worship’ of secular humanism, with mindless environmentalism occupying a central place in the new religion.

 

Not being in sync with any of this, how did I cope? Not so well, actually. First of all, it took me a long time to recognize and accept that the university atmosphere I knew as a student was gone. Initially, I was too busy pursuing my career and building my academic resume to notice what a fish out of water I had become.

 

My epiphany came about 20 years ago at the inauguration of a new campus president. In his acceptance speech, he said many things that seemed bizarre to me, but the comment I recall most vividly was his insistence that he would create a world-class university by building ‘excellence through diversity.’ His point seemed to be that by substantially increasing the number of minority and female faculty, staff and students (and consequently decreasing the number of white males), this would of necessity make us a great university.

 

I always thought that the best way to build a great university was to attract the brightest, most innovative and productive faculty and students — regardless of their hue — but I realized at that moment, as the applause for his idea rained down, how out of step I was.

 

What did I do? To my eternal shame, I ducked. Oh initially, during a painful, but relatively brief period, I contested the new campus consensus. People quickly, but politely, informed me that my ideas were retrograde and that I would be well advised to get with the program. In fact, I was passed over for an administrative position I coveted and for which I was far more qualified than the individual selected. Realizing that my resistance was damaging my reputation on campus, I more or less clammed up and spent more than a decade trying to ignore the poisonous atmosphere.

 

This less than noble strategy proved effective and eventually I achieved a high administrative position in which I adhered to policies and shepherded programs that were diametrically opposed to my fundamental beliefs. For years I tended to my bleeding tongue because I was constantly biting it during meetings to prevent myself from blurting out my true feelings about the bigoted ideas that constituted the consensus of the folks at the table.

 

But as I began to near retirement, I decided there was no point in maintaining my forced silence any longer. As I had 15 years earlier, I unburdened myself and let fly my misgivings about the liberal campus hegemony. What happened this time? Here come three novel observations: 

  1. To my surprise, my “retrograde” conservative opinions were not met with calumny or derision, but rather with smiles and amusement. “Oh, that’s just Ron being Ron,” it was said. I wasn’t viewed as a threat to the campus philosophy, but rather as some kind of queer duck to be tolerated at best, ignored at worst. This was certainly more pleasant for me than being told to shut up and get your head straight as I anticipated. But it was also incredibly frustrating that colleagues didn’t take me seriously. The impression I had was that they felt there was no reason to take my ideas seriously because I was so obviously wrong that no right-thinking person could be swayed by my arguments.
  2. My second observation is that I was not the only one failing to make waves. In fact, there were no waves whatsoever. There was no debate, no controversy; just the calm serenity of a campus at peace with its almost universally accepted mind set. I attribute this to three things. First, of course, anyone raising an objection was viewed, as I was, as hopelessly out of it and worthy only of being ignored. This has a chilling effect, perhaps even more effective than derision. Second, I suspect that those who believed as I did were still in lockdown mode—for the same reasons as I was over the years. And third, I believe the liberal brainwash has been so effective on campus—and in the national educational system in general—that many in the liberal majority can’t even fathom that there is anyone who doubts the legitimacy of their point of view.
  3. My final observation is the following. The liberal hegemony exists in many quarters of the country beside academia—e.g., the mainstream media, major foundations, law schools and the trail lawyers they produce, public school teachers, the Democratic Party, even big corporations. But none of these can maintain the atmosphere as effortlessly as campus profs and administrators. Politicians encounter opposition from their constituents; the media from its readers, listeners and viewers; trail lawyers from their clients; and corporations from their stockholders and consumers. But the educational establishment—both higher and lower—encounters little resistance. The students are ignorant, the parents are cowed, and Boards of Regents are cowardly. The ivory tower is alive and well in America and the intellectual product it presents is completely one-sided. What a tragedy for our nation and especially for its youth.

 

Our New President’s Three Top Priorities: Government Cures for Problems Caused by Government

President Obama repeatedly emphasized as a candidate that his three top priorities as President would be health care, energy and education. He has continued to stress those themes since his inauguration, both in proposed legislation and on the bully pulpit. To his way of thinking — and to that of the liberal elite who believe they are running the nation, which in fact they seem to be — these three issues are the most critical facing our nation at the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century. This would seem to relegate to secondary importance such ‘minor’ issues as: Islamic fundamentalism and its assault on Western Civilization; runaway entitlement programs that threaten to bankrupt the nation; a bloated federal government, massive deficits, a rapidly expanding money supply that portends severe inflation and a crippled economy, all of which threaten to do likewise; out of control illegal immigration, augmented by tens of millions of poorly assimilated minorities that weaken the cultural fabric of our society; and a profound ignorance among our citizens of the founding principles upon which our country was established.

Now while I think that the President’s priorities might be misaligned, I do not mean to suggest that Barack’s big three are not vitally important. They are. But what strikes me is that the three top problems that he has identified are perhaps the three that most clearly illustrate a principle that characterizes the behavior of our federal government. Namely, it is intent on solving problems that it created in the first place. Moreover, its preferred method of solution bears amazing resemblance to the methods it deployed that created the original problem. That assertion is true of some of the other issues I specified above. But it is particularly true of Obama’s big three. My purpose here is to elaborate on that observation.

I will take them in reverse chronological order. That means energy is first as the original sins of the government occurred less than a half-century ago. America’s need for and use of vast quantities of energy originate in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. Prior to that we got by with energy gleaned from ‘natural’ sources like water, solar, wind and of course human and animal strength. But the new engines of economic growth in the 19th century required more robust sources of energy — initially coal, and then later oil. These sustained us for more than a century, although they had certain disadvantages — primarily environmental and the fact that, at least in the case of oil, the sources were to be found increasingly in foreign lands.

Then, at almost exactly the same point in time, three critical events occurred: (i) the environmental impact of our heavy reliance on coal and oil worked its way into the consciousness of the American public’s mind; (ii) it became clear that the ‘finite nature’ of those resources would cause them, if not to disappear altogether, then at least to become dramatically more expensive and harder to obtain; and (iii) an amazing new resource became practical. At that point, the federal government initiated policies that recognized (i) but totally ignored (ii) and (iii). In short, beginning approximately 45 years ago and continuing to this day, the government implemented steps that: (a) restricted the use of coal and limited the deployment of more environmentally friendly coal technologies; (b) severely limited drilling and exploration for new domestic sources of oil, shale and other ‘dirty’ sources of energy; (c) began to emphasize and favor inefficient and expensive biofuels that has had the unanticipated consequence of distorting food prices (because of the diversion of certain grains from food production to biofuel production); (d) made the construction of new oil refineries virtually impossible; (e) pursued the chimera of reviving the use of ‘natural’ sources (water, solar, wind) in a major way, expecting beyond common sense that they would provide a substantial portion of our total energy needs; and (f) most importantly, essentially suspended the development and deploymentof nuclear technologies that would in fact have supplied huge proportions of our energy needs. Not surprisingly, these steps have caused scarcity in energy supplies, driven energy costs sky high and placed our industry and our lifestyle at grave risk. Stated in this fashion, and I believe it is an accurate summary of the idiotic government-driven energy policies our country has pursued over the last 45 years, it is natural to wonder how our government, with our concurrence, could institute these incredibly moronic policies. Why would any government do such things?

The answer: For exactly the same reasons that motivate the Obama administration, whose members seem to be convinced that to fix our energy problems we have to pursue precisely the policies that put us in this predicament — although they don’t see it that way. The Obamaniacs are motivated by the beliefs that:

  • The US is no more entitled to access to energy supplies than any other nation, that therefore our consumption of more energy per capita than anyone else is unfair, indeed morally wrong, and that it must cease;
  • Mankind is a threat to the Earth and living with less, cleaner energy is an appropriate check on our human tendency to ‘rape the Earth’;
  • It is the job of the federal government to control our energy appetite and referee the equitable distribution of energy, not only among the peoples of the nation, but also among the peoples of the world; and
  • Unregulated exploitation of the world’s energy sources is a reflection of the corporate greed that is so characteristic of an unfettered capitalistic system, a system that must be reigned in.

It is a radical, anti-free market, redistributionist philosophy that too many of our people have bought into because of the brainwashing they have succumbed to in our schools and at the hands of a biased media. It is a program that will lead us to economic ruin.

Having caused the problem, the government announces that we are in crisis and then sets out to resolve it by rededicating itself to the efforts that created it in the first pace. And the people buy it. But when there will be insufficient energy to heat their homes, power their vehicles and drive the engines of their businesses, then perhaps the good people of America will realize, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, that Barack Obama and the liberals calling the shots are the problem, not the solution.

Proceeding backward in time, the next issue is health care. The basic problem is the explosive nature of the cost of health care. It is universally acknowledged that American health care is the finest in the world — why else would foreigners flock here to access it? Unfortunately, its cost is exceedingly high and seemingly out ofcontrol. Why is that? I maintain the root cause is that the vast majority of American health care is paid for by so-called ‘third party’ insurers. That is, party one (the individual or family) seeks medical assistance from party two (doctors and hospitals), but the bill is paid by party three (either an insurance company or the government).

This abnormal situation came about because of two fundamental blunders by the federal government. The first was the wage and price controls it imposed during World War II. This caused business, when it sought to attract employees, to offer subsidized health care benefits to potential employees; the subsidies were not subject to federal income tax or wage controls. With the federal government’s acquiescence in this dodge around wage controls, thus was born employer-based health insurance that inaugurated the era of the third party payer system. It looked like a win-win for everyone, but the impression created in the public’s mind was that, while health care was not totally free, its costs were capped (by the premiums they paid through their employer) and so they felt no compulsion not to enjoy as much of it as they pleased. A simple case of supply and demand. The insatiable demand by third party-insured health care consumers drives the price for health care higher and higher.

The problem was compounded by the introduction of Medicare in the mid-60s. The target was America’s elderly instead of its workers and young families, and the third party insurer became the government instead of private insurance companies — a horrible eventuality for other reasons. But the third party payer principle was the same and so costs were driven even higher. Americans buy their car, life, home and disability insurance in the open market. Costs for these escalate in line with standard cost of living indicators as people pay directly for what they receive. But the federally-inspired, third party payer health care insurance industry interferes with the natural laws of supply and demand and drives prices to the stratosphere.

So how is the government going to fix this? Why of course by instituting universal health care — controlled, managed and financed by the government, which, whether purposefully or inadvertently, will drive private health insurers out of business. Nationalized health care! Oh swell, the government completely controlling the supply and demand for health care. Of course the demand will not decrease, so the only way to control costs will be by restricting supply. Yup, rationing of health care! Precisely what has happened in other countries that have nationalized health care (see, e.g., Great Britain and Canada)!

Having seen the disaster that nationalized health care has been in other countries, why would the US government implement it here and why would we the people vote for it and support it? Obama made no secret of his intentions. How could we have given him the power to do it? The answer to the second question lies in the brainwashing we have endured in the last few generations; the answer to the first looks suspiciously like the reasons for our misbegotten energy policies:

  • Access to health care is a basic human right (actually, where in the Constitution or Federalist Papers that might be found is a mystery to me — but Barack sees it clearly); all should have the same access — even if at a lower level for everyone.
  • The federal government has the obligation to guarantee that right.
  • Private insurers are motivated purely by the profit motive (damned corporate greed again), not by the desire to fulfill this human right — only the government can provide uniform and fair coverage.

Once again, a radical, redistributionist ideology at work that our brainwashed populace might conceivably not endorse, but certainly acquiesces in. And again, having caused the problem, the government proposes to fix it by redoubling its misguided efforts. When, like in Britain, it takes months (if ever) to see a specialist, we might have second thoughts on the wisdom of this fix.

This brings me to the third priority — education. In this case the original sin lies long in the past — namely, more than a century ago when radicals like John Dewey (and Horace Mann even earlier) convinced the American people that the education of their children was a task best left to the government. It need not have developed that way. True, the governments involved were local, or occasionally county or State, not federal. That would come later. But at the end of the nineteenth century the people of the United States relied on local, State and the national government for precious few services outside of those prescribed in the Constitution. Mail, transportation, some communications come to mind. All in the realm of interstate commerce. Today every activity falls under the rubric of interstate commerce — even education. But exactly where is it ordained that government-run schools are the preferred — and if some had their way, only — method of delivering an elementary school education to the youth of America? It is a choice made by the American people that has led to:

  • Inefficiency, waste and corruption in the administration of America’s school systems;
  • A level of performance by the average student that borders on the abominable;
  • A curriculum that is often at odds with the desires of the students’ parents;
  • A dangerous physical environment rife with drugs, promiscuity and violence;
  • A failure to transmit to America’s youth the fundamentals of our Constitutional Republic and the essentials of our American culture;
  • A total failure to teach our youth about free market capitalism, the fundamental economic system that is responsible for our unprecedented prosperity;
  • A cadre of teachers beholden to the most radical and powerful union in America — the National Educational Association; and
  • A homogeneity of thought on the part of the teachers and staff who run the system that has resulted in the brainwashing of America’s youth who are inculcated with a ‘progressive agenda,’ which is nothing more than the statist philosophy of the liberal elite.

Here Barack would disagree. He likely would think me daft and would instead cite the following as the fundamental problems with our schoolsystems:

  • Inadequate resources available to minorities compared to those for white males;
  • Too much emphasis on American history and culture and not nearly enough attention paid to the people of the world;
  • Insufficient study of the effect of mankind on the environment and not enough indoctrination — er, that is, information about being green;
  • Inadequate teacher salaries; and
  • Too much local control as it is clear that education is far too important to the future of America to be left to anyone but the federal government.

Well, how will he fix these problems? By nationalizing the schools of course and reinforcing the regimen implemented over the last century, which as I have pointed out, is responsible for the failures I have cited — as opposed to his phony problems. The schools will only get worse. But they will produce little Obama clones.

In summary, our esteemed President has identified three critical areas of concern for our nation, but failed to notice that they are areas of concern precisely because of past policies practiced by the government. He proposes to fix them by implementing ‘new’ policies that constitute nothing more than the ratcheting up of the methods that caused the concerns originally. Can you say ‘Prescription for disaster!’ Hopefully the American people will wake up before it is too late.

Different Visions

There is no doubt that the onset of the Obama administration has energized conservative intellectuals. A year ago conservatives were trying to reconcile themselves to the McCain candidacy — an eventuality that filled us with dismay as we contemplated yet another fake conservative presidency and the further dilution of the Reagan brand of conservative republicanism. Then, as the threat of an ultra-liberal Obama presidency loomed larger in the summer and fall of 2008, we exhorted ourselves to a more fervent support of John McCain — realizing that his election, dismal as the prospect might be, was the only hope of preventing the catastrophe that we believed an Obama presidency promised. But our hearts were not in it. When Obama triumphed, we licked our wounds, muttered pathetic excuses like ‘Bush and the Republican Congress brought this on with their profligate spending and betrayal of bedrock conservative principles,’ and took some solace from the ‘moderate’ or’ centrist’ feints that Obama engaged in during the transition period. We were hoping against hope that the newly arrived messiah — a designation not inappropriate to the manner of treatment accorded him by the media — might turn out to be more of a pragmatist, perhaps even a centrist, than his meager record and public utterings predicted that he would be. The dispirited nature of many of our columns, blogs and op/ed pieces during that period reflected the depth of our disappointment, the dejection we were experiencing and the slim reeds of hope at which we were clutching. Alas, not surprisingly, the reeds were ephemeral and the age of Obama has ushered in precisely the far left agenda that we feared.

Therefore, we are no longer able to deceive ourselves that President Obama might govern to some extent like Clinton did — i.e., from the center (sort of). And worse still, the new messiah might not — as many of us hoped — turn out to be as incompetent as the feckless Jimmy Carter. So now that we are truly frightened by the prospect of the great damage Mr. Obama might wreak in the next four or eight years, our juices have started flowing again, our batteries are charged and conservative outlets are overflowing with spirited, passionate and fervent pleas to the American people to recognize Mr. Obama for the dangerous, leftist radical that he surely is and barely attempts to conceal.

The examples are legion, but I would like to cite one specific piece by David Limbaugh in the Washington Times (3/28/09) entitled ‘Capital Arrogance.’ There is much in this trenchant column that highlights the threats posed by Obama and his Congressional allies, but I wish to focus on one specific paragraph:

The liberals see they now have a chance to actualize their vision for an America remade in their image and radically at odds with the vision of this nation’s Founders. It doesn’t matter that there couldn’t be a worse time in our history for implementing their reckless policies. They know they may not get another chance in their lifetimes to work such mischief. Even though it will break the federal bank, us, our children and our grandchildren, it’s all going to be OK because they will finally have achieved their statist vision for America.

There are four critical points raised here by Limbaugh:

  • Obama and his liberal henchmen have a fundamentally different vision for America from that of our Founders.
  • They perceive that this period presents them with perhaps a unique opportunity to implement that vision.
  • The damage to our country by the actualization of that vision, while calamitous at any time, will be especially bad at this time because of the severe economic distress in which we find ourselves.
  • The Obama regime is oblivious to the consequences that the realization of its vision will have on the people of our country; its adherents care only that their utopian dream of a society of equals (their brotherhood of man), guaranteed by an all powerful, ‘benign’ State, is in their view the right way to organize society, and that even if it means a lower standard of living, a diminished status in the world, and an erosion of our individual liberties, the new society will be a far fairer, more just and healthier nation than it was or ever could be under the old system.

Unfortunately, Limbaugh, like many conservative pundits, offers us little or nothing in the way of advice for preventing the calamity that he so acutely predicts. Many fear– and I worry that they might be correct — that there is no forestalling the radical remake of the USA that the age of Obama will usher in. Well, I am not ready to surrender just yet. I would like to make a strategic suggestion for combating Obama’s false nirvana. But before I do, let me say a little more about Limbaugh’s four points — especially the first and last.

Different Visions. One could go on at great length here; let me just say that the Founder’s vision of the USA incorporated: a limited government, empowered primarily to ensure the liberty of the people — thus, to defend the homeland, maintain the worth of the currency, guarantee the validity of contracts, ensure the rule of law, and not too much else; a virtuous populace, whose morals were derived from traditional Western religion and whose primary organization was based on the family (in the classic sense); an economy characterized by free markets and democratic capitalism; checks and balances between the federal government and those of the States, with all unenumerated powers reserved to the States and the people; a set of precious individual rights (life, liberty, freedom of speech, assemblyand religion, and the right to bear arms) that could not be circumscribed by the government; and a respect for and adherence to the Constitution as the fundamental law of the land that could only be altered through an elaborate process, which required a broad consensus of the people.

Obama’s and modern liberals’ vision of America is totally different. In short the fundamental guiding principles are not liberty and freedom, but rather equality and fairness; they take their inspiration from the ideals of the French, not the American Revolution. These include: a benign, but very powerful central government that sets and enforces the rules for virtually all aspects of American life; the elevation of tolerance, a non-judgmental perspective and equity far above all else in determining relationships between people; the belief that inequalities between individuals that result from a free market system are absolutely unacceptable and thus the economy must be strongly regulated — and occasionally controlled — by the government in order to spread the wealth and promote the three principles above; the certainty that American culture is no worthier than any other, therefore merits no celebration and should in fact be infused by cultures from around the world; conflict resolution by negotiation only and a strong aversion to military force — even in defense; the further belief that religion is superstition and inferior to rationalism; all forms of family structure are as valid as the ‘traditional’ family; and finally, the Constitution is a ‘living’ document that guides us but does not bind us.

The two long lists above could be fleshed out further, but you get the idea. Plainly, these are starkly different visions for the future of America.

Unique Opportunity. Due to the egregiously poor performance of the Republican Party (in both the executive and legislative branches) over the last decade, the electorate grew fed up and installed an ultra-liberal regime to govern the country. Something like this has happened three times in the last century — the administrations of Wilson, Roosevelt and Johnson. (The analogy is imprecise.) Liberals look back on these as golden ages; conservatives view them as tragedies that have had permanently devastating consequences for American society. We largely avoided permanent tragedies in the last two Democratic administrations – because Carter was incompetent, and Clinton was not a fanatical true believer; besides, he was checked by Gingrich. But today there is no Gingrich, no Reagan, and the overwhelmingly liberal Democratic Party has a good chance to bring about a fourth great leap to the left in America. They sense — not without justification — that this leap might put America irrevocably over the top. Social justice will reign and individual liberty will be a memory, and there will be no going back. They might be right — we will know soon enough.

Special Circumstances. Here I don’t see eye to eye with Limbaugh. Yes, Roosevelt engineered his leap to the left during the Depression and he used it for cover to enact his socialist programs. But both Wilson’s and Johnson’s surge to port were perpetrated in not particularly perilous times. Yet they both still managed to leave us with a sorry legacy. We are still coping with the tragedy of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution that enabled the federal income tax. And the social, moral and economic havoc that resulted from Johnson’s Great Society continues to poison our nation. Obama will almost certainly, like Roosevelt, use the current economic crisis as an excuse to enact his ultra-left program for America. (After all, his right-hand man, Rahm Emanuel, has already informed us that this crisis is too great an opportunity to waste.) But economic distress or not, whichever of Obama’s socialist, collectivist, egalitarian and pacifistic policies he is able to implement will be calamitous for America, even if the Stock Market was not doing a swan dive and the Mullahs were not splitting the atom.

Liberal Motivation. In this fourth point, Limbaugh is spot on. How can anyone survey the history of liberalism/socialismin the world over the last century and not conclude that it has been an abject failure? In its mildest form, Euro-socialism, it has resulted in the decaying societies of Western Europe — plagued by low birth rates, out of control welfare costs, high unemployment and low productivity, inability to project force and defend themselves, and a growing, subversive immigrant population that is needed to fund the entitlement programs. Canada fits that model as well. In its most virulent form, Nazism and Communism, it has resulted in horrors almost beyond human imagination. Well, I believe that liberals can ignore these results and continue to have faith in their leftist ideas for one of three reasons. Either the liberal is blind to the damage; or he sees it but believes the principles have not been applied correctly and that America is a special case in which liberalism can co-exist with classic American ideals in order to improve our country; or he flagrantly does not care.

In the first instance, much of the populace simply does not recognize or does not understand the wreckage of liberalism’s failures. They are so brainwashed by the media, the schools, the librarians, the ad agencies, the lawyers, the foundations and all the other opinion molding organs that have been thoroughly captured by the Left, that they believe — among other fairy tales — that Roosevelt’s New Deal pulled the US out of the Great Depression; that Great Society programs have produced a more just society — not one characterized by welfare dependency, out of wedlock births, rampant pornography, a permanent underclass and wanton crime; and that the Income Tax and the alphabet soup of federal regulatory agencies allow the Federal Government to assume its rightful place as the most important component of US society, providing vital support for education, energy, transportation, housing and virtually every other facet of American life. In the second instance, we encounter the ‘well-intentioned liberal.’ The Democratic Party is well-stocked with them. They are confident that they can fine-tune and spruce up American society according to more humane egalitarian principles in order to smooth the rough edges caused by rugged individualism. They do not believe that the fundamental character of the American experiment in freedom will be altered by their policies, rather it will be perfected. We will acknowledge our past flaws like slavery, maltreatment of American Indians and suppression of women’s rights, and by correcting them and other deficiencies in our society, we will create a more enlightened country that remains true to its fundamental creed as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Finally, in the third case, doctrinaire liberals/socialists do not care about the carnage because they would have you believe that America is an unjust, unfair, bigoted and corrupt nation that must be completely remade. They do not see prosperity and success as the nation’s primary goals, rather equality and fairness should reign supreme. Liberty and freedom are not nearly as important as social justice, multiculturalism and environmental justice — whatever that is. In which of these three categories Obama fits is a topic for a future article.

All that said, what is my strategic suggestion for turning the tide? The inspiration comes from the enemy. How did we reach this point? Why do the consequences of the Reagan and Gingrich Revolutions seem so meager today? Reagan won the Cold War, rebuilt America’s economy and restored the military. Gingrich — admittedly with Clinton’s help – balanced the budget. How did the Left bear those defeats and rise to the seemingly impregnable heights it occupies today? I believe the seeds were sown roughly a century ago, to a great extent by the socialist, Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, who preached that the way to convert the democratic, capitalistic countries of Western Civilization into socialist utopias was to capture the culture. Take over all the prime cultural institutions of the nation, convert the people to believers in the new culture and the politics would surely follow. Whether on purpose or inadvertently, that is exactly what the Left did. Led by early revolutionaries like John Dewey, Upton Sinclair and Woodrow Wilson, followed over several generations by Roosevelt and the New Dealers and then Johnson and the 60s radicals, the Left took control of all the organs of society that determine the culture: the media, educational system, legal profession, foundations, mainline churches, even big business to some extent. When the average American believes that abortion is a fundamental right, that the wall between church and state should be insurmountable, that Hollywood starlets have something to say about politics that is worth listening to, that it is alright for politicized teachers to have more influence over children than their parents, that soft core porn is acceptable fare for 8PM TV, that business is greedy and the government is competent and fair, that it is OK for athletes to tattoo their bodies, strut like peacocks and be role models for our children, then what chance does conservative politics really have against the liberal onslaught? With that cultural background it is not surprising that people vote for Barack Obama andNancy Pelosi.

So what are we to do? Take back the culture! Simple to say; hard to do. Yes, we have to continue to do battle in the political arena. Reagan’s and Newt’s victories in the political and economic spheres were fantastic. But these two gentlemen did not seriously contest the cultural battlefield. And without some advance in that arena, we are seeing that the political and economic victories cannot be consolidated. They are swept away by the influence of the filthy cultural tide that blankets America from the Left. We tend to see the battle between the Left and the Right as a political battle between liberals and conservatives. It is. But it appears that it is more fundamentally a social, cultural battle. It is good to know that Edmund Burke’s ideas can defeat those of Voltaire, that Adam Smith was wiser than Karl Marx, that Milton Friedman outshines John Maynard Keynes. The problem is that no one on the Right has taken on Gramsci. We need to have conservative philosophers and cultural icons that state the case for and epitomize the worth of traditional Western culture. More mundanely, we need to nurture conservative film makers, fund conservative law schools, build conservative foundations (like Heritage, but more of them), defend and expand talk radio, establish conservative newspapers (like the Washington Times, but more of them), concoct an organization to counter the NEA in the minds of the country’s teachers, abandon the mainline churches and support religious institutions that champion traditional values, etc. It might take a hundred years to achieve success; after all it took the Left a century to reach the dominance it currently enjoys. If we don’t do this, then the America that we have loved and which has proven to be such a boon to the peoples of the world will surely — perhaps slowly, but maybe not so slowly — wither into one more Euro-socialist State. Then the light from mankind’s last best hope will have gone out.

Keeping the American Mind Closed: The Continuing Sorry State of American Higher Education

In his 1987 book, Allan Bloom bemoaned the Closing of the American Mind. In his densely-written, trenchant and devastating depiction of the average American undergraduate’s intellectual equipment, Dr. Bloom laid the blame (partly) on how the nature of ‘general education’ in academia had changed for the worse in the preceding generation. Whereas up until mid century, no university student could escape with a degree without a classical education, that assertion was demonstrably false by 1980. In fact I was an undergraduate student in the early 1960s and to my good fortune, I received such an education. Its components included: mathematics and science; an in-depth history of ancient Greece and Rome; the art, literature, music and architecture of Western Europe from the Renaissance through the 19th century; the economic system of laissez faire capitalism pioneered by the Dutch and British and carried forward by the Americans; the notion of political freedom and liberty under the rule of law, exemplified by England and the USA, and highlighted by the stark differences between the American and French Revolutions; philosophy and morals, with an emphasis on the role played by the Church (sometimes good, sometimes bad); all of it subsumed under the rubric of Western Civilization. There was also a large dose of American history and government and, perhaps to the surprise of today’s youngsters, most of it was portrayed in a positive light.

In the 1960s and 1970s, these core components of a classical curriculum in higher education were not so much thrown out as shoved aside. The doyens of higher education decided that, while a classical education might have made sense in a classical age, the progressive times of the latter third of the 20th century demanded that more important ideas be imparted to the eager young minds entering the campus. Furthermore, not only were the components of a classical education obsolete, they shielded the youth of America from much that was unpleasant, even evil, about American history and Western Civilization—e.g., slavery, oppression of women, religious fundamentalism, colonialism and the ubiquitous presence of war. Thus a new, improved general curriculum was developed that embraced: deconstructionism, moral relativism, various ‘studies’ (black, women’s, gay & lesbian, urban, environmental, ethnic, etc.), cultures of the underdeveloped world, Marxism, and a de-emphasis, if not denigration of American society and Western Civilization.

I might mention that some of these drastic changes had already crept into the curriculum during my college days. For example, the Bible was still in the curriculum, but only as literature, certainly not in the context of history, philosophy or morals; the emphasis in economics was on Keynesianism; government was viewed as the ultimate arbiter of all American problems—based on the accepted wisdom that the New Deal saved America from the ravages of the Depression (whereas in fact, as most economists now acknowledge, it actually prolonged the Depression); and Soviet Communism was portrayed as a competing economic system, not the brutal totalitarian society that it was. Nevertheless, I would say that the basic underlying nature of the classical curriculum was largely intact at the time of my college education (early 60s). But it wouldn’t survive the decade.

The new curriculum introduced in American colleges in the 60s and 70s, in the words of Dr. Bloom, ‘failed democracy and impoverished the souls of the students.’ Indeed much of it was specious, sophomoric and subversive. A major undercurrent was that Western Civilization and American society were no better than and maybe worse than almost any other social, political or economic system. The new thinking completely ignored or devalued the achievements of Western Civilization such as ethical monotheism, democratic capitalism, European architecture, literature and art, the English/American concept of the rule of law, sanctity of private property and the economic prosperity that resulted. In their stead, the oppression of peoples of color and women, the evils of colonialism, the economic imbalances that result from free market capitalism and the injustices perpetrated by WASP legal systems were seen as the hallmarks of Western society. Of course, these defects would be corrected when enough of the populace was sufficiently inculcated with the ideas of the new curriculum.

Bloom also pointed out that critical and independent thinking was another casualty of the new curriculum. In the history, philosophy and political science courses of a classical education, students were encouraged to not simply blindly accept what was in the curriculum but to question for themselves the opinions and actions of the peoples and cultures they were studying. The scholars who taught the courses didn’t pretend they knew less than their students, but they were willing to listen and give credence to alternate views. In the new curriculum, although great lip service was paid to the idea that students should discover their own truths, in actuality it was made perfectly clear to them that there would be no deviation from the wisdom they were receiving. Bloom decried the mind-numbing conformity and ignorance that resulted. Students graduated without knowing the name of the river that Washington was crossing in that boat and why he was crossing it, who Adam Smith was and what the invisible hand is, who said ‘Out, damned spot!’ and its moral implications, what judicial concept Chief Justice Marshall introduced in 1803 and why it is still so important today, or exactly how many theses Martin Luther nailed on that Church door in Wittenberg or what ticked him off so much to do so. As their minds closed up, the students didn’t even know why it was so disappointing that they didn’t know these things.

Well another generation has passed and the ‘new’ curriculum is not wearing so well. Impetus for changing it has come lately from students and their parents. Of course in its desire to please its ‘customers,’ as many higher education officials are wont to call their students these days, revisions are the order of the day. A high level committee at my university has recently completed a draft of a new core educational program to replace the one that has been in force since the 70s. Alas, an examination of the document reveals that the minds of our students are not about to be pried open, but likely to remain firmly shut. Yes, the emphasis on ‘studies’ is gone; there is little about colonialism and oppression of third world cultures or the moral shortcomings of Western Civilization; and the word ‘deconstruction’ does not even appear. But these awful ideas have been replaced by the modern claptrap that has supplanted them in the minds of today’s great thinkers. The new document is shot through with buzzwords and cockamamie notions that have gained popularity in the last decade or so: sustainability, diversity, multiculturalism, equity, social justice, globalism (not the economic variety, rather one world political nonsense) and of course CHANGE. I emphasized the last topic since the word has now become holy. Heaven knows who is to change what to benefit whom, but the status quo is clearly totally unacceptable, we must all embrace change.

A new curriculum! But its components are still specious, sophomoric and subversive, just packaged slightly differently. The monumental achievements of Western Civilization remain off the menu. And the place of America in world history and affairs is not an exalted one. There is no hint of a society that saved the world twice from totalitarianism, created the greatest overall economic prosperity in the history of human existence, and is in fact one of the most tolerant multicultural societies on the planet.

One can take consolation from the following thought. Despite the banalities and inanities of the previous general curriculum, my university and others in the United States have continued to produce first class minds, genuinely creative thinkers and talented scientists, businessmen and artists—some of whom even managed to get a degree. (Sergey Brin, co-inventor of Google, is one of ours.) This means that either there is enough solid meat left in the curriculum to generate and succor terrific minds. Or perhaps the precise curriculum is irrelevant; there are a sufficient number of genuine and independent scholars among the faculty to motivate the most fertile minds among their students toward meaningful and objective scientific, political, economic and artistic pursuits. Either way, I am optimistic that the new drivel will also not prevent the cream of America’s youth from rising to the top.