Links to Consider, 10/6

Richard Hanania on the outlook for liberalism; Tim Shampling on reforming universities; Matt Goodwin on Zoomers; Niccolo Soldo calls Baloney Sandwich

Richard Hanania writes,

Far from revealing how fragile our system is, the events of January 6 showed how little even a president who wanted to stay in office can do to overthrow the system. Fukuyama himself has gotten caught up in a wider hysteria, I think making the common mistake of confusing his aesthetic revulsion towards Trumpism and populism more generally with something that will end democracy. On the right, there is a similar exaggeration of the ultimate impacts of wokeness, which, while annoying and ugly, is not the end of civilization. It may increase the crime rate, make women more neurotic, and slow economic growth, but it is a tax that we can afford to pay as long as we still have a stable government and a functioning market economy.

Far from always teetering on the edge of collapse, which is the impression one gets from reading our intellectuals, modern America might have the most stable political and economic system the world has seen since the Industrial Revolution.

…As for the rest of the world, they will continue to become more like us. There really isn’t any other option.

In belittling the threats to American democracy that supposedly emanate from Trump or the Woke, Hanania is in the same camp as Tyler Cowen. But Cowen does worry about Putin setting off a nuke.

Tim Shampling writes,

As late as 1960 only 8% of the country went to college; we were not then a notably less competent nation. Employers should be forbidden from requiring a college degree for any job that did not require one in, say, 1985. Likewise, the credential demands for promotion and salary increases in public sector jobs – which send students running to MPA, MSW, and worst of all M.Ed programs – should be eliminated. Education schools lead the pack in politicization and in the propagation of simple falsehoods. All Republican legislatures should ensure that no stage of the process of career or income latter involves further diplomas from these wretched places.

He has other proposals, including

ideally, Republican politicians would simply clean out the DEI bureaucracy altogether at public universities. In an astonishing pattern of political negligence, true Red states like Ohio have allowed the DEI caste to balloon to extraordinary levels, with over $10 million spent per year, and with 30 officials making over six figures, at Ohio State University alone. Every single one of these individuals whose position is not mandated by a narrow interpretation of existing civil rights, disability, or equal access law should be fired summarily.

It is a bracing essay, but I agree with a commenter who is skeptical about whether legislators are the ones to fix academia. I refer readers once again to the idea for a network-based university.

Matt Goodwin has an article about young people born early in this century.

Their liberal values have not only been shaped by their record rates of participation in higher education —which has been shown to push people in a liberal direction —but by their coming-of-age experiences. They are the generation of #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, Greta Thunberg, George Floyd, Jeremy Corbyn, The Squad, George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and the much broader cultural push for equality, diversity and inclusion, which is reflected in schools, universities, celebrity culture, and business.

Overtly political campaigns by the likes of Nike, Ben and Jerry’s, and HSBC might alienate other voters but they do appear to resonate among the members of Gen-Z, more than half of whom agree ‘companies should take a stand’. They are consistently more likely than older generations to say they feel passionate about mental health, racial, sexual, and gender equality and, in the words of one study, to see ‘the old white man’ as the typical opponent of their passions.

The feeling is mutual, kids. Pointer from Ed West. Goodwin’s entire essay is provocative, ending with this:

I suspect we are on the cusp of an entirely new cultural revolution in the West which will not only be driven by demands for more radical economic change but far more radical cultural and social change, too. And the Zoomers, as they trickle out of the universities into the institutions, will be in the driving seat of that revolution.

Niccolo Soldo writes,

Just look at this stupidity and ignorance:

The combination of education and technology overcame brute force during World War II, when the most militarily skillful and adaptable countries—the United States and the United Kingdom—were able to fight their enemies at a relatively small cost in casualties. The U.K., even though it fought around the world from 1939 to 1945, lost only 384,000 soldiers in combat. The U.S. lost even fewer, suffering approximately 290,000 battle deaths. The German armed forces, by contrast, lost more than 4 million soldiers.

That the British and American armed forces kept their casualties comparatively low is especially notable because they were confronted with an overwhelming majority of German arms, planes, and ammunition. Because of the sickening number of human casualties, the fighting on the Eastern Front between the Nazis and Soviets is widely deemed World War II’s largest engagement, but Germany had to send far more of its war production to fight the British and Americans than it did to fight the U.S.S.R.

This is because the Western Front was inactive for years, you lying shit. This is because the overwhelming majority of the fighting against the Germans on the European continent happened on the Eastern Front, you lying shit.

His post covers several topics of interest. And he links to what he wrote a year ago.

Biden is kicking into high gear the internal transformation of America from a White and Christian state into a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and secular global empire. Racism is the greatest sin of this new theology-ideology and slavery its Original Sin. And if its values are universal, then they must be imposed on the rest of the globe, either through diplomacy, coercion, or violence.