A chant applied to the Las Vegas massacre, almost anything bad involving guns, almost anything bad involving kids, and almost anything that’ll agitate the news cycle for more than a day.
The mass shooting in Las Vegas around 10 pm, Sunday, 10/1/2017.
Lately, we’ve developed a nervous tic nearly every time an incident of mayhem invades our tranquility. It won’t be long before a grandstanding politico trots out in front of a mike and cameras to announce, “We have to make sure this doesn’t happen again.” The fact is, it will. So what is up with the nonsense declaration? It’s the intro to the politicization of tragedy.
It begins with the unquestioning belief in the magical healing powers of legislation. Someone demands that we “do something”, and “do something” means “write a law”. Encapsulate the cure in a 20,000-word statute. What’s up with that?
Has anyone ever taken a look at the “geniuses” who’ll craft the cure? Sorry, high-wattage thinkers don’t heavily populate the upper rungs of those who play the game of politics (i.e. acquiring power, or getting elected), especially on the lefty side of the political spectrum. They may know the art of gaining power, but once in power we quickly learn that they really don’t know or understand much. They’re fumbling, and sometimes dangerous, empty suits.
Nancy Pelosi, (D) San Francisco, Democrat majority leader.
They normally trot out their ready-made, off-the-shelf nostrums. They don’t even have to be relevant to the issue at hand. Just plug ’em in anyway. In a recent CNN townhall after the Las Vegas shooting, Nancy Pelosi (D, San Francisco) quickly pivoted to her current favorite: background checks. The question directed to her was about actions to prevent the Las Vegas shooting. Her answer was nonsense. Do we have background checks? Yes. Would of any of their proposed changes to them make any difference? No.
Simply put, she didn’t answer the question. Besides, her response wasn’t pertinent. The killer, Stephen Paddock, passed background checks as he went about building his arsenal. It’s not that he didn’t go through any. The guy simply flew way under everyone’s radar, including his family’s.
On those “background checks”, all relevant records to a gun purchase are digitized with instant access for any government agent sitting time zones away from the site of the purchase. It doesn’t take long to do a check. States don’t vary that much in doing the look-see, only in the amount of arbitrary inconvenience for the buyer with their waiting periods. Nothing much is accomplished with waiting periods; much is accomplished in irritation.
Still, even with the Democrats’ background enhancements, Paddock would fly under those too.
And with Pelosi and her gang’s proposals, she’d effectively put “dead” to due process in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments for gun buyers. The Constitution is quite inconvenient for those in a hurry to win the political brass ring.
So, what’s she up to? She’s up to politics, gaining the majority in Congress, and impatient in imposing blue America’s values on the rest of the country.
I could bore you to tears with examples of politicos and their love affair with silliness. Here’s congresswomen Carolyn McCarthy, (D) New York, back in 2013 unable to describe a gun item (barrel shroud) mentioned in a bill that she supported.
You think that she’s the only one? Here’s 2 New York state politicos intent on their own bans.
Incendiary bullets are “heat-seeking”?
The confusion among the left about semi-automatic and automatic guns is rampant. The mixup extends to the progressive punditry. CNN’s Don Lemmon steps into it.
The ignorance is pervasive. The bulk of these people don’t own guns, haven’t really lived among them, and have SNL skits running around in their heads about rednecks and working stiffs. Their’s is the world of gentrified neighborhoods, bistros, smartphone-saturation, and the college bubble. Yet, they want to legislate for the rest of us. When they get their hands on the levers of power, the result is absurdity.
From where do we get get this tic to legislate our way to nirvana? It’s built into the progressive worldview. Progressives are intoxicated with the idea of using state power to manufacture a new world, and new human beings to go in it. That means legislation, laws, rules, decrees, and other such commands. Out goes anything not familiar to them in their cloistered existence.
Maybe something can be done about “bump stocks”, but don’t expect it to change the dynamic of fevered imaginations intent on killing large numbers of people. If the desire is there, a means will be found. In other words, it will happen again.
Evil resides in the souls of some men and women … but, first, you have to recognize the existence of evil. Now that’s something to scoff for your average run-of-the-mill urban sophisticate.
Most Oakland Raiders sit during the national anthem on Sunday Night Football, 9/24/17.
The NFL player protests, Black Lives Matter, the “blue” cocoon, Trump’s SOB’s, and the 1947 movie “Boomerang!” came to mind during the sit-ins by half-million-dollar-per-year protesters Sunday, September 24.
The first three on the list are animated by a faulty postulate: American law enforcement is riddled with racism. It’s the “cause without a cause”. In this case, “cause” being a premise without some relation to facts .
The slander has its biggest and loudest following in urban and academic centers, the so-called “blue” precincts. It has spread beyond the street and campus into professional sports – who, by the way, are centered in “blue” America – and earning the ire of a huge part of the fan base in “red” America and President Trump.
As for the movie, “Boomerang!”, it reminded us that “justice” is the ultimate goal of all legal proceedings, and hopefully resistant to mobs inflamed by falsehoods (more about the movie later). Real justice is an inconvenience for those in a hurry to hang a few cops. Now, professional athletes are getting sucked into the sordid enterprise.
So, in the end, we have the NFL tarnishing its reputation, players heightening their profiles as political firebrands, fans registering disgust, and all because of a demonstrably false proposition. Don’t expect justice here … but reckon a humbling decline in the once-vaunted NFL.
It’s a lesson for all high profile sports: Don’t insult your fans!
A good chunk of sports fans might have a very different take on issues like policing the streets of many of our wannabe Kabuls and Baghdads. Your average fan sitting in font of his big screen TV on Sunday afternoon probably doesn’t see the world like your typical Sociology professor or average campus SJW (social justice warrior), and for good reason. The alleged racism in police departments, so readily accepted in faculty lounges and by impressionable college sophomores, isn’t supported by the facts.
First, crime, like wildfires, isn’t evenly distributed. Local circumstances produce divergent results, without ever getting into the racism of the “man”. Certain areas of the country have a fecundity for crime as areas of thick forests produce a fire season. An infamous example is LA’s “death valley”, South Vermont Ave. Read the captions. (1)
Since 2007, 61 people have been killed on a two-mile stretch on or near South Vermont Avenue between Manchester Avenue and Imperial Highway. The area is the border of the Westmont and Vermont Vista neighborhoods.L. Christopher Caver Jr., 38, shows a scar on his stomach, a result of a 2012 shooting when he was hit seven times inside his car. He has lived in the Westmont area of South L.A. for more than a decade.People hang out in front of a pawn shop along Vermont Avenue and 83rd Street in the Westmont area of South Los Angeles.A woman and child walk down an alley between 93rd and 94th streets in Westmont. The 1.8-square-mile area has seen 100 homicides in the last seven years.A German shepherd stands sentry in the front yard of a home in the Westmont area of South Los Angeles.“I’m just fed up in this area,” said Aaron Eden, 38, about crime in his neighborhood. His house has been broken into twice, the Westmont resident said.
Some self-styled crusaders of justice cite deceiving statistics to hold up the edifice of rampant racism. Weaknesses in their assertions abound. For instance, their comparisons of crime to population over a broad space hide a serious problem in certain sectors. The overall crime number in a specific locale may register no concern since the good numbers coming out of some neighborhoods depress the frightening stats emerging from others. Examine the maps for New York City, Chicago, and Milwaukee. (2)
Source: City of New York crime mapSource: Chicago TribuneSource: Milwaukee Police Department
The theme throughout is the same: the highest crime rates occur in the locations with the highest concentrations of poverty. These areas correspond with the greatest assemblage of ethnic and racial minorities. The higher the incidence of crime, the greater the opportunity for run-ins with police for people of a particular hue who predominate in these places. We have a crime problem within certain sectors of our population, not a police problem.
Such subtleties might not course through the mind of an athlete whose life has been spent focusing on other things. The field is wide open for pop-culture grandees or media-savvy racialists to set the tone for the ill-informed.
Some may sound reasonable like Killer Mike above, but they still repeat a now well-worn mantra of a generalized campaign of racial injustice. Rapper T.I. pontificates, “Police brutality is really just a tentacle to a larger problem — the racial divide and the systemic racism that goes on from the highest of highs to the lowest of the low of society in America.” (3)
And of course we have Al Sharpton, the race hustlers’ version of the legal profession’s ambulance chaser. Here he is whipping up the congregation after the 2014 Ferguson shooting.
For many quick to have their biases confirmed, facts on the ground can be inconvenient. As it turned out, the deceased in Ferguson was no saint (see below). So much so, Pres. Obama’s Justice department, always on the hunt for the ghost of Bull Connor or Jim Crow, couldn’t gin up a case against the officer. No facts, no case – to borrow a much abused cadence.
After Ferguson, a movement was born: Black Lives Matter. Out of the garbage can, also, is resurrected the old conjoining of “cops” and “pigs”.
Like a teen girl watching the Emmies, the fashion is picked up by the impressionable tuning in. Thus is born Colin Kaepernick as self-anointed conscience of the NFL.
Kaepernick’s infamous socks as worn during an August 2016 practice.Former Green Beret Nate Boyer, second from right, stands next to a kneeling Colin Kaepernick during the national anthem on Thursday Night Football, 2016. (Chris Carlson / Associated Press)
The case of Colin Kaepernick is interestingly instructive. Having shown no prior desire to publicly pontificate as a SJW, all of a sudden he’s kneeling during the national anthem and brandishing cops-as-pigs socks. More than a few have speculated on the influence of his fiance/girlfriend, Nessa Diab.
Nessa Diab and Colin Kaepernick on the way to the gym, September 2017.
Most recently, she spouted off on Ray Lewis’s suggestion that Kaepernick keep his opinions private as Kaepernick was being considered by owner Steve Bisciotti for a position on the roster. She implicitly referred to Lewis as a “house negro” to Bisciotti’s slaveholder on Twitter.
Nessa’s tweet: Bisciotti/Lewis above, deCaprio/Samuel J. Jackson from “Django Unchained” below.
She’s quite the pollinating bee fluttering from the blue-dot worlds of celebrity, MTV, San Francisco, and a DJ gig at the HOT97 in New York City. She seems to have a thing for 49er players after dating Aldon Smith. She’s also fully immersed in the lingo of the left. Here she is commenting on the shooting death of Alton Sterling:
Imagine the victim #AltonSterling as your brother, father, son, cousin, friend, co-worker. You didn’t have to know him personally to feel this horrific pain. This is a MAN who wrongfully got murdered!!! Don’t let this “system” now criminalize Alton Sterling to help justify these coward actions by the police. They will try and they will also try to discredit the store owner’s account of what occurred because he’s Muslim and we know Islamaphobia is at an all time high in this country.
This kind of stuff isn’t hard to find in her social media posts.
Celebrities like Nessa Diab arrive at the 2015 MTV Movie Awards held at Nokia Theatre LA Live in Los Angeles, California on April 12, 2015.
As a Muslim and familiar with Saudi Arabia, she should be aware that her chic glam would attract the attention of the Mutaween, the kingdom’s religious police, if she traipsed around in Riyadh’s nightlife in her figure-hugging and revealing sartorial beauty.
Women in Burkas, in Mina near the Saudi holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia in 2011.
Bringing a Bible into the country is a crime; women can’t get driver’s licenses; and the public dress code for women centers on the burka. It’d certainly be hard for her to display her natural endowments robed like above.
You’d think that she would have greater appreciation for life in the good ol’ USA. Instead, she treats a multiracial country of 330 million experiencing the rare police shooting as if it is a hotbed of racial bigotry. She ignores the nature of life in dar al-islam (lit. territory of Islam). The lack of any sense of proportion is a hallmark of the ignorant. But nonetheless, she appears to be an influence on poor Colin.
A little digging by Colin and Nessa would undermine their jihad. Blacks are not shot or otherwise accosted by police in a broadly unjust fashion. If anything, they are disproportionately represented in the incidence of crime, particularly of the violent kind. And their victims are disproportionately black. (6) Yes, black lives matter, and, for their lives to matter, police need to seize their assailants … who happen to be disproportionately black. No wonder the high number of police confrontations with blacks, overwhelmingy male.
Yet, in the recent high-profile police shooting cases, few have resulted in convictions of the officers. Some hustlers use the fact as conclusive evidence of something airily called “systemic” racism. In other words, these pantomimes of racial justice want convictions no matter what. If so, why bother with a trial if media buzz is enough to condemn?
Prosecutor Henry Harvey (r), played by Dana Andrews, and murder suspect John Waldron (Arthur Kennedy) in “Boomerang!” from 1947.
The matter was brought into clearer focus while watching the movie “Boomerang!”. It’s the story of a prosecutor who refused to pursue charges against a murder suspect after being subjected to intense political pressure. The DA couldn’t remove from his mind the legal profession’s standards of ethical conduct for prosecutors. Put succinctly, “The duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice, not merely to convict.” (7) Is it asking too much to demand a similar sobriety in the celebrity world and the media-incited mobs?
Pres. Trump at campaign rally for Sen. Luther Strange, September 22, 2017.
Well, into the frenzy jumps Pres. Trump. Echoing the thoughts of many, speaking at a campaign rally for US Sen. Luther Strange, he said, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when someone disrespects our flag to say, `Get that son of a bitch off the field right now! Out. He’s fired! He’s fired!“ (8) Leaving aside the language, the sentiment has currency among many – if not most – veterans and a sizable swath of the country’s population, mostly in “red” America. Undoubtedly, the comment angered some of the marginally inclined in the locker room. So, we experienced the NFL’s own “black Sunday” on September 24. Here’s a sample.
Buffalo Bills take a knee, September 24.Jacksonville Jaguars take a knee, September 24.Indianapolis Cols take a knee, September 24.Some of the Chargers resort to the old black power salute.Several New England Patriots players kneel during the national anthem before an NFL football game against the Houston Texans, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2017, in Foxborough, Mass. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
It happened throughout the NFL on that day. And it drew criticism from fans.
In a debate on MSNBC between Brian Mitchell and Hugh Hewitt, Hewitt raises the scepter of the NFL losing touch with its fan base. As for Mitchell, he accepts the received wisdom of a pervasive racism. Take a look.
Some like Brian Mitchell see the players’ actions with all the integrity of The Grand Remonstrance of 1641. In 1641, the English Parliament presented to King Charles I a list of grievances, The Grand Remonstrance, which His Highness quickly dismissed. The result was over 40 years of civil war and social disruption. The players’ protest could do the same by inaugurating a civil war between the league and its fans. I don’t think the league will come out of it any better than Charles I. He lost his head.
The execution of Charles I, 1649.
The full effect of the protests will take awhile to gestate. The players have certainly displayed their right to free speech, and some fans are exhibiting the same right. Free speech for everyone, including the right to express that speech in the abandonment of the NFL. Many prescient owners and players can envision dollars whisking out of their wallets like so many autumn leaves on a windy day.
Could the NFL players’ racialized outcry have the same fallout as the 1994 baseball players’ strike on Major League Baseball? A person could argue that Major League Baseball hasn’t fully recovered from it. What waits in the offing for the NFL? Much depends on the NFL’s response to players using the national anthem as a forum to present their social and political discontents.
Entire Cowboys’ team kneels before the national anthem on Monday Night Football, September 25.
Sensing the trouble, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys knelt with the players and then everybody stood for the anthem. A compromise, but why kneel? What’s the reason for the kneeling? Is it to show solidarity for a broad charge of racism for which there is no valid proof? What’s the point?
The whole thing rests on a premise without much of a foundation. Indeed, it’s cause without a cause. To be clearer, it’s a political movement without much justification. Thus, any compromise gives credence to a sham.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“South Vermont Avenue: L.A. County’s ‘death alley’”, Nicole Santa Cruz and Ken Schwencke, Los Angeles Times, 1/19/2014, photos by Genaro Molina, http://homicide.latimes.com/post/westmont-homicides/
“The Debate Over Crime Rates is Ignoring the Metric That Matters Most: ‘Murder Inequality’: Focusing on the neighborhood level is the best way to understand violence in America. Here are six charts that prove it.”, Daniel Kay Hertz, The Trace, 7/25/2016, https://www.thetrace.org/2016/07/crime-rates-american-cities-murder-inequality/
“T.I. speaks out on police brutality”, Deena Zuru, CNN, 8/14/2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/24/politics/ti-us-or-else-movie-police-brutality/index.html
“CLASSY: Kaepernick’s Girlfriend Compares NFL Owners to Slaveholders, Ray Lewis to ‘House Negroes'”, Eliot Hamilton, The DailyWire, 8/3/2017, http://www.dailywire.com/news/19319/classy-kaepernicks-girlfriend-compares-nfl-owners-elliott-hamilton#
“The lies of Black Lives Matter”, Kelly Riddell, The Washington Times, 7/18/2016, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/18/lies-black-lives-matter/
“Criminal Justice Standards; Prosecution Function, Part I, General Standards”, https://www.americanbar.org/publications/criminal_justice_section_archive/crimjust_standards_pfunc_blk.html#1.2
“Trump Calls on NFL Owners to Fire Players Who Kneel During Anthem”, Daniel Politi, Slate, 9/23/2017, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/09/23/trump_calls_on_nfl_owners_to_fire_players_who_kneel_during_anthem.html
Unsurprisingly and generally speaking, parents strive to grease the skids for their kids’ future success. Particularly, middle class parents will drive themselves to near bankruptcy in order to guarantee their offspring’s advancement. Yet, when they buy into a nicer neighborhood to enroll junior in a “better” school, are they really getting a “better” school? There’s good reason to doubt that proposition. Much of the corruption in our schools has deep tentacles, and is no respecter of “red” vs. “blue” states, public or private schools, inner city or suburban schools, parochial or secular, and even reaches down into home-schooling. It’s equal-opportunity corruption.
I suppose that the issue hinges on what is meant by “better”.
Sure, avoidance of gang rape in the school’s bathroom, classrooms-as-battlefields, and the accidental straying beyond the school’s chain link fence into feral environs are legitimate parental concerns. Many parents would assign “better” to any school without these traits.
Under the belief that a geographic relocation might improve things for the munchkins, many parents can’t wait to hook up the U-haul and move to a richer zip code.
A moving truck is shown at a house that was sold in Palo Alto, Calif., Tuesday, June 19, 2012. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
However, zip codes of the affluent present their own problems, leaving aside the schools. Websites catering to the school-conscious parent have sprung up in places afflicted with a cost of living commensurate with Warren Buffett’s investment portfolio but many people possessing a net worth more in line with the denizens of 1950’s Levittown. California is a hotbed for these conversations. One site for Bay Area moms and dads, berkeleyparentsnetwork.org, is filled with advice such as “Of course, if you can afford to buy in a place with good schools then by all means buy.” (12) Though for most Californios, being able to make the rent, or mortgage, hangs overhead like the sword of Damocles.
Some have opted to jump ship and leave the state. For many, housing costs are just too big an obstacle to overcome in the quest for better family environs, including schools. From 2000 to 2009, the SF Bay Area registered a net outflow of 600,000 domestic migrants (mostly citizens, not immigrants). After a 5-year pause due to falling house prices from the Great Recession, the exodus resumed as shelter resumed its eye-popping California norm (house prices returning to 6x’s income, beyond the acceptable 3x’s). The 2016 losses for the whole state were on the order of 110,000, most of it from the heavily populated but very expensive coastal enclaves. (9)
Those “domestic migrants” – residents of one state moving to another – seem to be emerging from states with uniform ID: those with the adjective “high” before cost-of-living, taxes, crime, and regulation, and “low” for upward mobility and successful business formation. The usual suspects are California, Illinois, New York, et al.
Destinations are South and West — EXCLUDING CALIFORNIA! Look at the top and bottom of the chart below. The top is reserved for the welcoming states and the bottom for states that shed people like my dog does hair. (15)
Interestingly, the combination of escalating house prices and California’s hostility to suburban living is making for a return of feudal manorialism. A fleeing middle class, sensitive to rising prices for a family hearth, in combination with foreign immigration into the state (2.7 million “undocumented” live in the state – see 13 below), is resurrecting something resembling a lord/serf society. Two researchers characterized the situation like this: “Essentially, the model [for California] is that of a gated community, with a convenient servant base nearby.” (9)
“Convenient servant base”? Sounds much like “serf”, or maybe peasant, to me. “Gated community”? Sounds like “castle”, or chateau.
Is this a French manor from the Middle Ages or contemporary California?Gated development, Carlsbad, California.East Los Angeles neighborhood.
For many, moving for better schools and a more affordable roof most likely means leapfrogging the state entirely. But don’t delude yourself into equating a middle or upper class student body in a new state with a high quality education. Housing is cheaper but the vast majority of schools are likely, at best, to be only marginally better. The only real difference between the middle class kid and inner-city one is the poor kid’s path to mediocrity is a lot rockier. Yes, a mediocre curriculum and poor teacher training awaits all irrespective of better cars in the student parking lot or a student enrollment that’ll do the homework.
Students listening to Ernest Jenkins III in his Manhood Development class at Oakland High School. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York TimesSuburban school in school uniforms.
All schools draw from the same pool of teacher candidates and curricular resources. You’ll find the same textbooks on a home-schooler’s kitchen table as you will find in a Catholic school classroom and a suburban or inner-city public school. The vast majority of teachers are given a remarkably homogeneous college education and teacher training centering on the mind-numbing writings of John Dewey. The sameness is quite remarkable.
30 years worth of experience as a public high school and community college teacher has made me aware of the phenomenal uniformity of what is taught, how it is taught, and who is teaching it.
Two textbooks that were a staple of 20 years of high school instruction and widely adopted are displayed below.
A widely-adopted World History textbook.Ditto U.S. History text.
Over the years, textbooks have declined in narrative with a surge in graphics. Technical, thought-provoking theory has disappeared. Identity politics is amply displayed: for instance, out goes Henry Bessemer and in comes Mary Wollstonecraft. Much space is reserved for our historical sins as these crowd out the richness of debate over the nature of our federal system. Labor history is reduced to a Marxist distillation; excluded is the role of violent anarcho-socialists in some of that history. Immigration and immigrants, of course, are always saintly. The 1960’s reads as if it was cleansed through the censors of the radical left. I could go on.
For pedagogy, teacher trainees are immersed in the mind of John Dewey. Who’s John Dewey? He’s a turn-of-the-century socialist who wanted to turn the schools into factories for making socialists.
Prof. John Dewey at Columbia University.
He’s famous for such arcane mumbo-jumbo as “constructivism” and seemingly commonsensical “child-centered learning”. The “construction” in “constructivism” is simply the matter of raising (or constructing) the child’s receptivity to socialism. “Child-centered” is an assault on the established canon of western civilization. The child’s wants are the guide to instruction, not Plato, the Apostle Paul, or the Founders. The teacher as the adult in the room is to be replaced by the chaos of adolescent urges.
Howard Gardner dispensing his gospel in India.
On this foundation is built the everyone-wins-a-trophy philosophy of “multiple intelligences” via Howard Gardner. Everybody is assumed to be smart, but in reality nobody is smart … if you think about it. The whole thing is a levelling of all students. From this we get the dilution of the curricular core to include excursions into all the “intelligences” to the detriment of a traditional core. It’s conducive to “heterogeneity” and grouping in almost everything.
About that “grouping”, “cooperative learning” are watchwords. Kids are thrust together into groups of varying abilities – the “heterogeneity” thing – and responsibility is socialistically distributed. What better way to “construct” the new child for the socialist future? Keep this in mind as your kid comes home with stories of his or her classroom group.
Don’t think for a moment that AP courses are immune to these influences. AP Literature guidelines now reflect Dewey’s “child-centered” nonsense. AP US History deemphasizes a mastery of historical facts and their connections. They demand mature judgments from immature minds. Across the curriculum, we’re creating opinionated ignoramuses.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that our professional goal wasn’t Jefferson’s ideal of an educated citizenry. It’s about making good little Democrats — by Democrats, I mean the Democratic Party as part of the consortium of the world’s Social Democratic Parties. Read “socialist” for Social Democrat … mostly of the mild sort.
The kids’ minds have long been pried open to being college snowflakes and Antifa recruits. Intolerant and propagandized since shortly after becoming bipedal, many of them are now subjecting us to their partisan and ideologically-laced rhetoric. The rhetoric supplants mature thinking.
Listen to this exchange between a taxi driver and his youthful customer over a hula doll on his dashboard. Count the number of times political boilerplate and the word “offensive” is used by the female rider.
We are reaping the whirlwind as tantrums and thuggishness displace reasoned debate.
We are witnessing the results of 4-5 decades of a blinkered and tendentious instruction. It has penetrated nearly everywhere. Buying a home in a better neighborhood will buy you a preppy student body; it won’t guarantee you a education free of the bacillus. Fleeing a blue state to a red one won’t change the dynamic. A private or parochial school might only provide a safer and more accomplished route to mediocrity. Home schooling might be an option if the curriculum can be kept free of the college ed schools and government’s embrace of identity politics, an unlikely occurrence.
Education reformers are everywhere, and have been arising zombie-like throughout my career. Yet, reform seems to always originate from the same worn out premises. We’ve reached the point that real education reform may require us to ignore the reformers. Unless it happens, we had all better keep an eye on Tommy (see below).
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
Interesting and brief account of treating inner city school students: “An Inner City School Social Worker Shares Two of His Cases”, Howard Honigsfeld, Psychotherapy Networker, 7/28/2015, https://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/blog/details/607/therapy-strategies-for-working-with-underprivileged.
An account of the challenges in an Oklahoma urban school: “A look inside an inner city school struggling with multiple challenges, including ‘needing improvement’ sanctions”, Danniel Parker, The City Sentinel, 5/15/2011, http://city-sentinel.com/2011/05/a-look-inside-an-inner-city-school-struggling-with-multiple-challenges-including-%E2%80%9Cneeding-improvement%E2%80%9D-sanctions/.
Interesting advice in teaching inner city students: “4 Tips to Being a Good Teacher in the Inner-City”, The Libertarian Republic, 11/11/2014, http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/4-tips-good-teacher-inner-city/
Excellent maps showing a changing Los Angeles ethnic demography from 1940 to 2000: “Los Angeles County Ethnic/Racial Breakdown 1940-2000”, http://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=169073.0.
“White Flight Never Ended”, Alana Semuels, The Atlantic, 7/30/2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/white-flight-alive-and-well/399980/.
“Data shows how major U.S. cities are slowly re-segregating”, Kenya Downs, 3/7/2016, PBS NewsHour, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/major-u-s-cities-may-seem-integrated-but-not-for-long/.
A synopsis of John Dewey’s harmful impact on American education can be found in this critical review of Henry Edmondson’s book, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, Dennis Attick, PhD candidate in Social Foundations of Education at Georgia State University, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1061&context=eandc. The author is clearly supportive of the major tenets of Dewey’s education philosophy.
For an account of the most widely adopted textbooks in today’s America go here: “Widely Adopted History Textbooks”, American Textbook Council, http://historytextbooks.net/adopted.htm.
A summary of recent migration trends for California can be found here: “Leaving California? After slowing, the trend intensifies”, Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, The Orange County Register, 4/23/2017, http://www.ocregister.com/2017/04/23/leaving-california-after-slowing-the-trend-intensifies/.
Metrics of school quality don’t vary that much for schools within the same school district is asserted here: “Do Better Neighborhoods for
MTO Families Mean Better Schools?”, Brief No. 3; Kadija S. Ferryman, Xavier de Souza Briggs, Susan J. Popkin, and María Rendón; The Urban Institute, March 2008, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/31596/411639-Do-Better-Neighborhoods-for-MTO-Families-Mean-Better-Schools-.PDF. ** The metrics for measuring school quality were performance on state exams, the school’s poverty rate, and exposure to white classmates and students with limited English proficiency.
** “Our kids are still in early elementary school too but I think you will find the answer varies widely. Obviously… not ”everyone” can go to private school! I know some parents who have had their kids just tough it out at a not-so-great middle school, then get a scholarship for private high school. Others with more resources opt to start private school earlier on. And, even some high earning families I know chose Oakland public high schools including Skyline, Oakland Tech, and charter schools. Ultimately it’s hard to say before your child starts school, what type of high school will work for your family. That said, we chose our home based on both elementary and middle schools we liked, at least ”on paper” as you say, figuring high school was too far off to gauge.”; from “Moving for the Schools”, Berkeley Parents Network, August 2012, https://www.berkeleyparentsnetwork.org/recommend/housing/schools.
Ibid. From the segment “Moving vs. private school – how to make the decision?”.
“II. Where Do They Live?”, Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Research Center, 4/14/2009, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/04/14/ii-where-do-they-live/.
“5 facts about illegal immigration in the U.S.”, FactTank: News in the Numbers, Pew Research Center, 4/27/2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/.
“California, Illinois, and New York Keep Losing People to Other States”, Ryan McMaken, Mises Wire, 5/10/2017, Mises Institute, https://mises.org/blog/california-illinois-and-new-york-keep-losing-people-other-states
The Progressives’ zeal to mold people to fit an ideologically-driven stereotype is abundantly evident today as it was in the latter 19th century. Back then, the recipient of their benignly intended efforts – but with malign results – was the American Indian. Today, the target is the entire American population, if not the world’s. The modern Progressives’ gaze became vastly more panoramic as they substitute their judgment for the wishes of anyone directly impacted.
Connecting Progressivism’s dots between the 19th and 21st centuries isn’t hard. Progressivism wasn’t a product of spontaneous combustion. It’s got a lineage – or, if you will, a trail of tears. Its 19th century roots became evident just as one expansive civilization began to swamp a nomadic one. The Progressives of the era – call them “reformers” with their Obama-esque “arc of history” rhetoric – planned a quick transformation of the American Indian into rural gentry. The tinkering with humanity ensued and misery erupted.
Nathan C. Meeker, previously mentioned in another post, was one example of an archetype littered about the civilian branches of the U.S. government. Many were utopian, and near utopian, in outlook with a powerful confidence in their ability to engineer better human beings. The American Indian seemed to be the preferred guinea pig in their social laboratory.
Vincent Colyer
Another scion in the Progressive line was Vincent Colyer, the Indian Board of Commissioners secretary. In a 1871 “peacemaking” tour of New Mexico and Arizona reservations, he upset a happy arrangement for the Chihenne band of Apaches and all others concerned. They were ordered from their much-loved Canada Alamosa reservation (sometimes called Ojo Caliente) in the New Mexico territory to the more inhospitable Tularosa valley, a hundred miles northwest. Colyer simply substituted his judgment for the Chihennes. He would set off an Apache/US conflagration that would sputter on and off for 15 years and only ended with the capture of Geronimo in 1886 and decimation of half the Chiricahua Apache population.
Chiricahua Apaches, 1880s.Apaches on the San Carlos Reservation waiting in line for government rations, 1870s.Chiricahua prisoners, including Geronimo (front row, 3rd from right) being transported to Ft. Marion, Fla., 1886.
“Substituting their judgment” is a common trait of those consumed with the self-perception of possessing superior wisdom. It is the blind spot of the Progressive. Their unquestioning faith in the “expert” is without limit. Jump forward to the middle of the 20th century and we have “urban renewal”.
What started out as “slum clearance” ended up as slum intensification. Social planners – an established squadron in the ranks of the nomenklatura – substituted the haphazard arrangements of neighborhood residents for Sovietized housing monoliths and called it “urban renewal”. In 1954, they gave us Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis.
Pruitt-Igoe (actually Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments) just before completion and its first occupancy in 1954.
It didn’t last 20 years. By the end of the 1960s, it was uninhabitable and a massive eyesore. Its chief architect, Minuro Yamasaki, exclaimed, “I never thought people were that destructive”. The thing was demolished in 1972.
Pruitt-Igoe, 1970.Pruitt-Igoe, 1969.The demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in 1972.
If there was a FBI most-wanted list for such things, the following grandiose public housing projects would join Pruitt-Igoe (see 7 below):
Queens Bridge Houses, Queens, NYC. It was raided in 2005 as the home of the “Dream Team” drug syndicate.
Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago, Il. In an already crime-plagued city, Robert Taylor displays some of the highest rates of violent crime and gang activity in the city.
Jordan Downs, Watts, Ca. Crime and gang violence are its watchwords for today.
Magnolia Projects, or “Da Wild Magnolia”, New Orleans, La. Let’s just say that the place’s reputation isn’t conducive to raising kids.
Marcy Projects, Brooklyn, NYC. Rapper Jay-Z, a former resident, wrote the rap “Murder Marcyville” as an anthem to its atmosphere. Need I say more?
Cabrini Green, Chicago, Il. No list of the infamous should go without this lovely specimen. Prior to its closing in 2010, USA Today called the place a “virtual war zone, the kind of place where little boys were gunned down on their way to school and little girls were sexually assaulted and left for dead in stairwells.”
The benighted gaze of the “expert” isn’t limited to housing. They’ve destroyed entire swaths of cities in the name of “redevelopment”. A similar roster of the infamous could be constructed for this imperial march of eminent domain’s elimination of private property (see 5 and 6). Lost in the imbroglio is the unique character of a place, evolved over many years of human interaction, only to see it replaced by a modern sterility. This is devolution, not evolution, thanks to the Progressives’ “experts”.
Not happy with fiddling with the cities, under the guise of “climate change”, the “experts” want to bring to all of society what they brought to the urban landscape. Climate change is so protean of a concept that it will abet almost any government meddling in our existence. Now here’s a mandate for the know-it-alls.
California is the epicenter for this latest craze among Progressives. “Climate change” enthusiasms have made the place almost unlivable for anyone aspiring to the middle class. Utility bills and fuel prices are exorbitant. Solar panels are everywhere but that is only possible with a ponzi scheme of subsidies and utility rate manipulation.
The place is so regulated that even getting a plastic bag to carry your groceries to the car demands another purchase … or, alternatively, bring your own filthy things from home. Owning and maintaining a car is now a grueling experience. Illegality might await if you buy a water heater outside your air district. Expressing the desire to start a business could be justifiable grounds for an insanity declaration and commitment to a state institution.
And, of course, the tax burden is back-breaking. No surprise here since the expert-driven paradise is an expensive proposition.
The invisible hand of Adam Smith becomes a deadening hand if it is attached to a Progressive “expert”. In their wake, we have the plight of the American Indian, the inner-city poor, and the California middle class. If success is measured by failure, a place like Sacramento – or any blue dot on the 2016 election map – should have a hall of fame, or shame, dedicated to the Progressive “expert”.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
For a history of Apache resistance, read The Earth Is
Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, Peter Cozzens, hardback edition, pp. 358-415.
A good survey of early urban renewal efforts can be found in “The History of Hamlin Park Part VII: Early Housing Acts and Start of Urban Renewal”, Mike Puma, Buffalo Rising, 9/23/2013, https://www.buffalorising.com/2013/09/the-history-of-hamlin-park-part-vii-early-housing-acts-and-the-start-of-urban-renewal/
More on Pruitt-Igoe in wikipedia, “Pruitt-Igoe”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe
An early criticism of “urban renewal” from 1965 can be found here: “The Failure of Urban Renewal”, Herbert J. Ganns, Commentary, 4/1/1965, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-failure-of-urban-renewal/
More on “urban renewal” failures: “5 Disastrous Urban Renewal Failures”, Modern Cities, 3/10/2016, http://www.moderncities.com/article/2016-mar-5-disastrous-urban-renewal-failures-/page/1
More on “urban renewal” failures: “Redevelopment Wrecks: 20 failed Projects Involving Eminent Domain Abuse”, Castle Coalition, http://castlecoalition.org/pdf/publications/Redevelopment%20Wrecks.pdf
“The 7 Most Infamous U.S. Public Housing Projects”, Newsone staff, Newsone, https://newsone.com/1555245/most-infamous-public-housing-projects/
The book is a corrective for anyone wanting to go beyond politically correct fairy tales and the myths of manifest destiny. Naiveté is rampant alongside cruelty and bigotry.
Interesting to me is the now-familiar use of the momentary state of science to draw grand conclusions about people, such as the Native Americans (or American Indians, if you will). Couple that with “progressive” reformist zeal and disaster awaits.
Nathan C. Meeker
No better example can be found than the brief career of rookie Indian agent Nathan C. Meeker (above). A utopian down to his bones, it took him only a year to rile up the Utes as he impetuously and zealously embarked on the all-too-familiar crusade of socially engineering the Utes of Colorado in 1878-9 (pictured belwo). It would end in death all around, including Meeker’s own, the rape of his wife and daughter, and the near destruction of the Utes (illustrated below).
Utes in 1870s photo.Meeker’s destroyed agency in 1879.
Is there a lesson for us in this whole sordid affair?
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, Peter Cozzens, read pp 341-357.
Politically-inspired murder has spasmodically erupted throughout history, especially from the late 19th century to the present. Lately, it appears to be a more frequent guest to our political struggles. Intemperate discourse is all-too-common. Ramped up rhetoric, fueled by claims of vague and impersonal harms, has found expression in thuggishness, and even murder. Welcome to Charlottesville on August 12.
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane of the modern era. “The propaganda of the deed” (meaning: violent action as the catalyst for revolution) was all the fashion in anarcho-socialist circles at the turn of the 19th into 20th centuries. Assassinations, bombings, and robberies were the preferred means of activism of a violent element in Europe and the U.S. The mayhem was one of the prime motives for the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920’s.
The assassination of Pres. McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in New York, 1901. He would be executed in the electric chair later in the year.Luigi Galleani, anarcho-socialist shortly before his deportation in 1919. He was a loud and frequent exponent of the “propaganda of the deed”. Carlo Budda, brother of terrorist bombmaker Mario Budda, once said of Galleani, “You heard Galleani speak, and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw”.The Wall Street bombing of 1920, killing 30 people, was carried out by Galleani’s followers.
Individual and group violence has continued apace. Some of it spontaneous; some of it premeditated; and some of it less fatal, as in mere bullying and assault-and-battery. College campuses from Berkeley to Cambridge have become noted for the Antifa goons patrolling the corridors of higher learning.
More recently, taking it to new heights, was James Hodgkinson in his hunt for Republicans on June 14. On Saturday, August 12, James Alex Fields, Jr., plowed his car into crowd of counter-protesters killing one and injuring 19.
James Alex Fields, Jr., and his damaged car.
Are we approaching the Vietnam War era’s daily mortality counts? On the one side we have the wickedness of the tiki-torch carrying white thugs. Aggrieved by the alleged oppression of whites, they are on hair trigger for violence. On the other, we have the ready-made insta-mob of the consortium of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, et al. The scene is starting to resemble post-WWI Weimar Germany with its street battles of left and right gangs.
Berlin street fight scene between Nazis and communists in the early 1930’s.
It’s sad that both sides seem to be taking their cue from ISIS in Raqqa. The left had their Raqqa moment in June. The right’s imitation waited till August. The similarities are striking. Like ISIS defending their caliphate in northern Syria and Iraq, Hodgkinson preferred gunfire. Fields adopted the Nice and London method of political expression by simply smashing people with a vehicle.
It’s also sad that we have a president that can’t rise above any personal slight, no matter how slight, during these moments of sorrow. His combative nature muddies any attempt to have us rise to the “better angels of our nature”.
Mr. President, drop the twitter feed!
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and death: How a rally of white nationalists and supremacists at the University of Virginia turned into a ‘tragic, tragic weekend.'”, Joe Heim, Washington Post, 8/14/2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-timeline/?utm_term=.6ee9f78a1d31
What? “Man”? Have I committed a faux pas? Have I exposed my hidden longing for male hegemony?
“Man” in the title was meant to refer to “humankind”, not the archaic meaning fraught with all kinds of triggers for today’s amped-up sensitivities of some college millennials. No need to run for the couches and crayons. Please disband the tantrum mob. No harm was intended. The title merely rolls off the tongue easier without too many words and syllables. I preemptively apologize to the easily offended.
Obsessing over God’s gender has hit the divinity schools. To balance out the deity’s “correct” nature, should we have more images of God as a god-ette? Should the Sistine Chapel ceiling be repainted?
What I really mean to ask is, have we made ourselves God?
Now, with the pronoun battle put to rest (or maybe not), the campaign to invent new sexes – the waste product of divorcing sex, gender, whatever, from genitalia and chromosomes – has made a hash of our language. Confusion reigns and the hyper-sensitive are on patrol.
No such confusion, however, exists among the mostly urban sophisticates about the reasons for the boy/girl behavioral differences that would be apparent to anyone who happened upon a playground. While grudgingly having to accept some role for biology – genetic discoveries are too profound to completely ignore – in the nature/nurture battle, it’s really nurture now, nurture all the time, and nurture everywhere. Social circumstances occupy the pride of place for academic and big media drivel on the subject, the first step in the deification of the person.
The upshot of it all is the psycho-motor reflex among Progressive types to embark on the project to socially engineer away the differences, or to make our boys more like our girls and our girls more like our boys. To wit, make “man” – or “person-kind” if you will – the protagonist and prime mover in the Genesis story.
After all, it is asserted, we contrived the social surroundings and, therefore, must be willing to recontrive them more to the zeitgeist of today’s cultural nomenklatura. The endgame has no end, but is a perpetual crusade to blur distinctions, crown the person as the determiner of all reality, and disembowel institutions and anything old that confer responsibility and restraint.
The passion for the nurture thing lends itself to social fabrication. It is engineering with human beings as the raw material. God is no longer the clock-maker of all things. We are.
National Geographic magazine might be a bellwether of some cosmopolitan thinking on the subject. In the cover story “Genius” for its May issue, the author, Claudia Kalb, much expounds on the importance of social influences in the production of geniuses.
Really, really smart people, she proclaims, have abetting “social networks”. Those without, as in all our popularly-identified oppressed classes, suffer the lot of the forgotten. Women and the poor are two favorites. As Kalb writes,
“Throughout history women have been denied formal education, deterred from advancing professionally, and under-recognized for their achievements …. People born into poverty or oppression don’t get a shot at working toward anything other than staying alive.” (1)
The point has just enough of a kernel of truth to be dangerous. The call for coddling social networks is a blank check for all sorts of interventions to even the score. If women are handcuffed by the world, then spousal roles must be made to change, divorce made easier, the public treasury thrown open, paychecks additionally garnished, and volumes added to the tax and regulatory codes. The entertainment industry, the courts, and public schools are enlisted for the cause. Little goes unaffected.
Wonder Woman standing firm and erect, but with a physique that couldn’t crush a marshmallow.
Add a splash of science to the social ingredients and you can also relegate the baggage of moral restraint to the trash heap. Restraint was implanted by dad’s deadly glare, mom’s firm hand, and a pulpit’s fiery sermons. From there, it is embedded in the frontal lobes of the brain. Genius is correlated to creativity and creativity is generated by ignoring those frontal lobes, in Kalb’s rendering (2). I’m not so sure about Kalb’s causal train of thought but it does relegate the conscience to simply being an impediment to personal self-fulfillment, or “genius”. Once again, we have more fuel for more social fabrication to blast furnace away objective limits.
Nihilism becomes a factor of social production, or, more accurately, it’s about the annihilation of predetermined forms in favor of a freewheeling rejiggering of reality to match momentary fads of thought. Old time religion, the nagging voice of the old morality, marriage, and the dictionary must either face social expulsion or be contorted out of all recognition. As one scholar put it, the scorched earth is in the service of modern Progressivism’s ultimate goal: “the emancipation of the uninhibited self” (3).
The “uninhibited self” knows no restraint. Even chromosomes are no barrier to any thought, wish, or belief about ourselves. Don’t worry about science saying otherwise. The tent of science, faux or otherwise, is big enough to include people willing to wrap an aura of scientific truth around any self-conception. The gender revolution is born.
National Geographic magazine, January 2017 issue.
It’s a coup d’etat of the mind over the body. It’s a matter of a person convincing “ze-self” of being something in spite of their body saying otherwise. What’s next? Will transgender lead to trans-species?
Welcome to reptile man. Cosmetic surgery and tats can make your body conform to your self-image.
Progressivism is an ally in the “emancipation of the uninhibited self”. After all, what is Progressivism? In a nutshell, it is the rosy belief in the power of the state to actualize every person’s highest potential. The “highest potential” need have no reference to a deity. The “uninhibited self” is the new deity, and the referee of first and last resort of all things.
Even the limits of the economic principle of scarcity has no relevance in this universe. The state’s efforts at a takeover of healthcare, for instance, are about leashing the nation’s medical providers to the crusade. If you have a son living under your roof at age 26, the state will command your medical insurance provider to keep covering him. And for all those without insurance, the state will deconstruct the whole industry and throw open the public purse to further the fantasy that people have healthcare if they possess a piece of paper with “insurance” printed at the top. Actually, they have something with as much value as 1923 German marks ($1 =4,210,500,000,000 German marks) . What good is it if nobody will take it?
Children playing with stacks of marks and a man with a wheel barrow of marks to buy a loaf of bread, 1922 Weimar Republic, Germany.Post-Obamacare healthcare as government provides it for free to ever larger segments of the U.S. population?
What government is waiting to do for medical care it has done to schooling, motor vehicle management, and the ghetto. The cost of the “emancipation of the uninhibited self” comes in the form of destroyed lives, wrecked neighborhoods, and classrooms as incubators of good little Democrats and knowers of not much else.
4-6 hours wait time at California DMV offices after the state awards drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants.Inside the DMV office is worse.
Government can’t be the agent for liberating the self. The task is too gargantuan and the goal too pernicious. And there ain’t enough money. Maybe Dirty Harry of Clint Eastwood fame said it best:
“A Man’s Got to Know his Limitations” – regarding “man”, that includes the 2 God-created genders as well as the other 24 recently-discovered permutations.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
1. “Genius”, Claudia Kalb, National Geographic, May 2017, p. 48-49.
2. Ibid, p. 44.
3. The point was raised in an interview of Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, by Hugh Hewitt on July 4, 2016. The full conversation can be obtained at http://www.hughhewitt.com/dr-larry-arnn-4th-july-reflection-declaration-lincoln-dr-harry-jaffa/ .
In the article, she outlines the conflicting demands facing the Democratic Party. On the one hand, the party needs to recapture the middle-America working class. On the other, they are the party of coastal, urban, media, and academic populations for an obvious reason: it is the social orientation of the activist base and party elites. The people that man the phone banks, attend the rallies, donate money, and run the party are socially so far removed from the lives of ordinary working-class Americans. The core of the party has views to match the obsessions from these quarters. Which way to go – reach out to the neglected and despised, or stay glued to the base?
Some want the party to become more appealing to the working-class-without-college-degrees. Others, like Frank Rich, the party’s chief apologist and favorite economist, say, “Forget about ’em”. Read his piece “No Sympathy for the Hillbilly” in New York Magazine, http://nymag.com/…/frank-rich-no-sympathy-for-the-hillbilly… .
I don’t know how the Democrats can square this circle. There’s no way to make transgender bathrooms, the drumbeat of rampant misogyny and racism, climate-change hysteria, unrestrained immigration, a bullying multiculturalism, and socialism here/there/everywhere the key to an outreach program to anyone outside the Dems’ isolated demographic echo chambers.
They’ve got the wrong message and reputation for the wrong crowd. Good luck in reversing that.
Riots at UC Berkeley, Feb. 2, 2017, to protest the campus appearance of Milo Yiannopoulos.Gorsuch before the Senate Judiciary Committee, March 2017. (NBC News)
The Gorsuch nomination is a barometer of the condition of our politics. It’s a toxic environment of a lack of candor and a surplus of self-serving hyperbole. The very definition of a party partisan has gone through a transformation from party loyalty to ideological conformity. Heterodoxy in the parties has given way to orthodoxy. The fever is aggravated by the dramatic rise in the stakes. The breathtaking expansion of government power has exponentially increased the consequences and opportunities for those who wish to monopolize it. So much at stake and so many true-believers. No wonder Court nominations threaten to rip the republic apart. And, by gauging the reaction of Democratic Party activists to Trump’s victory, now the same is true of presidential elections.
“The Resistance” takes to the streets in – where else? – Berkeley, Ca.
How did we get to this sad state of affairs? For one, let’s consider the main legacy of Progressivism: the omni-competent state, or a government of virtuosos and unlimited possibilities. The Progressives’ faith in the “expert” means the deliberations of representative assemblies are more and more replaced by the deliberations of panels of hypothetical geniuses. The assumption is that the fortunes of humanity should not be left to the petty whims of politicos not in tune with the academic zeitgeist. The most undemocratic features of our constitutional order – the administrative agencies and courts – have feasted on this prejudice. Today, regulations govern more than laws, and judges have extracted prerogatives that were previously left to state legislatures and city councils.
Their legitimacy to rule doesn’t rest on the franchise but on their self-proclaimed knowledge and wisdom. When they or their politician advance-men lose an election, intelligence is said to be thwarted.
C.S. Lewis
The danger posed by such a narrow caste with pretensions to power was obvious to some. C.S. Lewis – writing at a time (1943) when Fascism was one of the popular versions of caste-rule, just as it was reified into a Luftwaffe bombing British cities – fingered the error in his essay, “The Poison of Subjectivism”. He wrote,
Many a popular “planner” on a democratic platform, many a mild-eyed scientist in a democratic laboratory means, in the last resort, just what the Fascist means. He believes that ‘good’ means whatever men are conditioned to approve. He believes that it is the function of him and his kind to condition men; to create consciences by eugenics, psychological manipulation of infants, state education and mass propaganda.
The rule of “experts” is the rule of perpetual busybodies, a class of people without second-thoughts. Humility doesn’t appear as a defining characteristic. Leave it to Friedrich Hayek, though, to bring them down to
Friedrich A. Hayek
earth when he stated, “No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society”. Expanding the field from a single person to a small group doesn’t much improve matters. Hayek asserts that markets, as large aggregates of individuals, know more than a small cohort of self-ordained wise-men. Failure results when power follows the false assumption that all pertinent knowledge is concentrated in a few.
Hayek’s lesson never caught on with our modern Progressives. The power of the centralized authority in the federal government, as gauged in 20th century federal outlays through Republican and Democratic administrations, resembles a ski slope — or, as Bob Hope would have said, his nose. It’s proof, once you start this kind of thing, that the government becomes a perpetual-motion-machine almost immune even to the best of intentions of those wishing to restrain it.
Stephen Moore, “The Growth of Government in America”, April 1, 1993, https://fee.org/articles/the-growth-of-government-in-america/. In inflation-adjusted 1990 dollars.
The incline continues into the new millennium in federal spending per household. The dip in 2009 was due to the end of many TARP bailouts.
Veronique de Rugy, “The Rapid Expansion of Federal Spending Per Household”, Mercatus Center, George Mason University, Nov. 1, 2010, https://www.mercatus.org/publication/rapid-expansion-federal-spending-household. In Inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars.
The federal government’s hyperactivity has distracted it away from its core Constitutional responsibilities like defense and managing immigration in favor of crusades like inflating our energy bills, directing our choice of light bulbs, a national sanctioning of sodomy as the basis for marriage, imposing a national license to take prenatal life, and dictating your elementary school’s bathroom policy. It’s so ludicrous, but nonetheless a sign of the times. Increasing federal power has intensified the battle over who’s to man (or woman) the federal parapets. Every election and Supreme Court appointment is freighted with dire potentialities.
The intensity of modern political battle has weeded out the faint-hearted and those lacking the zeal of the true-believer. A 2014 Pew Research Center study of party registrants illustrates the growing ideological polarization of the two parties. As they found,
The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10% to 21%. And ideological thinking is now much more closely aligned with partisanship than in the past.
Distribution of Democrats and Republicans on a 10-item scale of political values. Pew Research Center, 2014.
The chart shows a widening rift in 2014 in ideological purity among the parties’ rank-and-file.
Or, take a look at this chart from the same study. The mountain peaks for the Democrats (blue) shift to the left as the peaks for the Republicans (red) move right.
The same phenomena shows up in the halls of Congress (below). In the 93rd Congress (1973-4), there existed liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. By the 112th Congress (last bar graph below), they’re as extinct as woolly mammoths.
The party bases are uniformly polar opposites, and its reflected in the two Congressional caucuses. The leavening of other voices is gone. For nominees like Gorsuch, the Democrats’ howling base will push any Senator with a “D” after their name into rabid opposition.
Even the definition of “moderate” has shifted. Today’s moderate Democrat is only interested in some restraint in the party’s abortion blank check. Other than that, the vast majority are in lock-step with Mother Jones and the rest of the left-wing hive. Not good for any Republican Court nominee … unless a Republican president commits political suicide by presenting a choice who’ll gain the editorial board endorsements of Mother Jones and The Nation.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not decrying the vanishing “moderate” in both parties. It’s one thing to to be moderate in temperament, quite another to be moderate in your thinking. All-too-often the moderate thinker has a mind that resembles an attic. In it one finds a collection of mental bric-a-brac. Lying around is the anachronistic foolishness of grandma’s time alongside some of more recent vintage – all thrown up there to be accessed for the production of inane pronouncements.
But these “moderates” serve the purpose of forcing the core of both parties to come together to make political sausage. Their presence makes the art of governing easier, even if, as is more likely, the result is a continuation of the non-stop march to social and fiscal ruin. Remember the old adage of Republicans as caretakers of the Democrat-engineered welfare state?
Sen. Joseph Biden (left) leaning and talking to Robert Bork during Bork’s confirmation hearings, 1987. (The New Yorker)
Yet, the consequence of the disappearance of the muddled middle is no-holds-barred political war on nearly everything and in nearly every venue, including Supreme Court nominees before the Senate. The writing was on the wall when Robert Bork’s name came up in 1987. Ted Kennedy manufactured party opposition with the now-familiar chant, “He’s out of the mainstream”. Honestly, the “mainstream” for Ted is the blue hump in the previous chart’s last bar graph. Qualifications be damned; for the true blue like Kennedy, the ramifications are too important to be left to quaint considerations like “qualifications” and “bi-partisanship”.
After pioneering ideological reasons for blocking a Supreme Court nominee, the Democrats didn’t want to push their luck and swiftly approved Bork’s replacement, Anthony Kennedy, shortly thereafter.
In today’s political total war, everything is enlisted for the cause. The older self-restraint became the first casualty. Take for instance the filibuster. Talking a bill to death ended in the House in 1842 when the House became too large a herd to corral for meaningful work. It persists in the Senate, but rarely used for federal judicial nominations.
Here’s where it gets tricky for the Senate. There’s two types of Senate filibusters with different cloture (end debate and go to a vote on the issue at hand) requirements. To end a “legislative” filibuster, a three-fifths (60) vote is required by Rule 22. Ending a rules-change filibuster demands a higher threshold of two-thirds (66) … until Harry Reid in 2013.
To clarify, the old claim that it takes a vote of 60 to approve a nomination is inaccurate. A majority is required to approve a nomination. It’s just getting to the consenting vote that presents the problem. 60 votes are required to end debate (cloture) and proceed with the vote on the fate of the nominee.
As majority leader, Reid sidestepped the rules for ending debate (cloture) by motioning that Rule 22 requires a majority vote for cloture. Of course, Rule 22 says no such thing. The presiding officer rejected Reid’s intentional misreading of Rule 22. Having worked all this out beforehand in the Democratic caucus, Reid appealed to the whole Senate who voted to accepted his interpretation of Rule 22. A majority of Senators – all Democrats – voted to accept his reading of the rule in spite of its plain language. This is the “Reid Rule”, a method to change the rules of the Senate with only a majority vote.
Watch Senators Reid and the Republican leader McConnell speak to the matter in 2013.
Prior to the Reid Rule – or maneuver if you will – it was next to impossible to alter the operations of the Senate by changing the rules. Tooth fairies were more real than a 66-vote for cloture. Hellbent on getting Pres. Obama’s judicial choices past Republican opposition, Reid paved an interstate through any road blocks to his desired end: Pres. Obama’s goal to pack the courts with “living Constitution” wunderkinds.
A Progressive in a black robe is a dangerous person – dangerous only in a political sense, that is. A Progressive is impatient to change things and regards the Constitution, laws, and any stricture as wet clay to be molded to that end. One wonders why we should even bother to publish or put anything in writing. Separation of powers? What separation of powers? The delineation of powers in Articles I, II, III was made pointless. Applying the law in cases morphed into boundless interpretation following a witch’s brew of allegedly modern circumstances. The courts became super legislatures following penumbras rather than law. The possibilities are only as limited as a judge’s imagination.
Control of the courts, all of a sudden, became a high-stakes game. Everyone knows it. A state’s plebiscite to define marriage in a manner familiar to anyone going back to Emperor Justinian and further to Hammurabi – and maybe even to Lucy, our prehistoric ancestor in East Africa – could now be interpreted by jurists as something akin to the Nuremberg Laws. The beginning of life is not be defined by the people’s elected representatives but rather a majority of nine life-time appointees on a judicial panel in Washington, D.C. Conceivably, nothing is outside the purview of the judiciary.
With so much at stake, the days were numbered for the filibuster, especially in light of the gathering around opposing ideological poles in both parties. The only modern use of the filibuster for Supreme Court appointments prior to the new millennium was Abe Fortas’s attempted elevation from Associate Justice to Chief Justice in 1968 by Pres. Johnson. It occurred at a time when liberal R’s and conservative D’s still existed. As it turned out, opposition was truly bi-partisan and Fortas had a darker side of corruption. Not only did Fortas fail in winning his Chief Justice appointment, he was forced to resign his Associate Justice seat to avoid impeachment.
Pres. Johnson presenting Assoc. Justice Abe Fortas (r) as his nominee for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, June 1968.
The Fortas mess was an extremely rare occurrence in the history of the Senate filibuster for Court nominees. Even Clarence Thomas didn’t face one. We’d have to wait the dawn of the new millennium, after party orthodox purity was well under way, and judicial powers have raised the stakes so high, before the filibuster became a reliable weapon in ideological warfare.
The election of George W. Bush in 2000 incensed Democrats. He was considered by them to be a usurper after the hotly contested election. Immediately following the inauguration, the liberal hive was all abuzz. In January 2001, Bruce Ackerman, Yale law professor writing in The American Prospect, fearing a wave of conservative jurists, favored the Democrats’ use of the filibuster to block Bush’s judicial appointments. The judicial filibuster ball really started rolling after that.
Bush’s first 11 courts of appeal nominees never made it out of the Democrat-controlled Judiciary Committee from 2001 to 2003. To be fair, Republican majorities did the same to Clinton’s choices by 2000. Yet, widespread filibustering didn’t begin till 2003 and a slim 51-49 Republican majority. 10 appeals court choices were then blocked by Democrats with a filibuster threat. Bill Frist, the Republican Majority Leader, began to publicly talk of the “nuclear option” – ending the filibuster for judicial nominations – as Democrats’ use of the filibuster promised to be a frequent tactic.
The threat of the “nuclear option” faded after a compromise got the bulk of Bush’s nominees through in 2005. But blocking tactics without the need for filibusters continued through Bush’s second term as Democrats assumed control of the Senate in 2007.
When Republicans objected to Obama’s nominees in 2013, prior advocates of the judicial filibuster turned into vehement critics. Politics produces a bumper crop of hypocrites, and ideological zealotry sanctions a scythe to cut through anyone and anything to achieve a secular eschaton. What was done by the Democrats – invent a way to change the Senate’s rules with a simple majority and use it to end the filibuster for judicial nominations – will be picked up by the Republicans to approve an originalist on the bench.
Watch Senate Majority Leader McConnell exactly repeat Harry Reid’s 2013 maneuver to change the 60-vote threshold for cloture (end debate and vote on the nominee) in advance of the Gorsuch vote.
After this, the vote to approve the nominee follows the historical precedent of a majority to approve the nomination. The fate of Neil Gorsuch could have been decided on a simple majority vote if the Democrats eschewed the filibuster, as what happened to Clarence Thomas’s nomination in 1991. Now it’s kaput for the judicial filibuster.
One of the arguments against ending the filibuster was that the loss would put the last nails in the coffin of bi-partisan comity. News flash: comity was well on its way out since the Florida recount imbroglio of 2000.
We would see the increasing reliance on ad hominem politics occurring as credal purity came to characterize the parties. How many adherents of Hayek and Friedman still exist in the Democratic Party? Conversely, what about the standing of Keynes in the Republican Party?
The fate of ex-Democrat Phil Gramm of Texas is instructive. Gramm was a Democrat and a believer in the Laffer curve, two things that don’t comport in today’s Democratic Party. Like many such Democrats, their party’s hostility to anyone challenging the reigning statist orthodoxy drove people like them out. They became Republicans. It was a harbinger of things to come.
The Gorsuch nomination got caught up in this new political ecosystem. It’s a jungle with the courts as the new Tyrannosaurus Rex, with the administrative state in tow as clones. Their presence draws the attention of everyone.
The temperature once had a chance to cool when the state didn’t have such a large apetite. It’s different today. Control of the state is on everybody’s radar screen because the cost of playing blind and deaf may make you the meal. The stakes are too high for quaint niceties.
Maybe our chances for civility would improve if we scaled back the monster. But that would require the defeat of the Democrats’ statism. If true, a return of the Democratic Party to a more heterogeneous composition would be more therapeutic than a revival of RINO’s (Republicans In Name Only) in the GOP. Something to consider.
RogerG
Sources:
“Scalia’s Supreme Court Seat Has Been Vacant For More Than 400 Days”, The New York Times, March 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/15/us/supreme-court-nominations-election-year-scalia.html?_r=0
“The Poison of Subjectivism”, C.S. Lewis, 1943 essay. It can be obtained in Microsoft Word format here: https://calvin.edu/search/?q=the+poison+of+subjectivism&btnG=&site=calvin&client=calvin&proxystylesheet=calvin&output=xml_no_dtd&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=the%20poison%20of%20subjectivism&gsc.page=1
“Lewis & the Omnicompetent State (Part 1)”, Dr. Alan Snyder, professor of History, Southeastern University, Pondering Principles, Nov. 7, 2015, http://ponderingprinciples.com/2015/11/lewis-the-omnicompetent-state-part-1/
For a fuller treatment of Hayek’s knowledge problem see “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, Friedrich A. Hayek, The American Economic Review, Sept. 1945. A free copy can obtained here: https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society/
“The State of Disunion”, Lucas Rodriguez and Spencer Segal, Stanford Political Journal, Nov. 2, 2016, https://stanfordpolitics.com/the-state-of-disunion-901513b6b356
“Political Polarization in the American Public: How Increasing Ideological Uniformity and Partisan Antipathy Affect Politics, Compromise and Everyday Life”, Pew Research Center, June 12, 2014, http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/
“Polarization in Congress has risen sharply. Where is it going next?”, Christopher Hare, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, The Washington Post, Feb. 13, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/02/13/polarization-in-congress-has-risen-sharply-where-is-it-going-next/?utm_term=.e7cc91347bef
“A Filibuster on a Supreme Court Nomination Is So Rare It’s Only Worked Once”, Elizabeth King, Time, 2/8/17, http://time.com/4659403/neil-gorsuch-filibuster-abe-fortas/
“Filibuster and Cloture”, U.S. Senate website, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Filibuster_Cloture.htm
“George W. Bush judicial appointment controversies”, wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_judicial_appointment_controversies
“How Schumer turned against a filibuster he once tried to save”, Reid Pillifant, Politico, http://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2013/11/how-schumer-turned-against-a-filibuster-he-once-tried-to-save-009838
“How 52 Senators Made 60 = 51”, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Stanford Law & Policy Review, March 19, 2014, https://journals.law.stanford.edu/stanford-law-policy-review/online/how-52-senators-made-60-51
Could this be a typical PolitiFact.com newsroom cubicle as well?
One of the more important shifts in the sociology of professional employment is the increasing prevalence of college journalism graduates in the newsroom. And they seem to be pushing the profession to the left. Some undoubtedly will disagree but others have noticed, such as George Mason University’s Center for Media and Public Affairs. See this 2013 article from US News & World Report, “Who’s Checking the Fact Checkers?”(https://www.usnews.com/…/study-finds-fact-checkers-biased-a…).
Allison Graves, rookie PolitiFact reporter
An example of the trend is the background of the youthful Allison Graves, the rookie PolitiFact journalist who branded “false” Hugh Hewitt’s claim that the Obamacare exchanges are in a death spiral. She’s a creature of the University of Missouri-Columbia school of journalism – a 2016 graduate with a BA in journalism. She credits experience as city editor/reporter for the Journalism Department’s newspaper and padded her resume’ with “Copy editor/Nightside news editor” at “Fangirl the Magazine” (according to her LinkedIn page).
21-year-old rookies are now in charge of “acceptable” political discourse. Her involvement with PolitiFact is no act of serendipity. The school of journalism has a direct umbilical cord to PolitiFact. The school partners with PolitiFact in training young gatekeepers (see “How Mizzou Journalism Students Help Fact-Check for PolitiFact” on the mediashift.org website).
Prof. Mike Jenner and U. Of Missouri School of Journalism partnering with PolitiFact in a class session. (Stephanie Mueller/Columbia Missourian/AP)
This brings me back to my central assertion: the absence of a rich classical education among most college graduates is hampering their maturity of judgment. Therefore, their faddish leftism runs unchecked to the manifest disservice of the American public.
Unsurprisingly and generally speaking, parents strive to grease the skids for their kids’ future success. Particularly, middle class parents will drive themselves to near bankruptcy in order to guarantee their offspring’s advancement. Yet, when they buy into a nicer neighborhood to enroll junior in a “better” school, are they really getting a “better” school? There’s good reason to doubt that proposition. Much of the corruption in our schools has deep tentacles, and is no respecter of “red” vs. “blue” states, public or private schools, inner city or suburban schools, parochial or secular, and even reaches down into home-schooling. It’s equal-opportunity corruption.
