After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (23 page)

Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”

That’s the argument, such as it is: “Affirmative action” discriminates positively—in favor of certain groups that add an unspecified richness to campus life. As we know, Michelle Obama fell into the latter category of

“black student.” But what about the “farm boy from Idaho”? In 2010, the Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and his colleague Alexandria Radford produced an analysis of applications for eight highly competitive colleges and universities.42 What was most revealing was the way “affirmative action” has progressed from mere race bias to ideological apartheid.

Espenshade and Radford found that participating in “red state” activities such as 4-H, ROTC, or the Future Farmers of America substantially reduced a student’s chances of being accepted by these colleges. “Being an decline 155

officer or winning awards” with such groups had an even more severe impact, reducing your chances of admission by 60 to 65 percent.

So, if you’re a white farm boy from Idaho, you’re already at a disadvantage compared with the Michelle Obamas and Sonia Sotormayors of your generation. And, if you participate in 4-H or JROTC, you’re only making things worse. And, if you hold a leadership position in 4-H, you’re pretty much doomed. Over time “affirmative action” and “diversity” have so corrupted the integrity of American education that it now affirmatively acts in favor of ideological and cultural homogeneity. Or as the blogger Kate McMillan likes to say: What’s the opposite of “diversity”? University.43

This is why the massive expansion of American education is evidence not of progress but of its exact opposite—its decay into ideological factory farms. It’s a progressive 4-H: Hogwash, Hypersensitivity, Habituation, Homogeneity—for the price of which you wind up in Hock. “Our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in,” wrote Angelo Codevilla of Boston University, noting the unprecedented uniformity of the new American elite. “Until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another.”44 The social engineers changed all that, imposing a single orthodoxy on their pupils. For the most part, “diversity”

is merely a sentimental cover for mediocrity. As Codevilla pointed out: Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that “the best”

colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. . . . The most successful neither write books and 156

after america

papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

It was interesting to listen to Candidate Obama lecture Americans on their failure to learn another language.45 The son of a Ph.D. and a Harvard-educated economist, young Barack went to a fancy Hawaiian prep school, and then to Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard. And he’s hectoring a guy who graduated high school in Nowheresville and shingles roofs all day about not speaking French or German? Well, what’s Barack’s excuse? The Obamas are the beneficiaries of the most expensive and luxuriant education on the planet. Where’s their French?

Well, they were too busy cranking out sludge about the “desparation”

[sic] of separationists, or whatever Michelle was droning on about at Princeton in unreadable maunderings all too typical of what passes for

“education.” Is the credentialing mill up to the job of producing an American leadership class capable of competing with those of China, India, and other emerging societies? Aw, we’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid. California’s teachers are the highest paid in the United States, and its classrooms are among the worst.46 But at least they’re expensive—why, the Robert F. Kennedy Community School in Los Angeles is the first schoolhouse on the planet to cost over half-a-billion dollars ($578 million, to be exact).47

The Credentialed Age symbolizes an important transition in society.

We’ve gone through those before, of course—from an agrarian society to an industrial society, and thence to the so-called “knowledge economy.” But, when you think about it, is the “knowledge economy” really that knowledge-able? It would seem improbable that any society could undergo the massive expansion of college education that America has seen since the Second World War, and either effectively impart that much extra “knowledge” or decline 157

create the jobs that require it. So, instead, we have witnessed an explosion in the ersatz-knowledge economy, where it is possible to pass one’s entire life in an entirely bogus occupation—such as “community organizer” or

“diversity consultant,” to name only the First Couple’s contributions to the scene. Addressing a group of financially strapped women in economically debilitated central Ohio, Michelle Obama told them: “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do. Don’t go into corporate America.”48

But isn’t “corporate America” what pays for, among other things, the Gulf emir-sized retinue of courtiers the average U.S. senator now travels with? And in what sense did the Obamas “leave” corporate America? Before ascending to her throne, the First Lady worked for the University of Chicago Hospitals. She wasn’t a nurse or doctor, or even a janitor. She was taken on by the hospitals in 2002 to run “programs for community relations, neighborhood outreach, volunteer recruitment, staff diversity, and minority contracting.”49 She was a diversicrat—a booming industry in Eloi America.

In 2005, by happy coincidence, just as her husband was coming to national prominence, she received an impressive $200,000 pay raise and was appointed Vice President for Community and External Affairs and put in charge of managing the hospitals’ “business diversity program.” Mrs. Obama famously complained that America is “just downright mean,”50 and you can see what she’s getting at: she had to make do with a lousy $316,962 plus benefits for a job so necessary to the hospitals that when she quit to become First Lady they didn’t bother replacing her.51

Leave “corporate America” and get a non-job as a diversity enforcement officer: that’s where the big bucks are.

Abraham Lincoln, a predecessor of Barack Obama in both the White House and the Illinois state legislature, had eighteen months of formal education and became a soldier, surveyor, postmaster, rail-splitter, tavern keeper, and self-taught prairie lawyer. Obama went to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, and became a “community organizer.” I’m not sure that’s progress—and it’s certainly not “sustainable.”

158

after america

If he hadn’t become president, his resumé wouldn’t be anybody’s idea of a return on investment. His life would read like one of those experimental novels that runs backwards. But who cares? At every stage along the way, he got the measure of his guilty white liberal patrons and played them for saps.

President Obama now wants the rest of America to follow in his and Michelle’s footsteps. Under his student-loan “reforms,” if you choose to go into “public service” any college-loan debts will be forgiven after ten years.52

Because “public service” is more noble than the selfish, money-grubbing private sector. That’s another one of those things that “everybody” knows.

So we need to encourage more people to go into “public service.”

Why?

In the six decades from 1950, the size of America’s state and local workforce increased three times faster than the general population.53 Yet the president says it’s still not enough: we have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine.

Like many career politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured, or marketed any product other than himself. So quite reasonably he sees government dependency as the natural order of things. And in his college-loan plan he’s explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you’re a schmuck and a loser. In the America he’s offering, you’ll be working till you drop dead to fund an ever swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks’ vacation a year and retires at fifty-three on a pension you could never dream of.

Centralization, unionization, and credentialization have delivered American education into the grip of a ruthless and destructive conformity.

America spends more per pupil on education than any other major industrial democracy, and the more it spends, the dumber it gets.54 Ignorance has never been such bliss—at least for the teachers’ union. As for the students, nearly 60 percent of U.S. high school graduates entering community college require remedial education.55 In New York, it’s 75 percent.56 Obama’s proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent decline 159

guarantee of disaster. But, in his lavish, leisurely, over-lettered education, he embodies the failings of his class: credentialism isn’t going to be enough in the post-abundance economy, and 90 percent of expensively acquired college “educations” won’t see any return on investment.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

the feeLieS

Way back in 1993, in
The American Educator
, Lillian Katz, professor of early childhood education at the University of Illinois, got the lie of the land:

A project by a First Grade class in an affluent Middle Western suburb that I recently observed showed how self-esteem and narcissism can be confused. Working from copied pages prepared by the teacher, each student produced a booklet called

“All About Me.” The first page asked for basic information about the child’s home and family. The second page was titled

“What I like to eat,” the third was “What I like to watch on TV,”

the next was “What I want for a present.” . . .

Each page was directed toward the child’s basest inner gratifications. Each topic put the child in the role of consumer—of food, entertainment, gifts, and recreation. Not once was the child asked to play the role of producer, investigator, initiator, explorer, experimenter, or problem-solver.57

Professor Katz recalled walking through a school vestibule and seeing a poster that neatly summed up this approach to education—a circle of clapping hands surrounding the slogan:

We Applaud Ourselves.

160

after america

And not for the Latin scores. Our students are certainly expert at applauding themselves, with levels of “self-esteem” growing ever more detached from more earthbound measures of achievement. A 2003 OECD study asked pupils of many lands whether they got “good marks in mathematics.”58 Seventy-two percent of U.S. students said yes. Only 56 percent of Finns did, and a mere 25

percent of Hong Kong pupils. Yet, according to another OECD study of the world’s Ninth Graders, Hong Kong has the third best math scores in the world, Finland the second, and the top spot goes to Taiwan (which didn’t participate in the earlier feelgood study, presumably because their self-esteem levels are so low they’re undetectable).59 Where do all those Americans so confident of their “good marks” in math actually rank in the global Hit Parade? Number 35, between Azerbaijan and Croatia. We barely scrape the Top 40 in actual math, but we’re Number One in self-esteem about our math.

Lillian Katz made her observations in the early Nineties. Fifteen years later, a generation expertly trained in tinny self-congratulation went out and voted for a candidate who told them:

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

There’s a lot of it about in the age of self-esteem. No satirist could invent a better parody of solipsistic sloth dignified as idealism than a bunch of people sitting around waiting for themselves. Hey, man, you’re already there.

What are you waiting for?

Many electors voted for Barack Obama in order to check “vote for a black president” off America’s to-do list. Framed like that, it sounds worthy and admirable. But one could also formulate it less attractively: they voted for Obama in order to feel good about themselves. Which is what

“celebrating diversity” boils down to.

As for feelings in general, Obama himself is the perfect emblem of the Age of Empathy. Unlike the hard-faced Bush regime, he “cared.” After all, he told us so. Asked what he’s looking for in a Supreme Court justice, he gave the correct answer: “The depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”60

decline 161

In a TV infomercial a few days before his election, Obama declared that his

“fundamental belief” was that “I am my brother’s keeper.”61

Hmm. Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year.62

If Barack is his brother’s keeper, why can’t he shove a sawbuck and a couple singles in an envelope and double the guy’s income? Ah, well: When Barack Obama claims that “I am my brother’s keeper,” what he means is that the government should be his brother’s keeper. Aside from that, his only religious belief seems to be in his own divinity:

“Do you believe in sin?” Cathleen Falsani, the religion correspondent for the
Chicago Sun-Times
, asked then Senator Obama.

“Yes,” he replied.

“What is sin?”

“Being out of alignment with my values.” 63

That’s one convenient religion: Obama worships at his own personal altar at the First Church of Himself. Unlike Clinton, he can’t feel your pain, but his very presence is your gain—or as he put it in his video address to the German people on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

“Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”64