A big part of the problem is that the multiple ladders of success which have existed in American society are increasingly being collapsed into a single ladder, with access tightly controlled via educational credentials. More than 50 years ago, Peter Drucker asserted that a major advantage of America over Europe was the nonexistence of 'elite' educational institutions with overweening power over admissions to key positions in society:
"One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…"
American society today is a lot closer to accepting that claim than it was when Drucker wrote.
Another fine musing Perfesser. I agree that our libel and slander laws could use a deep updating; the only other option being, perhaps, the return of dueling which, may have to come first.
It is astonishing to consider the speed with which the Woke psychosis (not too strong a word I think) infected the American credentialed class though that in turn points to its origin, viz., the Academy. And if the Academy is the origin, how did that happen? Yes, the march of the Left through the humanities and the "social sciences" was known and observed with the requisite "tsk tsk" by the extant professoriate at the time it happened, and it was tolerated there, but now we have arrived at a place where Math and Science are denounced as racist and oppressive. Where free speech is racist and oppressive. Where any deviation from the Woke dogma is attacked, often with violence.
I think the blame can be placed on cowardice. Yes, plain ordinary, simple human cowardice. The leadership in the Academy are cowards as are most of the administration and professoriate.
Which begs the question, how then did cowards come to lead and administer the Academy?
Too many powerful unelected people in DC. The place should be shrunk until we don't have to care that people sell the United States to enrich themselves, because the grift will not amount to much.
No Idea how to do that. Perhaps bring back the spoils system....
And this is a very heavy lift. The people in DC and the surrounding counties like the way things are and will fight to keep it that way. Staying in their chairs is what they are good at.
There are a number of important factors, but this has got to be one.
The so-called ruling class' culture is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Fewer and fewer listen to, read, or watch the traditional outlets and thanks to an incredible explosion of alternatives presented by ubiquitous networks more and more are developing their own communities not manipulated by traditional gatekeepers. As decrepit institutions betray their self-serving objectives, new practices and priorities replace them. Those institutions, once gatekeepers due to their choke-hold on media and resources, are fading fast and the traditional elites are walling themselves off from the rest of the world out of desperation as much as anything else as their grasp collapses. I believe we are witnessing an explosion of creativity in every dimension; if you're following the traditional narratives you'll miss it for quite a while.
Fantastic! I had “parthenogenesis” on my February Bingo card for Glenn’s Substack!
Unfortunately, “meritocracy” appears to have become a dirty word in a growing number of fields, and has been replaced with “equity” (to make up for past sins).
We have been digging ourselves deeper and deeper into that era for the past fifty years.
Leftists are drama queens. Leftists constantly erupting in hysterics — male (girly men?) or female — rule the roost.
Racism! Patriarchy! Sexism! Rape on campus! Global warming! Christianity's bigotry! The reactionary average American! Republicans' hate speech and hate thought! US history, a litany of racism and oppression! All the founding fathers, hypocritical sonzabitches! All our ancestors, imperialist mongrels! Oppression of women, and gays, and transgenders!
(The only person, the only people, who come out positive in this (self-serving) world view are — surprise, surprise — the drama queens themselves! Also known as the wise men, and the wise women, arriving as knights in shining armor on their white steeds to fight for the victims and the martyrs of the world.)
Whenever there is drama — whenever there is a crisis (or the semblance of a crisis) — the left's drama queens win.
There must be constant drama — crises, if you prefer — or the movement loses momentum and/or comes to a standstill and/or dies out.
For my part, the various assertions and postures that make up so-called "woke" ideology are so incoherent, so ad hoc and ad hominem in nature, that I can't accept that the elites actually believe them as truths, monoculture or not. Searching for an explanation in human psychology, I end up at will to power refracted through a friend-enemy dualism as the only hypothesis that plausibly explains all of the evidence.
For instance: I believed in 2016, and still believe today, that this is only plausible explanation for HRC's candidacy. The Left wanted to install her in office to demonstrate that they could, that they had the power to do so. The frequent claims that she was the most qualified person for the presidency ever, or even that she was qualified at all, were so patently absurd that no one with any intelligence could possibly have believed them. The Left played every card in its deck to install her in the office, knowing that she was completely unfit, simply as an exercise of power.
Woke ideology is, or so I believe, merely a further extension of that will to power. The grievance olympics within it evidence the wills to power of its various separate constituents; it is a "popular front" that may or may not suffer the same fate as the original.
One level above the foundational, fundamental will to power is Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, a psychic channel for that will. The only thing that maintains the aggregate of woke factions in something resembling a whole is their acceptance of a common enemy, being all who refuse to uncritically accept and proclaim allegiance. Republicans generally, but mostly Trump voters and supporters--really, anyone who refuses to categorically denounce Trump in the prescribed manner--are the organizing center for that deep-seated emotion. How else to explain how it is that political principles once associated with the pre-Trump Right (regardless of party affiliation)--racial segregation, an almost colonial, imperial obsession with "democracy promotion" via the sword--are now tenets of the political Left? How else to explain the sheer, murderous hatred shown by the political Left to the political Right, a hatred unique in my lifetime if not all time.
I have little confidence that Glenn's prescriptions for defanging the elite monoculture will take. I think the only effective way to reduce their power is to reduce/remove/destroy the apparatus by which it is exercised; namely, the state (federal government agencies) and the universities (cut off their oxygen supply of federal money in all its forms). Elites and the woke will always be with us; what is to be done is limiting their reach.
Good ideas all around, but moral decay stands in the way, and it is very hard to turn around.
We won't get tort reform because so many people, consciously or otherwise, picture themselves as beneficiaries of suits against deep pocket corporations. We accept billions of dollars in unnecessary cost, and huge damage to institutions and corporations, hoping that one day one of those class action suits will pay off for someone other than the lawyers.
We won't get reform of government corruption for similar reasons. In our quest for perpetual childhood, it just sounds so good to have someone else take responsibility. The next program will surely benefit me!
So we are squandering the wealth and security accumulated by the greatest economic engine in history and the sacrifice of generations of quiet heroes.
That will work until nobody wants our money, or our enemies decide to strike. History is instructive...
Excellent analysis of the problem at the top. However, your prescriptions about what “should” be done rely largely on the very institutions that have created this monster. Ideally, the common people could provide guardrails via elections, buying habits, protests, etc., but that is unlikely since the monoculture provides just enough bread and circuses to keep the proles fat, dumb, and happy. Historically, I’m afraid, the only way out of this mess is a cataclysmic collapse of the entire system, involving a great deal of suffering and loss. On the bright side, such breakdowns are often followed by a slow renaissance of civilization among the survivors. Perhaps our best hope is passing along our values to our children and grandchildren so that those values can find root in some distant culture, and the rebuilding can begin.
Diversicrats are all about DEI until a pipe breaks or they get a flat tire. Then suddenly they're dependent on some rando—regardless of skin color or "gender"—with the right wrench to fix the damage.
There is a problem of competition in many regions of our society. And I don’t mean … We need more competition. I mean … We need competition.
From corporate cost targets to middle management hires to state government vs federal government dollars, the means and terms of competition have been set by the progressive left. The clerisy is merely the best at competing in this milieu - they are sophists trained in empty rhetoric and virtue signaling, and their rise is not measured by competence and achievement, but by cocktail party invitations and the politics of pull.
And there is seemingly no downside to ignoring competence: in the latest instance, Norfolk Southern engineers warned about train length, engine power, and payload, but were ignored in favor of balance sheet arithmetic. But who thinks that heads will actually roll or that things will actually change? Meanwhile the trained monkeys of the media look to …. Mayor Pete. He has never built anything, accomplished anything, created anything, or fixed anything, but our betters still look to the federal government to step into the competence breach with Speeches and Comforting Words and the appearance of competence.
The game is stacked against the achievers and the doers. Too much money is controlled by too many people who have little or no understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Here’s a thought experiment: change college exams to oral exams and practicals. I would bet that, on average, every state school’s test scores ( in stem and out) would increase, while Ivy League scores would decline. Ivy League students aren’t necessarily NOT intelligent, but they are better than most at taking tests and padding their resumes with meaningless fluff. There is plenty of talent and intelligence in America, but it can’t rise got the top in a game that is scored by PowerPoint presentations and virtue signaling.
Excellent points about the monoculture among today's American elites. We should not only presume, but assert, that this monoculture has made our elites less trustworthy. There is plenty of evidence to support that assertion, so let's adopt it as established fact and move on. I no longer feel the need to "prove" that our elites aren't trustworthy, and neither should we.
We should also assert that the elites need to be constrained. State legislatures can constrain out-of-control elites in state universities in a variety of ways. Defund them. Proclaim that we plan to spend the money currently going to DEI bureaucrats for police, schools or nurses instead. Let the elites convince voters that's the wrong thing to do.
A critical mass, if not a majority, of Americans are tired of wokeness and arrogant, entitled elites. Let's be their voice. We should realize that, now, we have the high ground. Let's act like it.
Just wanted to say I subscribed today in gratitude for the years of enjoyment you have given me through the Instapundit site, especially the Open Thread where I appear almost nightly as "Biff"
The dirty little secret is that there are more college seats, than qualified college students. If your child is pretty smart, he can go almost anywhere and succeed, and a lot of schools will give scholarship money if you can improve the school's averages. Meaning, if you're paying full tuition, you don't belong there.
Another secret is that the quality of a school's education has a lot to do with the intelligence and high school preparation of the students themselves. So at this point, "elite" colleges are only that way because lots of smart kids go there. You don't have to be an extremely talented Calculus I teacher if most of your students already got a 5 on the AP Calculus exam. A lot of schools that have been considered "elite" are sabotaging themselves by turning away the best and brightest applicants and admitting kids with lower scores and grades. Their elite status is already fading and will likely continue to fade.
And then there is the hostility of a lot of schools toward men, whites, Christians, straight people etc. Why in the world would anyone overpay to send his kids to one of those schools when there are hundreds maybe thousands of schools that are nonwoke?
The solution is simple: let the market kill off the bad schools, and pressure the state legislature to cut funding at schools where enrollment is declining. We're at a rough point where the quality of Ivy grads is declining, but they still have enough shininess to get good jobs. Send your kids to places like Asbury, or Faulkner rather than Stanford, Rose Hulman, Michigan, Vanderbilt. It's not rocket science!
A big part of the problem is that the multiple ladders of success which have existed in American society are increasingly being collapsed into a single ladder, with access tightly controlled via educational credentials. More than 50 years ago, Peter Drucker asserted that a major advantage of America over Europe was the nonexistence of 'elite' educational institutions with overweening power over admissions to key positions in society:
"One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…"
American society today is a lot closer to accepting that claim than it was when Drucker wrote.
More excepts from Drucker on education here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/26133.html
Another fine musing Perfesser. I agree that our libel and slander laws could use a deep updating; the only other option being, perhaps, the return of dueling which, may have to come first.
It is astonishing to consider the speed with which the Woke psychosis (not too strong a word I think) infected the American credentialed class though that in turn points to its origin, viz., the Academy. And if the Academy is the origin, how did that happen? Yes, the march of the Left through the humanities and the "social sciences" was known and observed with the requisite "tsk tsk" by the extant professoriate at the time it happened, and it was tolerated there, but now we have arrived at a place where Math and Science are denounced as racist and oppressive. Where free speech is racist and oppressive. Where any deviation from the Woke dogma is attacked, often with violence.
I think the blame can be placed on cowardice. Yes, plain ordinary, simple human cowardice. The leadership in the Academy are cowards as are most of the administration and professoriate.
Which begs the question, how then did cowards come to lead and administer the Academy?
Clear thinking Professor, very well written. Keep it up.
Great Topic! Thanks Glenn.
Too many powerful unelected people in DC. The place should be shrunk until we don't have to care that people sell the United States to enrich themselves, because the grift will not amount to much.
No Idea how to do that. Perhaps bring back the spoils system....
And this is a very heavy lift. The people in DC and the surrounding counties like the way things are and will fight to keep it that way. Staying in their chairs is what they are good at.
There are a number of important factors, but this has got to be one.
The so-called ruling class' culture is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Fewer and fewer listen to, read, or watch the traditional outlets and thanks to an incredible explosion of alternatives presented by ubiquitous networks more and more are developing their own communities not manipulated by traditional gatekeepers. As decrepit institutions betray their self-serving objectives, new practices and priorities replace them. Those institutions, once gatekeepers due to their choke-hold on media and resources, are fading fast and the traditional elites are walling themselves off from the rest of the world out of desperation as much as anything else as their grasp collapses. I believe we are witnessing an explosion of creativity in every dimension; if you're following the traditional narratives you'll miss it for quite a while.
Fantastic! I had “parthenogenesis” on my February Bingo card for Glenn’s Substack!
Unfortunately, “meritocracy” appears to have become a dirty word in a growing number of fields, and has been replaced with “equity” (to make up for past sins).
This is a hard, hard time for the Republic.
We live in the era of the Drama Queen.
We have been digging ourselves deeper and deeper into that era for the past fifty years.
Leftists are drama queens. Leftists constantly erupting in hysterics — male (girly men?) or female — rule the roost.
Racism! Patriarchy! Sexism! Rape on campus! Global warming! Christianity's bigotry! The reactionary average American! Republicans' hate speech and hate thought! US history, a litany of racism and oppression! All the founding fathers, hypocritical sonzabitches! All our ancestors, imperialist mongrels! Oppression of women, and gays, and transgenders!
(The only person, the only people, who come out positive in this (self-serving) world view are — surprise, surprise — the drama queens themselves! Also known as the wise men, and the wise women, arriving as knights in shining armor on their white steeds to fight for the victims and the martyrs of the world.)
Whenever there is drama — whenever there is a crisis (or the semblance of a crisis) — the left's drama queens win.
There must be constant drama — crises, if you prefer — or the movement loses momentum and/or comes to a standstill and/or dies out.
…/…
https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-era-of-drama-queens-every-crisis-is.html
For my part, the various assertions and postures that make up so-called "woke" ideology are so incoherent, so ad hoc and ad hominem in nature, that I can't accept that the elites actually believe them as truths, monoculture or not. Searching for an explanation in human psychology, I end up at will to power refracted through a friend-enemy dualism as the only hypothesis that plausibly explains all of the evidence.
For instance: I believed in 2016, and still believe today, that this is only plausible explanation for HRC's candidacy. The Left wanted to install her in office to demonstrate that they could, that they had the power to do so. The frequent claims that she was the most qualified person for the presidency ever, or even that she was qualified at all, were so patently absurd that no one with any intelligence could possibly have believed them. The Left played every card in its deck to install her in the office, knowing that she was completely unfit, simply as an exercise of power.
Woke ideology is, or so I believe, merely a further extension of that will to power. The grievance olympics within it evidence the wills to power of its various separate constituents; it is a "popular front" that may or may not suffer the same fate as the original.
One level above the foundational, fundamental will to power is Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, a psychic channel for that will. The only thing that maintains the aggregate of woke factions in something resembling a whole is their acceptance of a common enemy, being all who refuse to uncritically accept and proclaim allegiance. Republicans generally, but mostly Trump voters and supporters--really, anyone who refuses to categorically denounce Trump in the prescribed manner--are the organizing center for that deep-seated emotion. How else to explain how it is that political principles once associated with the pre-Trump Right (regardless of party affiliation)--racial segregation, an almost colonial, imperial obsession with "democracy promotion" via the sword--are now tenets of the political Left? How else to explain the sheer, murderous hatred shown by the political Left to the political Right, a hatred unique in my lifetime if not all time.
I have little confidence that Glenn's prescriptions for defanging the elite monoculture will take. I think the only effective way to reduce their power is to reduce/remove/destroy the apparatus by which it is exercised; namely, the state (federal government agencies) and the universities (cut off their oxygen supply of federal money in all its forms). Elites and the woke will always be with us; what is to be done is limiting their reach.
Good ideas all around, but moral decay stands in the way, and it is very hard to turn around.
We won't get tort reform because so many people, consciously or otherwise, picture themselves as beneficiaries of suits against deep pocket corporations. We accept billions of dollars in unnecessary cost, and huge damage to institutions and corporations, hoping that one day one of those class action suits will pay off for someone other than the lawyers.
We won't get reform of government corruption for similar reasons. In our quest for perpetual childhood, it just sounds so good to have someone else take responsibility. The next program will surely benefit me!
So we are squandering the wealth and security accumulated by the greatest economic engine in history and the sacrifice of generations of quiet heroes.
That will work until nobody wants our money, or our enemies decide to strike. History is instructive...
Excellent analysis of the problem at the top. However, your prescriptions about what “should” be done rely largely on the very institutions that have created this monster. Ideally, the common people could provide guardrails via elections, buying habits, protests, etc., but that is unlikely since the monoculture provides just enough bread and circuses to keep the proles fat, dumb, and happy. Historically, I’m afraid, the only way out of this mess is a cataclysmic collapse of the entire system, involving a great deal of suffering and loss. On the bright side, such breakdowns are often followed by a slow renaissance of civilization among the survivors. Perhaps our best hope is passing along our values to our children and grandchildren so that those values can find root in some distant culture, and the rebuilding can begin.
Diversicrats are all about DEI until a pipe breaks or they get a flat tire. Then suddenly they're dependent on some rando—regardless of skin color or "gender"—with the right wrench to fix the damage.
There is a problem of competition in many regions of our society. And I don’t mean … We need more competition. I mean … We need competition.
From corporate cost targets to middle management hires to state government vs federal government dollars, the means and terms of competition have been set by the progressive left. The clerisy is merely the best at competing in this milieu - they are sophists trained in empty rhetoric and virtue signaling, and their rise is not measured by competence and achievement, but by cocktail party invitations and the politics of pull.
And there is seemingly no downside to ignoring competence: in the latest instance, Norfolk Southern engineers warned about train length, engine power, and payload, but were ignored in favor of balance sheet arithmetic. But who thinks that heads will actually roll or that things will actually change? Meanwhile the trained monkeys of the media look to …. Mayor Pete. He has never built anything, accomplished anything, created anything, or fixed anything, but our betters still look to the federal government to step into the competence breach with Speeches and Comforting Words and the appearance of competence.
The game is stacked against the achievers and the doers. Too much money is controlled by too many people who have little or no understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Here’s a thought experiment: change college exams to oral exams and practicals. I would bet that, on average, every state school’s test scores ( in stem and out) would increase, while Ivy League scores would decline. Ivy League students aren’t necessarily NOT intelligent, but they are better than most at taking tests and padding their resumes with meaningless fluff. There is plenty of talent and intelligence in America, but it can’t rise got the top in a game that is scored by PowerPoint presentations and virtue signaling.
Excellent points about the monoculture among today's American elites. We should not only presume, but assert, that this monoculture has made our elites less trustworthy. There is plenty of evidence to support that assertion, so let's adopt it as established fact and move on. I no longer feel the need to "prove" that our elites aren't trustworthy, and neither should we.
We should also assert that the elites need to be constrained. State legislatures can constrain out-of-control elites in state universities in a variety of ways. Defund them. Proclaim that we plan to spend the money currently going to DEI bureaucrats for police, schools or nurses instead. Let the elites convince voters that's the wrong thing to do.
A critical mass, if not a majority, of Americans are tired of wokeness and arrogant, entitled elites. Let's be their voice. We should realize that, now, we have the high ground. Let's act like it.
Just wanted to say I subscribed today in gratitude for the years of enjoyment you have given me through the Instapundit site, especially the Open Thread where I appear almost nightly as "Biff"
A thoughtful beginning to a national conversation on "what to do about it"...
-Foo
The dirty little secret is that there are more college seats, than qualified college students. If your child is pretty smart, he can go almost anywhere and succeed, and a lot of schools will give scholarship money if you can improve the school's averages. Meaning, if you're paying full tuition, you don't belong there.
Another secret is that the quality of a school's education has a lot to do with the intelligence and high school preparation of the students themselves. So at this point, "elite" colleges are only that way because lots of smart kids go there. You don't have to be an extremely talented Calculus I teacher if most of your students already got a 5 on the AP Calculus exam. A lot of schools that have been considered "elite" are sabotaging themselves by turning away the best and brightest applicants and admitting kids with lower scores and grades. Their elite status is already fading and will likely continue to fade.
And then there is the hostility of a lot of schools toward men, whites, Christians, straight people etc. Why in the world would anyone overpay to send his kids to one of those schools when there are hundreds maybe thousands of schools that are nonwoke?
The solution is simple: let the market kill off the bad schools, and pressure the state legislature to cut funding at schools where enrollment is declining. We're at a rough point where the quality of Ivy grads is declining, but they still have enough shininess to get good jobs. Send your kids to places like Asbury, or Faulkner rather than Stanford, Rose Hulman, Michigan, Vanderbilt. It's not rocket science!