We are witnessing a widespread crisis of faith in our progressive guardians of the last 30 years. These are the blue-chip, university-certified elite, employed by universities, government, and big-money private foundations and financial-services companies. The best recent examples are sorts like Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Robert Rubin, Steven Chu, and Timothy Geithner. Politicians like John Kerry, John Edwards, and Al Gore all share certain common characteristics of this Western technocracy: proper legal or academic credentials, ample service in elected or appointed government office, unabashed progressive politics, and a free pass to enjoy ample personal wealth without any perceived contradiction with their loud share-the-wealth egalitarian politics.
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The house of a John Kerry, the plane of an Al Gore, or, in the European case, the suits of a Dominique Strauss-Kahn are no different from those of the CEOs and entrepreneurs who were as privately courted as they were publicly chastised. These elites were mostly immune from charges of hypocrisy or character flaws, by virtue of their background and their well-meaning liberalism.
The financial meltdown here and in Europe revealed symptoms of the technocracy’s waning. On this side of the Atlantic, Geithner, Orszag, Summers, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Krugman, and Christina Romer apparently assumed that some academic cachet, an award bestowed by like kind, or a long-ago-granted degree should give them credibility to advocate what the tire-store owner, family dentist, or apple farmer knew from hard experience simply could not be done — borrow or print money on the theory that insular experts, without much experience in the world beyond the academy or the New York–Washington financial and government corridor, could best direct it to productive purposes.
But now they have either left government or are no longer much listened to — and some less-well-certified accountant will be left with the task of finding ways to pay back $16 trillion. Abroad, at some point, German clerks and mechanics are going to have to work a year or two past retirement age to pay for those in Greece or Italy who chose to stop working a decade before retirement age — despite all the sophisticated technocratic babble that such arithmetic is reductive and simplistic.
In the devolution from global warming to climate change to climate chaos — and who knows what comes next? — a small group of self-assured professors, politicians, and well-compensated lobbyists hawked unproven theories as fact — as if they were clerics from the Dark Ages who felt their robes exempted them from needing to read or think about their religious texts. Finally, even Ivy League and Oxbridge degrees and peer-reviewed journal articles could not mask the cooked research, the fraudulent grants, and the Elmer Gantry–like proselytizing about everything from tree rings and polar-bear populations to glaciers and the Sierra snowpack. A minor though iconic figure was the truther and community activist Van Jones, the president’s “green czar,” who lacked a record of academic excellence, scientific expertise, or sober and judicious study, assuming instead that a prestigious diploma and government title, a certain edgy and glib disdain for the masses, and media acclaim could permit him to gain lucre and influence by promoting as fact the still unproven.
Higher education is no longer affordable for many families, and does not guarantee well-rounded, well-educated graduates. A university debt bubble, in Fannie and Freddie fashion — together with the rise of no-frills private online certificate-granting institutions — is undermining traditional higher education. The symptoms are unmistakable: tuition spiraling far ahead of inflation; elite faculty excused from teaching to publish esoteric articles in little-read journals; legions of poorly compensated part-time instructors and graduate-student assistants subsidizing the privileged class; political orthodoxy as an unspoken requisite for membership in the club. An administrator is deemed successful largely for promoting “diversity” — rarely on the basis of whether costs stabilized, graduation rates increased, the need for remediation declined, or post-graduation jobs were assured on his watch. This warped system, which grew out of the bountiful 1960s, is now a vestigial organ, an odd-looking thing without an easily definable purpose. When will the bubble burst? If the four-year university cannot ensure its graduates that they will necessarily have a better-paying job and know more than the products of an upfront credentialing factory, why incur the $200,000 cost and put up with the political indoctrination?
Dear liberals
In the name of progress you have destroyed the traditional family structure.
In the name of progress you have wiped out traditional morality.
In the name of progress you have undermined any respect for authority.
In the name of progress you have removed childhood innocence.
In the name of progress you have dumbed down education.
In the name of progress you have demonised heterosexuality.
In the name of progress you have sent women out to work and deconstructed the role of men in society.
In the name of progress you have turned patriotism into a dirty word.
In the name of progress you have treated criminality as an illness rather than a moral failure of the individual.
In the name of progress you have smothered any sense of the sacred and the transcendent.
In the name of progress you have replaced self-respect and duty with rights and entitlements.
In the name of progress you have punished the hardworking, the self-reliant and rewarded the lazy, the indolent and the self-obsessed.
In the name of progress you have let your sheer hatred for western civilisation get out of control and made you embrace anything that is inimical to democratic values, no matter how destructive the results.
In the name of progress you have taxed and over regulated business so that it is all most impossible run a successful small business. But that doesn’t matter to you because you’ve always favoured big government over free enterprise anyway.
Through constantly trying to manipulated the economy and distorting the free market you have brought the west to is knees with unplayable debt, entitlements and public pension promises it can never honour
And now the rest of us are reaping the rewards of your ‘progressive’ agenda: chaos and, anarchy where the amoral, feckless, lawless underclass you have created are free to plunder, murder and comprehensively destroy the livelihoods of those who have supported them.
Lets face it you have done more damage to civilisation than Napoleon, Lenin or Hitler in your vain, short sighted and arrogant attempts to change society into some happy Eden where the great god government will care for your every whim and personal responsibility is a distant memory.
Conservative in London, you are helping to restore my weakened faith in the English. You have listed a very good detail of the ills which threaten the civilized world. The arrogance of the elite is so extreme that they think that "unpapered" workers are totally blind. Professional qualifications are now simply a joke.
Dear liberals
In the name of progress you have destroyed the traditional family structure.
In the name of progress you have wiped out traditional morality.
In the name of progress you have undermined any respect for authority.
In the name of progress you have removed childhood innocence.
In the name of progress you have dumbed down education.
In the name of progress you have demonised heterosexuality.
In the name of progress you have sent women out to work and deconstructed the role of men in society.
In the name of progress you have turned patriotism into a dirty word.
In the name of progress you have treated criminality as an illness rather than a moral failure of the individual.
In the name of progress you have smothered any sense of the sacred and the transcendent.
In the name of progress you have replaced self-respect and duty with rights and entitlements.
In the name of progress you have punished the hardworking, the self-reliant and rewarded the lazy, the indolent and the self-obsessed.
In the name of progress you have let your sheer hatred for western civilisation get out of control and made you embrace anything that is inimical to democratic values, no matter how destructive the results.
In the name of progress you have taxed and over regulated business so that it is all most impossible run a successful small business. But that doesn’t matter to you because you’ve always favoured big government over free enterprise anyway.
Through constantly trying to manipulated the economy and distorting the free market you have brought the west to is knees with unplayable debt, entitlements and public pension promises it can never honour
And now the rest of us are reaping the rewards of your ‘progressive’ agenda: chaos and, anarchy where the amoral, feckless, lawless underclass you have created are free to plunder, murder and comprehensively destroy the livelihoods of those who have supported them.
Lets face it you have done more damage to civilisation than Napoleon, Lenin or Hitler in your vain, short sighted and arrogant attempts to change society into some happy Eden where the great god government will care for your every whim and personal responsibility is a distant memory.
Amen brother Hanson; the times are unstable and exciting indeed. The exposure of the elite is like watching the Emperor march proudly down the street in his new clothes. They just have not caught on that we now see them as they are. However, I have to admit that a little more stability and a little less excitement might be nice, but I do not expect that any time soon.
Progressives, the new American elite, are convinced they are on the side of what is right and just. They don’t need evidence for this. They just know. After all, they are the smartest among us. Little people, the rest of us, have no right to question anything. Therefore, whatever they do or say in service of their ideals is right and just, despite the dismal outcome.
Progressives, the new American elite, are convinced they are on the side of what is right and just. They don’t need evidence for this. They just know. After all, they are the smartest among us. Little people, the rest of us, have no right to question anything. Therefore, whatever they do or say in service of their ideals is right and just, despite the dismal outcome.
I would love to see a moratorium in our government on graduates of Harvard, Yale and Stanford, especially those with law degrees. In addition, Goldman Sachs employees, past or present, should be no where near the reins of power.
It's the law degree thing that rankles the most. We need more people with actual, productive, real world skills.
Lawyers tend to be one-trick ponies at best. They are good at writing laws that must be translated by lawyers. That is one reason we get monstrosities like Obamacare. An engineer, scientist, or skilled tradesman probably could have written a more sensible, useful bill that took up about 1% as much paper.
Where do I sign up to revolt against all the incompetent people who run my slave life?
I'd rather not keep having them fine me two thousand dollars for jaywalking and then show up three hours after every violent crime because most of them are pension sucking cowards like the Ventura Police. (One of them, Borkjavic, literally told me that I deserved to get beat up over a verbal altercation and that it didn't matter that they tried to do a home invasion and assault me in my house...the people I got into a fight with were white and I'm brownish so that made me guilty and them innocent no matter what in the eyes of a high school educated steroid taking buffoon..good thing we give them guns and let them beat, shoot and bloodsuck us dry!)
This article is a disappointment from one of NR's customarily more incisive commentators, Victor Davis Hanson, and shouts of being 'mailed in'. Preconceived notions conclusions and sound-bite characterizations are duct-taped to a set of facts with little of the normal courtesy of analysis. The crisis of confidence that is shaking financial markets and political systems is about much more than lack of faith in a few conveniently chosen "usual suspects" (thank you, Mr. Gore, you may be excused now). It's deeper and crosses more boundaries of culture, social class, profession and perception, and its roots are deeper than widespread disaffection with Europe's overseers in Brussels and Strasbourg, and with ours here in DC - though without a doubt that disaffection plays a role. For conservatism to gain control of the narrative, those aspiring to speak for a conservative remnant and to speak truth to the inertial "power" of the conventional wisdom, more is going to be needed than a sermon to the converted that seems dashed off the preceding Saturday afternoon, between tennis and cocktails. Anyone who knows Mr. Hanson's writing knows he is eminently capable of better than this - and conservatives will need more trenchant analysis than this to prevail in the debate.
