the president’s demagoguery did agitate the constituencies that matter most: the pro-Obama media, the even more pro-Obama media, and Europeans (who, let’s face it, are just more soignée than we are). Judging by my Facebook feed, he’s doing a pretty good job of getting his rank and file followers to mouth the appropriate slogans as well.
But I think Pruden is missing a piece of good news in all this. Obama has also demonstrated the limits of propaganda that was perfected in the era of totalitarianism. It was easy for FDR to make a crude campaign against the court stick because (sorry, Greatest Generation) Americans back then were across the board less educated and less skeptical, and they had access to a universe of information so small that, by the standards of 2012, it can barely be said to have existed.
Last month, an ABC News/Washington Post poll indicated nearly 70 percent of Americans believed the Court should strike down the individual mandate or the entire PPACA. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll also showed majority belief that the mandate was unconstitutional. I don’t read too much into that. (Among the many ways we’re smarter than our ancestors is that we’re more skeptical of opinion polling.) But if you had taken a similar poll taken in 1935, the majority of responses to a question about judicial review and constitutionality under either the commerce clause or the necessary and proper doctrine would have been “Huh?” That Obama is out of his depth just shows again that he’s everything Bill Clinton wasn’t: inflexible, intellectually lazy, and tied to a vision of America the rest of the country stopped caring about decades ago.
We’re just not as stupid and ignorant as they wish we were. Or they are.
This doesn’t just happen on the Left Coast. The University of North Carolina at Wilmington saved some money by lumping together two science departments and raised spending on its five diversity-multicultural offices.
But, to quote George W. Bush, is our students learning? Not very much, concludes the California Association of Scholars in its 87-page study of the University of California system.
Students aren’t required to study American history or Western civilization. But they’re subjected to a lot of political indoctrination by leftist activists. “Far too many” have not learned to write effectively to read “a reasonably complex book.”
“In recent years, study after study has found that a college education no longer does what it once did and should do,” the report concludes. “Students are being asked to pay considerably more and get considerably less.”
That’s the sort of thing that happens when you pump money into an insular system and don’t hold its leaders accountable for results.
And man, that’s an unflattering picture of Sherry Lansing. She looks like she’s auditioning for the Walking Dead.
In sum, the left systematically has dumbed its side down, to the point where supposedly well-educated elites are untrained and unaware of our country’s history and constitutional traditions. The left thinks words have no fixed meaning (health care and health insurance, are close enough, so they insist we can define the latter to be the former.) The liberal elites have a poor grounding in market economics so they swallow the idea that health-care insurance is “unique” because others’ purchases affect your cost of goods. (Surprise: all markets operate this way.) They advance illogical and counterfactual arguments (e.g., withdrawing a 100 percent subsidy for health care to seniors is a “mandate”) because they are unused to vigorous debate that upsets their preferences dressed up in a thin veil of factual distortion. (Sorry, taking away a freebie is not remotely the same in logic or in law as requiring you purchase something.)
Conservatives, well aware of the intellectual deterioration of liberal institutions, have spent decades pursing supplemental education in think tanks, the speeches and writings of public intellectuals (e.g., Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson), professional organizations (e.g., the Federalist society) and classrooms of intellectually rigorous scholars (e.g., Robert P. George, Harvey Mansfield and Richard Epstein). In doing so, they sharpened their rhetorical kills, versed themselves in history and political philosophy, and prepared themselves for intellectual combat against those who had rejected the idea of objective meaning, be it in literature or the Constitution. In moments like the Supreme Court argument we see how vast is the gulf between conservative and liberal elites.
The liberalization of the American educational establishment has been a colossal failure. Liberals overtook the universities because (reasonably) they saw them as the way to shape a more progressive society in the long term. They insisted that they could set aside their own partisan beliefs and teach in ways that are fair to both sides. It is abundantly clear, however, that a progressive political mindset prevails in the American university system, especially at the elite levels. It’s more difficult for conservative professors to be hired or receive tenure, it’s more difficult for conservative students to speak up without fear of the consequences, and liberal students emerge from the universities with a terrifically superficial understanding of the conservative mindset — and American society is the poorer for it.
When you look at the three values that conservatives (according to Haidt) honor but liberals do not — loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity — these are precisely the values that are flouted in the precincts of American academe. The result is a more impoverished moral imagination amongst students, a stubborn inability to understand the beliefs and the motives of conservatives, and thus the imputation of nefarious motives to those irrational conservatives who do not see things in the ways the illuminati do. If you don’t believe that this has contributed to the partisanship we’ve observed in recent years — particularly the exceedingly nasty way in which liberals in general have responded to the Tea Party movement, to social conservatives and generally to anyone who refers too much to moral sanctity and loyalty to American traditions and institutions, then I think you’re wearing exactly the kind of blinders Haidt talks about.
I never took it, but here’s a guy who retook it at age 35. The analytic geometry question was easy for me, but I didn’t take the time to try to figure out the covered polygon. I assume I’d probably do pretty well on it, even now.
How did I get two degrees from Ann Arbor without taking the SAT? By spending the first two years at community college.
And boy, can I identify with this:
Because I work on a computer like normal human beings, I’d forgotten how painful it can be to write in longhand for long stretches of time. I know it’s not as bad as digging trenches in the Amazon, but still—it’s AGONY. Your neck gets sore from staring down. You get that weird dent in your middle finger and thumb from pressing the pencil too hard. Everything around you starts to smell like old pencil shavings. This is why I fucking hated blue-book exams in high school and college. It wasn’t that I had to study, or that I had to think on the fly. It was the hard LABOR of it all. Every time I finished a blue-book exam in school, I felt as if I had just moved a cord of firewood. Many times, I would hurry up and try and finish the essay early, just so that I could stop writing and rest. It’s amazing, when you think about it. You spend a whole semester studying for some test, and then you rush it because you just want five extra minutes to relax. That’s how my brain works. It’s not a perfect organ.
I am so fortunate that computers came along when they did. My writing volume would be a tiny fraction of what it is if I had to write long hand.
Backpage accounts for about 70 percent of prostitution advertising among five Web sites that carry such ads in the United States, earning more than $22 million annually from prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a media research and consulting company. It is now the premier Web site for human trafficking in the United States, according to the National Association of Attorneys General. And it’s not a fly-by-night operation. Backpage is owned by Village Voice Media, which also owns the estimable Village Voice newspaper.
Attorneys general from 48 states have written a joint letter to Village Voice Media, pleading with it to get out of the flesh trade. An online petition at Change.org has gathered 94,000 signatures asking Village Voice Media to stop taking prostitution advertising. Instead, the company has used The Village Voice to mock its critics. Alissa thought about using her real name for this article but decided not to for fear that Village Voice would retaliate.
How could she think such a thing of those beneficent, woman-loving leftists?