Mark Zuckerberg in April of 2018 was quoted as saying before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. I would take it further. Any of the deep blue dots on the election map are, by definition, “extremely left-leaning place[s]”.
Today, almost any large institution or organization in our densely-packed urban nodes is likely to be an “extremely left-leaning place”. An example would be our tech giants like Google (or Alphabet, Inc). Daily, we are exposed to the socio-political biases of these “extremely left-leaning place[s]”. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF) in Montana was recently confronted with it. (see here)
Google employees at the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.
The RMEF had been running ads on Google for years. In April, they were email notified by a Google employee that it would be no more. It seems that Google has a policy against hunting. Somebody apparently did a Google search on the RMEF. The RMEF quickly appealed to the Montana congressional delegation and the rejection was reversed.
Whether Google has a policy in opposition to hunting isn’t the pertinent question. Our gaze should be directed at the Google workroom. What’s happening in there? I suspect, with good reason, that they have an “extremely left-leaning” population at work. To them, nature is a Disney cartoon; hunting is cruelty; and we should all be vegan anyway. Hippie food stores and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation don’t go together.
Just another reminder that urbanity-as-in-citified is synonymous with eco-zealotry, gender fluidity, and Bernie bros/gals.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) pegged. Yes he did, without ever laying eyes on the spirited millennial.
Solzhenitsyn in his 3-volume novel on Russia in the runup to the Bolshevik Revolution (August 1914, November 1916, and March 1917) sought to explain how Russia could turn into the 74-year nightmare called the Soviet Union. In so doing, he spends much time on the fashionable currents of thought among college students in the few years before the Revolution. His account is fascinating for its parallel with our own youth’s growing affection for socialism and a host of chic causes. In both generations, the enthusiasm for their infatuations is matched by an unwarranted confidence in their judgment.
Some might rightly use the word “arrogant” in describing the mental disposition of more than a few of our most hearty firebrands, then and now. Humility would require something other than an absolute faith in their youthful “answers” to life’s real or imaginary problems. Sounds like AOC. Combine the cock-suredness with a prescription that centers around the empowerment of the state and we have all the makings for disaster.
First, let’s take a look at an MSNBC townhall with AOC from April 1, 2019. Watch the whole thing to have a feel for the march of unexamined assumptions and faulty reasoning.
Now, compare the above with the book. In a scene from August 1914 (pp. 334-348), two university students on a Moscow holiday before they were to report to artillery school run into an elderly college acquaintance and professor on the street. The three agree to go to a pub for beer, food, and conversation. The back-and-forth is enlightening.
The two university students in the story are Sanya and Kotya and the elder sage is Varsonofiev. Here’s Varsonofiev making one of the young minds realize their affection for the state.
Varsonofiev: “But if you are a Hegelian you must take a positive view of the state.”
Kotya: “Well, I … I suppose I do.”
Kotya was unaware of this basic assumption in his thinking till the old guy brought it to his attention. He would have to embrace the state as savior for his reasoning to make any sense.
Does AOC show any evidence of a similar “Oh, I see” moment? Nowhere in her unchallenged comments on MSNBC does she say anything like, “We must give government more power”. Instead, it’s left unstated and abstract. Her favorite word is “mobilize” – a verb – as in mobilize everyone to the cause (her climate-change cure). Who’s doing the mobilizing? It won’t be AOC and her merry band of climate-change barkers who’ll convince the nation’s entire populace to voluntarily jump on board the train to the carbon-free utopia. If she’s relying on that, the growing number of dissenters will exercise an early-term abortion on the scheme. Clearly, she’s not telling the audience that an omni-competent state will have to be created to manage the people’s lives in the minutest detail. And, of course, AOC and kindred spirits will do the managing. It’s sooooo unstated.
What’s the historical experience of activists who created such all-powerful governments? The 20th century showed that the supposed failures of the marketplace were pale next to the ensuing government failures. Such a thought will never grace the mind of the youthful zealot. That would require the humility of recognizing the possibility of being wrong. Don’t expect it from AOC.
Another aspect of these conversations – whether in a Solzhenitsyn novel or AOC interview – is the prevalence of the procrustean fallacy. To be “procrustean” (adj.) is to enforce “uniformity or conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality”. For instance, activists frequently use “people” as if the people are an undifferentiated mass. The same would be true with the litany of ethnic, gender, and racial groups: all African-Americans, Hispanics, women, and evangelical white Christians think this or that. AOC does it with “all scientists”, along with the rest of the demography in tow. It’s how she tries to make her opinions incontestable.
Varsonofiev catches Kotya in the same falsehood. Here they are talking about the “people”.
Kotya: “What we need is a strict scientific definition of the people.”
Varsonofiev reminds him of the foolishness of attempting to know “the people” as a uniform whole: “Yes, we all like to look scientific, but nobody has ever defined what, precisely, is meant by the ‘the people’. In any case ‘the people’ don’t just comprise the peasant mass. For one thing, you can’t exclude the intelligentsia.”
Kotya responds by compounding the error: “The intelligentsia also has to be defined.”
Varsonofiev counters: “Nobody seems capable of that either. We would never think of the clergy, for instance, as part of the intelligentsia, would we?”
Trying to make Kotya understand the problematic nature of his thinking is doubly difficult when his answers are so obviously true … to him! Ditto AOC. Her responses to her self-defined prediction of environmental doom are festooned with “We’ve got to do ….” Our young congressional zealot gets away with it when MSNBC lines up on the stage (see the above video) fellow travelers in the climate-change apocalypse movement and create the false impression that all questions are settled and now all that’s left is building the omni-competent state … on the q.t. of course.
The scene wasn’t an exchange of views but more like the mutual reinforcement of the like-minded. The program had all the atmospherics of an evangelist’s tent-meeting revival.
More to the point on the arrogance of the young, in an exchange on the proper form of social organization, the old master set the record straight for our young interlocutors on our ability to make the best form of government.
Kotya: “So you don’t think that the rule of the people is the best form of government?”
Varsonofiev: “No, I do not.”
Kotya: “What form of government do you propose then?”
Varsonofiev: “Propose? I wouldn’t presume to do that. Who is so rash as to believe that he can invent ideal institutions? Only those who suppose that nothing valuable existed until the present generation came along, who imagined that whatever matters is only just beginning, that the truth is known only to our idols and ourselves, and that anyone who doesn’t agree with us is a fool or a scoundrel.”
I’ll get to the direct reference of youthful arrogance in a moment. It’s coming. But here Sozhenitsyn goes after another favorite gambit of people like AOC. It’s the “right side of history” thing. AOC is symptomatic of a kind of person who sees that their views are especially ordained since history, in their adolescent reasoning, leads to the present moment and their opinions. They are therefore justified in dismissing and silencing opposing views. Now that’s arrogance!
Varsonofiev continues: “Still, we mustn’t blame our Russian youngsters in particular, it’s a universal law: arrogance is the main symptom of immaturity. The immature are arrogant, the fully mature become humble.”
Pow! The eight-ball is sunk in the corner pocket. In AOC’s mind, the answers are so simple, and she won’t hesitate to bull rush her solutions down the throats of any who disagree. She has all the arrogance of the immature.
The presence of AOC on the national stage gives us a chance to peel back the scab on the festering wound that is the intellectual bankruptcy generated by our failed schools. AOC throws out terms from a textbook as if their presence in a textbook is all one needs to know of their veracity. She uses “market failure”, “externalities”, and “social cost” as if their use is ipso facto proof of any claim that utilizes them. Her understanding is that of a textbook and not the workings of a critical mind. She throws out the terms to impress her audience. It’s another form of arrogance recognizable to Solzhenitsyn.
A truly thoughtful mind would be more skeptical. Completely absent from her thought process was a limiting principle, the simple idea that there are other concerns to limit their application. If “market failure” condemns free markets, then its replacement, government, also elicits “government failure”. If “externalities” (effects on those not a party to an action) condemns capitalism, then what of government’s “externalities” of illegitimacy and crime stemming from the Great Society programs? If “social costs” (the costs that befall society as a whole) condemns free markets, do such negatives accrue to government actions, and are the alleged social costs a sufficient excuse to ignore the benefits of the action in question? For AOC, she appears to be ignorant.
Maybe Varsonofiev’s maxim should be altered. Instead of limiting the adage to the factors of maturity and arrogance, we need to add ignorance. Thus, immaturity leads to arrogance because it is based on ignorance.
The making of the omni-competent state democratic can’t paper over the hot mess. There are certain things that shouldn’t be a matter of democracy. Democracy can’t make the immoral moral. Democracy oughtn’t willy-nilly confiscate my property or invade my freedom of conscience. Democracy isn’t a license to trample on my God-given rights. Indeed, they come from God (or Nature according to Locke and Jefferson) and not the state.
If all this is true, we’ve just laid the foundation for free markets. Are you listening AOC?
Here’s a thought, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (waitress/batender/sophmore class president) makes it easy to imagine: AOC is proof of the mistake of extending the vote to 16-year-olds. With the exception of age, what’s the difference between her and Molly Ringwald’s character in “Sixteen Candles”? Answer: not much.
Think of this as a personal letter to Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. My purpose is to remind her that she’s 29, not 16, and should think like it.
Move over you establishment types, the youngins are elbowing their way in, and they fully intend to impose their fantasies on how the world works. Many happen to be Bernie-bros/gals/? and are fully marinated in identity pandering and socialism, the bane of millennials everywhere. The current sensation is Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (AOC), all of 29 years old and ready to lecture everyone on the need to reshape their lives to match her dream. Her beau-ideal is a hyper version of California – take California and sprinkle a heavy dose of the looney-left-on-speed. She wants to take this uber-cousin of California national, and international.
If you find this kind of thing appealing, sharp objects, intoxicants, and land salesmen shouldn’t be within reach. Personally, I think she is simpleminded. She’s proof that anyone can get a college degree and come out of it dense as granite. Oh, she can put a sentence together but it’s all so glib. She can’t help it since she knows and understands so little.
Her Path to an Erotic Relationship with Socialism
Her ignorance is only matched by her bravado, something common in a youthful zealot. There’s nothing in her background to prove otherwise. The Wikipedia bio on her reads like an inflated paper resume’. Look for yourself.
During her formative years, she was immersed in all things Hispanic. She was coddled and favored within the cramped confines of Hispanic activism. Not surprisingly, ethnic identity matters a lot to her and it shows in the inanities that roll out her mouth.
One of the oddities in social research is the fondness in the offspring of the comfortable middle and upper classes for lefty causes. AOC fits the bill since she was raised in a Westchester County, NY, a region with 2-3 times the per capita income of the district that she now represents. Things got financially dicey for the family upon the death of her father, but her general outlook had already been cemented by then. Once it had solidified, everything else would be funneled through the mental prism.
Her education didn’t correct for the silliness, and probably made it worse. Think of it: her Boston University BA in International Relations with a minor in Economics led her to … socialism. Socialism isn’t economics; it’s public administration. Socialism occurs when the government controls most of everything, ergo the public administration. Those decisions of buying and selling are taken from individuals and turned over to government bureaus. Does she know that? Was she ever schooled in its failures? Real economics either didn’t stick for Alexandra or it was the largest category of units to be cobbled together to make for a paper minor. Either way, her socialism is ipso facto proof that she doesn’t understand the subject.
A Primer for AOC
A stroll down memory lane would help fill her huge knowledge deficits, but she’s also got an experience handicap in having been born in 1989. Her mother gave birth as Reagan slipped off into retirement. The last dose of domestic socialism in the mid-60’s to the late 70’s would be only a history book recitation for her, if that. The horrors of the international variety likewise. In the US, the period’s skyrocketing crime, the pandemics of STD’s and drugs, a near decade of inflationary recession, the Sovietizing of housing in urban renewal, the dole’s destruction of the inner-city family, etc., would be conceptual at best and therefore easy to dismiss once she settled on a weltanschauung.
Overseas, the era’s wreckage was even more stark. Did it penetrate AOC’s brain? If so, there’s no evidence of it. There’s a reason for socialism’s black eye in the fall of the Berlin Wall, collapse of the Soviet Union, the Tienanmen Square massacre, the gulags and reeducation camps, the mass exterminations, and Eastern Europe throwing off its shackles and joining the West. She might have in mind the welfare states of Scandinavia as her template for socialism, but how much does she understand their situations? My guess is that she wouldn’t let any discomforting thoughts spoil the fairy tale.
Soviet-era housing in Latvia.
All the evidence points to deep and abiding ignorance. Take a look at this typical example of her airy pronouncements:
“When we talk about the word ‘socialism,’ I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity and our economic, social, and racial dignity. It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day.”
She’s in substantial agreement with Marx when he once said, “Democracy is the road to socialism.” Alexandra just resurrected the old codger whether she realizes it or not. My bet is that she’s oblivious.
She can’t comprehend that mixing “socialism” with “democracy” is just introducing more politics into the provisioning of wants and needs. More and more of life is exposed to ambitious politicos, campaigning, political donations, busybody activists, lobbying, and civil service-protected government workers. It’s unavoidable. That’s AOC’s socialism, and that’s ruination. Come on, Alexandra, do we really need more of our existence to be put to a vote? She apparently believes so.
The resurgence under Reagan and the public intellectual debate that proceeded it appear to be beyond her familiarity. A new cadre of free-market economists at the time convincingly showed that the long-neglected production side of the economic equation was, and still is, an important answer to the doldrums.
It’s based on a simple truism: an economy’s good fortune doesn’t ride on the job-creating potential of poor people. You need rich people for jobs. Rather than fleece them and cause their dollars to go underground, reduce their punishment and allow them to keep more their earnings. Ditto for the rest of population. It’s called “tax cuts” and they were successfully implemented by JFK and Reagan. The AOCs of the world want government to abscond with more of people’s earnings so a collection of short-sighted and politically powerful activists can decide. It’s why they’re socialists, and it’s why they ought not to be trusted with power.
Others in this grand discussion of the 70’s and 80’s – before AOC was even a blastocyst – started to notice the social dissolution that arose during and after the Great Society splurge. Government largesse in entitlements seemed to foster a dependency that isn’t conducive to human well-being. Work requirements for welfare, broken windows policing, block granting to the states, and removing the subsidy for underage motherhood came out of this grand rethink. Words like accountability, responsibility, and self-reliance made a comeback. Though, not for Alexandra. She’s clueless.
Alexandra, watch this short report from 1970 NBC News on Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing project.
She in her makeshift reasoning unknowingly wants a return to those days of Carter’s famous one-word description, malaise.
Hardly is she forward looking. She’s stuck in the past. Ocasio Cortez and others like her are still planted in the mind of Bernie Sanders and his world of 1988 when he was 37 and honeymooning in the Soviet Union. Actually, her ideological lineage goes back further to Tom Hayden, the SDS, and Port Huron Statement. Her’s is a reactionary perspective, not a revolutionary one. Alexandra, here’s news for you: been there, done that. It’s old hat.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visited the medical school on his trip to Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1988. PHOTO: COURTESY OF VALERY VOLOVENKO
Certain basic realities haven’t set into her brain about her favorite hobbyhorse. Socialism, for instance, has peculiar centralizing tendencies. You can’t have it without a central planner. If you allow freedom and pursue only a more local variety of it, the ensuing jurisdictional competition and free choice would kill it off with great fanfare as shortages and long lines cause rapid depopulation away from the grip of local zealots like her. The only way to implement the monstrosity is to nationally impose the misery from a central point under the sway of all-powerful ideological oligarchs. Lenin realized it, but he was smarter and more dangerous than her.
In the end, a Socialist someone with plenipotentiary powers has to decide the answers to the basic livelihood questions: (1) What is to be produced?; (2) How is it to be produced?; and (3) Who’s to get it? If you allow people to freely determine these matters, some will be better at it than others and get rich. Can’t have that in Alexandra’s fantasy world. Better we have equality and squalor than inequality and plenty in her twisted mind.
The wait in long lines outside a Soviet store, 1970’s.
Be prepared to be inundated with her inanities through a sycophantic media now that she’s moved her shtick to DC . Not long after arriving, she presented her latest foray into nonsense, something dubbed the Green New Deal. Don’t think for a moment the idea is original with her. She latched onto buzz words circulating the lefty hive.
Not that the first New Deal edition was any great success. A compressed summary of the 1930’s would be as follows: (1) a depression beginning in ’29-’32; (2) the New Deal of intense government intervention, following Hoover’s, inaugurated in ’33; (3) unemployment hovered between 33% to 14% throughout the 30’s; (4) industrial production similarly languished; (5) WWII was a recess with the depression getting set to resume after; and (6) a recovery finally took hold when Congress, starting in ’47, dismantled much of the wartime/New Deal political and economic machinery.
U.S. unemployment in the 1930’s. Notice that the unemployment rate never gets below 12% throughout the 30’s.
It’s a history that won’t comport with AOC’s clichéd version of it. For people like her, the War ended the Great Depression. Rubbish. The War was the excuse to continue a steroid-induced version of the New Deal. The unemployment problem was cured by putting much of the workforce in uniform to kill Germans and Japanese and herding what’s left over into factories to arm those in uniform to kill Germans and Japanese. Industrial production went up, but factories weren’t making cars and refrigerators for the average person to enjoy. They made the stuff that was useful in killing Germans and Japanese, with much of it destroyed on the battlefield or at the bottom of the ocean. What kind of “end” is it when unemployment is solved by making millions of soldiers – a good number of them killed or maimed – and a rekindling of industrial production that leads to shortages and rationing, a set of circumstances not much different from the years before?
Here’s an unsettling historical fact for Alexandra: the New Deal in one of its first incarnations, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), had a whiff of fascism about it. It attempted to militarize the US economy as Mussolini did in Italy. The taint isn’t surprising given the fact that Mussolini was lionized in the early 30’s for providing a hypothetical antidote to the failure of capitalism. FDR and the National Recovery Administration’s Hugh Johnson had kind words at the time for the tyrant.
Like Mussolini’s corporatism, the NIRA tried to concentrate all of economic life into 3 monolithic entities (government, business, labor) to set prices, wages, and production. The thing floundered not only because of its inherent contradictions but also because it didn’t jibe with our Constitution. The Supreme Court in 1935 put a stake through the monster’s heart when some Jewish butchers (the Schechters) challenged the National Recovery Administration’s attempt to fine and jail them for violating its ukases on chicken. Is this what Alexandra means by a Green New Deal? Her thoughts on the subject were likely shaped by the mental prison of people like Howard Zinn.
If the real New Deal, if she was aware of it, would be unnerving to AOC, wait till she finds out that the real recovery from the Great Depression occurred when the evil Republicans gained the majority in the 80th Congress (’47-’49) and began to dismantle a good portion of the administrative state and its nomenklatura. Down came the War Production Board, the War Labor Board, and Office of Price Administration. Government spending was slashed. Maybe as many as a million civilian government workers had to get out of the business of telling others what to do and get real jobs. After that, we had the 50’s boom. Surely deregulation and smaller government can’t be what AOC is talking about, even though that’s what worked.
Bad Ideas Are Immortal
Bad ideas are immune to death, mainly because a new generation of the gullible hears them for the first time and mistakes them once again for divine wisdom. Absent are the reservations and the caution of maturing experience and a lifetime of study. If you expect additional years in our bankrupt public schools to correct for the deficiency – K through grad school – you’re a fool. There, the mental bankruptcy will be reinforced, not cured.
Old lefty nostrums are recirculated and repackaged to the birdbrained innocent. Every generation when young will be rich in the species. For many in today’s youth cohort, the latest craze in junk thought is the “Green New Deal”. Nothing really new here that in many ways hadn’t already been touted by Eugene Debs, Gus Hall, Earl Browder, and the aforementioned SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) of 60’s radical-Left fame. Most fundamentally, it’s a return of central planning.
Since central planning is key to the scheme, the Left’s latest rendition of the New Deal moniker isn’t much different from anything that hadn’t already come out of Gosplan, the Soviet Union’s economic planning agency, or Stalin’s notorious Five-Year Plans. Only this one is in the service of international greenie fanatics, not the maniacs fighting some vague oppression of the international proletariat.
Step back, there’s elements of the latter in the former. The similarities of Five-Year Plans and the Green New Deal make them near identical twins of the mind. They are encrusted with lofty goals and then hemorrhage the spending and coercive means to achieve them.
But even prior to that, the plots hinge on a rigid conception of the world. G.K. Chesterton called it “the clean well-lit prison of a single idea”. It’s the notion that people need to be directed according to the likes of activists caught up in their own mental prison. Their cognitive jail is the relentless pursuit of oppressors, many invented to justify the means to the desired end. The would-be bogeymen are, for both Marxists and eco-zealots alike, capitalists or anyone who pursues a livelihood in ways the militants deem “selfish” or “greedy”. Welcome to the mental detention center lying between the ears of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and others with the same hangup.
Those who disagree are more than opponents. They are “enemies of the people” to be vanquished. This wafts with the odor of totalitarianism. Their intense gaze isn’t just directed at what you do, but also in what you think and say. In the jurisdictional hothouses where this mental smog reigns – California, New York, and Massachussets, are you listening? – the odor has gotten stronger as powerful mandarins seek to outlaw the speech of anyone who dares to disagree with the high priests of Climate Change.
They won’t be satisfied with the chump change of subsidies and test projects for their utopia. They’re into lifestyle management. You must live, think, and speak like them. Already, the schools, with their lefty curriculum and lefty teacher training, and comrades in big city media have become the boot camps for generating the latest version of Stalin’s Young Pioneers. AOC would have fit in quite nicely.
Poster of Stalin and his youth corps, the Young Pioneers.Young Pioneer walk during their school fest in Kemerovo, Eastern Siberia, 1981. The Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union, also Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization was a mass youth organization of the USSR for children of age 10?15 in the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1991.
It’s so reminiscent of Stalin’s collectivization of farming, extensive network of eyes and secret police covering homes and workplaces, and internal passports, leaving aside the gulags where malcontents – real or imagined – were penned. No wonder this is nothing but a prescription for producing refugees.
So, what’s in this latest edition of the 5-Year Plan … er, New Deal? Some sense of it can be found in AOC’s draft request for a “Select Committee For A Green New Deal”. (5) Here’s a taste:
A deadline of March 2020 for the House select committee to finish its Plan for a Green New Deal.
As in Stalin’s 5-Year Plan, you’ll find timelines/deadlines to achieve certain numerical goals. For example, in 10 years after passage, 100% of electrical generation will be commanded from the greenie favorites: wind, solar, biomass, etc. 100%!
A massive public works boondoggle to build the infrastructure to replace our current networks with one accommodating to the utopia. One hasty calculation by someone in the know sets the cost at $2 trillion. And I’m not taking into account the fact that much of the technology – such as storage – doesn’t even exist, and may not ever exist to any practical extent.
Mandates to meet the goals will fall upon businesses, farms, and homeowners. There will be a colossal reordering of life to achieve the targets.
The socialist dream of wealth equality will be pursued through the Plan. Lefty boilerplate like “just transition” [to the utopia] is scattered throughout.
What’s the upshot? What does all this really mean for all Americans? David Roberts in a sympathetic piece for Vox stated it quite clearly,
“… the GND is not just a climate change policy. It is a vision for a new kind of economy, built around a new set of social and economic relationships. It is not merely a way to reduce emissions, but also to ameliorate the other symptoms and dysfunctions of a late capitalist economy: growing inequality and concentration of power at the top.” (2)
The Green New Deal is a plot against the fundamental principles of our constitutional order and civilization. It’s in the same vein as the grand pronouncements of the Marxist scolds of the past. GND boosters are out to manufacture a new person for a new society. What will happen to those who resist? Well, coercion is absolutely essential or it won’t work – or, more accurately, it won’t work as the history of communism attests, but the utopian bullies won’t even get the chance if they don’t do some silencing. Monkey wrenches will not be allowed on the path to their heaven/hell on earth.
The Teenager in Central Planning
Alexandra’s belief system is a product of profound immaturity of thought. Her thinking is grounded only in Lefty boilerplate. In many ways, she acts with all the excitement of a teenager who was introduced to some factoid for the first time but lacks the seasoned judgment to process it. In a recent twitter storm with Republican Steve Scalise, the 29-year-old Alexandra tried to correct the 53-year-old Scalise by repeatedly instructing him on the meaning of “marginal tax rates”. I think that everyone in the capitol knows term, but Alexandra acts as if she only became aware of the concept in the past few days.
She can find no fault in a marginal tax rate of 70% for the “wealthy” since she’s blind to the 60-year public debate on the matter. Apparently, her economics education didn’t inform her of the dispute between Keynesian dogmatics and the free-market ideas of the Vienna School of Economics. Hayek and Milton and Rose Friedman weren’t on her reading list.
As such, she’s probably not aware that she’s gearing up to imitate Joseph Stalin. Because there’s not much rolling around in that head, the problems of our times seem so simple. They always do for the young when there’s nothing else in the cranium to cause pause. She’s the equivalent of a teenage central planner but is completely ignorant of the fact.
Alexandra Ocasio Cortez is proof that there is a place for people like her. It just shouldn’t be in a room with adults. She might be a great ASB president, but her flights of fancy disqualify her from babysitting.
RogerG
Bibliography and references:
“Bernie Sanders traveled to communist Cuba and urges a ‘political revolution.’ Will exile Miami take him seriously?”, Patricia Mazzei, Miami Herald, 2/29/2016, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election/article62748002.html
“The Green New Deal, explained”, David Roberts, Vox, 1/7/2019, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez”
The Great Depression Was Ended by the End of World War II, Not the Start of It”, Peter Ferrara, Forbes, 11/30/2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/11/30/the-great-depression-was-ended-by-the-end-of-world-war-ii-not-the-start-of-it/#2f706afb57d3
“Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt”, David Boaz, Reason, October 2007, https://www.cato.org/commentary/hitler-mussolini-roosevelt
Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s draft proposal for a select committee on a Green New Deal, and the rationale, can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jxUzp9SZ6-VB-4wSm8sselVMsqWZrSrYpYC9slHKLzo/preview#heading=h.z7x8pz4dydey
“Five things to know about Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal'”, Timothy Cama, The Hill, 11/24/2018,
California’s hard left lurch is a matter of much discussion. As a side-bar but related matter, there exists tech’s similarly hard left climate of opinion, much of it originated and housed in the state. Tech’s leftist orientation was made glaringly obvious in a Stanford Graduate Business School study of December 2017.* Next question: Does tech’s hard left lurch correspond to California’s transformation into a hard left bastion?
I’ll start off by saying, I don’t know. Correlation ain’t causation.
There’s no doubt, though, that tech is an overbearing piece of California’s fiscal and economic puzzle. Has its prevailing ideological bearings bled into the state’s political bloodstream? A connection can only be intimated, not necessarily proven.
The Stanford study makes clear that an incoherent blend of self-interest and lefty tropes blanket Silicon Valley and its offshoots like a thick layer of smog. Techies overwhelmingly, almost militantly, stand four-square with the cultural left in the culture war. LGBTQ everything, multiculturalism, racial/ethnic/gender victimology, environmentalism, gun control, unrestrained abortion, a rejection of traditional institutions, open borders – the usual stuff of the left-wing orthodoxy – feature prominently.
All the while, techies don’t like anybody telling them what to do, especially the government. Yet, government isn’t treated like Christianity, something for the unenlightened and hide-bound rubes. While they don’t like regulation, they seem to be fully on-board with government-directed redistribution. Is the inconsistency an attempt to paper over their guilt about their riches? Could be.
Somehow their brains allow them to harbor “no government” alongside “lots of government”. All the isms and assaults on traditional institutions, and the Robin Hood regime, mandates a whole lotta government. I suppose that they want government to make everybody else live and believe like them. At heart, then, this is Stalinism.
Some have attributed this motley collection of beliefs to the hippies of yore as there appears to be a line of mental and lifestyle, if not genealogical, descent. The hippies were a mess, though. Their hedonism and gross naivete about human nature gave us STD’s, a drug epidemic, and a new generation of Democratic Party activists. Have the techies taken over where the hippies left off? Quite possibly.
The hippies of yore (1960’s).
Now we have the techie industry taking root throughout the country, and with it, implanting its mental smog and lifestyle. In that sense, California is the future – a dystopian one.
I know, I know, it’s faulty thinking to draw grand conclusions about an entire generation on a sample of one or a few individuals. For millennials, they’ve been given a bad rap for a host of alleged sins. Yet, a certain type is beginning to recur among them in my explorations of news and information: the ill-informed college-educated in positions of societal influence. A classic example of the phenomena appeared yesterday in an interview of Luke Zaleski by Hugh Hewitt.
Luke Zaleski with son.Hugh Hewitt in his broadcast studio.
Zaleski seems to be in his mid-to-late 30s, a U. of Delaware graduate in Philosophy, and is currently Legal Affairs Editor for Condé Nast publications. He exhibits much of the hyper-progressivism of the deeply-entrenched left in today’s media, replete with a dislike for Trump and Republicans, an embrace of identity politics, and rampant victimology. And its all wrapped in a thin verneer of knowledge and understanding.
For example, here’s Zaleski on Hewitt’s lack of “diversity” in the previous day’s guests – Mike Lupica (sports writer), Sen. Tom Cotton (R, Arkansas), and Sen. John Cornyn (R, Texas):
“I feel like the sports world … would benefit from having more people of color and women … prominent in the conversations.” The diversity schtick on parade, eh? As for Cotton and Cornyn, he says, “… these guys are kind of the enemies of progress”.
Zelaski on his level of understanding of history as it relates to today’s issues and climate of opinion:
Hewitt asked him, “…was Alger Hiss a communist spy?” Zaleski dodged the question by mentioning Wikipedia and “I’m not a historian. I’m not an expert. I’m not interested in conspiracy theories. I’m not interested in debating Alger Hiss”. Mmmmm.
Another example of more recent history, Hewitt asked him, “Have you read The Looming Tower?” The quick and short of it, No! Since he didn’t mention any other book on the rise of international terrorism, I can assume he doesn’t read in depth, particularly on that topic.
Zaleski’s unfamiliarity with the principal characters involved in Iran’s export of its brand of Islamic extremism was evident when Hewitt asked him, “What is your opinion of Qasem Soleimani?” Zaleski’s answer: “I’m not familiar with that person.”
Remember that this guy, Zaleski, is an editor in a major media organization (look up Condé Nast).
Zaleski showed profound ignorance of nuclear weapons. Hewitt asked him, “So which part of the nuclear triad needs fixing the most?” Zaleski jumped to an unresponsive generality, “I’d like to see global denuclearization.” Related questions about our weapons systems were similarly met with befuddlement.
As a “Legal Affairs Editor”, one would think Zaleski has some legal training or even a law degree. Well, no. His background is as a “fact checker” for 20 years. Since “legal” is his beat, you’d think that he would be aware of the Supreme Court’s recent 8-0 smackdown of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for its abuse of the Endangered Species Act. But no.
I could present more on the interview but I think that you get the idea. A modern college education does not, ipso facto, dispel ignorance, let alone promote wisdom.
RogerG
Here’s the link to the transcripts of the interview: http://www.hughhewitt.com/luke-zaleski-legal-affairs-editor-at-conde-nash-former-director-of-research-at-gq/?fbclid=IwAR3Scthy-2tCxV5gKtPCKq5A79eMp-FkG7mK5R0n7UrtrbZSDqtqBEhiq3A
What’s up with millennials? Why do many appear to be enthralled with socialism? Recently, these questions have been raised more than a few times. Some polls seem to support the charge. I tepidly weigh into the accusation knowing the limits of cloaking an entire generation in the same linen. No doubt, at least publicly, socialism is experiencing a revival with new fans among late teens and twenty-somethings.
Generalizations, Generalizations, Generalizations
Right away, let’s draw back a bit by recognizing that assigning a trait to a large group of people is fraught with imprecision. Of late, we’ve been into “generationism” since the heyday of the baby-boomers. We stamp all the people of a given age – usually in ten year increments – with the same cookie-cutter traits. It’s what you do when you want to boost your own opinions with extra peer company, or turn life into a cartoon.
The Boomers (born between ’46 and ’64) are forever associated with hippies (counterculture), peace (anti-War), free love (sexual license), rock n’ roll, and mind expansion (drugs). A label was applied that has only been made more deeply affixed by Hollywood types like Steven Spielberg as they rise up the ladder of cultural influencers.
Most recently, out he comes with The Post with a favorite bromide of today’s Boomers-of-influence: Nixon-hate and crusading journalists as the angels of truth. Are we to be endlessly inundated with stories of Nixon in the same company with the Boston Strangler? Are we to be forever afflicted with communication majors channeling Woodward and Bernstein? I’m a boomer and find it quite tiring.
Scene from the The Post by Steven Spielberg.
That’s the thing with this form of simplism on parade. Once the image gets implanted, and reinforced thereafter, we get impressionable and educationally debased youth in subsequent years (dare I say “generations”) attracted to, and try living up to, a fabrication. The boomer Left may have been trounced in ’72 when they championed McGovern, but they succeeded in occupying the cultural commanding heights to define for everybody the period and everyone in it.
We’er in stereotype territory now. For now, all Boomers are crammed into and onto John Kesey’s bus, the quintessence of the myth.
John Kesey’s bus, Further, and his Merry Band of Pranksters, around 1964. It was the rolling quintessence of 60’s hippiedom.
The story about this birth cohort is more complicated than the Lefty-brewed legend. Today, boomers are more likely to be conservative than liberal according to a 2015 Gallup survey. (3) Who would have thunk it? From DeadHeads to Reagan Republicans? Some certainly made a transition. Others didn’t have to move. Remember, George W. Bush and Donald Trump are boomers.
A similar story is probably true with the millennials. There exists a conservative streak within them. Indeed, some studies show them to be more conservative than previous contingents when in high school and college. (4) Could it be that the media-saavy Lefty element within the cohort hijacked the power to etch everyone in it? It’s something worth pondering.
Socialism and the millennials
Still, two glaring stats stare in the face: millennials overwhelmingly support gay marriage (74%) and pot legalization (71%). (4) Apparently, buggery as the conjugal act for marriage and a mom strolling an infant through a park with engulfing pot smoke aren’t disturbing scenarios for three-quarters in the poll.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised since being young carries with it a near biological imperative to incessantly ask the question, “Why not?” It’s the universal adolescent response to the parental “No”.
By so doing, they push the bounds of acceptability to the next level. Some of it survives as greater sexual license and pot legalization, while other excesses wait for another day. Another day will arrive that further inches out the limits. The process then continues. And it all stems from the adolescent predilection for “Why not?”
Adolescents don’t get it, human nature that is. If the reasoning requires more than 2 sentences, they huff and roll their eyes. They haven’t been around long enough for the grind of personal experience to wear on them. As such, the concept of human nature – if it occurs to them at all – is about as understood as retirement planning. How can they appreciate something [human nature] if they can’t acknowledge its existence? Holes like this in their understanding makes it easy to embrace inanities – such as 40 or so genders or marriage encompassing same-sex carnal affection. After all, why not?
The stats, coupled with the naiveté, might be a troubling sign of an enthusiasm for the refashioning of social mores to the dictates of juvenile reasoning, while extending it into early adulthood and the Bernie campaign. The old morality is an impediment and socialism and Bernie provide the wrecking ball. There’s ample room in the juvenile vision for embellishing the powers of the state to blast through the last vestiges of the parental “no”.
The psychological tic for a kinder-and-gentler socialism gets the reinforcement of the lefty myth-making machine redolent in their media and the 12-16 years of their schooling’s curriculum.
Shane Smith, cofounder and CEO of Vice Media.
I risk generalizing an anecdote but the parallel is too obvious. According to Forbes (7/27/2017 issue), Shane Smith’s Vice Media website is popular among millennials. It’s online offerings include such juicy tidbits as a story that includes masturbation as one way to juice up your life while taking the “Dry January” sobriety pledge. The home page includes other offerings such as “Can a Gay Veteran Latina Sheriff Get Texas to Vote?”, “Vinny from ‘Jersey Shore’ is a secret climate change nerd”, and “Anti-Muslim bomb plotters can’t stack jury with Trump voters, judge rules”. I don’t know about Vinny’s acumen for meteorology, but I suspect the large number of millennial clicks shows Vice hitting the ideological sweet spot of a sizable base of twenty-somethings … while Vinny is caught up in facile, chic thought. (13)
The cultural messaging is compounded by the same boomer mandarins of pop culture, like Spielberg and a good chunk of the teaching profession. An underlying and unspoken theme throughout is the view of the state as the guarantor of a person’s highest “potential” – presently “potential” being synonymous with “license”. It’s the core premise of progressivism from its 19th century birth to the present day, and an unspoken lefty assumption in discussions weightier than Facebook gossip.
The goal is ambitious and requires a reformulation of America’s traditional social and political organization. Many founding ideas were seen as obstacles to be skirted along the way to an empowered state plowing a path to personal actualization. Josh Lerner, Harvard Econ professor, put it aptly when he recently wrote,
“They [progressives] thought that the state should not be constrained by republican measures to prevent too much action, but rather be guided by the best of modern science (natural and social) and capable of acting in whatever ways were necessary.” (5)
Their’s is not a limited-government vision, or one firmly planted in popular sovereignty. It’s the elevation of a new aristocracy, not one fixed to family of birth but to the possession of paper credentials. The credentialing is in the form of diplomas, degrees, and certificates that are distributed through the K-16 schools.
It is there that we find the implantation of the hidden notion of state-sponsored personal actualization. The outlook of the 19th century progressives is the unspoken assumption in our schools’ History texts. It’s the stuff of teachers’ training and education. It’s the thing lurking in the mental background of most people, let alone many millennials.
John Dewey at Columbia University saw the public schools as the vehicle for the creation of the new progressive citizen.
The compatibility of progressivism with socialism was immediately acknowledged by many of its early purveyors. John Dewey, the renowned progressive education philosopher, could move seamlessly from the American Socialist Party to the Progressive Party. While rigid class dialectics and violent revolution would repel him and others from the communism of Karl Marx, the rejection of classical individualism and natural law would leave them swimming in the same political soup with their more violent brethren. These early practitioners knew, and lived, the inherent amity between the two.
The cognitive ground has been prepared for many of a generation to unthinkingly express fondness for something only vaguely understood. To them, socialism is synonymous with “cooperation”. Cooperation is the antidote to an allegedly toxic individualism.
It’s ironic, though, that the individualism of self-reliance is derided while the individualism of expansive moral license gets pride-of-place. Square that circle.
The outlook isn’t leavened by personal experience of government evils or of overpowering international events bringing to light socialism’s failures – the Cold War being another topic to snooze though in History class – or of the consequences of vice. It’s easy for socialism to occupy that space in the mind where warm and fuzzy “togetherness” is located and faces no competition from anything more real.
Pop media and curriculum as accomplices
Socialism’s identification with “togetherness” had the schools as an accomplice for about 4 decades. Furthermore, the schools as accomplice also had an accomplice in the popular media. In this way, the whole crowd of adolescents-to-teens is covered, from valedictorian to dropout.
Those that remained at their desk through the 12-year gauntlet were shaped by the curriculum with media reinforcement. Parents moved into the realm of background noise. Those voluntarily or involuntarily exiting prior to commencement at least got the banalities through pop media spin.
It’s a form of comprehensive mind-shaping. The pop culture molding is found in more than tv shows like TheBig Bang, and even the older Sex in the City, Friends, etc. It’s the DNA of modern commercials. One prominent theme can be summarized as girls, girls, girls, and more girls: girls as John Wayne wannabes, girls as Einstein, girls as Thomas Edison, girls as John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind fame), girls as Bruce Lee, girls as Richard Petty.
A Nissan commercial: the girl as soon-to-be car jock and speed demean, with mom proudly looking on.Another Nissan effort: the girl as teen driver and, of course, outer space fighter pilot.GE gets into the act with the free-wheeling girl as math whiz, inventive mechanical genius, and adult engineer par excellence.
The NFL and MLB are equally enthused about casting girls into their sponsored activities.
The NFL can’t wait to get into the inclusiveness game. Here they are advertising girls in the punt, pass, and kick competition.MLB is not one to be left behind. Girls are prominently displayed in youth fitness campaigns and youth baseball lineups.
What’s with all the girl-mania? Well, honestly, all I have is a suspicion. I reckon that it has much to do with the incessant equation of “disparity” with “oppression”. A statistical difference between the sexes is presumed to be prima facie evidence of “prejudice”. Fewer girls as race car drivers must be due to the heavy foot of misogynistic social pressure. A weak hypothesis to be sure, but it certainly and instantly is transformed into fact in minds weaned on nothing else. For the young, the message’s constant drumbeat must be proof of a “reality” that demands vast cultural reversal. Thus we have all the pop media brandishing of girl-mania as the corrective.
Repeat the story often enough and a view of reality begins to anchor. Prior to the crusade, physical and athletic roles were assigned to men and boys, reflecting the understanding that estrogen isn’t an athletic enhancing substance. Testosterone works better. Don’t let the fact that boys have more of it stand in the way of the brave new world of unrelenting equality. Ours is an age of make-believe, but not realized as make-believe. For the poor millennial, it’s the only storyline they’ve ever known. Nurture trumps nature anytime in the deep synapses of their brains.
The stage is set for the resurrection of socialism. Once our hypothetical social contrivances are blamed, no better opportunity for state aggrandizement can be evinced than to turn over preexistant disparities to the civil courts, law enforcement, and innumerable taxpayer-funded programs and their administrators.
Not be outdone in the zeitgeist category, the private sector jumps in with both feet.
What the media-industrial-complex has accomplished, the schools bolster with teachers, curriculum, and textbooks. The classroom becomes the place for taking the hasty supposition and enveloping it with a facade of reasonableness. Girls and women are injected wherever possible, even if it means a displacement of eminent men. Out goes Henry Bessemer to make room for Mary Wollstonecraft in World History texts.
History and Civics instruction makes it easy for the under-aged to dispense with obstacles to the disparity-free nirvana, such as the Constitution. Let’s just have the thing “evolve”. It’s meaning must be allowed to change with the times, thus placing a premium on mixing interpretation with social engineering. The old framework is effectively interpreted out of existence.
The treatment is common in many widely used Civics and History texts. For instance, one of the hot sellers in McDougal Littel’s stable of textbooks for high school U.S. History classes is The Americans.
It devotes an entire chapter to the “The Living Constitution”. You know, “living” as in “organism” as in “evolution”. The authors play up the Constitution not for its steadfast adherence to universal truths. Universal truths be damned. The document’s virtue, they insist, lies in its ability to meander with contemporary fads of thought.
I’m not certain if that is a virtue or a vice. Hitler’s dictatorship relied on an “evolving” interpretation of the emergency provisions of the Weimar Constitution (Article 48). No need to waste time and effort writing another one; just clear the path to the better world by interpreting the present one out of the way. Instantaneously, a constitution becomes a non-constitution. Problem solved.
Is this the meaning of “education” that comes from patronizing pundits and self-satisfied millennials as they applaud themselves for being the “most educated generation in history”? Pew Research backs up the assertion … in a superficial sense. More millennials – men and woman – are getting bachelor’s degrees than ever before. (7)
“Education” connotes improvement is some sense. Where’s the improvement? For some college graduates, they got it. For many others, maybe the bulk, I’m not so certain.
It appears that millennials are good at getting credentials, but what does the paper represent? It represents a society that values paper, even though the paper may not reflect superior knowledge, wisdom, or skill. It might be more indicative of perseverance in hoop-jumping, and along the way getting some partisan rhetoric deeply ingrained, K through PhD.
Looking at the college end of the education track, fields that might not lend themselves to ideological infection – most majors outside of the humanities and the Social Sciences – are popular among millennials. Don’t be so sanguine with this happenstance. The general ed requirements for all students have gone through a metamorphosis. For instance, the Western Civilization course is no longer a centerpiece. Even History majors can avoid the course, or its equivalent, entirely. (10)
Instead, balkanized and hyper-opinionated offerings by theme, region, and period populate the course catalog. The old Western Civ 2-semester survey course is eligible for the endangered species list. There’s few avenues for a comprehensive, serious treatment of the civilizational basis for the international order. Without Adam Smith and Blackstone, where would GATT and Interpol be? For the modern professoriate, the question is shrugged off with the admonition, “All cultures are alike”. For the college millennial, they won’t know any better because many don’t know anything else.
Education? What education?
Once in the grip of an identity- and oppression-laced curriculum, not much will be expected of the matriculant. College is easier to slide through than ever before. The more-than-average student devotes less time in preparation for class and less is assigned once in class. College isn’t what it used to be. (11)
The preconditions are present for the younger tranche of the population to cuddle with the notion of the omnicompetent state. The ubiquity and intensity of a singular message takes its toll.
And there’s more.
Modern life
The allies in the mind-shaping effort are manic interconnectivity, re-urbanization, and a media octopus (maybe a centipede is a more appropriate metaphor) of many venues but homogeneous in outlook, at least for the young enthusiast in pop fashion. The nexus is a womb of mind formation.
The cellphone is a wondrous thing. About the size of a modern voltmeter, it connects you to the universe of friends, friends, and more friends, and an ocean of info/entertainment. The possibilities are endless. Why need a wife if a holographic projection of a sex kitten will do the trick?
Frivolity begins to replace deep thought. The scene of being alone in a study with a great book is swamped by Facebook strategies to keep you glued to the screen. Old email can’t keep up. Add Twitter and Instagram to Facebook and you have the nuclear triad of avant-garde social engagement. They are instantaneous, awesome, and addictive. Who has time for old Aristotle, Augustine, or Nietzsche? Who has any interest in such things when Mary and Jim’s cavorting in Soho nightclubs awaits?
Pop thought goes viral with interconnectivity as the accelerant. But beyond the dabbling in gossip and personal lives, there’s no there there. All that remains of anything resembling serious thought is the fuzzy progressive platitudes from an incoherent public school education. But who cares? Aren’t we having fun?
All the digital linkages work best in the cities. It’s there, in its density of cell towers, that a car with a dashboard-turned-tablet works best. Furthermore, who needs a pickup for hedge clippings for residences without landscaping? Cement doesn’t need trimming. The whole transportation thing can be boiled down to the occasional use of a Prius, or anything that can scoot in a bike lane.
Electric vehicles in Ontario, Canada.
For the professional and single millennial, the college dorm life can be simulated in the gentrified neighborhoods of our inner cities. It can be communal, while according easy access to choice seats for Miranda’s “Hamilton”. Professional millennials and hangers-on are congregating in these precincts in increasing numbers. (12)
Renting a brownstone in a gentrified neighborhood with your buds has an appeal for a youth weaned on The Big Bang.
So long as the city maintains a protective cocoon of cops, firemen, EMT’s, parks, jogging/biking paths, roads, and abundant entertainment and utilities, who cares about the Second Amendment, self-reliance, debates about the role of government, and any thought of the government’s immense capacity to eviscerate the soul? They’re comfortable with the government as a surrogate mommy and daddy. Combined with little understanding of its ability to do harm, urban lifestyles reinforce a coddling view of government. The hardy individualist of the farm and suburban diy’er is replaced by the weekend hiker and wine soirée enthusiast.
Backyard soirée in a gentrified portion of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant.
For these people, why not socialism? If “socialism” seems too provocative of a word, wait, Democratic Party talking points will provide a soothing palliative.
The Embrace of a New Faith – Environmentalism
One of those palliatives is encapsulated in two words: “the environment”. It has a special meaning beyond the simple natural surroundings. In the hands of our lefty partisans, the word is defined by a worship of nature, the singular purpose of preservation, economics as human malevolence, and man-caused apocalyptic climate change. The definition cries out for state-empowered social engineering. Now we’re into the wheelhouse of the Elizabeth Warrens and Bernie Sanderses of the world.
The millennial was raised in the spectral glow of Earth Day. The chief organ of propaganda was the schools, with an assist from Hollywood. Every April these kids were subjected to almost anything labeled “sustainable”: solar powered cookie-baking, solar-powered everything, and recycling, recycling, and more recycling.
Tumwater School District elementary classroom on Earth Day. Olympia, Washington State.
After the kids leave the classroom, they can head over to the multiplex for further reinforcement with warm and fuzzy cartoon characters.
It’s not a well-balanced approach to a serious subject. The treatment pre-ordains a bias that these kids will carry into adulthood. Complications and consequences are skipped in favor of immediate activism.
As a veteran teacher of a high school and college classroom (29 years), students are frequently left speechless when confronted with a few basic queries about their recycling activities. Almost every year a student from the recycling club will approach me with the request to place a recycling box in my room. Here’s a typical exchange:
Student: Mr. Graf, can we put a box in your classroom?
Teacher: Yes, if you can answer a few basic questions. First, why recycle paper (or cans, whatever)?
S: It’ll help clean up the earth and reduce the need for dumps.
T: How much does it cost to recycle the stuff?
S: Uh, I don’t know.
T: How much energy and resources like chemicals are required? Are you creating another environmental problem by having to dispose of new industrial chemicals?
S: Uh, I don’t know. But the paper will break down into the water table if we throw the stuff into the dump.
T: How do you know that it beaks down like that? Can dumps be designed to prevent it? Is the real danger from stuff that doesn’t break down or stuff that does?
S: I don’t know how to answer those questions.
T: If you can’t answer those questions, why are you asking me to do it?
S: Okay Mr. Graf, we’ll go to the next classroom.
The same interrogatory would be at work if a person was asked to buy solar panels. While at a Lowe’s in California a few years ago, I met a solar panel salesman (a millennial) at a table. He told me of all the government-financed incentives for the things. I responded with a few questions.
How long do the things last before they have to be replaced?
Is solar power cost effective without the subsidies? Is there a limit to the amount of energy that can extracted from the sun?
If I Iower my utility bill with them, how is that paid for? Who must pay for me to get a cheaper electricity bill? Is the system like a Ponzi scheme that will crash if everyone did it?
Would we be better off building more nuclear power plants, investing in clean coal, or designing better fossil fuel plants? Are we making these more realistic options unlikely by forcing and bribing scarce resources into what might be a dead end?
As before, few credible answers were forthcoming. What happened to the hippie ideal of “question authority” as these notions were implanted in their young minds? Is something like a healthy skepticism so alien to them, other than the proverbial hostility to the parental “no”? It might be too much to ask in the case of people who don’t know enough to be able to ask hard questions. With Bambi rolling around in your head, disturbing thoughts of consequences and trade-offs won’t arise.
As older consumers and entrepreneurs, they’ll frequent the “sustainable” craft brewery and try to power their enterprises with windmills and the sun. The customer base for the Prius isn’t a rancher or construction worker.
Corporate America tailors their messaging to the perceived interests of the upcoming band of consumers, people who were nurtured on world citizenship and greenie causes. Believe me, businesses have heavily invested in market research. They know how to sell to millennials by knowing what appeals. In their case, togetherness and environmental purity work well.
New Belgium brewery’s ad expressing their fealty to the cause of dam removal.
In the end, we have more horsepower in the drive for an expansive and coddling state. The average millennial might be more open to the government molding a “better” human being.
But I leave this topic with another question: How can better human beings be created by other human beings who aren’t better? The occupant of a government office isn’t a person free of our failings. All too often, it’s just another human being with another set of biases and unfounded assumptions, but with the power to make us live a certain way.
So, What are We Left With?
The average millennial is a river fed by many tributaries. Nothing unique here. Only this generation has too many tributaries [influences] that push them into the arms of the Democratic Party and lefty causes. Their media and schooling bias their judgments. The lifestyle reinforces the predilections.
To be a conservative, defender of traditional marriage, opponent of pot legalization, while possessing a healthy apprehension about environmentalism, a millennial must be willing to stand upwind in a cultural gale. There are such millennials, which causes me to draw back against over generalization. Yet, signs are abundant of a lean away from scripture, tradition, limited government, as they entertain a tolerance of more moral license.
Anybody mindful of the trend will have their work cut out for them. Well, life might do the trick. Settling down, having kids, mortgage payments, and the approach of the peak earning years may do more to prove the foolishness of those prior decades. Kids will do a lot to dispel the earlier fantasies. It might even push many of them into a pew.
Let’s pray for life.
RogerG
Bibliography and references:
“This Is Why Millennials Favor Socialism: They realized that the ‘trickle-down economics’ theory didn’t work.”, Sean Vazquez, HuffPost, 4/17/2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-is-why-millennials-favor-socialism_us_58ed0feae4b0145a227cb8d3
“Why So Many Millennials Are Socialists”, Emily Elkins and Joy Pullman, The Federalist, 2/15/2016, http://thefederalist.com/2016/02/15/why-so-many-millennials-are-socialists/
“U.S. Baby Boomers More Likely to Identify as Conservative”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup News, 1/29/2015, http://news.gallup.com/poll/181325/baby-boomers-likely-identify-conservative.aspx
“The Conservative Millennial: No Longer a Myth”, Chase Paulson, Capital Research Center, 10/25/2017, https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-conservative-millennial-no-longer-a-myth/
“Understanding The Progressives: And the Transformation of the American Political System”, Josh Lerner, Counterpoint, University of Chicago, http://counterpoint.uchicago.edu/archives/winter2011/progressives.html
“Education or Indoctrination? The Accuracy of Introductory
Psychology Textbooks in Covering Controversial Topics
and Urban Legends About Psychology”, Christopher J. Ferguson, Jeffrey M. Brown, and Amanda V. Torres, Current Psychology, ISSN 1046-1310, 2016.
“Millennials On Track to be the Most Educated Generation to Date”, Pew Research Center, 3/17/2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/03/19/how-millennials-compare-with-their-grandparents/ft_millennials-education_031715/
“Bachelor’s degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by field of study: Selected years, 1970-71 through 2014-15”, National Center for Education Statistics, 2016, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_322.10.asp?current=yes
“Decline of ‘Western Civ’?”, Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed, 5/19/2011, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/05/19/national_association_of_scholars_report_finds_no_mandatory_western_civilization_courses_at_top_universities
“THE VANISHING WEST: 1964 – 2010: The Disappearance of Western Civilization from the American Undergraduate Curriculum”,
Media
National Association of Scholars, May 2011, https://www.nas.org/images/documents/TheVanishingWest.pdf
“A Lack Of Rigor Leaves Students ‘Adrift’ In College”, NPR staff, NPR, 2/9/2011, https://www.npr.org/2011/02/09/133310978/in-college-a-lack-of-rigor-leaves-students-adrift
“Why So Many Americans Are Saying Goodbye to Cities”, Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 4/4/2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/why-is-everyone-leaving-the-city/521844/
“I Tried Out a Bunch of Natural Highs to Make Dry January Less Boring: From floating to masturbation to self-flagellation—there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t contain alcohol and allegedly gets you high”, Justin Caffeir, 1/18/2018, Vice, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paqw8b/i-tried-out-a-bunch-of-natural-highs-to-make-dry-january-less-boring. For the website’s homepage, just strip away the article portion of the address.
“America’s Shrinking Middle Class: A Close Look at Changes Within Metropolitan Areas”, Pew Research Center, 5/11/2016, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking-middle-class-a-close-look-at-changes-within-metropolitan-areas/
