The following is a Facebook exchange about my latest post – “CNN’s Little Red Guards” – on both my blog and Facebook page. Check it out.
Respondent: Mao’s Red Guards? Good Lord. Take a chill pill, Roger, and stop stuffing so much wood into the stove. Go cross country ski for ten miles.
RogerG: Chill pill? Good Lord, Seth. A 17-year-old witness to a shooting spree does not a pundit make. That CNN lynching didn’t do anything but add a few more nominees for Warhol’s 15-minutes-of-fame museum. Now it turns out that the public employees and their bureaucracies in the vicinity, for whom our dependency would grow if gun-control zealots have their way, failed massively — from the FBI on down. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the model for the Broward County Sheriff’s Department is the California DMV – or maybe Caltrans. All the talk about robust nix lists, gun bans, licensing, expanded gun restrictions, etc., will be executed by the same people who can’t manage a downtown office, can’t restrain an out-of-control 18-year-old, can’t maintain the roads, won’t neutralize an active shooter, and is more concerned about public employee perks than job performance. Good Lord, Seth, get a grip. Layered security is the key: armed outside the buildings and armed inside the buildings.
Respondent: the Red Guard analogy was overwrought. Come on.
RogerG: No, not overwrought but dramatic — because kids are attracted to the dramatic. It’s in their DNA, so to speak. Their mental immaturity shows as unleavened opinions of stark over-simplicity. The Action Jackson of the Hitler Youth, Fascist Youth, and Mao’s Red Guards resonates much less among almost anyone old enough to have kids, a spouse, a mortgage, and freighted with the responsibilities of life. Kids occupy that space of free-wheeling innocence. Their opinions have a scent of irresponsibility about them while anxious to get on with the frenzy of the “movement”. You’re wrong in dismissing this cross-cultural predilection for blunt opinions and fevered activity. They are prime recruits for utopia-mongering, whether it be one of blissful equality or a nanny state managed gun-free existence. In a nutshell, they’re as crazy as moonbats.
SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND – FEBRUARY 21: Students from Montgomery Blair High School march down Colesville Road in support of gun reform legislation February 21, 2018 in Silver Spring, Maryland.Red Guards — high school and university students — wave copies of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book during a parade in June 1966 in Beijing’s streets at the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution.
CNN’s townhall (2/21/2018) on guns was staged in Broward County, the scene of the shooting, and also a Democrat bastion in a state trending Republican. Remember, Al Gore tried to cherry pick friendly counties like Broward County for never-ending recounts for manufacturing votes to reverse his loss of Florida in the 2000 election, only to be stopped by the Supreme Court.
Broward County canvassing board member Judge Robert Rosenberg looks over a questionable ballot, 25 November 2000, at the Broward County Courthouse in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. AFP PHOTO/RHONA WISE / AFP / RHONA WISE (Photo credit should read RHONA WISE/AFP/Getty Images)
On 2/21, CNN conducted a theatrical display of ritual humiliation reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards during the weighty days of the Cultural Revolution. Go view CNN’s tape of their event and compare it to this 7-minute exhibit of rage, youthful exuberance, and inhumanity from Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Today’s young firebrands, in their bullying antics towards Southern statues and the NRA/guns, has striking similarities to Red Guard attacks on bourgeois decadence and, of course, statues.
Toppling a statue in Durham, NC.
We don’t have to look far into the pages of history for evidence of adolescent cruelty. Movements built around coercive utopias have frequently found a receptive audience among the young. Italy’s Fascist Party youth, the National Socialist Hitler Youth, Stalin’s Young Pioneers, Mao’s Red Guards, Bela Kun’s Lenin’s Boys (Hungarian Soviet Republlic, 1919) show the capacity for enthusiastic intolerance among the young. The spectacle of orchestrated hate depicted on CNN is true to form.
Bela Kun’s Lenin’s Boys, the enforcers of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919.
We must understand these things for what they are. They are not forums for calm deliberation, but devolve into kangaroo courts for compulsory humiliation. Let’s stop the pretense of calling it a “townhall”.
David Hogg has thrust himself into the difficult gun control debate. There’s a reason for the age distinction of minority/majority in law. There’s a reason for the separate existence of juvenile courts. There’s a reason for the determination of minors to be not fully capable in law of “consent”. It’s the same reason they cannot be a representative, senator, or president. Mental immaturity, raging hormones, and victim status aren’t qualifications for the seat of Solomon.
Hogg has been treated with “kid” gloves (pun intended) as he has thrust himself onto the public stage. His opinions have the depth of reasoning of a kid’s Christmas wish list. His demands should be confronted and dispatched, not indulged. There’s too much at stake for millions of others to let rantings go unanswered.
David, you wanted a debate; now you should get it.
This whole Russia dust-up is only about one thing: the Dems were shocked on Nov. 8, 2016. Then, the deligitimization campaign kicked into high gear. Hillary oppo research was leveraged into a smear operation. They were assisted by bureaucratic sympathizers who stretched their authority and an ideologically sympathetic legacy media to keep the fantasy on the front burner.
The Russians weren’t anymore prescient about the election result than Gallup. Their efforts were really done on the cheap. As a matter of fact, we have been famous for interfering in foreign elections. Ask Brexit supporters or Benjamin Netanyahu. Or take a look at the 1980’s Soviet disinformation campaigns in support of the nuclear freeze movement and domestic efforts to block Reagan’s decision to install medium range missiles in Europe. Many lefties, including lefty Dems, benefited from the succor. The current Dem obsession is divorced of any context, except their displeasure about losing.
Really, it’s all about the election result. As for the Russians, they tried to weaken the clout of their expected winner: Hillary. Now, the Russkies are focused on delegitimizing Trump. Pardon me for noticing the commonality of purpose of our “loyal” opposition and the Kremlin. Collusion anyone?
Nikolas Cruz being subdued about an hour after the shooting spree.Students gather at a memorial in Pine Trails Park in Parkland, Fla., in honor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting victims. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times).
A school shooting reflexively leads to calls for gun control, and currently for Trump to be a “Nixon-to-China” emissary to the NRA to make gun ownership more difficult. Lost in the noise is whether any of this will do any good, and any suggestion that there be a Pelosi-to-the-Gun-Control-Lobby or Schumer-to-the-Gun-Control-Lobby. It’s only Trump-to-the-NRA.
This boilerplate, one-sided prescription ran at the top in “Axios AM” for 2/16 by MIke Allen: “1 big thing: Why Trump drags his feet on guns”. According to Allen, a Trump delegation need only go to the NRA. I’m waiting for Bernie, Nancy, Chuck, and the rest of the Democratic Party apparatchiks to be envoys to the Brady Campaign. Allen’s blinders don’t seem to allow a place for moderation of gun control zealots in his field of vision.
Probably Allen’s blinders has much to do with the sociopolitical nest that he inhabits. Speaking of sociopolitical nests, we’ve got a national one that goes further to explain the gun violence than anything off the lips of Nancy Pelosi. The straws of the nest include: (1) many no-dad-in-the-home families; (2) insular lives in an obsessively digitized world; (3) a craven fixation on girls, girls, girls that leaves little room for boys – except for Ritalin; (4) the attempt to embed morals through secular means only; (5) the segregation of faith into the home and sanctuary; (6) absentee parents in pursuit of material comforts, etc., etc., etc.
The Dems’ only answer is some form of chant about gun control. If guns were confiscated or regulated and priced out of society, would we be any safer? In other words, would making the whole country into one big soft target be preferable? I doubt it. The preferred method of mayhem would shift to cars, machetes, pressure cookers, box cutter/commercial jets ….
Here’s a suggestion: Let’s turn our schools from soft to hard targets. It’s what we might have to do in a culture of our own making.
Classic expression of “implicit bias” as translated into a modern political movement.
The following post is a comment to “Psychology Professors Argue Against Groupthink in Their Field”, George Leef, The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 2/7/2018, https://www.jamesgmartin.center/…/psychology-professors-ar…/.
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“Back in 2000, a pair of psychologists [Banaji and Greenwald] announced that they had devised a test for implicit bias and stated that their results showed that more than 90 percent of Americans have a problem of unconscious prejudice.” (Leef from the above article) This questionable assertion is used to justify a host of crusades from Black Lives Matter to a campaign to address the paucity of female coders at Google.
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I say:
“Implicit bias” has a striking similarity to the “hidden structures of oppression” in much of the left’s revolution-mongering of the last couple of centuries. Marx relies on a vast set of social arrangements in market economies that work to oppress the “masses”. Generalities run rampant. The “men of commerce” are reduced to hated “capitalists” in order to more easily encapsulate the enemy, while labor is compressed into the “proletariat” as the sympathetic victim. Then, an all-encompassing revolution is necessary to upturn the very bases of life in the march to the better world.
Soviet post from 1917 depicting the “autocratic system” of oppression. The illusions throughout are of the oppressed who are chained and exploited for the benefit of the rich and powerful.
Today, Marx’s general outline is replicated in regards to other broad classes of the “oppressed”. “Implicit bias” is the same old gambit dressed up to embrace our fashionable victims’ groups.
International Women’s Day march in front of the White House, 3/9/2017.
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/
The following is a comment to “‘We will prosecute’ employers who help immigration sweeps, California AG says”, Angela Hart, The Sacramento Bee, 1/19/2018, http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article195434409.html .
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State officials are not required to enforce federal immigration law. But California actions to not hold suspects of federal detainer requests, refuse to share information, and help facilitate violations of federal immigration law veer awfully close to nullification. Now, upping the ante further, the state’s attorney general threatens prosecution of any employer who adheres to the requests and instructions of federal authorities. Not participating has morphed into obstruction.
Employers in a state, first and foremost, are citizens of the U.S., but merely residents of a state. Patriotism applies to loyalty to the nation, not a state. Mr. Becerra is forcing patriotic employers of the state into obstructing federal authorities in the fulfillment of clear and unambiguous Constitutional powers – Article I, Section 8, clause 3. The state is forcing U.S. citizens within its borders into not cooperating with federal authorities.
Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun disagreed over South Carolina’s nullification of the tariff law. Asked if he had any regrets during his presidency, Jackson said, “[That] I didn’t shoot Henry Clay and I didn’t hang John C. Calhoun.”Andrew Jackson threatened to march into South Carolina and hang the state’s government in 1833 over its nullification of the tariff law. U.S. AG Jeff Sessions needs to indict and submit Mr. Becerra to a perp walk. If the rest of the brood in Sacramento continues to interfere, a criminal conspiracy is at work. Apply RICO.
The following is a reply to “Where are Americans Moving?”, 2017, https://www.northamerican.com/migration-map.
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The map says it all according to a report issued by North American Van Lines for 2017.
Coupling the data about moves with economic rankings for states, Hillary country in the last election is a scary place for people wishing to better themselves. Take a look at the charts in the previous article and the map in this article and a picture crystallizes of people fleeing the Dems’ poison. Long term Dem control of the state legislature is a sure signal to look elsewhere to live.
The following is a reply to “America’s top five inbound vs. top five outbound states” by Mark J. Perry of AEI, http://www.aei.org/publication/americas-top-five-inbound-vs-top-five-outbound-states-how-do-they-compare-on-a-variety-of-economic-business-conditions-and-political-measures/comment-page-1/#comment-191182.
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Below is a chart showing the states in the grip of the poison and those with the antidote.
I’ve been beating this drum for quite some time, and it deserves to be beaten, and beaten, and beaten. People know poison when they see it, at least those who can load up a U-Haul. The Dems are, at this juncture, the purveyors of poison, and it shows in moving stats.
Repetition may force the message to sink in as we approach the November 2018 elections. In spite of Trump’s Twitter flatulations, the Dems aren’t a choice to register discontent with presidential behavior. Slicing off your nose to spite your face isn’t sound medical advice.
If in power as of January 2019, the Dems will take California national. It’s their beau ideal.
Whichever way the electoral winds blow, I’m still vexed by the same question. How much do people understand of this state of affairs? Do they understand that poison isn’t a health food? Or, are they so deranged by Trump that they’ll take poison by voting to imbibe the California venom?
