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The “radicals” I knew in the early 1970s spouted Marxist drivel, but the booming economy of the 1980s converted many or most into well-paid Republicans.
A later generation of undergraduates, charged much higher tuition and taught by an increasingly lefty professoriate, gravitated more towards NGOs, government and the bloated administrative ranks of academia but still achieved above-average incomes.
The newest college generation has been subjected to a worse-than-useless, indoctrination-filled education at even more exorbitant prices with vastly reduced prospects for paying off that debt with a successful career. David Broder named this new demographic the “barista proletariat." They are the electoral base of the absurd NYC mayoral prospect named Mamdani. They are proponents of a lunatic mishmash of causes—pro-Hamas, pro-transgender, climate fantasy, etc.—held together only by a near-religious anti-American, anti-Western disposition available only to the very badly educated.
Colleges tried to make earlier generations of students into Marxists but made the mistake of (a) permitting substantive education and (b) transmitting marketable skills. The current curricular configuration largely corrects those errors. Hence, Mamdani, AOC and the rise of the barista proletariat. More pitiable than those misguided youths are the aging Democrat politicians being pushed aside even as they try to obediently echo the destructive inanities of their new masters.
As long as our poisoned universities have outsized influence and continue as deformation factories, that voting bloc could increase. It is already the dominant faction of the Democratic Party. The DEI campus bureaucracy has taken a well-deserved, long-overdue major hit, but there are still 1,500,000 college professors—the great majority of whom were likely hired more for ideological fidelity and DEI criteria than competence. The career path to all professions is still held hostage.
We owe it to our youth and our country to recognize the real enemy. The continuous propaganda assaults from Moscow, Beijing, George Soros and Tehran would have little or no purchase without pre-existing, organized domestic subversion. We need to craft education funding policies accordingly.
Discussion (23)
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Here's something by the great writer on management and society, Peter Drucker, published way back in 1969:
"One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…"
We as a country are a lot closer to accepting Grande Ecole status for Harvard Law School and similar institutions than we were when Drucker wrote the above. Does anyone really believe that this is a good thing?
Link
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Also, an interesting view of Harvard from an English traveler in 1835. She says:
The politics of the managers of Harvard University are opposed to those of the great body of the American people. She is the aristocratic college of the United States. Her pride of antiquity, her vanity of pre-eminence and wealth, are likely to prevent her renovating her principles and management so as to suit the wants of the period; and she will probably receive a sufficient patronage from the aristocracy, for a considerable time to come, to encourage her in all her faults. She has a great name, and the education she affords is very expensive in comparison with all other colleges. The sons of the wealthy will therefore flock to her.
Much more here.
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What a fascinating essay. Thanks for the link. Here is another gem:
The traveller is met everywhere among the aristocracy of the country with what seems to him the error of concluding that letters are wisdom, and that scholarship is education. Among a people whose profession is social equality, and whose rule of association is universal self-government, he is surprised to witness the assumptions of a class, and the contempt which the few express for the many, with as much assurance as if they lived in Russia or England.
That presumption was thought to arise from having been exposed to the great works of European civilization. But for modern wannabe elitists to feel superior for having read a summary of Wikipedia 's entry on Derrida or Foucault...?
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I have a question:
Why don't we teach in K-12 that communism is a failed system that doesn't work? Why can't we teach in K-12 that we should take pride in our country (kids can learn about the warts when older)?
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