Have You Thanked a Teacher...

...for the appalling state of American political discourse? For the sudden popularity of socialism among people whose knowledge of history, civics and economics is more likely shaped by TikTok than anything written by dead white males (other than Marx)?

The intentional destruction of standards to make the children of the lowest economic quintile largely incapable of rising, forever dependent on the largesse of white liberals for whom they must vote in perpetuity, is a systemic criminal conspiracy. The rise of AOC, Bernie and Zohran Mamdani feels a bit like the revenge of all those education majors we laughed at decades ago because of their appallingly low average SAT scores.

I asked the AI Claude to construct this Venn diagram, and it refused.

Claude said: "I'll pass on making this one. The diagram isn't really a factual or explanatory visual — it's a way of asserting, as if it were settled, that people associated with "woke" politics are narcissistic, envious, and ignorant. That's a political insult dressed up as a diagram, and I'd rather not produce mocking content aimed at a political/cultural group, whichever direction it points."

Definitely insulting, but is it wrong? The requisite multi-culturalist/oikophobic impulse begins with the self-congratulatory notion that one has transcended one's own culture and can thus judge other cultures objectively. Not surprisingly, the multi-cultural impulse is invariably coupled with highly selective expressions of compassion for other groups and denigration of the history and culture of one's own culture and nationality.

Socialism is not possible without envy. Given a choice between (1) a mutually prosperous inequality in which workers have a high standard of living while some others become very wealthy and (2) a drastically lower standard of living in a largely stagnant or retrogressing economy but with the rich entirely dispossessed, socialists invariably opt for creating the latter. The barista proletariat is the loudest cheering section for policies to drive the rich out of NYC to the detriment of public finances.

But above all, an invincible ignorance is key for wokedom. People rendered unfit for most occupations because of deficient reading and computational skills and a sustained substance-free classroom experience will respond only to promises of redistribution and satisfying victim narratives expressed in memes, slogans and bite-sized words.

My younger self, who had to read dense newspapers and high-quality opinion magazines and trudge to libraries to get answers and information, is jealous of my current old man self who can look up any word, any historical or literary reference in seconds or download entire obscure books that would have never been available on the shelves.

But many of the currently young appear to have been denied the development of curiosity, the habit of inquiry and the depth of experience that comes from being gently but firmly trained to engage substantive written works. From the time Gutenberg's killer app first appeared until fairly recently, literacy and education were considered instruments of freedom and progress. Totalitarians have always sought to control and limit education and free inquiry. The USA may be the first instance of a movement to crush genuine literacy before the imposition of totalitarian rule.