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It is a valid and perennial criticism of the GOP that the party rarely rallies around a well-defined forward-looking policy agenda. Republicans are often pretty good at grabbing votes at the margins when the left overreaches or nominates a moron. Running against bad ideas is more fun than defending and explaining good new ones.
But there is a fundamental issue for which I don’t think anyone on the right has an electorally satisfactory answer:
Why should we keep the Constitution, separation of powers, the Electoral College, free speech and economic freedom if it all just goes to create a society in which a gender studies major can’t get a high-paying job?
You might laugh, but that encapsulates the issue that is now the driving force for the most vibrant faction in the Democratic Party and could drag us all to a bad outcome. When a (now old-fashioned) candidate of either party claims to stand for bringing about economic growth with the inference that more of us will be employed and that there will be real wage growth, what does that offer to the barista who stopped a few credits and a thesis short of that PhD in Intersectional Street Puppet Theater Studies and knows he is never going to be sought by employers?
We have an enormous number of people (a) denied substantive cognitive or professional skills (b) trained to resent and follow rather than think and analyze and (c) burdened with absurd debts from the easy-money hucksters in the college finance office. These people do understand that even if the existing economy were to boom, it would likely not offer them serious opportunities for material success because they have little to offer in a free market.
Their only option is politically dictated redistribution. Even if this would provide a marginal increase in wealth, it would cripple the financial well-being of the rich and the presumptuous bourgeoisie who profit from the current system that unjustly fails to elevate the barista proletariat. And bringing the rest of us down is a feature, not a bug.
The old politics in which voters consider their options with respect to vibrant markets and job-growth versus safety net and benefit expansion has no purchase on this new demographic. Only a system that grants them the power to redirect resources independent of actual values and economic realities will deliver them from their current predicament.
And the politics of this new demographic will continue to be funded by trust fund heirs with daddy issues, ultra-wealthy divorcees (surprisingly groupthink-oriented), tech innovators and the satanic Soros and molded into a force to be dealt with for quite some time.
Discussion (20)
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So for those who go after a totally meaningless and useless degree, they expect to depend on the rest of us to give up our money when they can't get a job. Makes sense to me!
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My simplistic response is that colleges and universities should be making the student loans. If they sell someone a worthless degree, they should be the ones who have to fight to collect payment.
If their graduates can't pay, the institutions are the ones who should be on the hook.
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Yes, maybe it would reduce the number of worthless degree programs being offered.
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College is not a job training program. Back in the day, people majored in all sorts of subjects that had no immediate application beyond becoming a professor or teacher in that subject. But they were rigorous programs that allowed people to master other skills like critical thinking that could be put towards many different careers, many of which are quite high paying. Every classmate I met after graduation who majored in Classics or English or History seemed to be studying for the LSAT. So I don't think it is the study subject per say that makes a degree worthless, it is the grade inflation, the indoctrination, the requirement to please your radical professors, the lack of rigor, the fetishization of victimhood, identify politics, the inability to confront failure etc etc etc that make a degree worthless. The colleges and universities that produce responsible and educated young people ready to take their place in society will succeed while the others can go away without much loss to anyone.
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Well said.
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