November 21, 2023
Dear Friends and Family,
My research indicates the Internal War on our values which has erupted into significant division within this nation, started in 1962 with a small group of college students who embraced Marxism and argued that democracy in America was a sham resulting in the formation of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Their published manifesto, “Port Huron Statement,” describes a plan that is almost identical to what has happened to our colleges and universities – molding the attitudes to the SDS way of thinking. This indoctrination has spread throughout our higher educational system now for three generations.
The concepts arose to prominence with President Obama’s apology tour throughout the world in 2009. Then it took a big leap forward with a campaign tweet by Joe Biden on July 5, 2020, when he promised, “We won’t just rebuild this nation – we’ll transform it.” We are now experiencing some of the elements of that transformation effort including: the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives, Critical Race Theory, public schools trying to displace parents, disregard for meritocracy, an attempt to change American demographics wherein the population of people of color surpasses that of white people (via open borders), and elimination of free speech, all enhanced by the threat of climate change. This is often termed the “Woke Ideology.”
This leads to two fundamental questions: (1). Can an ideology like wokeness successfully replace our culture, traditions, and values or will its endpoint be an authoritarian tyranny of the minority or possibly a new governing state such as the Chinese Communist Party, and (2). Do we want such a change? Two rather meaty questions. Hopefully this segment will help you determine your answers and what if anything, you might do about it.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
My research indicates the Internal War on our values which has erupted into significant division within this nation, started in 1962 with a small group of college students who embraced Marxism and argued that democracy in America was a sham resulting in the formation of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Their published manifesto, “Port Huron Statement,” describes a plan that is almost identical to what has happened to our colleges and universities – molding the attitudes to the SDS way of thinking. This indoctrination has spread throughout our higher educational system now for three generations.
The concepts arose to prominence with President Obama’s apology tour throughout the world in 2009. Then it took a big leap forward with a campaign tweet by Joe Biden on July 5, 2020, when he promised, “We won’t just rebuild this nation – we’ll transform it.” We are now experiencing some of the elements of that transformation effort including: the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives, Critical Race Theory, public schools trying to displace parents, disregard for meritocracy, an attempt to change American demographics wherein the population of people of color surpasses that of white people (via open borders), and elimination of free speech, all enhanced by the threat of climate change. This is often termed the “Woke Ideology.”
This leads to two fundamental questions: (1). Can an ideology like wokeness successfully replace our culture, traditions, and values or will its endpoint be an authoritarian tyranny of the minority or possibly a new governing state such as the Chinese Communist Party, and (2). Do we want such a change? Two rather meaty questions. Hopefully this segment will help you determine your answers and what if anything, you might do about it.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SEEKING WISDOM FOR AMERICA – SEGMENT 20
THE INTERNAL WAR: VALUES & DIVISION FROM WITHIN
Problem Definition
Our nation grew with a set of values shaped by Christian and Jewish faiths – the Ten Commandments, Golden Rule, and the teachings of the Bible and Torah – plus a set of laws shaped by British Common Law. As people immigrated to our country the adopted these values, learned English, and over time we became a melting pot of many faiths, ethnicities, and customs. Our Constitution bound the citizenry together around these values except for one: Slavery.
The Civil War was fought over this issue which resulted in the freeing of slaves. However, the Democratic Party led by President Andrew Johnson (following the assignation of President Abraham Lincoln) disavowed the Reconstruction agreement put in place at the end of the war and implemented his own Presidential Reconstruction. This policy included Black Codes which many Southern states expanded to deprive the “freemen” of their civil liberties. This set of racial values continued for about 100 years backed by the Southern Dixiecrat Democrats. The associated discrimination was particularly strong in the southeast portion of the country.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 sought to ensure civil rights for all and end the discriminatory actions. The Act was passed with a vote of 290 – 130 in the House of Representatives (115 to 96 by Democrats and 138 to 34 by Republicans) and 73 to 27 in the Senate (44 to 23 by Democrats and 27 to 6 by Republicans). Significant progress was made on civil rights for Blacks and other minorities from 1964 to the early 2000s. Since that time (roughly 20 years) we are seemingly fighting a third battle of racial civil rights with the advent of the Woke ideology forged by the progressive part of the Democratic Party. Some of the aspects of the Woke ideology includes:
WISDOM ON POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS -- EXCERPTS
REALITY:
In many ways, it would be disturbingly easy for America to continue along the path of even greater polarization. Growing political tribalism provides a clear enemy – the “socialist” left or “extremist” right – for Americans feeling left behind economically or culturally by rapid global change. It offers the comfort of someone else to blame, however misplaced. By continuing on this path, the right and left would exist ever more within their own comfortable echo chamber of endorsement and reinforcement, with progressively more extreme views rarely questioned. Neither side would take responsibility for the problems confronting their country or for addressing them. Instead, they would launch increasingly vitriolic political attacks on their opponents, aided and abetted by the partisan U.S. media., forcing ever more Americans to pick sides to avoid being ostracized or attacked themselves. Even less would get done and America’s fault lines would grow deeper.
The U.S. would not be the first country to play out this scenario. We’ve seen it before in other parts of the world, where traditional systems break down, where opponents are demonized and dehumanized, and where seemingly stable and prosperous countries descend into serious political crisis and worse. The U.S. may be some way from this sort of breakdown. But moving down the path of polarization would not be in the interests of the U.S. itself or the wider Western world which would quickly feel the cold wind of a distracted and declining America.
Source: The Great American Delusion by Patrick Davies (2020)
No other country can play the role of defender of the West, despite the sometimes-lofty claims from the European Union and other individual nations. Only the U.S. has the scale, power, and resources to secure the future of the Western system, to influence the course of history by the power of its example, backed by its economic strength and military might. Even the U.S. cannot do this alone as great powers emerge in China and India; it needs to work ever more closely will allies in Europe, Africa and Asia. But whether we like it or not (and many in Europe don’t), the future prosperity and the longevity of the West once again depend substantially on the U.S.
No one it the West can afford the U.S. to weaken or decline more quickly than it might in the course of history. The loss of the U.S. as a strong symbol and defender of Western democracy would have global implications that the West’s enemies would quickly seek to exploit. Tensions would grow as malevolent powers would seek to expand their areas of influence and control. The global economy would be hit by falling confidence in America’s economic future. And democracy itself would begin to lose its attraction for countries in transition aspiring for a better future.
So then, how do we move beyond the frustratingly obtuse nature of our current political discourse, and forward to a more productive one? The first step is to unshackle ourselves from our in-groups, liberating sufficient space for individual reflection on the core issues and principles underlying the American Schism. We must confront the harsh reality that our in-groups are uncompromisingly reinforcing our unproductive behavior. What is required is not a collective acceptance or rejection of specific points of view nor a consensus of principles by our tribal groups, but instead individual reflection on and meaningful consideration of our own personal views on the substantive principles themselves, divorced from the pressures of our self-created mobs. The second step is to be open to listening and more munificently understanding, considering, and pondering on the perspective of others, especially those not in our in-groups, without resorting to ad hominem attacks. Personal introspection and empathetic listening to rival points of view are the essential prerequisites for a fruitful discussion and constructive debate.
Source: American Schism by Seth David Radwell ((2021)
THE DEBATE: Meritocracy versus Wokeness:
Meritocracy: The logic of meritocracy is ironclad: putting the most qualified, best equipped people into the positions of greatest responsibility and import. It would be foolhardy to toss the principle out in its entirety. You certainly wouldn’t want surgeons’ licenses to be handed out via lottery or have major cabinet members selected through reality TV-style voting. Instead of abandoning meritocracy, we need to develop better strategies for its effective and measurable 21st-century implementation.
Meritocracy is efficient at developing and channeling the best and brightest toward opportunities where they can contribute the most to the collective societal good. Thus, while in such a society people focus on maximizing their personal gain, because the accomplishments they produce are valued as measured by society, people concurrently contribute to society overall. Meritocracy produces a better society for us all. In rewarding efforts and smarts we incentivize both. At the same time, for those who are less successful within any specific period, the republic’s role is to ensure a “safety net” so that these members can still pursue a dignified life. Sounds pretty simple.
But the harsh reality that we have achieved quite unequal success and at times appalling failures in our quest to attain a true meritocracy does not in any way compromise the validity of the principle nor obviate the imperative to strive for its greater realization. The model of a meritocracy can still be a sacrosanct model, a goal to which all societies might strive.
In The Meritocracy Trap (2019) Daniel Markovits that meritocracy achieves the precise opposite of its intended goals. He claims that because the competition is so rigged in favor of the affluent at every level of education and training, the outcome of a meritocracy is inevitably a caste system where the modern elite pass down the benefits of their status to their children in an analogous manner to how, in centuries past, the aristocratic elite passed down land and capital.
The fact that our meritocracy can have a much more level set of points for entry and development, with more equitable access to training along the way, indicates that a better implementation of meritocracy is the goal, not its entire replacement.
Source: American Schism by Seth David Radwell (2021)
The way to save meritocracy from degenerating into aristocracy is to give inheritance and estate taxes real teeth, while cutting the progressive income taxes that penalize those who work hard and create value while they are alive. Tax someone’s wealth heavily, sure. But wait until they die. You can’t take it with you, after all. Neither should your kid. This approach is both efficient and fair. Unlike an income tax, it encourages spending money rather than uselessly hording it, because most people would rather spend their money while they’re alive than have it taxed heavily when they die. And, most importantly, a hefty inheritance tax with no gaping loopholes gives us the best of meritocracy while avoiding the worst: people have an incentive to work hard and innovate during their lifetimes, but their children must start fresh, without getting to ride on their parents’ coattails.
Some people spend their lives building empires precisely so they can pass them down to their children; they want to build dynasties that will outlive them. My response is that we should think of high inheritance taxes not just as a way of redistributing wealth, but a way of redistributing duty. If a talented person benefits from a meritocratic system and becomes rich, they owe it to everyone else to preserve meritocracy, so others have the chance to do the same. Making their own way in the world, on their own merit, not only makes children better citizens; it makes them better people.
Source: Nation of Victims by Vivek Ramaswamy (2022)
Wokeism: The story of Obama’s 2012 victory is the story of the transformation of American politics. That strategy was “transformational.” [Note: A word President Biden often uses to describe his administration today]. It pitted Americans against Americans, race against race, sex against sex. Obama domesticated the destructive impulses of authoritarian leftism in pursuit of power. Obama acting as a community organizer within the system itself, declaring himself the representative of the dispossessed, empowered with the levers of the state in order to destroy and reconstitute the state on their behalf. And it worked.
The argument put forth by the new intersectional coalition is that any failures within the American system are due to the inherent evils of the system, not to individual failures within that system. That now predominates throughout instruments of politics, government, and law. Joe Biden’s unity agenda with Bernie Sanders pledged, “On day one, we are committed to taking anti-racist actions for equity across our institutions, including in the areas of education, climate change, criminal justice, immigration, and health care, among others.” By anti-racist policy, Biden means policy designed to level all outcomes, no matter the individual decision making at issue. The 2020 Democratic Party platform makes that point even clearer: “Democrats are committed to standing up to racism and bigotry in our laws, in our culture, in our politics, and in our society, and recognize that race-neutral policies are not sufficient to rectify race-based disparities. We will take a comprehensive approach to embed racial justice in every element of our governing agenda.”
For progressives, the importance of the Obama coalition lies in its purported ability to cram down policy on a large minority – or even a majority of Americans. The coalition is authoritarian in orientation: it promotes revolutionary aggression against the system itself, from both within and without; it seeks top-down censorship of those who disagree; and it sets itself up as an unquestionable moral system, superior to its predecessors.
But the coalition is so fragile, it can be fractured. The most obvious way to fracture is through generalized resistance to individual elements of the intersectional agenda. And each element is becoming increasingly more radical. The renormalization of American politics that the coalition seeks can only occur in the absence of majoritarian backlash.
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021)
Education versus Indoctrination:
Nothing Matters more than Education. Access to a good education is the gateway to the American dream. It gives students a base of knowledge and the ability to learn, which opens endless doors. A good education also makes students into better citizens. Through civics and American history, they learn our nation’s story and what good citizenship entails. It not only teaches them skills but also gives them the ability to exchange ideas and wrestle with hard problems. But you only get one shot at a K-12 education, and sadly our education system has work to do on all accounts.
A Plan to Fix Our Schools: I am not an education expert, but I know three things to be true. First, the status quo must change. Second, there is no shortage of ideas for how to improve schooling, only a shortage of action. And third, education in America is, “first and foremost about the kind of people we want to be.”
The ideas that follow will not address every issue. Instead, they are intended to break the mold. To put children and their families first. To refocus our schools on raising informed citizens. To teach students how to think. And, most of all, to ensure as much equality of opportunity as is possible.
Let’s start by empowering families. Every family should have a choice in where their children go to school and a say in what their children learn. It is the responsibility of local, state, and federal governments to ensure they have the opportunities and funds needed to exercise that right.
The ultimate form of accountability is the ability of parents to leave a school that isn’t working for their son or daughter. In the current framework of our K-12 system, the opposite happens: a bad school just gets more money. We also must resist the campaign of dumb down education in the name of “equity,” which holds that equality of outcome, not opportunity, is what matters. In recent years, Oregon has suspended proficiency standards in reading, math and writing for high school graduates, and school districts have abolished honors math programs. Similar efforts are underway across the country. These campaigns are designed not to help students learn, succeed, and overcome the racial achievement gap, but to limit them. They rob children of the opportunity and deny the essential truth that each is unique and blessed with their own talents and potential. Rather that the educational achievement gap is insurmountable and brings the educational level down to the lowest level.
Choice lets funding follow the student to the best schools, often to schools with clever business models or with fewer rigid and arcane rules, meaning teachers get to do what they care most about – educate.
Finally, we must develop not just good students, but good citizens. As Henry Kissinger warns, “No society can remain great if it loses faith in itself.” The preservation of the American experiment requires citizens who understand the American system and are grateful for that inheritance. Therefore, it is imperative that students learn our country’s history honestly, including the injustices and missteps, but also how exceptional America is and how far it has come. The classroom is not the place for indoctrination.
Source: Superpower in Peril: A Battleplan to Renew America by David H. McCormick (2023)
I launched a new initiative to enhance American civics education in high school, launched a major speech and debate initiative, established strong statewide civics standards, and created a training course for teachers after which each teacher would receive a $3,000 bonus. We even developed a civics exam for all graduating seniors modeled after the citizenship exam that immigrants must take prior to naturalization. Civics education has universal utility. No matter what students decide to do after they graduate from our school system, all will be called upon to exercise the duties of American citizenship. It is our responsibility to ensure that these students are not just a blank slate, but that they have a solid foundation in the core principles of our republican system of government and a firm idea of what it means to be an American.
Florida has done much over the years to boost school choice, support parental involvement, and increase student achievement. Many liberal states have done the opposite by subordinating the interests of students and parents to teachers’ unions, and the cost of doing so has been devastating.
In the 2022 Legislative session a bill named “Parental Right in Education” was passed. The bill provided for a flat ban on classroom instruction on sexuality and gender ideology in lower elementary school and required that sex instruction in other grades be age and developmentally appropriate. This made a lot of sense. Most Floridians want our schools focused on teaching our kids to read, write, add, and subtract. It was disturbing that the left wanted to indoctrinate very young students in woke gender theory.
Free Speech versus Censorship:
Big Tech companies have been a major cog in the woke machine, impacting both policy and individual freedom in a big way. These companies are quasi monopolies that exert more power over society than the big monopolies at the turn of the 20th century ever did. They receive liability protection from the federal government on the basis that they are not publishers but merely platforms, yet they then turn around and apply their opaque terms of service in way that discriminate based on viewpoint. Florida enacted legislation to combat Big Tech censorship by providing individuals with the right to bring a consumer fraud action if they were censored or deplatformed in a way that is discrimination.
Both the legislative and executive branches should use their respective authorities to defend individuals against large corporations that are wielding what is effectively public power. Reining in Big Tech, enforcing antitrust laws, prohibiting discriminatory job training, and crippling the ESG movement are all ways in which the political branches can protect individual freedom from stridently ideological private actors. The Founders recognized the dangers posed by an accumulation of power within the structure of government, and recent years have demonstrated that this concern extends to the corporate sphere. At the end of the day, the re-mooring of the constitutional ship of state will provide the needed foundation for the reinvigoration of a society rooted in freedom, justice, and the rule of law.
Source: The Courage to Be Free by Ron DeSantis (2023).
SEEKING UNITY:
The antidote to social crackup is not more openness but more cohesion, more careful attention to the ancestral memory and shared history of the people already struggling to live together in this country. Rhetoric that is truly “divisive” and “partisan” is not that which invokes America’s national identity but that which encourages Americans to think of one another in terms of race, sex, or even vaccination status. In this context consider what it means that President Biden and his administration regularly talked in terms of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”— as if some portion of the American citizenry was tantamount to a disease. The most damning indictment of our political and cultural elites is that they seem dedicated, with almost every word and action, to eroding the civic friendship that remains our only real hope of survival and restoration. Too many of our leaders seek to be demagogues, exploiting the already tense division between us for their own venal ends.
But the way out of this mess, paradoxically, is to think smaller and not bigger. The truth is that you and I are not, in fact, powerful enough to Save America or Save the World. Nor indeed will we get anywhere by continuing to think only in grand abstractions, even lofty and noble ones like “America,” “the republic,” or indeed “the West.” But one article of wisdom that comes down to us through history of Western thought is that all such high ideals are embodied in the small concerns and daily activities of the here and now. We fight for them by living them out in our own lives, and we preserve them by taking some part of them into ourselves. If it is true that our regime crisis is a failure of civic friendship, then the antidote is not grand schemes to redistribute wealth or overturn the 2020 election but re-investment in our neighbors as our neighbors.
This is not at all to say that when you turn your attention to the people and things immediately surrounding you, there will be no problems to contend with. There might be terrible problems like drug addiction, child abuse, contentious school board meetings over racial and sexual extremism, or the threat or reality of poverty. But the strangely comforting thing about even these problems is that they are you-sized: unlike the global disasters which you perceive or imagine, your personal and local problems represent the potential for you and those around you to get on with the actual work of civic engagement and republican friendship. In this context you actually can make things better – as parents around the country are starting to do with their local schools, and as ordinary people do every day, over the breakfast table and on the street, in acts of charity and kindness. The burden of building a family and cherishing it, the burden of fighting through the ruble of this broken world toward the good, the true, and the beautiful; these burdens, no more, and no less, are yours to bear.
When you do get about that work, you may find that the tribal designations you have attached to yourself hold less and less weight. It may surprise you to learn that a “Republican” is not actually a type of person, and neither is a “Democrat.” In our transformative age of realignment, the divide is really, more than anything, between people who want to live in the real world – the world where there are two sexes, kids are important, and the weak need protecting – and people who want to deny or upend that world.
You and I wake up every day in a world that is real, surrounded by people who are also real, and that is enough. It is everything. And if you and I wake up determined that we will live as if the eternal truths handed down to us by our ancestors are as real as ourselves and the world around us – if we do that in faith, then that’s better than good. That is how to save the West.
Source: How to Save the West by Spencer Klavan (2023)
POTENTIAL SOLUTION
To move from the current “tyranny of the minority” to the “democracy of the majority” Americans need to be educated on the consequences of what we are facing as a country.
To prepare for the inevitable, debate needs to occur on several planes and the people need to cast their ballot on what is needed to maintain our way of life versus that of Communist authoritarianism. Is it:
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE INTERNAL WAR: VALUES & DIVISION FROM WITHIN
Problem Definition
Our nation grew with a set of values shaped by Christian and Jewish faiths – the Ten Commandments, Golden Rule, and the teachings of the Bible and Torah – plus a set of laws shaped by British Common Law. As people immigrated to our country the adopted these values, learned English, and over time we became a melting pot of many faiths, ethnicities, and customs. Our Constitution bound the citizenry together around these values except for one: Slavery.
The Civil War was fought over this issue which resulted in the freeing of slaves. However, the Democratic Party led by President Andrew Johnson (following the assignation of President Abraham Lincoln) disavowed the Reconstruction agreement put in place at the end of the war and implemented his own Presidential Reconstruction. This policy included Black Codes which many Southern states expanded to deprive the “freemen” of their civil liberties. This set of racial values continued for about 100 years backed by the Southern Dixiecrat Democrats. The associated discrimination was particularly strong in the southeast portion of the country.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 sought to ensure civil rights for all and end the discriminatory actions. The Act was passed with a vote of 290 – 130 in the House of Representatives (115 to 96 by Democrats and 138 to 34 by Republicans) and 73 to 27 in the Senate (44 to 23 by Democrats and 27 to 6 by Republicans). Significant progress was made on civil rights for Blacks and other minorities from 1964 to the early 2000s. Since that time (roughly 20 years) we are seemingly fighting a third battle of racial civil rights with the advent of the Woke ideology forged by the progressive part of the Democratic Party. Some of the aspects of the Woke ideology includes:
- Every institution in America is rooted in white supremacy; every institution is “structurally” or “institutionally” racist. It is white power that makes the laws, and it is violent white power that enforces these laws with guns and nightsticks. These institutions have to be torn down to the ground and rebuilt to eradicate the since of such institutions.
- Our nation is made up of the oppressed and the oppressors on an individual basis. Even minor offenses on the part of the oppressors inflict profound damage to the oppressed. These “microaggressions” are brutal acts, are deeply wounding, and exhibit racism. Thus, the oppressors can be racist without intent. Therefore, silence by the oppressor provides the only protection to the oppressed.
- To achieve equality between the oppressed and oppressors, a hierarchy of victimhood has been established wherein you gain credibility based on the number of victim groups to which one belongs. Only those in the hierarchy can effectively judge racism. This hierarchy is also manifested by how you identify politically e.g., Democrat or Republican.
- Meritocracy (defined as developing and challenging the best and brightest toward opportunities where they can contribute the most to the collective societal good) is unfair because the outcome is one of privilege based on your skin color. Therefore, it has to be mitigated by equity (defined as racial justice for everybody who has not had the benefit of the system that has not served everybody) by seeking equal outcome for everyone – hence socialism. This replaces the historical value of providing equal opportunity for everyone.
- The traditional family – a father, mother, and children – is not serving society well, particularly children. They have been raised in a system that is evil, a repository of discrimination and bigotry, in a country founded and steeped in cruelty. Therefore, the state has to take a much larger role in our children’s education via teachers trained and subscribing to woke principles.
- Free speech is a public and private threat. It leads to people being offended and not feeling safe from people who disagree with them. People should have the right to be protected from unpleasant realities and ideas counter to the woke ideology. Therefore, we need to abandon free speech and invoke censorship by monitoring and canceling bad ideas for public consumption in the media, particularly on social media platforms.
WISDOM ON POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS -- EXCERPTS
REALITY:
In many ways, it would be disturbingly easy for America to continue along the path of even greater polarization. Growing political tribalism provides a clear enemy – the “socialist” left or “extremist” right – for Americans feeling left behind economically or culturally by rapid global change. It offers the comfort of someone else to blame, however misplaced. By continuing on this path, the right and left would exist ever more within their own comfortable echo chamber of endorsement and reinforcement, with progressively more extreme views rarely questioned. Neither side would take responsibility for the problems confronting their country or for addressing them. Instead, they would launch increasingly vitriolic political attacks on their opponents, aided and abetted by the partisan U.S. media., forcing ever more Americans to pick sides to avoid being ostracized or attacked themselves. Even less would get done and America’s fault lines would grow deeper.
The U.S. would not be the first country to play out this scenario. We’ve seen it before in other parts of the world, where traditional systems break down, where opponents are demonized and dehumanized, and where seemingly stable and prosperous countries descend into serious political crisis and worse. The U.S. may be some way from this sort of breakdown. But moving down the path of polarization would not be in the interests of the U.S. itself or the wider Western world which would quickly feel the cold wind of a distracted and declining America.
Source: The Great American Delusion by Patrick Davies (2020)
No other country can play the role of defender of the West, despite the sometimes-lofty claims from the European Union and other individual nations. Only the U.S. has the scale, power, and resources to secure the future of the Western system, to influence the course of history by the power of its example, backed by its economic strength and military might. Even the U.S. cannot do this alone as great powers emerge in China and India; it needs to work ever more closely will allies in Europe, Africa and Asia. But whether we like it or not (and many in Europe don’t), the future prosperity and the longevity of the West once again depend substantially on the U.S.
No one it the West can afford the U.S. to weaken or decline more quickly than it might in the course of history. The loss of the U.S. as a strong symbol and defender of Western democracy would have global implications that the West’s enemies would quickly seek to exploit. Tensions would grow as malevolent powers would seek to expand their areas of influence and control. The global economy would be hit by falling confidence in America’s economic future. And democracy itself would begin to lose its attraction for countries in transition aspiring for a better future.
So then, how do we move beyond the frustratingly obtuse nature of our current political discourse, and forward to a more productive one? The first step is to unshackle ourselves from our in-groups, liberating sufficient space for individual reflection on the core issues and principles underlying the American Schism. We must confront the harsh reality that our in-groups are uncompromisingly reinforcing our unproductive behavior. What is required is not a collective acceptance or rejection of specific points of view nor a consensus of principles by our tribal groups, but instead individual reflection on and meaningful consideration of our own personal views on the substantive principles themselves, divorced from the pressures of our self-created mobs. The second step is to be open to listening and more munificently understanding, considering, and pondering on the perspective of others, especially those not in our in-groups, without resorting to ad hominem attacks. Personal introspection and empathetic listening to rival points of view are the essential prerequisites for a fruitful discussion and constructive debate.
Source: American Schism by Seth David Radwell ((2021)
THE DEBATE: Meritocracy versus Wokeness:
Meritocracy: The logic of meritocracy is ironclad: putting the most qualified, best equipped people into the positions of greatest responsibility and import. It would be foolhardy to toss the principle out in its entirety. You certainly wouldn’t want surgeons’ licenses to be handed out via lottery or have major cabinet members selected through reality TV-style voting. Instead of abandoning meritocracy, we need to develop better strategies for its effective and measurable 21st-century implementation.
Meritocracy is efficient at developing and channeling the best and brightest toward opportunities where they can contribute the most to the collective societal good. Thus, while in such a society people focus on maximizing their personal gain, because the accomplishments they produce are valued as measured by society, people concurrently contribute to society overall. Meritocracy produces a better society for us all. In rewarding efforts and smarts we incentivize both. At the same time, for those who are less successful within any specific period, the republic’s role is to ensure a “safety net” so that these members can still pursue a dignified life. Sounds pretty simple.
But the harsh reality that we have achieved quite unequal success and at times appalling failures in our quest to attain a true meritocracy does not in any way compromise the validity of the principle nor obviate the imperative to strive for its greater realization. The model of a meritocracy can still be a sacrosanct model, a goal to which all societies might strive.
In The Meritocracy Trap (2019) Daniel Markovits that meritocracy achieves the precise opposite of its intended goals. He claims that because the competition is so rigged in favor of the affluent at every level of education and training, the outcome of a meritocracy is inevitably a caste system where the modern elite pass down the benefits of their status to their children in an analogous manner to how, in centuries past, the aristocratic elite passed down land and capital.
The fact that our meritocracy can have a much more level set of points for entry and development, with more equitable access to training along the way, indicates that a better implementation of meritocracy is the goal, not its entire replacement.
Source: American Schism by Seth David Radwell (2021)
The way to save meritocracy from degenerating into aristocracy is to give inheritance and estate taxes real teeth, while cutting the progressive income taxes that penalize those who work hard and create value while they are alive. Tax someone’s wealth heavily, sure. But wait until they die. You can’t take it with you, after all. Neither should your kid. This approach is both efficient and fair. Unlike an income tax, it encourages spending money rather than uselessly hording it, because most people would rather spend their money while they’re alive than have it taxed heavily when they die. And, most importantly, a hefty inheritance tax with no gaping loopholes gives us the best of meritocracy while avoiding the worst: people have an incentive to work hard and innovate during their lifetimes, but their children must start fresh, without getting to ride on their parents’ coattails.
Some people spend their lives building empires precisely so they can pass them down to their children; they want to build dynasties that will outlive them. My response is that we should think of high inheritance taxes not just as a way of redistributing wealth, but a way of redistributing duty. If a talented person benefits from a meritocratic system and becomes rich, they owe it to everyone else to preserve meritocracy, so others have the chance to do the same. Making their own way in the world, on their own merit, not only makes children better citizens; it makes them better people.
Source: Nation of Victims by Vivek Ramaswamy (2022)
Wokeism: The story of Obama’s 2012 victory is the story of the transformation of American politics. That strategy was “transformational.” [Note: A word President Biden often uses to describe his administration today]. It pitted Americans against Americans, race against race, sex against sex. Obama domesticated the destructive impulses of authoritarian leftism in pursuit of power. Obama acting as a community organizer within the system itself, declaring himself the representative of the dispossessed, empowered with the levers of the state in order to destroy and reconstitute the state on their behalf. And it worked.
The argument put forth by the new intersectional coalition is that any failures within the American system are due to the inherent evils of the system, not to individual failures within that system. That now predominates throughout instruments of politics, government, and law. Joe Biden’s unity agenda with Bernie Sanders pledged, “On day one, we are committed to taking anti-racist actions for equity across our institutions, including in the areas of education, climate change, criminal justice, immigration, and health care, among others.” By anti-racist policy, Biden means policy designed to level all outcomes, no matter the individual decision making at issue. The 2020 Democratic Party platform makes that point even clearer: “Democrats are committed to standing up to racism and bigotry in our laws, in our culture, in our politics, and in our society, and recognize that race-neutral policies are not sufficient to rectify race-based disparities. We will take a comprehensive approach to embed racial justice in every element of our governing agenda.”
For progressives, the importance of the Obama coalition lies in its purported ability to cram down policy on a large minority – or even a majority of Americans. The coalition is authoritarian in orientation: it promotes revolutionary aggression against the system itself, from both within and without; it seeks top-down censorship of those who disagree; and it sets itself up as an unquestionable moral system, superior to its predecessors.
But the coalition is so fragile, it can be fractured. The most obvious way to fracture is through generalized resistance to individual elements of the intersectional agenda. And each element is becoming increasingly more radical. The renormalization of American politics that the coalition seeks can only occur in the absence of majoritarian backlash.
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021)
Education versus Indoctrination:
Nothing Matters more than Education. Access to a good education is the gateway to the American dream. It gives students a base of knowledge and the ability to learn, which opens endless doors. A good education also makes students into better citizens. Through civics and American history, they learn our nation’s story and what good citizenship entails. It not only teaches them skills but also gives them the ability to exchange ideas and wrestle with hard problems. But you only get one shot at a K-12 education, and sadly our education system has work to do on all accounts.
A Plan to Fix Our Schools: I am not an education expert, but I know three things to be true. First, the status quo must change. Second, there is no shortage of ideas for how to improve schooling, only a shortage of action. And third, education in America is, “first and foremost about the kind of people we want to be.”
The ideas that follow will not address every issue. Instead, they are intended to break the mold. To put children and their families first. To refocus our schools on raising informed citizens. To teach students how to think. And, most of all, to ensure as much equality of opportunity as is possible.
Let’s start by empowering families. Every family should have a choice in where their children go to school and a say in what their children learn. It is the responsibility of local, state, and federal governments to ensure they have the opportunities and funds needed to exercise that right.
The ultimate form of accountability is the ability of parents to leave a school that isn’t working for their son or daughter. In the current framework of our K-12 system, the opposite happens: a bad school just gets more money. We also must resist the campaign of dumb down education in the name of “equity,” which holds that equality of outcome, not opportunity, is what matters. In recent years, Oregon has suspended proficiency standards in reading, math and writing for high school graduates, and school districts have abolished honors math programs. Similar efforts are underway across the country. These campaigns are designed not to help students learn, succeed, and overcome the racial achievement gap, but to limit them. They rob children of the opportunity and deny the essential truth that each is unique and blessed with their own talents and potential. Rather that the educational achievement gap is insurmountable and brings the educational level down to the lowest level.
Choice lets funding follow the student to the best schools, often to schools with clever business models or with fewer rigid and arcane rules, meaning teachers get to do what they care most about – educate.
Finally, we must develop not just good students, but good citizens. As Henry Kissinger warns, “No society can remain great if it loses faith in itself.” The preservation of the American experiment requires citizens who understand the American system and are grateful for that inheritance. Therefore, it is imperative that students learn our country’s history honestly, including the injustices and missteps, but also how exceptional America is and how far it has come. The classroom is not the place for indoctrination.
Source: Superpower in Peril: A Battleplan to Renew America by David H. McCormick (2023)
I launched a new initiative to enhance American civics education in high school, launched a major speech and debate initiative, established strong statewide civics standards, and created a training course for teachers after which each teacher would receive a $3,000 bonus. We even developed a civics exam for all graduating seniors modeled after the citizenship exam that immigrants must take prior to naturalization. Civics education has universal utility. No matter what students decide to do after they graduate from our school system, all will be called upon to exercise the duties of American citizenship. It is our responsibility to ensure that these students are not just a blank slate, but that they have a solid foundation in the core principles of our republican system of government and a firm idea of what it means to be an American.
Florida has done much over the years to boost school choice, support parental involvement, and increase student achievement. Many liberal states have done the opposite by subordinating the interests of students and parents to teachers’ unions, and the cost of doing so has been devastating.
In the 2022 Legislative session a bill named “Parental Right in Education” was passed. The bill provided for a flat ban on classroom instruction on sexuality and gender ideology in lower elementary school and required that sex instruction in other grades be age and developmentally appropriate. This made a lot of sense. Most Floridians want our schools focused on teaching our kids to read, write, add, and subtract. It was disturbing that the left wanted to indoctrinate very young students in woke gender theory.
Free Speech versus Censorship:
Big Tech companies have been a major cog in the woke machine, impacting both policy and individual freedom in a big way. These companies are quasi monopolies that exert more power over society than the big monopolies at the turn of the 20th century ever did. They receive liability protection from the federal government on the basis that they are not publishers but merely platforms, yet they then turn around and apply their opaque terms of service in way that discriminate based on viewpoint. Florida enacted legislation to combat Big Tech censorship by providing individuals with the right to bring a consumer fraud action if they were censored or deplatformed in a way that is discrimination.
Both the legislative and executive branches should use their respective authorities to defend individuals against large corporations that are wielding what is effectively public power. Reining in Big Tech, enforcing antitrust laws, prohibiting discriminatory job training, and crippling the ESG movement are all ways in which the political branches can protect individual freedom from stridently ideological private actors. The Founders recognized the dangers posed by an accumulation of power within the structure of government, and recent years have demonstrated that this concern extends to the corporate sphere. At the end of the day, the re-mooring of the constitutional ship of state will provide the needed foundation for the reinvigoration of a society rooted in freedom, justice, and the rule of law.
Source: The Courage to Be Free by Ron DeSantis (2023).
SEEKING UNITY:
The antidote to social crackup is not more openness but more cohesion, more careful attention to the ancestral memory and shared history of the people already struggling to live together in this country. Rhetoric that is truly “divisive” and “partisan” is not that which invokes America’s national identity but that which encourages Americans to think of one another in terms of race, sex, or even vaccination status. In this context consider what it means that President Biden and his administration regularly talked in terms of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”— as if some portion of the American citizenry was tantamount to a disease. The most damning indictment of our political and cultural elites is that they seem dedicated, with almost every word and action, to eroding the civic friendship that remains our only real hope of survival and restoration. Too many of our leaders seek to be demagogues, exploiting the already tense division between us for their own venal ends.
But the way out of this mess, paradoxically, is to think smaller and not bigger. The truth is that you and I are not, in fact, powerful enough to Save America or Save the World. Nor indeed will we get anywhere by continuing to think only in grand abstractions, even lofty and noble ones like “America,” “the republic,” or indeed “the West.” But one article of wisdom that comes down to us through history of Western thought is that all such high ideals are embodied in the small concerns and daily activities of the here and now. We fight for them by living them out in our own lives, and we preserve them by taking some part of them into ourselves. If it is true that our regime crisis is a failure of civic friendship, then the antidote is not grand schemes to redistribute wealth or overturn the 2020 election but re-investment in our neighbors as our neighbors.
This is not at all to say that when you turn your attention to the people and things immediately surrounding you, there will be no problems to contend with. There might be terrible problems like drug addiction, child abuse, contentious school board meetings over racial and sexual extremism, or the threat or reality of poverty. But the strangely comforting thing about even these problems is that they are you-sized: unlike the global disasters which you perceive or imagine, your personal and local problems represent the potential for you and those around you to get on with the actual work of civic engagement and republican friendship. In this context you actually can make things better – as parents around the country are starting to do with their local schools, and as ordinary people do every day, over the breakfast table and on the street, in acts of charity and kindness. The burden of building a family and cherishing it, the burden of fighting through the ruble of this broken world toward the good, the true, and the beautiful; these burdens, no more, and no less, are yours to bear.
When you do get about that work, you may find that the tribal designations you have attached to yourself hold less and less weight. It may surprise you to learn that a “Republican” is not actually a type of person, and neither is a “Democrat.” In our transformative age of realignment, the divide is really, more than anything, between people who want to live in the real world – the world where there are two sexes, kids are important, and the weak need protecting – and people who want to deny or upend that world.
You and I wake up every day in a world that is real, surrounded by people who are also real, and that is enough. It is everything. And if you and I wake up determined that we will live as if the eternal truths handed down to us by our ancestors are as real as ourselves and the world around us – if we do that in faith, then that’s better than good. That is how to save the West.
Source: How to Save the West by Spencer Klavan (2023)
POTENTIAL SOLUTION
To move from the current “tyranny of the minority” to the “democracy of the majority” Americans need to be educated on the consequences of what we are facing as a country.
- First, if China becomes the world’s only superpower what will that mean for Americans? Undoubtedly, they would institute their social credit system so the CCP would have control over our society. How would that translate to discrimination and racism? It certainly would not lessen it.
- Second, who is going to stop China from doing so? America is the only hope for the democratic world – the “West,” Japan, South Korea, Australia, et. al.
To prepare for the inevitable, debate needs to occur on several planes and the people need to cast their ballot on what is needed to maintain our way of life versus that of Communist authoritarianism. Is it:
- Equity and Tribalism or meritocracy and individualism?
- Education with indoctrination via teacher union dictates or school choice?
- Censorship or Free Speech?
- Identity and Elite Rule or Unity and Democracy?
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| america_20l_internal_war_values_and_division_--_segment_19.pdf |