THE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERIKA

Commentary: When Will Conservatives Understand That It’s Not a Contest of Ideas?   

ROFLMAO SO WILL YOU READ ON THIS IS AN EXCERPT

January 24, 2020 Admin

by Mark Bauerlin

This is how the game works. It’s not a contest of ideas, it’s a competition for jobs. As leftists take over human resources offices, reduce the number of conservatives on the faculty to less than 3 percent, make appointments to political office contingent upon compliance with political correctness, and exile troublemakers and nonconformists such as James Woods and Charles Murray, the game as conservatives used to understand it is over. Conservatives lost the war of positions long ago. Woods is a great actor, but so what? Murray is one of the great social scientists of our time, but no academic department would have him.

For the Left, outcomes trump procedure just as politics eclipses intelligence, conscientiousness, and competence. One thing I saw in more than 30 years in academia was that while leftists on the faculty were not always the brightest bulbs in the room, they often managed to populate university and department committees where policies were created and passed. While we were teaching and researching; they were reshaping the institution. We were getting on with our work, pushing our individual careers, getting our names in print, and believing we were advancing the field and the school. They were taking over. Put it this way: We were clueless, they were canny.

Donald Trump understands this. That’s one reason the Left despises him. He typically doesn’t bother to debate ideas and ideals, but this is not anti-intellectualism, as the liberal says. It is, instead, his awareness that politics is now, first and foremost, a battle of persons, not ideologies or tax rates or trade. The Kavanaugh episode proves the point, for this battle was all about the individual (which is one reason why Supreme Court appointments are so heated).

In recent times, conservatives have tended to focus on ideas. If, after President Trump leaves office, they don’t start thinking more about personnel, if they don’t consider the population of institutions as much as they do the structure of institutions, if they choose a leader who thinks technocratically instead of ad hominem-ly, we will indeed end up with the permanent Democratic majority liberal intellectuals have predicted for the last 20 years.

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Mark Bauerlein is a senior editor at First Things and professor of English at Emory University, where he has taught since earning his Ph.D. in English at UCLA in 1989. For two years (2003-2005) he served as director of the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy, The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief, and The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. His essays have appeared in PMLA, Partisan Review, Wilson Quarterly, Commentary, and New Criterion, and his commentaries and reviews in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, The Guardian, Chronicle of Higher Education, and other national periodicals.
Photo “Marco Rubio and Sean Hannity” by Michael Vadon. CC BY-SA 2.0.