I Want a New Left

The Sad Plight of Poor Blacks

Reader Mark Spahn sent me this summary of a long article in The Atlantic (here; I confess I haven’t read it) about poor blacks and the schools they go to in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

I distinctly remember the day in about the year 1970 when I first heard the idea that blacks ought not to try to do well in school because that was a white thing. No doubt it had been percolating for at least a year or two before I heard about it, but I remember how shocking I found it. I spent several minutes agonizing over it because on the one hand I wanted to support blacks, but on the other hand I strongly believed in education as a way to get ahead. I finally decided that it was their business and not mine and that they could do as they liked. I regret that decision, yet even if I had gone against it, what difference would it have made? The fact is that I would have been one lone leftist among tens of millions who felt differently. The chance that anything would have been different if I had decided differently is extremely remote. These things were already in place before I even got involved in radical politics. Likewise, the leftist alliance with the Muslim right somehow got going from the disgusting stew of Sixties radical politics, and not even if I had joined the John Birch Society back then would that have made the slightest difference. One needed to speak out about all this before things got going too far, which means maybe about 1965. I was still in junior high at that time, but even older people just had not antipated either of these developments back then.

Note: Typepad is now working again. I don't know what the problem was last night.

Whither the Shop Class?

According to an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, schools don't offer shop classes much anymore. This is a bit strange. We have moved from the days when boys took woodworking and metalworking and girls took cooking and sewing, to the days when they both took both types of classes -- my wife got in on that and learned a bit of welding -- to now when no one takes it, apparently. I didn't do so well in woodworking and metalworking, I found mechanical drawing so-so, but I liked the print shop and electricity classes. Of course, no one sets type anymore, and the expression "pied type" will be understood by less than, say 5% of the population. Actually, after talking with friends, it seems that not that many others took a print shop class even during the period when I took it. Too bad.

Anyway, the author of the piece points out that there are welders making $150,000 a year, because there are so few of them. Most young people today get shunted into college, even though they end up in jobs that don't require a college education. Instead of going to college and racking up all that debt, they could have been taking shop classes and be gainfully employed right out of high school.

Note: I'm having trouble getting onto Typepad, so I'm having to do it via an app on my ipad. This will be my only post for tonight. Sorry.

A Basic Guaranteed Income versus Job Creation

This book tells of a new class of worker, which the author calls the precariat, whose basic existence consists of short-term jobs with never a chance at anything stable and permanent. This includes adjuncts and temps in academia – see here, which is where I found the link, to see what a series of one-year jobs in academia is like  – but also plenty of other people. The author recommends “an unconditional basic income for everyone, contributed by the state, which could be topped up through earned incomes.” Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll take job creation any day over this nonsense. Job creation, given that there is plenty of it, allows people to break out of poverty, while a basic income keeps them at the bottom. Job creation is why my ancestors came to America and why so many Latinos are coming to America now.

Higher Education’s Woes

Something called Mid-Continent University is the latest college to close (here). Too bad, though with a mere 300 students, this shouldn’t be unexpected. I have been hearing a lot about declining enrollments and the pinch it is causing (though not at Kenyon College where my wife teaches; for no obvious reason, they had more applicants than expected). This is perhaps the reason more institutions are heading toward a new model of using more adjuncts teaching with fewer tenured faculty. As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has suggested, why aren’t the administrators ever adjuncts? Then there’s this essay from Slate by a woman who is left-of-center who actually understands that there are too many administrators. But then she spoils her essay by praising the governor of Michigan for raising spending for higher education. If there are too many administrators raising the costs, then the states have every right to tell their public universities to cut those costs before they raise more money for them. After all, why should taxpayers be expected to cough up money for something that is not their problem?

For Leftists, It’s All about the Results

So, the processes don’t matter. See here for an article from the Washington Examiner informing us that Obama has indicated that he may not enforce a bill that he himself signed into law. This is typical of the left, because for them the results mean more than the processes, and if those processes (laws or procedures or rules or whatever) get in the way of progressive results, then they can be dispensed with. Even the Tsar of Russia, as portrayed by Tolstoy in War and Peace, declares at one point, “I cannot do it, General. I cannot, because the law is stronger than I” (end of Book V, chapter xx).

I have a liberal friend who was in his college’s psychology department – he has since moved over to neuroscience – and he was constantly complaining about how the strident feminists in his department bent the rules whenever they felt like it. They would buy things for themselves using the departmental budget, they would hire people without putting the matter to a vote of the whole department, and they would raise the scores on the comprehensive exams of those seniors they liked so they could get honors.

It’s all very sleazy, to say the least.

Nothing But the Facts

Today’s schools seem to serve up nothing but anti-American diatribes so that students come away with the most amazingly distorted views of the world and of history. For example, a few years ago I stumbled on an account by a young woman who thought that Japan was wholly innocent during WWII and that we were horrible monsters because of the atom bombs we dropped on them. She said she learned otherwise from her boy friend, who was better informed. Let me note that I am not against criticizing America. What I’m against is the culture of criticizing America, because it takes it too far and becomes unbalanced. Their formula seems to be that everything associated with mainstream America is bad, and everything in the Third World is good. Imperialism by others is denied, slavery is either denied or declared not as bad as what our South had, and when pushed up against it, we are told that the ill of some distant country “is their culture,” so we mustn’t criticize it. Self-critical leftism aims to see reality as it is and not as some wish to see it.

I have found that the Economist is a good source for actual facts about the rest of the world, its only trouble being that you have to read it regularly to pick out those facts. Let me mention two. A number of years ago, it had an article about slavery in north Africa. The countries mentioned were Niger (where it said that 43,000 were enslaved), Mauritania, Chad, Mali, and Sudan [3/12/05]. It seems that an institution I thought was dead is still alive. Those in America who bang on about how evil we are to have had slavery would do better to go over there and free some actual slaves.

The other fact comes from this week’s Economist (4/19), where it is stated that in Algeria there are ethnic clashes between Arabs and Berbers. This sentence gave me a jolt when I read it. The words “Arabs and” came at the end of the line, so my eye didn’t leap ahead to see who the other party was. I assumed it was Europeans of French descent, so I was quite surprised to see that it was Berbers. Yet, this kind of strife between different groups in the Third World is always played down by our intellectual elites, given that they are dedicated to saying that the world's biggest problem is our reluctance to accept all the different groups of the Third World.

It is facts like these that young minds need to know to put the propaganda they are getting into its proper perspective.

An American Privilege

In all the talk of white privilege, let me observe that all of us Americans get a privilege because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. See here, and note this sentence in particular: “Persons who live in a country that issues a reserve currency can purchase imports and borrow across borders more cheaply than persons in other nations because they need not exchange their currency to do so,” since so many international transactions use that currency.

And speaking of privileges, this essay, about the privileges of being a progressive in academia and other elitist enclaves, is a pleasure to read.

Putin Revealing His True Colors?

A few days ago I was praising Putin for complaining that there were anti-Semites involved in the revolution in Kiev, but perhaps his own anti-Semitism is now coming out. We are hearing that Jews in eastern Ukraine must register. On the other hand, it is not at all clear who made this demand. It seems that no government is claiming to have done it, and instead it was done by three masked men (see here) who for all I know are agents provocateurs hoping to discredit the Russians.

Paul Krugman, or Why We Know the Left Is Run by the Rich

Various people have informed me of the fact that Paul Krugman has been offered a (part-time) position at CUNY with a ridiculously high salary, even though the position is explicitly about economic inequality. (See here.) Plus, he doesn’t have to teach his first year and will have a very light load after that. Now given that our colleges and universities are dominated by the left, let me note that it is hard to imagine this sort of thing if the poor were in charge of the left. Only if the rich were in charge of progressive politics would such a salary even be offered. Moreover, it is offered without the slightest awareness of the sort of message that it sends.

It is true that to prove that the left is run by the rich would require me to say a lot more than this, and I will do so on another occasion. But for now, let me note that the role of the rich leftist seems to consist of raising awareness about income equality and exhorting conservatives and corporations to give up their wealth. It does not require rich leftists to actually give up some of their own money. That, apparently, would be unthinkable. After all, merely by being on the left, one is already deemed one of the good guys and so is excused from having to actually give.

Needless to say, this has to change.

The Check-Your-Privilege Quiz

Someone has come up with a ridiculous quiz called “Check Your Privilege” (here). You can imagine how poorly thought out this is. For example, “I have never been the only person of my race in a room.” This has happened to me a number of times, and I couldn’t even tell you how many times it has happened. It meant nothing. I suppose they were thinking it only happens to blacks, but it doesn’t.

Then there’s this one: “I was not bullied as a child for any of my identities.” Why not just ask if they were bullied? Why distinguish those who were bullied because they were black, gay or whatever from those who were just bullied? Doesn’t being bullied for any reason mean that one was not privileged in that respect?

Another one mentions “social disabilities.” What are they? I couldn’t find a definition of it anywhere. I remember spending much of my adolescence bemoaning the fact that I lacked a skill that many others seemed to have naturally: being able to converse with strangers. I worked hard to overcome this, though I still don’t find it at all easy. Anyway, does that count? I suspect not. Whenever these people start talking about privileges, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that any way in which I felt disadvantaged doesn’t count with them. For example, for the poor, one has to be dirt poor, and being lower-middle class doesn’t count. Being left-handed doesn't count, either, though lefties are treated horribly in some countries.

Anyway, one could write a book on all the nonsense associated with this quiz, and I suspect that someday people will regard it about the way my generation regarded Reefer Madness when we were young. In fact, plenty of people seem to regard it that way now.