Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Sign up to attend Michael’s talk in Los Angeles on Thursday, November 20: HERE.
The seemingly growing popularity of socialism, and the election of socialist Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s new mayor, have led billionaire Peter Thiel to reprise a 2020 email that explained with “a simple theory” why millennials are attracted to socialism, and down on capitalism. It seems that loads of student loan debt, and exorbitant prices for houses have kept them from achieving the American dream of earlier generations. “If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist,” Thiel told the Free Press.
This analysis is superficial and oddly simplistic about what has happened to higher education, which has nothing to do with capitalism “proletarianizing” students––it’s pure bathos, by the way, to describe some of the most privileged young people in history as “proletarians.”
For instance, take the complaint about student loans. They were federalized and politicized by Barack Obama, leading to programs and regulations that ignore fiscal responsibility and common sense––the very dysfunctions that created our federal entitlements’ drunken-sailor largess that has led to more and more money spent on entitlements.
Indeed, currently we spend more on entitlements than on our military, and on servicing the growing interest on this mountain of debt that will have to be paid for by our grandchildren and their grandchildren. Not even the rapacious demagogues of ancient Athens thought to redistribute the wealth of the unborn.
So, how did those students amass so much debt? Aren’t they adults responsible for their bad decisions, including the choice of trendy, useless majors with little value on the job market? Do we think it’s rapacious capitalism’s fault when a spendthrift can’t repay his loan for an expensive car? Or is it justice to strong-arm the dealer to post facto to lower the price, or coerce the bank that loaned the money to reduce the interest rate?
But aren’t those adult borrowers the victims of inflated tuition? That’s not capitalism’s fault, given that under Obana student loans create an opportunity for universities with gigantic, tax-free endowments to raise tuition costs and milk the corrupt student loan racket. Making the universities contribute to paying off students’ bloated loans would make more sense and be more just than blaming some cartoon caricature of our free-market economy.
The bigger problem with Thiel’s “theory” is that it misses the dysfunctional changes over the last fifty years that have damaged our universities’ legitimate purpose. The cultural Marxist “long march” through the institutions has gradually politicized universities with Marxist ideology, which in turn opened the way for the “higher nonsense”: Postmodernism and poststructuralist ideologies––the idiot bastards of Marx’s malign ideas like “false consciousness” –– that have also infected the university with other sophistic ideas such as simplistic, radical materialist determinism and juvenile relativism.
All these preposterous ideological sophistries have polluted the universities’ core mission of liberal education––to equip students with free minds and truths necessary for political freedom. They’ve been replaced with the noxious notion that everything we believe is real, good, and true are mere illusory “constructs” serving the plutocratic’ selfish powers of capitalism.
The result ensures that the citizenry taught by families, churches, schools, tradition, virtues, and morality, are now trained to believe themselves to be victims of “false consciousness.” And so, rather than free, they believe they are mere dupes conditioned by “the man” to accept the “lie” that capitalism and free markets, merit and hard work, create and distribute wealth more widely and justly than collectivism, redistribution of others’ money, dirigiste economic policies, and the unjust equality of outcome.
Postmodern ideology, moreover, adds radical epistemic relativism to this toxic Marxist brew–– the lie that meaning, facts, knowledge, truth, rights, morality, even personal identity itself, are mere “constructs,” minions serving the power of those who own and shape the means of production. Their aim is to justify and mystify the oppressive social, political, and economic power and privilege of the capitalist hegemony.
And, of course, our universities have demonized Western Civilization with the chimeras of false consciousness now distorting the foundations of Western Civilization––rationalism, our Judeo-Christian inheritance, freedom, equality, and democracy. Our universities have redefined and replaced these foundations with “toxic masculinity,” metastasizing “phobias,” and “white supremacy” ––all the seeds of racism, and predatory, genocidal “settler colonialism” and imperialism.
We saw the fruits of these big lies on October 7, 2023, in the despicable protests from students in some of our most prestigious universities in support of terrorist murderers of Israelis and Jews. Not just supporting the butchers, but also chanting vile antisemitic, genocidal slogans like “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada,” ––a favorite of New York City’s new communist mayor and champion of jihadists.
Most damning for our universities is the failure to teach their charges that the Marxism and postmodernism preached in their courses have little or no empirical evidence to support their claims, and few, if any, sound arguments to recommend these ideologies that are internally incoherent. If “truth,” for example, is merely a fable of malign power and its “discourses” that no one can escape, then why should we believe the magical economics of Karl Marx, or the juvenile, epistemic nihilism of Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault? Aren’t these poststructuralist malignant fads just more “constructs,” an invention of pampered, privileged academic savants sawing off the civilizational branch they’re sitting on?
George Orwell knew where such fantasies lead. Speaking of the West and its cultural degeneration into utopian political fantasies, and the failure of civilizational nerve in 1940 after the appeasement of Hitler ignited World War II, Orwell wrote that “for two centuries we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on.” But when the branch finally broke, it didn’t land us “in a bed of roses,” but a “cesspit full of barbed wire” ––a fitting description of utopian communism and its cesspit of mass slaughter, show trials, and dehumanizing gulags.
Finally, the popularity of communism and its knock-down socialism have been influencing our culture and politics for over a century, and left residues in our institutions, culture high and low, and and government that reached its apogee in the presidency of Barak Obama and his ambition to “fundamentally transform the United States.”
That sentiment has the ring of Progressive movement that began over a century ago. It was filled with ideas and political ambitions that started with communism and socialism. This movement begat our political Progressivism. Especially influential has been its displeasure with the Constitution and its balanced and divided powers, and unalienable rights codified in the Bill of Rights.
President Woodrow Wilson, the academic godfather of the Progressive movement, was vocal about his dislike of the Constitution and its empowerment of ordinary people, instead preferring technocracy and rule not by We the People, but by a “public bureau.”
As Wilson wrote, our government needed “a public bureau skilled in economical administration,” one comprising the “hundreds who are wise” given the power to guide and control the thousands who are “selfish, timid, stubborn, or foolish” –– a contrast that still defines and separates our two political parties and their policies, administered by bloated, politicized Federal agencies that even with Donald Trump’s pruning are still creating expensive and tyrannical mischief.
But we don’t have to go back to the Progressives to see the influence of communism and its baleful effects. In 1976, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his speech “If One Doesn’t Want to Be Blind,” compared our political culture and ideology to those of Soviet-era Russians who were living through communism’s bloody tyranny:
“What we see [in the West] . . . is still the same [as the Soviet Union]: the universal reverence of adult society for the opinion of children; the feverish infatuation, on the part of many young people, with vanishingly worthless ideas; the timorousness of professors to find themselves outside the latest trends; the failures of journalists to take responsibility for the words they fling so readily; the universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; the muteness of people with serious objections; the passive defeatism of the majority; the feebleness of governments and the paralysis of society’s defense mechanisms; the spiritual dismay leading to political cataclysm.”
Finally, the bacillus of leftism has spread and colonized our institutions for at least a century, making “school loans” and “expensive” houses superfluous, if not irrelevant, for explaining the fad of socialism among our young. If we want to slow down that fad, we should support President Trump’s efforts to reform the corrupt institutions of our universities.
