by Mark Steyn
In both Chicago’s Ward Four, where the Obamas lived, and Ward Five, where they worked, 95 percent of electors voted Democrat in 2004.25 You would be hard put to find another constituency so committed to celebrating lack of diversity. Like most professional multiculturalists, Obama has passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn’t depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world. The aforementioned Michael Ignatieff, who actually has viewed the world, gets close to the psychology in his response to criticisms of him for spending so much time abroad. Deploring such “provincialism,” he replied: “They say it makes me less of a Canadian. It makes me more of a Canadian.”26
Well, yes, you can see what he’s getting at. Today, to be an educated citizen of a mature western democracy—Canada or Germany, England or Sweden—is not to feel Canadian or German, English or Swedish, heaven forbid, but rather to regard oneself as a citoyen du monde, like Obama in Berlin. Obviously, if being “more Canadian” requires one actually to be a Harvard professor or a BBC TV host or an essayist for The Guardian, then very few actual Canadians would pass the test. They would be condemned to be eternally “less Canadian.” What Ignatieff really means is that in a post-nationalist west, the definition of “Canadian” (and Dutch and Belgian and Irish) is how multicultural and globalized you feel. The UN, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Bono: these are the colors a progressive worldly
This Barack Obama did brilliantly. His rise and the dancing fountains of media adoration accompanying it are a monument to the fraudulence of so much elite “accomplishment.” The smart set were bamboozled because he seemed like one of their own: Columbia, Harvard Law, sort of “editing” a journal yet the only editor in its history never to publish a signed article, giving a lecture or two on constitutional law, handing out leaflets on the South Side of Chicago, voting present, listening to Jeremiah Wright’s conspiracy theories for twenty years, dining with terrorist educator William Ayers.... This is a life? These are achievements?
Well, yes. For the parochial one-worlders among the American elite, that’s a resumé and Sarah Palin’s isn’t. The American Eloi elected one of their own, and, if a year into his reign it was possible to detect signs of embarrassment among some of those gullible enough to fall for such a transparent crock, well, thanks for nuthin’. “I thought he’d do a better job,” whimpered telly genius Jon Stewart.27
“Based on what, his extensive experience?” responded Instapundit Glenn Reynolds. “Rube.”28 The election of Obama was a profoundly unserious act by an unserious nation, and, if you were Putin, the ChiComs, or the ayatollahs, you would have to be awfully virtuous not to take advantage of it.
Within months of his inauguration, I found a lot of Americans saying to me sotto voce that they had no idea the new president would feel so “weird.” But, in fact, he’s not weird. He’s WEIRD in the sense of those students in the behavioral studies: Western Educated Idle Rich Deadbeat. He’s not, even in Democrat terms, a political figure—as Bill Clinton and Joe Biden are. Instead, he’s a creature of the broader culture: there are millions of people like Barack Obama, the eternal students of an unbounded lethargic transnational campus for whom global compassion and the multicultural pose are merely the modish gloss on a cult of radical grandiose narcissism.
We were waiting for a man who would have been unthinkable as the leader of a serious nation until our civilization had reached such a level of bland bovine prosperity it truly believed that the platitudinous nursery chants it teaches our children as a substitute for education are now a blueprint for governance. Obama is not just a product of his time, but the product of his time.
THE STUDENT PRINCES
In 1940, a majority of the U.S. population had no more than a Grade Eight education.29
By 2008, 40 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in college.30
So we’re on track to a world in which the typical American is almost twice as old by the time he completes his education as he was in 1940, and has spent over twice as long in the classroom—and, in theory, gotten twice as much attention from his schoolma’am: the pupil/teacher ratio is half of what it was a century ago.31 Indeed, since 1970 overall public school employment has increased ten times faster than public school enrollment—with no discernible benefit to student performance.32 Here’s reporter Howard Blume in the Los Angeles Times: “Despite thousands of teacher layoffs and shrinking school budgets, Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest school system, posted gains on annual standardized tests. Schools statewide also posted overall gains in results released Monday.”33
“Despite”?
Today’s “educators” take no chances with their young charges, to the point of keeping as many as they can in “school” until well into what now passes for adulthood. What dragons have been slain by this semester-creep? In 1940, before this process got rolling, Americans had a literacy rate of over 97 percent.34 Seventy years later, at a student demo to protest budget “cuts” WHO’S SCHOOLS? OUR SCHOOLS!35
And you’re welcome to them. Or, as their placards would no doubt put it, your welcome to ’em. Were they English majors?
Education is the biggest single structural defect in the United States. No country needs to send a majority (never mind “all,” as is President Obama’s ambition) of its children to college, and no country should: not every child has the aptitude to benefit from college, and not every child who has wants to go, or needs to. For most who wind up there, college is a waste of time, and money, and life. Hacks pretend to teach, slackers pretend to learn, and employers pretend it’s a qualification. Full disclosure: I never went to college, which is why my critics usually preface their dissections with a reference to “the uneducated” or “the unlettered Mark Steyn.” Guilty as charged: no letters on me. But I was doing ancient Greek in high school and Latin by middle school, not because I was “gifted” but because that’s just the way it was back then. I long ago gave up marveling at how little American education asks of its inmates. By universalizing university, you let K-12 off the hook. College becomes the new high school—which is exactly the opposite of what a dynamic, efficient society would be doing: middle school should be the new high school. Early-year education is the most critical; if you screw up the first eight grades, keeping the kid in class till he’s thirty isn’t going to do much to fix things.
Beyond the academic arguments, no functioning state can afford to keep its kids at school till they’re twenty-two. It leads to later workplace participation, later family formation, and societal infantilization. Take America in its most dynamic years—the period when it put great inventions within the reach of every citizen (the automobile, the telephone, the washer and dryer), and, for you culture-du-plaisir types, also developed the modern entertainment industry (radio, talking pictures, gramophone records, Tin Pan Alley,
Oh, well. What does an American get for sticking with the system to Ninth Grade, Twelfth Grade, Sixteenth Grade, and beyond? Is he more “educated”? Not obviously so. But he is indisputably credentialed, and in the credential-fetishizing America of the early twenty-first century, that’s what counts. So American families plunge themselves into debt and take huge amounts of money out of the productive economy in order to feed the ravenous diploma mill. It’s not too demanding, and getting less so every year: by 2010, only 23 percent of courses offered at Harvard required a final exam.36 For most of its “scholars,” college is a leisurely half-decade immersion in the manners and mores of American conformism. Other than that, it doesn’t matter what, if anything, you learn there, just so long as you emerge with the diploma. It used to be made of sheepskin. But these days the students are the sheep and the ones getting fleeced are their parents.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, America had per capita two-and-a-half times as many college students as Britain and Spain. Its college population was significantly larger than its high school population, mainly due to the fact that such fields of scholarshi
p as “Jiggle in My Walk: The Iconic Power of the ‘Big Butt’ in American Pop Culture”37 are so rigorous that to complete a bachelor’s degree can take twice as long as it once would have. Say what you like about half a decade of “Peace Studies” but, while light on the studies, it’s certainly peaceful. To acquire the ersatz sheepskin, Americans not only forego what might have been six years of profitable and career-advancing work, they also rack up a six-figure debt in order to access a job that is increasingly unlikely to justify that outlay. But then taking that first step on the debt ladder is as important an initiation into contemporary adulthood as the magic credential.
In fairness, there remain certain exceptions to these leisurely frauds. America retains world-class academic institutions in science and engineering. 38 Perhaps we could retrain a few Diversity Officers to replace retiring physicists. Beyond that, has universal credentialism created a golden age of American scholarship? Not so’s you’d notice. Michelle Obama was born in 1964, so, unlike Condi Rice, she has no vivid childhood memories of racial segregation. She was among the first generation to benefit from “affirmative action,” which was supposed to ameliorate the lingering grievances of racism but seems, in Mrs. Obama’s case, merely to have transformed them into post-modern pseudo-grievance. “All my life I have confronted people who had a certain expectation of me,” she told an audience in Madison. “Every step of the way, there was somebody there telling me what I couldn’t do. Applied to Princeton. ‘You can’t go there, your test scores aren’t high enough.’ I went. I graduated with departmental honors. And then I wanted to go to Harvard. And that was probably a little too tough for me. I didn’t even know why they said that.”39
But hang on. Her test scores weren’t “high enough” for Princeton? Yet, rather than telling her “You can’t go there,” they took her anyway. And all the thanks they get is that her test scores are now a recurring point of resentment: “The stuff that we’re seeing in these polls,” she told another audience, “has played out my whole life. You know, always being told by somebody that I’m not ready, that I can’t do something, my scores weren’t high enough.”40 If she had been Elizabeth Edwards and her scores weren’t high enough, that’d be that (Teresa Heinz Kerry could probably leverage the whole Mozambican thing). Yet Mrs. Obama regards contemporary statemandated compensation for institutional racism from before she was born as merely another burden to bear. In testament to an age of boundless selfinfatuation, she arrived as a black woman at Princeton and wrote her undergraduate thesis on the difficulties of being a black woman at Princeton. “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community”41 is a selfmeditation by the then Miss Robinson on the question of whether an Ivy League black student drawn into the white world is betraying lower-class blacks. Or as she put it: A separationist is more likely to have a realistic impression of the plight of the Black lower class because of the likelihood that a separationist is more closely associated with the Black lower class than are integrationist [sic]. By actually working with the Black lower class or within their communities as a result of their ideologies, a separationist may better understand the desparation [sic] of their situation and feel more hopeless about a resolution as opposed to an integrationist who is ignorant to their plight.
Ah, the benefits of an elite education. Suppose Michelle Obama had not suffered the crippling burden of being American but had instead been born in France or Switzerland, India or China. In less enlightened lands, when you’re told “Your test scores aren’t high enough,” that’s it, you can’t go. To get into other countries’ elite institutions, you have to be objectively excellent. To get into America’s best schools and join its elite, you need mediocre grades and approved social points. Harvard’s defense of “affirmative action” rests on the benefits of “diversity”: “A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”
That’s the argument, such as it is: “Affirmative action” discriminates positively—in favor of certain groups that add an unspecified richness to campus life. As we know, Michelle Obama fell into the latter category of “black student.” But what about the “farm boy from Idaho”? In 2010, the Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and his colleague Alexandria Radford produced an analysis of applications for eight highly competitive colleges and universities.42 What was most revealing was the way “affirmative action” has progressed from mere race bias to ideological apartheid. Espenshade and Radford found that participating in “red state” activities such as 4-H, ROTC, or the Future Farmers of America substantially reduced a student’s chances of being accepted by these colleges. “Being an
So, if you’re a white farm boy from Idaho, you’re already at a disadvantage compared with the Michelle Obamas and Sonia Sotormayors of your generation. And, if you participate in 4-H or JROTC, you’re only making things worse. And, if you hold a leadership position in 4-H, you’re pretty much doomed. Over time “affirmative action” and “diversity” have so corrupted the integrity of American education that it now affirmatively acts in favor of ideological and cultural homogeneity. Or as the blogger Kate McMillan likes to say: What’s the opposite of “diversity”? University.43
This is why the massive expansion of American education is evidence not of progress but of its exact opposite—its decay into ideological factory farms. It’s a progressive 4-H: Hogwash, Hypersensitivity, Habituation, Homogeneity—for the price of which you wind up in Hock. “Our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in,” wrote Angelo Codevilla of Boston University, noting the unprecedented uniformity of the new American elite. “Until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another.”44 The social engineers changed all that, imposing a single orthodoxy on their pupils. For the most part, “diversity” is merely a sentimental cover for mediocrity. As Codevilla pointed out:Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that “the best” colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages.... The most successful neither write books and
It was interesting to listen to Candidate Obama lecture Americans on their failure to learn another language.45 The son of a Ph.D. and a Harvard-educated economist, young Barack went to a fancy Hawaiian prep school, and then to Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard. And he’s hectoring a guy who graduated high school in Nowheresville and shingles roofs all day about not speaking French or German? Well, what’s Barack’s excuse? The Obamas are the beneficiaries of the most expensive and luxuriant education on the planet. Where’s their French?
Well, they were too busy cranking out sludge about the “desparation” [sic] of separationists, or whatever Michelle was droning on about at Princeton in unreadable maunderings all too typical of what passes for “education.” Is the credentialing mill up to the job of producing an American leadership class capable of competing with those of China, India, and other emerging societies? Aw, we’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid. California’s teachers are the highest paid in the United States, and its classrooms are among the worst.46 But at least they’re expensive—why, the Robert F. Kennedy Community School in Los Angeles is the first schoolhouse on the planet to cost over half-a-billion dollars ($578 million, to be exact). 47
The Credentialed Age symbolizes an important transition in society. We’ve gone through those before, of course—from an agrarian society to an industrial society, and thence to the so-calle
d “knowledge economy.” But, when you think about it, is the “knowledge economy” really that knowledgeable? It would seem improbable that any society could undergo the massive expansion of college education that America has seen since the Second World War, and either effectively impart that much extra “knowledge” or 48
But isn’t “corporate America” what pays for, among other things, the Gulf emir-sized retinue of courtiers the average U.S. senator now travels with? And in what sense did the Obamas “leave” corporate America? Before ascending to her throne, the First Lady worked for the University of Chicago Hospitals. She wasn’t a nurse or doctor, or even a janitor. She was taken on by the hospitals in 2002 to run “programs for community relations, neighborhood outreach, volunteer recruitment, staff diversity, and minority contracting.”49 She was a diversicrat—a booming industry in Eloi America. In 2005, by happy coincidence, just as her husband was coming to national prominence, she received an impressive $200,000 pay raise and was appointed Vice President for Community and External Affairs and put in charge of managing the hospitals‘“business diversity program.” Mrs. Obama famously complained that America is “just downright mean,”50 and you can see what she’s getting at: she had to make do with a lousy $316,962 plus benefits for a job so necessary to the hospitals that when she quit to become First Lady they didn’t bother replacing her.51