Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  If one single genuine “magic bullet” cure for America’s education decline exists, it would be to eliminate the bottom quarter of those past 8th grade. Unfortunately, the “democratization” of education seems to be irresistible as educational reformers increasingly call for enrolling semiliterates in college as if a degree itself certifies proficiency.66

  Weissberg believes we should push students to the limits of their ability, then push them again, and, when they have ceased to learn, push them out the door and accept the reality that all are not equal in their aptitude for and attitude about academic learning. This used to be called common sense.

  THE GLOBAL GAP IN TEST SCORES

  “That speaks about who is going to be leading tomorrow,” said Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which, every three years, holds its Program for International Student Assessment tests of the reading, math, and science skills of fifteen year olds worldwide.67 Gurria was referring to the results of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment tests. Sixty-five nations competed. Chinese students swept the board. The schools of Shanghai finished first in math, reading, and science. Hong Kong was third in math and science. Singapore, a city-state dominated by overseas Chinese, was second in math and fourth in science.

  And the United States? America ranked seventeenth in reading, twenty-third in science, thirty-first in math. “This is an absolute wake-up call for America,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “We have to face the brutal truth. We have to get much more serious about investment in education.”68

  Yet a closer look at the PISA scores reveals some unacknowledged truths. While Northeast Asians are turning in the top scores, followed by Europeans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders, looking down the list of the top thirty nations, one finds not a single Latin American nation, not a single African nation, not a single Muslim nation, not a single South Asian or Southeast Asian nation (save Singapore), not a single nation of the former Soviet Union except Latvia and Estonia. Among the OECD’s thirty-four members, the most developed nations on earth, Mexico, the principal feeder nation for U.S. schools, came in dead last in reading.

  Steve Sailer got the full list of sixty-five nations, broke down the U.S. reading scores by ethnicity, and measured American students against the continents and the countries from which their families originated. What he found was startling. Asian American students outperformed all Asian students except those from Shanghai. White Americans outperformed the students from all thirty-seven predominantly white nations except Finland. U.S. Hispanics outperformed the students of all eight Latin American countries that participated. African American kids outperformed the only black country to participate, Trinidad and Tobago, by 25 points.69

  America’s schools are not all abject failures. They are successfully educating immigrants and their descendants to outperform the kinfolk their parents or ancestors left behind when they came to America. What America’s schools are failing at, despite the trillions poured into schools since the 1965 Primary and Secondary Education Act, is closing the racial divide. We do not know how to close test-score gaps in reading, science, and math between Anglo and Asian students on one hand and black and Hispanic students on the other. And, judging from the PISA tests, neither does the world.

  The gap between the test scores of East Asian and European nations and Latin American and African nations mirrors the gap between Asian and Anglo students in the United States and black and Hispanic students in the United States.

  As the Heritage Foundation reported after analyzing the PISA reading test results, “If white American students were counted as a separate group, their PISA reading scores would rank them third in the world. Hispanics and black Americans, however, would score 31st and 33rd respectively.”70

  “America’s educational woes reflect our demographic mix of students,” writes Weissberg:

  Today’s schools are filled with millions of youngsters, many of whom are Hispanic immigrants struggling with English plus millions of others of mediocre intellectual ability disdaining academic achievement.… To be grossly politically incorrect most of America’s educational woes vanish if these indifferent, troublesome students left when they had absorbed as much as they were going to learn and were replaced by learning-hungry students from Korea, Japan, India, Russia, Africa, and the Caribbean.71

  Education reformer Michelle Rhee asserts that, “It is abundantly clear from the research that the most important school factor in determining a child’s success is the quality of the teacher in the front of the classroom.”72

  But is this really “abundantly clear”? With the Coleman Report and Charles Murray, Weissberg dissents, arguing that 80 percent of a child’s success depends on the cognitive ability and disposition he or she brings to class, not on textbooks or “the teacher in front of the classroom.” If brains and a desire to learn are absent, no amount of spending on schools, teacher salaries, educational consultants, or new texts will matter.

  Even if we could equalize the home environment, and the school environment, for all children, we would still not get equal test scores. As Discover magazine science blogger Razib Khan writes, “When you remove the environmental variance, the cognitive variance remains.”73

  BURNING HERETICS

  A refusal to accept what human experience teaches is the mark of the ideologue. At a January 2005 academic conclave, Harvard President Larry Summers was asked why there were so few women receiving tenure in mathematics and the hard sciences. Summers volunteered that it might be due to unequal abilities of men and women. “In the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude,” said Summers, wading out into treacherous waters. These may cause “the different availability of aptitude at the high end.”74

  “I felt I was going to be sick,” said MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins. “My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow.… I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill.” Had she not fled the room, said Hopkins, “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”75

  A year later, Summers was subjected to a “lack-of-confidence” and censure vote by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—and was gone. Egalitarianism is an ideology not terribly tolerant of dissent.

  A year after Summers’s departure, Dr. James Watson, winner, with Dr. Francis Crick, of the 1962 Nobel Prize for their discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, volunteered to the Sunday Times that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa,” as “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.”76

  Watson’s 2007 autobiography, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, was then found to contain this heresy:

  There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.77

  Watson’s address to London’s Science Museum was immediately canceled, as was his book tour. And he was compelled to resign as the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he had served for forty years.

  “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” said Voltaire to Rousseau. “Error of opinion may be tolerated where truth is free to combat it,” said Jefferson. What does it say about twenty-first-century liberalism, and what does it say about twenty-first-century America, that one of her greatest scientists can be flogged, fired, and forced to recant beliefs he has formed from a lifetime of study and experience?

  In Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, Murray looked at four thousand significant figures and the world’s greatest achievements in science, art, music, philosophy, and mathemat
ics. He concluded that 97 percent of the most significant figures and 97 percent of the greatest achievements in astronomy, biology, earth sciences, physics, mathematics, medicine, and technology came from Europe or North America. An astonishing record for one civilization. Women were credited with 0 percent of the achievements in philosophy, 1.7 percent in the sciences, 2.3 percent of the greatest Western art, 4.4 percent of great Western literature, and two-tenths of 1 percent of great Western music.76

  It is a time for truth. As most kids do not have the athletic ability to play high school sports, or the musical ability to play in the band, or the verbal ability to excel in debate, not every child has the academic ability to do high school work. No two children are created equal, not even identical twins. The family is the incubator of inequality and God its author. Given equal opportunities, the gifted will rise and the less talented, athletically, artistically, academically, will trail. Yet for forty years, writes Charles Murray, “American leaders have been unwilling to discuss the underlying differences in academic ability that children bring to the classroom.”79

  In “The Inequality Taboo,” an essay in the September 2005 issue of Commentary, Murray writes that the mistaken assumption behind affirmative action is that if all socially imposed impediments to equality were removed, true equality would exist.

  Affirmative action … assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong.

  When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations, or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong.80

  Watching America’s exertions to achieve an unattainable equality—through affirmative action, quotas, set asides, progressive taxes, and a mammoth welfare state—brings to mind Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark.” In that short story, the scientist Aylmer, passionately in love with his beautiful young wife, Georgiana, becomes obsessed with a small red birthmark on her cheek in the shape of a hand. Coming to hate the birthmark, Aylmer conducts a dangerous surgery to remove it—to make his wife perfect. He removes the imperfection, and his wife dies. Our pursuit of the perfect, an ideal nation where at last all are equal, is killing the country.

  EQUALITY AS POLITICAL WEAPON

  In revolutions where equality is the enthroned idol—in the French, Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions—the dispossession of the old regime was often a merciless affair. Political and propertied classes, priests and poets, were sent to the guillotine, the Lubianka, the gallows, the firing squad, or the labor camp. And as the old order went off to jails, exile, and graves, the revolutionary elite, uglier and more brutal than those they displaced, moved into the palaces, mansions, and dachas.

  George Orwell’s Animal Farm got it right. The revolution rises on the slogan, “All animals are equal.” But once power is attained, the pigs move up into the farmhouse and the slogan is amended to read, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The revolution to establish equality for all invariably ends up establishing the dictatorship of the few.

  “Every revolution must have its myth,” writes Duncan Williams, British professor of literature, “and the most persistent of these, and the one which, contrary to all human experience, has gained the most ‘romantic’ adherence over the past century and a half is the belief in the ‘equality of man.’” From her life’s work as an anthropologist, Margaret Mead concluded that this belief in equality is rooted in myths and dreams: “The assumption that men were created equal, with an equal ability to make an effort and win an earthly reward, although denied every day by experience, is maintained every day by our folk-lore and our day dreams.” “In the realm of sport this belief seems curiously absent,” writes Williams. “No man in his senses would dare to presume that he has, on the grounds of equality, an inalienable right to represent his country in the Olympic games, any more than a boy would imagine he can automatically claim a place in his school football team.”81 Sports are too important to Americans to indulge such myths as the equality of all men.

  Over the past half-century, we have plunged trillions of dollars into public education, a large share of which has gone toward efforts to close racial gaps. But we have never come close to achieving equality in test scores. We have created a mammoth welfare state, but the percentage below the poverty line stopped dropping four decades ago. We have exempted half the nation from income taxes and laid three-fourths of the burden on the talented tenth. But we have never created equality of wealth and never will as long as we are a free people. Indeed, the more we become an economy based on knowledge, not manual labor, the wider the inequalities become. To create the egalitarian society that exists only in the minds of ideologues we are killing the wonderful country we inherited from the Greatest Generation.

  For decades, we have maintained standing armies of bureaucrats whose pay and benefits far exceed those of the taxpayers who subsidize and sustain them. Eventually one realizes that this transfer of wealth and power from one class to another is really what the “equality” game is all about:

  The doctrine of equality is unimportant, because no one save perhaps Pol Pot and Ben Wattenberg really believes in it, and no one, least of all those who profess it most loudly, is seriously motivated by it.… The real meaning of the doctrine of equality is that it serves as a political weapon.82

  So wrote author and essayist Sam Francis. A century and a half earlier, Tocqueville had seen through egalitarianism—to the drive for power that lay behind it.

  [T]he sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced … to a single principle.83

  Bertrand de Jouvenel, who lived through the Nazi occupation, echoed Tocqueville: “It is in the pursuit of Utopia that the aggrandizers of state power find their most effective ally. Only an immensely powerful apparatus can do all that the preachers of panacea government promise.”84

  Long before him, the Italian philosopher Vilfredo Pareto wrote that equality “is related to the direct interests of individuals who are bent on escaping certain inequalities not in their favor, and setting up new inequalities that will be in their favor, this latter being their chief concern.”85

  Cui bono?—Who benefits?—is ever the relevant question. When a new class advances preaching the gospel of equality, who gets the power?

  7

  THE DIVERSITY CULT

  Never in recorded history has diversity been anything but a problem.1

  —ANN COULTER, 2009

  Diversity’s beauty is in the eye of the beholder.2

  —PETER SKERRY

  “Beyond Sushiology: Does Diversity Work?”

  I firmly believe the strength of our Army comes from our diversity.3

  —GENERAL GEORGE W. CASEY,

  Army Chief of Staff

  On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress moved that on the Great Seal of the United States there be emblazoned the motto E pluribus unum. The men of Philadelphia understood that only their unity gave them the strength to defy the mighty British Empire.

  On the eve of war Patrick Henry had declared, in the Virginia House of Burgesses, “The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American.” If Americans were to win their freedom, national identity must supersede all others. “We must all hang together,” said Franklin, “or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

  Yet it is now fashionable to assert that America’s greatness comes from her diversity. A corollary is that the more diverse America becomes, th
e better and stronger country she becomes, and America will not realize her true destiny until she evolves into—in the title of Ben Wattenberg’s 1991 book—The First Universal Nation, embracing all the races, tribes, creeds, cultures, and colors of planet Earth.

  “The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality,” Wattenberg trilled.4 Yet one wonders: what kind of man looks with transcendental joy to a day when the people among whom he was raised have become a minority in a nation where the majority rules? This is normally a disorder of the left.

  “The full-blown modern style of ethnomasochism,” writes John Derbyshire, the National Review columnist, “is, like many other psychosocial pathologies, a product of Anglo-American progressivism. It was already showing up in its finished form among pre-boomers such as Susan Sontag (b. 1933) and Ann Dunham (b. 1942).”5

  We read about Ann in her son’s autobiography … refusing to accompany her Indonesian husband to dinner parties with visiting American businessmen. These were her own people, Ann’s husband would remind her; at which, the son tells us, “my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout. They are not my people.”6

  Ann Dunham’s son is Barack Obama.

  Americans who seek stricter immigration control have been charged with many social sins: racism, xenophobia, nativism. Yet none has sought to expel any fellow American based on color or creed. We have only sought to preserve the country we grew up in. Do not people everywhere do that, without being reviled? What motivates people who insist that America’s doors be held open wide until the European majority has disappeared?