8. Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Politics,” American Quarterly 35, nos. 1–2 (1983): 27. A recent confirmation of this assessment can be found in this statement by political scientist James Stimson: “When we observe the behavior of those who live in distressed areas, we are observing not the effect of decline on the working class, we are observing a highly selected group of people who faced economic adversity and chose to stay at home and accept it when others sought and found opportunity elsewhere. . . . Those who are fearful, conservative, in the social sense, and lack ambition stay and accept decline.” In other words, the disadvantaged status of the white working class is the workers’ own fault. Cited by Thomas B. Edsall, “The Closing of the Republican Mind,” New York Times, July 13, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/opinion/republicans-elites-trump.html.
9. Matt Reed, a community college dean, acknowledged his opposition to the likes of Allan Bloom in the 1980s, but wonders where such conservative defenders of the humanities have gone in the wake of aggressive financial cutbacks in the humanities by conservative legislators: “I can only imagine Allan Bloom’s response to the Florida bill. Any conservative culture warrior worthy of the name should be apoplectic at the idea of letting legislators dictate curriculum. At this point, conservatives have given up on the idea of maintaining an intellectual tradition, and have settled on cost reduction as a good in itself. They’ve decided that rather than defending Edmund Burke, it’s easier just to run Intro to Business online and call it a day.” “Remember the Canon Wars?” Inside Higher Ed, April 11, 2013, https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/remember-canon-wars. See also Jonathan Marks, “Conservatives and the Higher Ed ‘Bubble,’” Inside Higher Ed, November 15, 2012, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/11/15/conservative-focus-higher-ed-bubble-undermines-liberal-education-essay.
10. The history of institutional name changes is instructive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_university_and_college_name_changes_in_the_United_States.
11. Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits,” Harper’s, May 2008, 37–38.
CHAPTER 6. THE NEW ARISTOCRACY
1. Murray, Coming Apart.
2. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 23, 26.
3. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, ed. Ronald Hamowy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 96.
4. Ibid., 95–96.
5. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Past the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), 258.
6. Ibid.
7. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Gray, On Liberty and Other Essays, 12–13.
8. Ibid., 65.
9. Ibid., 67.
10. Ibid., 68.
11. Ibid., 72.
12. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 76.
13. Ibid., 29, 49.
14. Robert B. Reich, “Secession of the Successful,” New York Times, January 20, 1991; Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elite and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1994).
15. Murray, Coming Apart; Robert A. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015).
CHAPTER 7. THE DEGRADATION OF CITIZENSHIP
1. Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, November–December, 1997, 22–43. Zakaria subsequently expanded this essay in his book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2007).
2. William Galston, “The Growing Threat of Illiberal Democracy,” Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2017, http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-growing-threat-of-illiberal-democracy-1483488245.
3. Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). In the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump, Brennan wrote in a Washington Post article, “Most voters are systematically misinformed about the basic facts relevant to elections, and many advocate policies they would reject if they were better informed. We get low-quality government because voters have little idea what they are doing”; “The Problem with Our Government Is Democracy.”
4. Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Jeffrey Friedman, “Democratic Incompetence in Normative and Positive Theory: Neglected Implications of ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,’” Critical Review 18, nos. 1–3 (2006): i–xliii; Damon Root, Overruled: The Long War over Control of the U.S. Supreme Court (New York: St. Martin’s, 2014).
5. Edward A. Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), 98.
6. Walter J. Shepard, “Democracy in Transition,” American Political Science Review 29 (1935): 9.
7. Ibid., 18.
8. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; Athens, Ohio: Swallow, 1954), 183–84.
9. John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” in The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 5 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–72).
10. Quoted in Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory, 95.
11. Quoted ibid., 103.
12. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. George W. Carey and James McClellan (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), no. 10, p. 46.
13. Ibid.; emphasis mine.
14. Ibid., no. 34, p. 163.
15. Ibid., no. 34, p. 164.
16. Ibid., no. 17, p. 80.
17. Ibid., no. 46, p. 243; ibid., no. 17, p. 81.
18. Ibid., no. 17, p. 81; emphasis mine.
19. Ibid., no. 46, p. 244.
20. Ibid., no. 27, p. 133; emphasis mine.
21. “It is no accident that the growing organization of democracy coincides with the rise of science, including the machinery of the telegraph and locomotive for distributing truth. There is but one fact—the more complete movement of man to his unity with his fellows through realizing the truth of life”; John Dewey, “Christianity and Democracy,” in Boydston, Early Works, 4: 9.
22. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 243.
23. Ibid.
24. Quoted ibid., 46.
25. Ibid., 515.
26. Ibid., 57.
27. Ibid., 243–44.
28. Jason Brennan writes, “[The] decline in political engagement is a good start, but we still have a long way to go. We should hope for even less participation, not more. Ideally, politics would occupy only a small portion of the average person’s attention. Ideally, most people would fill their days with painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain, or perhaps football, NASCAR, tractor pulls, celebrity gossip, and trips to Applebee’s. Most people, ideally, would not worry about politics at all.” Brennan, Against Democracy, 3.
CONCLUSION
1. Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body and the Machine,” in What Are People For? (New York: North Point, 1990); Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neo-Liberal Crisis (New York: Verso, 2013).
2. Cavanaugh, “‘Killing for the Telephone Company.’”
3. In addition to aggressive efforts to narrowly define religious freedom as “freedom of worship” under the Obama administration, consider efforts to define the relationship of parents and children in liberal political terms and thus to put them under the supervision of the state. See, for instance, Samantha Goldwin, “Against Parental Rights,” Columbia Law Review 47, no. 1 (2015).
4. Tom Shachtman, Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish (New York: North Point, 2007).
5. Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel, 2017).
6. Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture (Left to Right, 2010).
7. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 510.
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