Posts tagged ‘President Obama’

How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture and ushered in the Obamacrats

BY DAVID GELERNTER

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=3624

Reviewed by STEPHEN DAISLEY

“If this book makes its way on to a single college reading list. Hell will have frozen over.”

(I started to redact this review but, each word was so delicious and the subject matter so vitally important to the recovery (only after a change of administration, of course) of our previous US way of life, I could not cut a single word. And, I hope you read the review with the same appreciation and intensity) jsk

From: Commentary June 2012

WHY is academia so monolithically left-wing? David Gelemter, himself a tenured professor of computer science at Yale, attempts an answer in his newbook America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and ushered in the Obamacrats).

For Gelemter, a postwar cultural revolution saw America’s elite colleges laid low by the double punch of the “Great Reform” and the rise of “Imperial Academia.” Institutions that had served the WASP elite found themselves transformed into pseudo-intellectual salons, the pipe-smoking pedants who (as Yeats wrote) “cough in ink” replaced with amazing speed by modish dilettantes.

The old establishment, through a combination of naivete and upper-class manners, stood aside and made way for the revolutionaries storming the gates. The change agents hacked away at the idea of college as an inculcator of knowledge and virtue and asserted instead the primacy of the theory, “substituting for the intractable bloody mess, called reality, a seamless, silken tapestry of pure ideas.”

History departments were seized by the ideologues of post-colonialism and anti-Occidentalism, political-science courses by antagonists of the United States and Israel, and law schools by activist theorists for whom the Constitution was to be understood through its emanations rather than its plain meaning.The principled opposition to bigotry was diverted into radical victimologies: critical race theory; gender studies and sexual identity politics.

Empiricism was deposed in favor of the epistemic dead end of post-structuralism and its showy progeny – postmodernism. Critical thinking, which is to say thinking critical of America was encouraged. Ideas that had been orthodoxy became heretical ciphers for racism, sexism, and homophobia and were dissuaded, forcefully.

Hiring practices and speech codes formalized the boundaries of this new closed shop of left-liberalism. The result is the replacement of the WASPS by the PORGIs (Post-religious globalist intellectuals.)

Gelemter says they have remade universities into production lines churning out an army of leftist drones trained on the battlefield of ideology and now occupying the newsrooms, classrooms, and social institutions and saluting one of their number who made it all the way to commander in chief. (Ugh).

He writes, everyone agrees that President Obama is not only a man but a symbol. He is a symbol of America’s decisive victory over bigotry. But he is also a symbol, a living embodiment of the failure of American education and its on-going replacement by political indoctrination. He is a symbol of the new American elite, the new establishment, where left-liberal politics is no longer a conviction, no longer a way of thinking: It is built-in mind furniture you take for granted without needing to think.

There is no conspiracy, no collusion, merely a new politics of vacuity: All former leftist movements were driven by ideology. Obama’s is driven by ignorance. If that seems harsh, remember that Obama, the Harvard-educated law professor said there was no precedent for the Supreme Court to strike down unconstitutional statutes! The closing of the American mind has been followed by the opening of the post-American mind, a process whose first concrete political achievement was the election of a post-American president.

Gelemter contends that Obama’s reign of ignorance portends implications far beyond the current president’s term (or two). Those who care about the future of academia, the culture, and the country cannot claim they haven’t been warned. (Israel Commentary has been at the forefront of this warning process, See: http://israel-commentary.org/?p=4 Obama is not a blip but a blueprint for the future direction of the American left, and he could also be the trajectory of America for the next generation.

Where the old-style Democrats won power by dominating labor unions and immigrant organizations, the Obamacrat ascendency will be guaranteed by their monopoly over the education cartels, chief among them the universities and graduate schools.

What is to be done? “The true university of these days is a collection of books,” Thomas Carlyle believed. Gelemter’s “one-point plan” updates this. Given that the Internet represents the world’s largest “collection of books,” Gelernter says our salvation from Imperial Academia is to move the American educational system onto broadband networks as a remedy for political indoctrination.

How this would work in practice is a little fuzzy, but there is no question that the ability of digital media and socially networked individuals and organizations to challenge establishment universities should not be dismissed. It could succeed, however, only within a framework of higher-education reform that prized rigor and merit while creating real disincentives for faculty lounge radicalism and soft-focus, easy-A degrees.

Gelemter’s critique is in the great tradition of William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. This succinct book is as streamlined as a dart and as precise. Far from harking back to a chimerical past, America Lite bristles with frustration that America is not moving forward to meet her potential.

The United States is a supercomputer that has slowed down. Gelemter, like a systems analyst, tears through the hard drive deleting, without pity, every superfluous and corrupt file. The starkness of his admonition is matched by an unfashionably American optimism that the academy’s course can be corrected and that the nation, by extension, can be made great once more.

Gelemter, who has contributed articles and reviews and stories to COMMENTARY, writes with the precision of a technologist and the range of an artist. His citations run from statistics to philosophy to history, and you can almost hear the sucking of teeth from social scientists when he turns to novels and movies for evidence (a brief detour on silver-screen intellectuals, from Cary Grant’s bumbling professor in Bringing Up Baby to Fred Astaire’s tap-dancing psychiatrist in Carefree, is insightful and entertaining).

Gelemter is an intellectual in the truest sense of the term: He is an educated man but also a lettered one, boasting a frame of reference far beyond his professional field of expertise. America-Lite is lean, incisive convincing, delightfully indelicate, and, in a break from the conventions of the literature on education honest. It is a fine dissection-construction, if you must-of the corruption of higher education and the resulting debasement of political culture. If it makes its way on to a single college reading list. Hell will have frozen over.

STEPHEN DAISLEY is a writer living in the United Kingdom who blogs as the Eclectic Partisan. This is his first review for COMMENTARY.

Posted by Jerome S. Kaufman on June 5, 2012.

By Thomas Sowell

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=1988

The Washington  Times
October 17, 2011
Among those who have been disappointed by President Barack Obama, none is likely to end up so painfully disappointed as those who saw his election as being, in itself and in its consequences, a movement toward a “post-racial society.”Like so many other expectations that so many people projected onto this little-known man who suddenly burst onto the political scene, the expectation of movement toward a post-racial society had no speck of hard evidence behind it — and all too many ignored indications of the very opposite, including his two decades of association with the egregious Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Those people of good will who want to replace the racism of the past with a post-racial society have too often overlooked the fact that there are others who instead want to put racism under new management, to have reverse discrimination as racial payback for past injustices.Attorney General Eric Holder became a key figure epitomizing the view that government’s role in racial matters was not to be an impartial dispenser of equal justice for all, but to be a racial partisan and an organ of racial payback. He has been too politically savvy to say that in so many words, but his actions have spoken far louder than any words.
The case that first gave the general public a glimpse of Attorney General Holder’s views and values was one in which young black thugs outside a voting site in Philadelphia were televised intimidating white voters. When this episode was broadcast, it produced public outrage. Although the Department of Justice’s prosecution of these thugs began in the last days of the Bush administration, and the defendants had offered no legal defense, the case was dropped by the Justice Department after Eric Holder took over. One of the lawyers who were prosecuting that case resigned in protest.

That lawyer — J. Christian Adams — has now written a book, titled Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department. It is a thought-provoking book and a shocking book in what it reveals about the inner workings of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division. Bad as the Justice Department’s decision was to drop that particular case, which it had already won in court, this book makes painfully clear that this was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Despite the efforts of some in the media and in politics to depict the voter intimidation in Philadelphia as just an isolated incident involving a few thugs at one voting place, former U.S. Attorney Adams shows that these thugs were in fact part of a nationwide organization doing similar things elsewhere. Moreover, the civil rights division of the Justice Department has turned the same blind eye to similar voter intimidation and corruption of the voting process by other people and other organizations in other cities and states — so long as those being victimized were white and the victimizers were black.

This is all spelled out in detail, naming names and naming places, not only among those in the country at large, but also among those officials of the Justice Department who turned its role of protecting the civil rights of all Americans into a policy of racial partisanship and racial payback.

The widespread, organized and systematic corruption of the voting process revealed by the author of Injustice is on a scale that can swing not only local but national elections, including the 2012 elections. The Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder has not only turned a blind eye to blatant evidence of voter fraud, it has actively suppressed those U.S. Attorneys in its own ranks who have tried to stop that fraud.

Even in counties where the number of votes cast exceeds the number of people legally entitled to vote, Eric Holder’s Justice Department sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil — if the end result is the election of black Democrats. It has become the mirror image of the old Jim Crow South.

This is an enormously eye-opening book which makes painfully clear that, where racial issues are concerned, the Department of Justice has become the Department of Payback. A post-racial society is the last thing that Holder and Obama are pursuing

Thomas Sowell is a nationally syndicated columnist

Posted by Jerome S. Kaufman on October 29, 2011.