Ivy League Useful Idiocy

by Andrew Mellon

Big Government would not exist were it not given sanction by the people.  Those who continue to support it have been duped in large part as a direct or indirect result of the ideological subversion of our academic institutions.  The leaders in all fields of our society were raised in the politically correct, militantly liberal academy, and so it is only natural that the influence of socialist ideas has infected every aspect of our culture.  In so doing, academia has produced leaders that undermine our society rather than helping it to flourish.

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It is evident that educational institutions are turning society on its head when we see the kinds of leaders they herald as the shining examples for our students to follow.  On May 17th of this year, the graduating students of Columbia University will spend their morning listening to their Class Day speaker, Benjamin Jealous.  Readers may recall that Mr. Jealous penned a piece for the Huffington Post in which he ardently defended and praised Van Jones, calling him “an American treasure.”  He is being called on to speak because he is a star in the social justice movement.

For as Columbia’s Dean puts it, “Columbia’s undergraduate experience is built on the idea that our college must not only help students develop their capacities for critical thinking, but also nurture in them the responsibilities of citizenship in a democratic society. Benjamin Todd Jealous wonderfully personifies the value that Columbians have long placed on active engagement in the world and in finding the solutions to society’s challenges.”  Jealous does so by leading what he refers to as “a volunteer army for social change” in the NAACP.  That he would describe the organization in such a light should come as no surprise as Jealous is a former New York community organizer and AFL-CIO spokesman.

Mr. Jealous’ address to my class will mark a fitting end to my four years at Columbia in which I witnessed the attack on members of the Minutemen, the speech of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a professor pushing for students to join the peace corps in the middle of his science class and Israeli Apartheid Week amongst innumerable other travesties.

I say that this is a fitting end not to compare Mr. Jealous as a man to the perpetrators of the above acts, as I am sure he is a charismatic, intelligent (he is a Rhodes Scholar), ambitious (he is the youngest NAACP President ever elected), nice guy (anyone who feels such love for Van Jones has to be).  Rather, what is fitting is that Jealous and the major players in these events represent many principles opposite of those that should be championed at Columbia with its core curriculum steeped in the classics of Western Civilization.

Granted, Plato, Rousseau and Karl Marx amongst others hold a place in our curriculum, and they did not stand for Liberalism, but in my view their ideological counterparts handily defeated them on the merits of their ideas.  Unfortunately however, we failed to make the Liberal victory stand up, as we have not adequately defended its superior ideas.  And so this is why in the 21st century, the speakers at Columbia and across academia held up as the leaders of our society are community organizers and champions of “social justice,” rather than entrepreneurs, innovators, risk takers, life savers and others that produce things that really help society progress.  As a result of our perverted value system, the thinkers and the doers are subordinated to the political activists.  Hence the election of our Community Organizer in Chief.

And yet ironically, it is the activist community organizers who are the community destroyers, as they pit their followers against the policies that would otherwise help them advance in society into the productive positions I mentioned.  They advocate for the minimum wage, creating unemployment.  They advocate for green jobs, jobs that destroy wealth and by extension greater real job creation as dictated by consumers.  They advocate for labor unions that end up wrecking the companies that created the labor in the first place.  They advocate for socialized medicine, which like all experiments in central planning produces a worse and more costly service.  They advocate for artificially cheap credit for things like homes that end up distorting and crushing the economy.  They advocate for affirmative action which institutionalizes reverse racism and denigrates the people it purports to help by implying that those of a certain background cannot make it on their own merits.

In sum, they attack the free market and individual liberty and as a result punish their communities with bankruptcy and decay.  Shamefully, they continue to perpetuate the idea that big government is there to coddle them and provide them with “rights” to everything under the sun, and that it is the evil, racist conservative that wishes to oppress them.  Under the guise of justice, they divide our country on the basis of race and class, the very things that we are supposed to be beyond.

The rabblerousers amongst these activists in our society are even rewarded for perpetrating offensive acts.  As Benjamin Jealous noted regarding his suspension from Columbia for protests he organized as a student:

When you’re the first students suspended from Columbia University — the famous cauldron of student activism — in two decades, people take notice…Even when they’re sure all you really know how to do is organize campus protests and get kicked out, they offer you jobs. So, my career accelerated, because I accepted a job offer at the AFL-CIO to be a student organizer.

That there has been such a great proliferation of groups in the social justice movement, and that the social justice narrative has become such an indelible part of modern American culture is a testament to the infiltration and indoctrination of the socialists in academia and especially high academia.  Those taught at our country’s top universities are met with a constant barrage of in-your-face moral relativism and socialist propaganda, and given that this has been going on for multiple generations, though dressed up more clandestinely today, a disproportionate percentage of leaders in politics, business, media and the arts have caught the socialist bug to varying degrees.

Since relativism deems there to be no absolute truths, it has allowed the purveyors of ideological putridity to completely pervert our values so that justice becomes injustice, progress becomes regress, freedom becomes tyranny and right becomes wrong.  You see this in the titling of almost every single bill put up by Democrats in Congress.  Without any objective truth, you can cloak the most nefarious things in the nicest of language.

While our ideological foils veil their policies, they also veil the end of their policies.  The end of the Utopic socialists is substantively similar to the one Rousseau speaks to in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in which after attacking the progress of man in every field, he laments the impossibility of a return to what he perceives as the theoretically superior savage state of nature, whining:

O you, who have never heard the voice of heaven, who think man destined to only live this little life and die in peace; you who can resign in the midst of populist cities your fatal acquisitions, your restless spirits, your corrupt hearts and endless desires; resume, since it depends entirely on yourselves, your ancient and primitive innocence: retire to the woods, there to lose the sight and remembrance of the crimes of your contemporaries; and be not apprehensive of degrading your species, by renouncing its advances in order to renounce its vices.

Look at the nations that have renounced their advances to renounce their vices, and acted accordingly, and the result has been mass impoverishment, mass death and generally the worst kinds of vices.

Since Rousseau does not believe a return to the state of nature to be practical or practicable, as man has been civilized, he argues instead that the good citizen will “particularly honour those wise and good princes, who find means of preventing, curing or even palliating all these evils and abuses, by which we are constantly threatened; they will animate the zeal of their deserving rulers, by showing them, without flattery or fear, the importance of their office and the severity of their duty.”  What than could be better than for the idealists themselves to become the rulers?

Luckily in my time at Columbia there has been some semblance of balance as in addition to studying those such as Aristotle, Adam Smith and Locke (even if the lessons drawn from them in classes have been obscured), people like John Bolton, Geert Wilders and even Ann Coulter have come to campus to speak, providing if nothing else some relief.  But the studying of liberty here and I am sure at the vast majority of schools in the country must be self-directed.  Any balance is incidental.

This is where more so than in any other area we need to fight because if the parents who were brainwashed in our schools fail to adequately educate their children, it is only in the schools where our sons and daughters can be saved.  We need a hundred Hillsdale Colleges.  We need ten-thousand high schools modeled after Hillsdale College.  We need people to go into the public schools and teach to counter the indoctrination that begins from the time our children are young.  Education is essential because it is the only way to combat the sophistry of socialism, and if we cannot halt our nation’s collapse it will only be those armed with the right ideas who can restore it.

The education on our side will be unlike that of the propagandizing socialists.  We will really educate because we will present the fundamental ideas of both sides and let the ideas speak for themselves.  School is supposed to be where one learns to think, and the only way for one to learn to think is for one to grapple with all of the ideas.  How can one be considered educated if they are only exposed to half of them?

Ultimately, what is most important in winning the war of ideas against those who wish to transform this nation is to show that ours is first and foremost a moral vision that best allows us to pursue our happiness.  Theirs is one in which happiness is gifted in forcibly taking from one person and giving to another.  Ours is one in which the rights of the smallest and most important minority, the individual must be protected against any and all aggression.  Theirs is one in which the most important rights are the vacillating ones of the collective, rights not granted by our creator but decreed by our rulers.  Ours is one of harmonious freedom.  Theirs is one of discordant tyranny.  Look behind every single policy that the socialists proffer, and one finds that where one group is “helped,” the rest of society is hurt, the effects of which in the end trickle down to us all.

We cannot suffer any more generations of useful idiots.  The other side has been given a free pass for far too long, and their propagandizing efforts under this administration are only growing in strength and egregiousness.  We can dispel the myth that socialism helps the poor, the minority and the ill so long as we appeal to truth, reason and morality.  And we must.


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Posted Mar 28th 2010 at 8:31 am in Culture, Economics, Education, Politics | 121 Comments