The endless war against merit

 

This blog frequently links to historian Victor Davis Hanson’s essays. At his recent essay at American Greatness, he considers the definitions and consequences of socialism and its derivatives ("Do We Even Know We Are All Socialists Now?”).  Here’s his conclusion:

. . . A final note: the Orwellian police state is central to socialism, since the ideology is contrary to innate human nature and when fully implemented quickly ruins all that it touches and is commensurately despised in its fruition. So to force compliance is a 360 degree, 24/7 project that transcends all our institutions and culture.

That is why the woke FBI goes after counter-revolutionary parents at school board meetings or traditionalist Catholics rather than Pentagon leakers or Islamic terrorists.

That is why the FBI and the CIA respectively tried to warp the 2016 election with the phony Steele dossier and in 2020 probably did so by suppressing the truth about the “bombshell” evidence found on wayward Hunter Biden’s laptop.

That is why news disappears off Facebook and the old Twitter. That is why the order of Google search results seems bizarre. That is why Disney or Budweiser suddenly virtue signal their nihilist politics, or why Nike makes the mediocrity Colin Kaepernick a multimillionaire, or Stanford University attempts to purge vocabulary such as “citizen,” “immigrant,” and “American.”

Once socialism takes hold, every mediocrity, every ossified bureaucracy, every constipated careerist, every hack writer and nobody actor, comes out of the woodwork to find his socialist “fair share” of what he lacked in talent or accomplishment.

In the end, perhaps the best definition of socialism is simply “The endless war against merit.”

Read the rest here.

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A Case Against Socialism

 

Posting at Campus Reform, Ilya Buynevich explains why advocates for socialism in America don’t know what they’re talking about:

Walking near Temple University, I noticed a flyer advocating for “socialism in our lifetime.” The message from an outside group reads in full, “Socialist Revolution: Join the fight for socialism in our lifetime.” Having grown up in Soviet-era Ukraine and now a tenured professor at Temple, I feel strongly that most college-age Americans do not understand what they are saying when they advocate for socialism. 

Today, many American college students do not understand that they are advocating for a system that goes beyond what even the Soviets promoted. There is a real distinction that students do not appreciate between the romanticized idea of state socialism in Scandinavia and the reality of socialism – what I experienced as a student in the Soviet Union. 

Most student activists tout equity and many undergraduates champion socialism as a means to achieve equity – a process to engineer outcomes. Where I grew up, this would mean giving everyone the same grade, so it was never a factor in Soviet higher education.  . . .

Much more at the link here.

RELATED:  ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) will bankrupt you (Allan J. Feifer at American Thinker here)

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Merit vs Diversity

AF Branco [Americans for Limited Government] cartoon at Townhall    

In his column “Destroying Meritocracy Is Deadly” at Townhall, Victor Davis Hanson discusses the decline in the aviation industries, both commercial and military, but his concerns could as easily be about the medical, educational, agricultural, energy and other professions. VDH concludes:

. . . America's security, safety, prosperity, and postmodern lifestyles are not our birthright.

They are the dividends of centuries of prior hard work, unfettered freedom of speech, disinterested research, and a meritocracy.

Tamper with any of that and the system begins to fall apart.

The United States will then resemble the miasma we see in most of the world abroad where ideology suppresses free inquiry, political correctness warps research, and tribalism trumps meritocracy.

Many of the major airlines have established racial and gender quotes for government pilot training programs. United Airlines has set quotas to ensure half of its trainees will be minorities or women. Since 2013, the FAA has been lowering standards for air traffic control qualifications to achieve de facto race and gender quotas.

In testimony before Congress our top military brass has bragged not of their reduction in standards for enlistment, but of their "diversity" hiring, as they purportedly ferret out "white supremacy" and "white rage."

In sum, our government is playing with our lives as it prefers diversity, equity, and inclusion over ensuring the best qualified employees are hired on the basis of racially and gender-blind competitive tests and experience.

Keep it up, and there are going to be a lot more Afghanistan-style surrenders, Chinese surveillance craft in our skies, and airline nightmares.

The full column is here.

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The Decline of Higher Education

 

The great Victor Davis Hanson goes through all sorts of “woke” reasons that colleges and universities are failing.  The full article (“Are Universities Doomed”) is at The Daily Signal here, but here’s his conclusion:

How ironic that universities are rushing to erode meritocratic standards—history’s answer to the age-old, pre-civilizational bane of tribal, racial, class, elite, and insider prejudices and bias that eventually ensure poverty and ruin for all.

VDH could as well be describing the decline of western civilization itself.

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