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| by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness We in America are regressing—now returning to the distant neanderthal past, now embracing the worst of what the 19th and 20th century had to offer. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ONLY RADICALS FEEL NO NEED TO GO BEFORE THE PEOPLE. BIDENITES CANNOT DEFEND HIS RECORD SO FEEL COMPELLED TO CHANGE THE TOPIC AND/OR DUCK A DEBATE. +++ John Fetterman must debate and let Pennsylvania voters decide if he’s up to the job BY Rich Lowry John FettermanPennsylvania Lieutenant Governor and US Senate candidate John Fetterman needs to prove he is ready to take on the new position amid health concerns. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz John Fetterman has been in elected politics for nearly 20 years and last spring was on the cusp of taking the Democratic nomination in a very winnable Pennsylvania Senate race, the political opportunity of a lifetime. Then he suffered a stroke. He won the nomination anyway — while in the hospital and on the same day he had a roughly three-hour operation to implant a defibrillator. For Fetterman to have experienced a life-threatening, debilitating health event as he closed in on achieving a long-held ambition — he’d run in and lost a Senate primary in 2016 — was a terrible misfortune. Everyone of good will should wish him a full and rapid recovery and years of good health ahead. He is not fully recovered, though. There is no doubt his health status is an entirely legitimate issue and should be wholly litigated before Pennsylvania voters choose between Fetterman and his Republican opponent, the TV doctor Mehmet Oz. Fetterman, a former mayor and the current lieutenant governor whose left-wing politics, mountainous size and sartorial informality have made him a media sensation, has been scarce on the campaign trail. In a brief rally in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago, he at times painfully lost his way trying to deliver his riffs. Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor and U.S. Senate candidate John FettermanThe Senate candidate suffered from a stroke earlier this year.Reuters/Elizabeth Frantz The meandering isn’t his fault, of course — it’s a symptom of his condition. Fetterman still has trouble speaking and has used closed captioning to help understand what media interviewers are saying to him over Zoom. This is such a concern because talking (and listening) constitutes much of the job of a US senator, whether in committee hearings, on the Senate floor, in media interviews or with constituents. If his condition is anything like it is today, Fetterman would have trouble operating effectively in the Senate. Oz has been pestering Fetterman to agree to debates, which are a pretty good proxy for the kind of performance that a senator has to be routinely capable of. Oz has agreed to five invitations from various media outlets, and Fetterman none. His reluctance to agree to what are standard events in any high-profile campaign, and quite valuable ones for voters, is telling. It doesn’t mean the Oz campaign has to be witless and cruel about it. One of the sarcastic concessions it made to Fetterman in the back-and-forth about debating was to say it’d be happy to “pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby.” Lines like that have allowed Fetterman to play the victim, even though his campaign, in lieu of its candidate being out on the trail, has relied heavily on mockery of Oz on social media. The debate over debates is beginning to have an impact. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette just editorialized, “Voters have a right to know whether their prospective senator can do the job — including handling the give-and-take of a vigorous debate.” Supporters surround John FettermanSupporters surround Fetterman during a Labor Day parade in downtown Pittsburgh on Sept. 5, 2022.AP/Steve Mellon Indeed, Fetterman should have to show and not tell. It is a universal law of politics that elected officials and candidates who are ailing lie about their health or at the very least shade the truth. Fetterman didn’t tell anyone he had been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation in 2017, and he and his team initially minimized the severity of his stroke and have been overly optimistic about his recovery. Fetterman’s campaign was going to test the proposition that Bernie Sanders-style progressivism becomes more appealing when the vessel is a 6-foot-8 man with a shaved head and goatee who habitually wears hoodies — he looks more like a stevedore than a senator. The Pennsylvania race would be much more edifying if it were a debate about the underlying issues, including Fetterman’s fashionable anti-incarceration views. First, though, it has to be established that the Democrat can debate. That he’s in this position at all isn’t fair, but he can’t sidestep elemental questions about his fitness to serve. ++++++++++++++++++++ Are al Qaeda and Iran really at odds? by Jonathan Schanzer Washington Times A photo, first posted on an anonymous Twitter account, circulated last week among terrorism watchers here in Washington. It received scant attention in the mainstream media. The now authenticated photo, dated 2015, shows three of al Qaeda's top leaders smiling casually. Their names: Saif al Adel, Abu Muhammad al Masri, and Abu al Khayr al Masri. Their location: Tehran. All three men served in key leadership positions for the world's most dangerous terrorist organization. And all three men were apparently circulating freely in Iran. Al-Adel is now believed to be on the short list of candidates to lead al Qaeda after the American assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan in early August. Al-Masri was a senior al Qaeda leader who was gunned down on the streets of Tehran, presumably by the Israeli Mossad, in November 2020. Al Masri, another senior al Qaeda leader, was felled in Syria by a U.S. drone strike in 2017. The photo questions — yet again — the notion that al Qaeda and the Islamic Republic were at odds. If anything, they appear to cooperate, even if Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian tensions prevent a full-blown alliance. American officials (mostly those advocating for a nuclear deal with Iran) have repeatedly and falsely asserted that the Iranian regime maintained an antagonistic relationship with al Qaeda, placing members of the world's most dangerous terrorist group under house arrest. This assertion has been regurgitated by prominent beltway analysts such as Nelly Lahoud and Peter Bergen. Both wrote books recently, parroting lines proffered by U.S. officialdom, downplaying the ties between Tehran and al Qaeda. Both got it wrong. Here's just a sample of what we know: The 9/11 Commission Report (released in 2004) states: "Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11 ... some of these were future 9/11 hijackers." In 2009, the U.S. Treasury Department issued sanctions against four al Qaeda leaders based in Iran. One of them was Sa'ad bin Laden, the son of Osama bin Laden. In 2012, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Adel Radi Saqr al-Wahabi al-Harbi, a top al Qaeda operative in Iran. According to the Treasury press release, "Iran continues to allow al Qaeda to operate a core pipeline that moves al Qaeda money and fighters through Iran to support al Qaeda activities in South Asia. This network also sends funding and fighters to Syria." This came on the heels of a designation the year prior in which Treasury sanctioned "Ezedin Abdel Aziz Khalil, a prominent Iran-based al Qaeda facilitator, operating under an agreement between al Qaeda and the Iranian government." Treasury targeted Khalil (aka Yasin al-Suri) along with five other al Qaeda operatives, noting how Iran was a "critical transit point for funding to support al Qaeda's activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This network serves as the core pipeline through which al Qaeda moves money, facilitators and operatives from across the Middle East to South Asia ..." What's most notable about these revelations is that they were made by the Treasury during the Obama administration. When the Obama Administration inked the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear accord with the Islamic Republic in Iran, there was no discussion of this pipeline. The administration yielded an estimated $150 billion dollars to the regime in exchange for fleeting nuclear restrictions. The regime's malign regional activities, including its collaboration with al Qaeda, were deemed outside the purview of the agreement. While the Obama administration ended its investigation into this collaboration, the Trump administration revived it. In 2017, the Central Intelligence Agency released (thanks to a campaign by FDD's Long War Journal) a trove of documents from the 2011 raid by U.S. Navy SEALS on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Among the documents was a video that revealed that bin Laden's son Hamza was married in Iran, with senior al Qaeda figures in attendance. In 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo renewed the allegations of Iranian collusion with al Qaeda. In early 2021, he charged that Iran was the new home base for al Qaeda. This did not stop the incoming Biden administration from pursuing a return to the nuclear deal that President Donald Trump exited in 2018. The deal currently being negotiated in Vienna could yield Iran an estimated $275 billion in the first year, and as much as $1 trillion over the ensuing decade. Once again, the regime's ties to al Qaeda are not addressed. Earlier this year, a federal judge found in favor of victims and families that sued Iran for providing "material support" to al Qaeda, among other groups that perpetrated terrorist attacks against American servicemembers and civilians in Afghanistan. The case offered new insights into this dynamic. The debate about the Islamic Republic's collaboration with al Qaeda is far from over. Much is already known, and there is ample evidence yet to be released. However, proponents of nuclear diplomacy with Iran hope to sweep it under the rug, for fear of scuttling talks. Another 9/11 anniversary is approaching. For the sake of those who perished on that day, not to mention the men and women who gave their lives on the battlefields of Afghanistan, it's time for a full and truthful account of this relationship to be released by the U.S. government. It should be produced without fear or favor. Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is senior vice president for research at the nonpartisan think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). +++++++++++++++++++++ WHEN YOUR SO CALLED "FRIEND" KNOWINGLY MAKES A DEAL THATCAN/Will LEAD TO WAR AND THE POTENTIAL OF YOUR SEVERE DESTRUCTION CAN THEY STILL BE YOUR FRIEND? +++ Will a new Iran deal redefine the US-Israel relationship? Another weak nuclear accord will create a confrontation that could help erase Trump’s Middle East triumphs that were based on both partners pursuing their own interests. BY JONATHAN S. TOBIN (September 6, 2022 / JNS) At this stage, it’s likely that not even those American diplomats most immersed in the ongoing nuclear talks between the United States and Iran know what the outcome of their efforts will be. For the last 20 months, since President Joe Biden was sworn into office, the expectation has been that Tehran will sooner or later agree to re-enter the weak nuclear accord it concluded with the administration of former President Barack Obama in 2015. But, as they did during the two-year lead-up to that agreement, the Iranians are clearly having too much fun making their American counterparts sweat to agree to the advantageous terms that everyone knows that Biden’s foreign-policy team has been offering to them. Yet if, as most observers still believe, a nuclear deal is reached, it will set up a new and potentially divisive chapter in U.S.-Israel relations and a dilemma for the government of the Jewish state. That will be true whether it is led after the Knesset election in November by current Prime Minister Yair Lapid or his rival for power, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud Party remains the largest in Israel but is not assured of being able to assemble a majority coalition. Unless the diplomatic effort being pursued by Biden and the Democrats is thwarted by Iranian intransigence, it will set in motion a series of events that could (assurances to the contrary being made by both countries) lead to a situation in which past assumptions about the alliance will be thrown to the winds. Such a scenario will be bad for both Israel and the United States—not least because a nuclear Iran, which is more or less guaranteed to eventually be the result of a new deal, will undermine both nations’ security and undermine alliances in the Arab world. The most frustrating aspect of all this is that it could potentially undo so much of the good that was done to the region by the Abraham Accords that brought normalization of relations between Israel and important elements in the Arab world. And if that happens, it will be because the Biden administration has decided to ignore some basic conclusions about the Middle East and foreign policy that its predecessor had learned. That involves choosing ideology and false assumptions about Israel and the Islamic world over realism and, most of all, returning to a policy that isn’t based on the understanding that alliances work best when all sides to it are pursuing their own best interests. In recent weeks, there had been a surge of optimism in Washington, which generated a corresponding sense of panic in Jerusalem and Arab capitals, about the Iranians finally dropping some of their most outrageous and clearly unserious demands, and finally taking “yes” for an answer and thereby beginning to profit from the dropping of Western sanctions. But as with every previous such glimmer of hope among Biden officials that their efforts will be rewarded with success, there has come a new set of unreasonable answers from Tehran. Iran’s most recent response to a draft conveyed to them by the European Union—after all this time, the talks are still being conducted with intermediaries rather than directly by the two countries—was termed “not constructive” by the U.S. State Department. However, no one should be under the impression that this will deter Biden’s team from continuing to push for a new pact at any price. The Iranians believe with good reason that time is on their side. Given the pressure from the Europeans to get Iranian oil flowing at a time of shortages caused by the sanctions on Russia, few people involved doubt that sooner or later, the Americans will agree to some sort of “compromise” that will finally end this dispiriting example of weakness. When that happens, it will force Arab states to make a choice. Their only options will be to surrender to Iran as the nation anointed as the “strong horse” in the region by the retreating American superpower or to throw in their lot with an Israeli effort to stop Tehran’s inevitable push for a weapon in spite of certain American opposition. Though the administration continues to say that it won’t tie Israel’s hands in efforts to deal with the Iranian threat, this is utterly disingenuous. Any Israeli effort to attack Iran after an agreement will place it in a direct confrontation with Washington. This will lead to incalculable complications for relations between the two allies. Indeed, given the hostility to Israel on the part of the base of the Democratic Party to which Biden is beholden, there’s no telling what will result if either Lapid or Netanyahu takes such a course. And even if they don’t, the undermining of Israeli security by such a deal will inevitably lead to scenarios in which terrorist groups—funded and directed by Iran—will seek to take advantage with new confrontations and an upsurge in Palestinian terrorism. All of this has the potential to overturn the progress made towards peace under the Trump administration and the Abraham Accords it jump-started two years ago. Just as Iranian appeasement is the inevitable result of a return to power on the part of the foreign-policy establishment that Biden has reinstated, former President Donald Trump’s success was the product of his handing over the problem to amateurs. That team of diplomatic novices, including presidential senior advisor/son-in-law Jared Kushner, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt and Friedman’s aide, Aryeh Lightstone, was not hindered by the establishment’s almost religious belief in a peace process for its own sake and the myths that pressuring Israel was the key to peace. They agreed with a policy that put America’s interests first and comprehended that allowing other countries to do the same would provide a more stable and surer path to a better outcome. Biden, like Obama and all of their predecessors of both parties in the White House, treats Israel like a client state that should be compelled to agree to concessions to the Palestinians and acquiesce to appeasement of Iran because that fits in with some grand ideological construct about the Middle East that has little connection to reality. They are equally unrealistic about Arab nations pursuing their self-interests by allying themselves to an Israel that is an economic window to the West as well as a bulwark for their security. Many in both the United States and Israel are anxious to downplay the impact on the alliance of a new deal that will lead to a nuclear Iran by the end of the decade. The implications of Obama’s appeasement were, though profoundly serious, still something that would occur in what then seemed like the distant future. But that is not true of a new agreement that will also expire while ignoring the danger from Iranian missile-building and funding of terrorism. The next such boost given the Iranian regime will place in jeopardy not just existing alliances but remove some of the guardrails that could operate to deter escalations in violence. Though Biden apologists wrongly blame the current peril on Trump’s decision to withdraw from the original deal, he was right to junk it sooner rather than later and push for a necessary renegotiation that would end rather than perpetuate the nuclear threat. That kind of realism is out of fashion in Washington these days as the old establishment of career diplomats, think-tank operatives, academics and journalists who cling to the failed assumptions that were the foundation of American Middle East policy are back in the driver’s seat. If the alliance between Israel and the United States is to be saved from Biden’s Iran folly, then it will require returning to the Trump-era understanding of national self-interest and discarding magical thinking about both Iran and the Palestinians. Whether such a turnabout can happen in time to prevent the chaos and possible horror implicit in the appeasement of Iran remains to be seen. +++++++++++++ I AM A "MAGA" AND THUS, A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY BEAUSE I BELIEVE IN SECURE BORDERS, HAVE NO DESIRE TO ALLOW MY FELLOW CITIZEN TO BE KILLED BY DRUGS, SUPPORT THE POLICE IN THEIR OFFICIAL DUTY AND WOULD SEND TO JAIL THOSE WHO DESTROY PROPERTY OF OTHERS. I AM A "MAGA" BECAUSE I WANT A STRONG MILITARY, BELIEVE IN THE ENFORCEMENT OF ALL LAWS EQUALLY, SUPPORT LAW AND ORDER, THE CONSTITUION,MOST PARTICULARLY FREE SPEECH, NO INTRUSTIONS ON RELIGION, LIMITED GVERNMENT AND RIGHTS OF STATES TO DETERMINE LAWS WHERE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS NO ROLE. IF THIS MAKES ME A THREAT THEN WE NEED TO HAVE ONLY ONE PARTY RULE THE NATION AND THAT WOULD BE THE CURRENT RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRAT PARTY.. THE CURRENT PRESIDENT MUST SWITCH THE DEBATE BECAUSE HE HAS LOUSED UP JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING HE HAS ATTEMPTED TO DO INCLUDING LEAVING CITIZENS BEHIND ENEMY LINES, SUPPORTING BREAKING OF CONTRACTS AND PLEDGES TO DEFEND ONE'S ALLIES AND THE LIST GROWS AND GROWS WITH THE PASSAGE OF EACH DAY. +++ With Malice Toward Quite a Few BY BRET STEPHENS Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address was a 3,600-word olive branch to a South on the eve of the Civil War. His second promised malice toward none after the war left 620,000 dead. Americans have long revered both speeches because they offered a measure of redemption, and a means of reconciliation, to those who deserved it least. Joe Biden’s speech in Philadelphia last week bears no resemblance to either address, except that, in his own inaugural, he staked his presidency on ending “this uncivil war that pits red against blue.” So much for that. Like the predecessor he denounces, Biden has decided the best way to seek partisan advantage is to treat tens of millions of Americans as the enemy within. How can an American president go wrong in identifying threats to democracy? Biden offered a master class. Start with the “MAGA Republicans,” who, Biden said, “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” Who are they? The president allowed that they are “not even the majority of Republicans.” Then, in describing their goals, he cast a net so wide it included everyone from those who cheered the attack on the Capitol and the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, to those who oppose abortion rights and gay marriage. As categories go, this one is capacious. It includes violent Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — as well as every faithful Catholic or evangelical Christian whose deeply held moral convictions bring them to oppose legalized abortion. It takes in the anti-Semites who marched at Charlottesville — as well as socially conservative Americans with traditional beliefs about marriage, which would have included Barack Obama during his 2008 run for president. It encompasses undoubted election deniers like lawyers Sidney Powell and John Eastman — along with ordinary Americans who have been bamboozled into harboring misguided but sincere doubts about the integrity of the last election. In other words, Biden claimed to distinguish MAGA Republicans from mainstream ones and then proceeded to conflate them. That may resonate with partisan Democrats who have never seen a conservative they didn’t consider a bigot or a fool. But it gives the lie to the idea that dismantling MAGA Republicanism is the prime objective of the president or his party. Then there were the transparently partisan purposes of Biden’s speech. For this election cycle, pro-Democratic groups have spent north of $40 million in ad buys to help nominate the Trumpiest candidates in Republican primaries, on the theory that they will be easier to beat in November. That included a successful effort to defeat Michigan Representative Peter Meijer — one of just 10 House Republicans who voted for Donald Trump’s impeachment last year — in last month’s G.O.P. primary. Is that smart as hardball politics? Maybe. But Biden could have spared us the pieties about timeless American values. As far as I can tell, he has yet to say a word in public against the ad buys, much less tried to stop them. Instead, his speech makes a neat bookend to a strategy of promoting MAGA extremists so they can be denounced as MAGA extremists. Some liberals took a similar approach in 2016, all but rooting for Trump to win the nomination on the theory that he’d be Hillary Clinton’s weakest opponent. Look how that worked out. And then there was the crassest part of Biden’s speech, in which an ostensible presidential address became a campaign rally for Democratic priorities such as prescription-drug benefits and the “clean energy future.” When a president makes the implicit claim that to be a small-d democrat one must today be a big-D Democrat he advances the interests of neither his party nor the country. He only gratuitously insults millions of voters as deplorables while again branding Democrats as the party of sanctimony and condescension. I write this as someone who has long thought that Trump represents a unique threat to democracy. He is the only president in American history who has refused to concede an election, who has schemed with conspiracy theorists to remain in power, who has sought to bully state officials into finding him votes, who has egged on a mob, who has cheered an assault on Congress, who has put the life of his vice president in jeopardy, who has flouted the demands of the Justice Department to return classified documents, who has violated every norm of American politics and every form of democratic decency. He is the tribune of the “mobocratic spirit” that Lincoln warned against in his first major address, and to which he devoted his life to stopping. The gravest threat American democracy faces today isn’t the Republican Party, MAGA or otherwise. It’s Trump. He’s one man, sinister but also buffoonish. To defeat him, the core task is to make him seem small, very small. Biden’s misbegotten speech did precisely the opposite. The next time Biden talks about democracy, he should remember Lincoln’s other exhortation: charity for all. +++++++++++++++ SO TRUE: The Futility of Reasoning With the Progressive Socialist LefT BY Allen West +++ White House Can’t Shake Major ‘MAGA Republican’ Miscalculation +++ Biden's Strategy For Ukraine: Don't Win BY Oliver North and David Goetsch +++
++++++++++++++++++++ Labor Day Weekend A Bloodbath for Democratic-Run Cities Cities run by Democrats were battlegrounds over the Labor Day holiday weekend with dozens killed and wounded in a continuous series of attacks. The major culprits? Chicago and Philadelphia. At least 11 mass shootings occurred in cities across the country, and Gun Violence Archive says at least 15 were killed in the incidents. The culprits included St. Paul, Charleston, S.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Cleveland. This comes as Democratic mayors desperately try to skew statistics in their favor, finding some nuance that shows their lack of leadership has somehow resulted in a reduction in violent crime. The results, however, paint a starkly different picture. The Hill reports three people died in a mass shooting in St. Paul, Minnesota. Two others were injured in the incident. Philadelphia police investigated more than 20 shootings over the long Labor Day weekend. Over 30 were shot and at least 10 have died from their injuries. In the city’s Hunting Park neighborhood, two were killed and four others wounded in an early Monday morning shooting. The day before, a 19-year-old man was killed after an argument in a restaurant drive-thru. The city’s homicide total for 2022 sits at 368, seven more than at this time last year. In 2020 at this point, 309 people had been killed. In Chicago, at least nine people were killed and 47 others wounded over the Labor Day weekend. The victims ranged in ages from 13 to 63. Two men, ages 18 and 20, were killed and another two shot outside a Chicago residence Sunday. One 24-year-old man was killed in West Garfield Park when two cars pulled up and the occupants got out and opened fire. Two other men were shot when they argued with a third man while walking down the street. Late Friday night, a 15-year-old boy was on a sidewalk when four unknown male assailants opened fire with what police report were nearly 45 rounds. The victim is in critical condition with two gunshot wounds to the back. The city, of course, has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation. And Illinois dropped cash bail last year. The number of victims for just these few Democrat-run cities for the Labor Day holiday weekend are staggering, and strict gun control has done little or nothing to improve the situation. It is past time for voters to realize that Democratic leaders in these large cities are not getting the job done. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ America’s Institutional Crisis By George Friedman - In my latest book, “The Storm Before the Calm,” I predicted that the U.S. would go through a massive social crisis in the 2020s. That prediction has obviously come to pass. I also forecast that America would go through its fourth institutional crisis. The previous three all followed existential wars and transformed the governing institutions. The first came after the Revolutionary War, which eliminated British imperial rule and installed a union of states and a republican form of government. The second, some 80 years later, came after the Civil War, which established the primacy of the federal government over the states. Eighty years after that, World War II extended the power of the federal government over American society and put in place a technocratic government – that is, a government of experts. We are now 80 or so years removed from World War II, and the nature of this new institutional crisis is becoming clear. It started when the COVID-19 pandemic revealed how ineffective a federal technocracy is in imposing solutions over a vast and diverse continent. As I argued in “The Storm Before the Calm,” experts are essential but insufficient when it comes to governance. Their fundamental weakness is that expertise in one area can be insensitive to or ignorant of the problems their solutions create. Medical institutions did the best they could do under the circumstances, but their solutions disrupted the production and distribution of goods and alienated people from one another. Governance is the art of seeing the whole. Physicians tend to see only their own domain. The federal government responded to expertise in one area without creating systems of competing expertise, and it often failed to recognize the variability of circumstances that the founders envisioned. Now another important dimension of the institutional shift is taking place: the crisis of universities. Universities have been central to the moral functioning of the United States since Thomas Jefferson required that all new states admitted to the republic fund universities. He saw them as essential in the cultivation of expertise and in creating an educated elite armed with varied knowledge essential to the regime. Over time, universities, and especially elite universities, tended to exclude prospective students and teachers who were not already part of the elite, and thus tended to suppress ideas offensive to elite values. The GI Bill disrupted the system by welcoming soldiers into universities regardless of background. Many of them already had elements of technical expertise, thanks to their time in the armed services, and they knew too much about life not to doubt the self-certainties of their professors. This development helped create a massive professional class with highly specific areas of knowledge. That notion of expertise fed the emerging principle of government. It accepted diversity as a principle, except that its proponents weren’t always aware of, let alone concerned about, those their definition of diversity excluded. The university was therefore the pivot to the elite. It always develops cultural idiosyncrasies that overlay its function, but it also remains a foundation of the institutional structure. The university has again developed strange dynamics, but it has also developed in a direction that is deeply linked to the federal system. The problem is that students must take out outlandish loans to pay for the outlandishly high price of higher education. Given the existence of a federal lending program that linked available credit to the cost of education, universities had little incentive to control costs. The lending program was linked to cost, and the cost could rise because the available loans, in general, increased in tandem. At the time that I wrote “The Storm Before the Calm,” student debt stood at about $1.34 trillion. This was roughly equal to the amount borrowed by subprime homeowners prior to 2008. A massive default on student loans would create problems at least on the order of the subprime mortgage crisis. The government control system was used warily, not wanting to upset an unqualified class of borrowers for political reasons or lenders who were reaping substantial profits before the collapse. The government wanted to be as inclusive as possible; it couldn’t risk excluding an “unqualified” class of people from borrowing, and it wanted to take advantage of the large constituencies endemic to large universities. The debt burden assumed by students was staggering, and universities kept increasing costs, and thus increasing the debt, hoping to ride the train as long as they could. The recent decision to bail out students, then, is the least of the issues. How the government allowed the situation to get to this point is the issue. Ohio State University charges $23,000 a year for in-state residents, including room and board. Harvard University charges nearly $100,000 per year. These prices (which do not include financial aid outside of loans) reached this level in 2019 on an intensifying curve, a curve made possible by the government acting like a subprime lender. The likelihood of repayment was questionable at best, but it went on anyway. Why is college so expensive to begin with? First, there is the lavish campus replete with things like tennis courts and other features disconnected from education. I went to the City College of New York many years ago, when it was bare bones but sported superb professors. I then went to graduate school at Cornell. I loved it and still love going back. The campus is beautiful, and seeing the Finger Lakes and hearing the chimes is a great pleasure. But the fact is that the land on which Cornell is situated and the buildings are worth a fortune, and the pleasure I got from this did not address the fact that professors are essential to a university and the rest is marketing to get students to spend their borrowed money there rather than elsewhere. Columbia University is in Manhattan, some of the most expensive real estate in the world. If it sold its facilities there and moved to let’s say Queens, with the money placed in a trust, it could lower the cost of tuition dramatically. The university has become a central part of the social crisis demanding fealty to values rather than inviting debate over those values. But that’s a discussion for a later date. The student loan crisis is the result of a major institution running out of control with the tacit permission of the government. This was partly political in that borrowers had parents, and parents voted. But there was a deeper problem: The experts running the student loan system focused on the benefits of education without measuring the costs. Those charged with charting the development of the economy had as their constituency banks, which, of course, love loans. The basic argument in my book is that technocracy is built on experts, and that experts, while necessary, tend to have a narrow focus. To lack generalists is to lack common sense, and a lack of common sense gave us another train wreck, one that will end with a transformation of how government works. It should be noted that the systemic shifts of the past required major wars to compel change. All were existential in the sense that the republic was at stake. The war in Ukraine does not have that much weight for the United States. With only three prior institutional shifts, we don’t have enough examples to be certain war is required. Or there is a nasty one coming. +++++++++++++++++++++
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