%20(1)%20(4)%20(1)%20(1).jpg)
+++++++++++++++++++++++
WHY? Do Palestinians serve the Triangle City's same purpose?
The History of the Media Intifada Against Israel -WHY? Do Palestinians serve the Triangle City's same purpose?
+++
Why Do Stanford, Harvard and NASA Still Honor a Nazi Past?
By Lev Golinkin
Mr. Golinkin is the author of the memoir “A Backpack, a Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka.”
This year, Harvard unveiled a report on the university’s history of profiting from slavery. “I believe we bear a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard and on our society,” Lawrence Bacow, the university president, wrote in an open letter to the community. The study was heralded as a long overdue reckoning by an elite institution with its dark past.
But tackling its role in the American slave trade only addresses one aspect of the school’s past. Harvard still boasts a fellowship and a professorship named for Alfried Krupp, a Nazi war criminal whose industrial empire used around 100,000 forced laborers.
Harvard is not alone: From NASA to Stanford to the United States Army, American institutions continue to acknowledge — and sometimes even celebrate — high-profile former Nazis.
The individuals honored aren’t obscure Holocaust guards who managed to skulk past immigration officers — some of them are historical figures whose relationship with America has been extensively chronicled, including in well-researched tomes by Eric Lichtblau and Annie Jacobsen.
The institutions that whitewash the Nazi past of men whose names grace Harvard and Stanford programs, part of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and multiple locations in Huntsville, Ala., typically do so via deception by omission — erasing history by leaving out or sidelining inconvenient facts.
How did the United States go from fighting the evil of Nazism to lauding ex-Nazis? It began with the end of the wartime honeymoon between Moscow and the West. With Germany divided and defeated, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union quickly became America’s biggest enemy. Washington needed technology to compete with the Kremlin and a solvent West Germany to serve as a bulwark against Communism spreading through Europe. The ex-Nazis offered tantalizing expertise. So while a handful of prominent Third Reich figures were hanged in Nuremberg, many others saw their noxious pasts wiped clean as they became partners and allies in the Cold War.
By the 1960s, with the space race well underway, the former S.S. officer Wernher von Braun found himself meeting with U.S. presidents and being presented by the media as a math wizard working to get America to the moon. In other words: We didn’t just hire him; we made him a hero.
Just shy of 30 years after the war, there was barely a ripple of surprise when it was announced that Harvard would receive $2 million (approximately $12 million today, adjusted for inflation) from the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation. It was 1974, and the funds were used to establish the Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies as well as the Krupp Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship.
Alfried Krupp was an industrial baron and was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Nuremberg. His company had a slave-built factory in Auschwitz and put to work approximately 100,000 forced laborers, including prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates and children. When Harvard accepted Krupp’s money, The Harvard Crimson published a letter stating that “few names are more honored in the annals of mass murder and genocide than that of Krupp.” (In 1951, Krupp’s sentence was commuted and he was released from prison.)
The web pages for Harvard’s Krupp fellowship and the Krupp professorship say nothing about their namesake being a convicted war criminal.
The Krupp Foundation also sponsors Stanford’s Krupp Internship Program for Stanford Students in Germany, advertised as a “unique and prestigious program.” The fact that Krupp was a war criminal is only mentioned once on the program’s webpage.
But the rehabilitation of Krupp pales in comparison to America’s overt whitewashing of von Braun and Kurt Debus, two of the Third Reich scientists responsible for giving Hitler the deadly V-2 ballistic missile. The V-2 was built by concentration camp prisoners toiling under abhorrent conditions in Germany’s infamous underground complex near Dora-Mittelbau. At least 10,000 enslaved people were killed in the process of making the rockets; American troops liberating the concentration camp were sickened when they discovered a ghastly plateau strewn with emaciated corpses.
But von Braun’s and Debus’s membership in the Nazi Party didn’t preclude them from being offered jobs via Washington’s infamous Operation Paperclip program that recruited former Nazi scientists to work in America.
Von Braun eventually moved to Huntsville, which became a center for America’s budding space industry. Today the city and surrounding area house a number of shrines to the former Nazi: His name graces a research hall at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a performing arts center and a planetarium
“Dr. Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists transformed Huntsville, Ala., known in the 1950s as the ‘Watercress Capital of the World,’ into a technology center that today is home to the second-largest research park in the United States,” proclaims the “About Us” section of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center — a Smithsonian-affiliated museum and the home of the renowned Space Camp program. (A spokeswoman for the center said, “We are in a current redevelopment of the rocket center’s website affiliated Space Camp pages,” and that the center intends to provide additional context.)
In the meantime, von Braun is lauded at practically every turn: on the Space Camp website, on the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s school history page, in the description of the Dr. Wernher von Braun Scholarship, even in a 2019 speech by Robert Altenkirch, who was then the university president — none of which mention Nazis or slave labor. (The school does have a web page about rocketry and slave labor that mentions von Braun.)
As for the von Braun Center performing arts venue, a spokesperson for the city of Huntsville said that there is “an ongoing effort to provide greater historical context and information” on the center’s website. But how long does it take to correct the record?
The impression one gets from these sanitized histories is that this was a man who had materialized out of nowhere, with no discernible past, like an astrophysical Mary Poppins who had come to teach the people of Huntsville how to make rockets.
It seems it is less common to note a Nazi past than to look past it. Such is the case with the NASA Kennedy Space Center’s visitor complex in Florida, which is home to the Dr. Kurt H. Debus Conference Facility. In the official NASA biography of Debus there is but a short, vague paragraph about his life in Germany. On June 24, the Kennedy Space Center’s director, Janet Petro, accepted the National Space Club Florida Committee’s Dr. Kurt H. Debus Award; NASA’s webpage celebrating the event referenced Debus’s astronomical achievements, noting nothing of his S.S. membership and intimate involvement with building the V-2.
Perhaps the most astonishing example of Nazi laundering comes from the Redstone Arsenal, a U.S. Army post next to Huntsville, which has a building complex named after von Braun. The arsenal’s history section features dozens of photos of von Braun, while his bio says he was “employed by the German Ordnance Department” and was the technical director of the center where the V-2 was developed. No mention is made of how the V-2 was used by the Third Reich to unleash hell on civilians.
Though our military is slowly dealing with its numerous tributes to the Confederacy, it has yet to adequately address its lionization of a man who built weapons for Hitler. It is astounding that institutions like the Army, NASA and leading universities persist in insulting the sacrifice of thousands of American soldiers by openly celebrating Nazi weapon makers.
Lev Golinkin is the author of the memoir “A Backpack, a Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Hey Antifa, Who Are the Real Fascists?
By Allen West
The recent revelations about the full-scale censorship of conservative thoughts, perspectives, opinions, and insights by Twitter are very telling. It confirms what everyone knew to be happening. But, to say so, you were branded as a conspiracy theorist. Now we know — contrary to the testimony of one Jack Dorsey — that Twitter, under his leadership, was doing something called "shadow banning." In essence, Twitter was enacting one of the fundamental tenets of fascism: suppression of political opposition. Why was that necessary? It’s simple; the truth cannot be challenged or confronted by progressive socialists, the real fascists.
Now, one must wonder, what does this mean for our very own domestic terrorist organization of Brown Shirts known as Antifa — meaning anti-fascists?
And.
++++++++++++++++++++++
Anyone left who believes this? Article from AmericanThinker https://www.americanthinker.co
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Why do progressive hypocrite liberals want to withhold black education. Is it because they depend upon their votes?
+++
Daniel Greenfield expands on my own concerns.
Charter Schools’ Success Makes Them a Political Target
By Jason L. Riley
A recent news article in the New York Times about the growing popularity of charter schools in New York City was remarkable for its balance. The story stated matter-of-factly that the “vast majority of students in charters are Black or Latino” and that charters “receive less per-pupil funding than district schools” but nevertheless “typically outperform district schools in math and reading on state standardized tests.” The cap on the number of charter schools allowed to open in New York was reached three years ago, but Democrats oppose lifting it. So do the teachers unions, which “are major political players and disapprove of the schools, which tend not to be unionized.”
None of that is news to regular readers of these opinion pages, but it’s not the type of coverage you read often in news articles, let alone in the New York Times. And the timing is superb because attacks on school choice have escalated. It’s hard to believe, given today’s hyper-divisive political climate, but after their inception in the early 1990s charter schools enjoyed bipartisan support that spanned four presidential administrations.
Bill Clinton set up the federal Charter Schools Program in 1994 to fund charter startups. George W. Bush said charters “encourage educational entrepreneurs to try innovative methods” and “break up the monopoly of one-size-fits-all education.” Barack Obama praised them for giving “educators the freedom to cultivate new teaching models and develop creative methods to meet students’ needs.” Donald Trump chose an education secretary, Betsy DeVos, whose family had started a charter school and who was easily the strongest school-choice advocate ever to hold the position.
Under Joe Biden, however, this trend has been broken. The president has called for banning some types of charter schools outright, increasing regulations for others, and giving school boards dominated by union allies more power to block their expansion. Earlier this year, the Biden administration announced new rules that make it far more difficult for charter operators to receive funding from the Charter Schools Program.
Charter schools are also fighting for survival in the courts, where activist judges are undermining state charter laws and limiting the ability of the schools to operate independently, which is the source of their success. In 2015 Charter Day School, a public charter school in Leland, N.C., was sued by the parents of three female students who objected to the school’s dress code for girls. Charter Day requires all students to wear navy-blue tops and khaki or blue bottoms. Boys must wear a belt and can’t wear jewelry. Girls must wear skirts, jumpers or skirt-like shorts known as skorts.
The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union with notable backing from the nation’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. The plaintiffs argued that the dress code was based on gender stereotypes and violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. They won, and earlier this year the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower-court ruling in a 10-6 decision. North Carolina passed a charter school law in 1996 that says charters may “operate independently of existing schools” and are “exempt from statutes and rules” that apply to government-run schools in the state. Despite the clear wording and intent of the law, the appellate court ruled that Charter Day is a “state actor” under North Carolina law and therefore is constrained by the U.S. Constitution.
In a dissenting opinion, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum took issue with the novel characterization of charter schools as “state actors,” which he noted is something that neither the Supreme Court nor any other federal appellate court had ever concluded when addressing similar issues in the past. Judge Quattlebaum’s dissent also stressed what is at stake if the majority opinion is allowed to stand.
“The immediate casualty of the majority’s decision is a small part of a dress code at a particular charter school. That is the least of my concerns,” he wrote. “My worry is that the majority’s reasoning transforms all charter schools in North Carolina, and likely all charter schools in the other states that form our circuit, into state actors. As a result, the innovative alternatives to traditional public education envisioned by North Carolina when it passed the Charter Schools Act, and thus the choices available to parents, will be limited.”
Next month, the Supreme Court is expected to decide whether to hear Charter Day’s appeal, and charter advocates have their fingers crossed. Like Judge Quattlebaum, they understand that this isn’t really about school uniforms. It’s about school choice.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Is XI concerned?
+++
China’s President Shows Rare Display Of Weakness
(RoyalPatriot.com )- President Xi Jinping’s relaxation of COVID-19 mitigation policies in response to a wave of protests in China was a rare display of weakness, according to a human rights activist and leader from Tiananmen Square.
According to Amnesty International U.K., pro-democracy protesters held peaceful demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 to demand political and economic reform. Protesters perished as a result of the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown.
Reports show a new wave of protests has recently erupted across China in response to Xi’s zero-COVID policy, which entails strict lockdowns and other measures that have frustrated Chinese residents. Because lockdown measures delayed the arrival of rescue crews, ten people were killed in a fire while sealed inside an apartment in Urumqi. The lockdown policy has become the subject of increased scrutiny and outrage.
Some reports indicate that authorities are targeting individuals in their own homes in an effort to dissuade residents from participating in the protests in the first place.
Two cities, Guangzhou and Chongqing, announced that they would be relaxing COVID measures in response to the unprecedented protests.
It is currently difficult to predict the outcome of the protests.
Fengsuo Zhou, a student leader for Tiananmen Square, told reporters the zero-COVID policy is already beginning to loosen, a rare sign of weakness from Xi Jinping. College students participating in the protests are undergoing a baptism of political activism and becoming masters of their own fate by taking action.
Zhou explained that as a survivor of the Tiananmen massacre, he was in tears as he observed protesters chanting ‘end CCP’ in Shanghai, the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party. Zhou does not believe Xi’s power has diminished due to the protests, but his control may hinder the nation’s ability to respond to unforeseen situations. His subordinates are unwilling to take the initiative without his explicit direction.
I wonder if the People’s Liberation Army smells blood in the water.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Fusion commentary:
+++
+++
How Fusion Works and Why It’s a Breakthrough
American science scores a triumph, though it’ll be decades before it yields a viable energy source.
By Steven E. Koonin and Robert L. Powell
The Energy Department has announced the first gain in energy from fusion in a laboratory—the first time fusion reactions produced more energy than it took to induce them. Last week 192 laser beams at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility heated and compressed a capsule of hydrogen to previously unattainable temperatures and pressures, igniting fusion reactions that produced 50% more energy than the laser beams had delivered.
Fusion, by contrast, relies on the universe’s smallest atom, hydrogen. Energy is released when two hydrogen nuclei combine to produce a helium nucleus and a neutron. Unlike fission, fusion produces no radioactive fragments. Fusion is much harder to induce than fission, since the hydrogen nuclei must be heated to nearly 100 million degrees Celsius to overcome the electrical repulsion that hinders their reaction. Stars run on fusion energy, but on Earth it has previously been released only in thermonuclear explosions. This stunning new result in laboratory fusion opens doors for unprecedented studies in basic and applied science.
The concept of laser fusion had been pursued without success since the 1960s and it became a central part of a 1990s program to ensure continued confidence in the nuclear-weapons stockpile without underground testing. Although scientists knew that high-powered laser beams could probe the properties of matter relevant to the early stages of detonating a nuclear weapon, the goal of laser fusion would allow for studies in the later stages. It would also challenge and demonstrate the ability to understand and predict the dynamics of hot, dense matter more generally.
Construction of the ignition facility at the Livermore lab began in 1997, and experiments attempting ignition began soon after construction was completed in 2009. The design and construction of the world’s most powerful laser was an engineering triumph, but three years of failed attempts to achieve fusion ignition brought the program close to cancellation in 2012. But the program continued with a more deliberate approach that included outside peer review.
The decade of research from 2012 to 2022 illustrated the ability of the Energy Department’s national laboratories to marshal an interdisciplinary team of scientific and engineering talent from the government, universities and private sector in long-term pursuit of an audacious goal. Researchers in lasers, nuclear and plasma physics, precision-target fabrication, instrumentation and high-fidelity computer modeling helped design and undertake a series of experiments that gradually approached ignition conditions. The payoff came last week.
As recent world events make apparent, the U.S. nuclear deterrent is effective only if there’s confidence that the weapons remain effective. Laser ignition demonstrates to the world a deep understanding of weapons science and will be important in sustaining confidence in the coming decades.
The U.S. hasn’t been alone in recognizing the importance of laser fusion. France and China are building comparable facilities. But as the new American results show, the years of learning were necessary to form a potent intellectual and innovation ecosystem at the National Ignition Facility. The U.S. now leads every other country by a decade because of its foresight, perseverance and research enterprise. Continued investment in laser fusion will ensure that this leadership endures.
These days one can’t mention fusion without thinking about energy. The ignition milestone demonstrates fusion gain, a necessary condition for practical energy production. But that is only the first step. Several decades of engineering would be required to make fusion a practical, emissions-free source of electricity. And even then, it would have to be cost-competitive with alternatives. Like the initial decision to pursue the ignition goal, this is not at all guaranteed. But it’s well worth considering.
Mr. Koonin is a professor at New York University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.” Mr. Powell is a professor at the University of California, Davis. Both are governors of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
And:
Hold the Nuclear Fusion Hype
The Editorial BoardDec.
Scientists have spent decades studying how to replicate in labs the nuclear fusion reactions that power the sun and stars. The fission reactions that power today’s nuclear plants involve splitting atoms and result in radioactive waste. Fusion entails combining atoms and theoretically could provide abundant, clean energy with no hazardous waste.
Hydrogen, fusion’s input, is the most abundant element in the universe, and no country dominates its supply, unlike some minerals used in lithium-ion batteries and wind turbines. The reactions also don’t generate CO2. But a stumbling block has long been figuring out how to generate more energy from the fusion reactions than is used to ignite them.
In the experiment that resulted in Tuesday’s breakthrough, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used 192 lasers to heat and compress hydrogen atoms at more than 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. The reaction released 3.15 megajoules of energy for every 2.05 megajoules of input—with some major caveats.
The lasers are less than 1% efficient and used about 300 megajoules. As Lawrence Livermore director Kim Budil put it: “300 megajoules at the wall [socket], two megajoules at the laser.” Generating electricity from fusion would require such reactions to be performed every second of the day, a vast increase in laser efficiency and reduction in their size.
There’s good reason to be excited about the breakthrough, but the Biden Administration is overselling its immediate impact. “This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said.
What the experiment proved is that scientists can recreate the physical reactions in stars. But scaling the technology and making it commercially viable by most scientists’ accounts will likely take another few decades.
It’s also important to distinguish between basic and applied research. Government’s proper role is to fund basic research of the sort that produced Tuesday’s breakthrough and which businesses have little incentive to do. Private companies do a far better job of taking discoveries out of the lab to the market.
A bipartisan complaint is that the U.S. spends too little on research and development, which has the country trailing China. That’s not true. U.S. businesses in 2019 spent nearly eight times more on R&D than the federal government. The U.S. as a whole spent a third more as a share of GDP on R&D than China.
China spends more subsidizing politically favored companies, but its industrial policy has reduced productivity, as a new study in theNational Bureau of Economic Researchshows. The fusion breakthrough shows that America still leads the world in innovation, and that what the government does best is basic research, not picking winners and losers.
If climate change is an 'existential threat to human existence,' as President Biden suggests, nuclear power may have to be part of the transition from fossil fuels. The Bill Gates-backed TerraPower plant in Wyoming will be a test of that proposition.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Voters REJECT Biden 2024 Campaign | |
A new poll shows that most American voters do not want Joe Biden to run for another term in the White House in 2024. | |
 | |
+++
The Credibility Crisis of America’s Institutions
By Daniel Greenfield
The nation’s credibility crisis didn’t arrive overnight. It’s been coming down since the sixties. That was a time when 4 out of 5 Americans believed that they could trust the federal government.
These days it’s more like 1 out of 5.
Congress enjoys the trust of 1 in 10 Americans. The presidency, 4 in 10. (That’s up from 1 in 3 under Obama.) Around the same number trust the Supreme Court.
It’s not just political institutions.
Trust in the media is understandably low with only 1 in 4 trusting newspapers, and less than 1 in 5 trusting television news. Only 1 in 3 trust organized religion and the medical system, even fewer trust public schools, labor unions, banks, the criminal justice system, and big business.
America’s political crisis is really a collapse of trust in institutions. And that’s one thing that Republicans and Democrats agree on. The Republican solution is to restore confidence by decentralizing institutions while the Democrat solution is to restore confidence by expanding government.
The Democrats, who had become the more institutional party, blamed the credibility crisis on FOX News, on fake news on Facebook, and on the Russians. Their proposals for protecting “democracy” from fake news by censoring social media were typical of totalitarian regimes trying to maintain control.
But FOX News was created in 1996. Facebook in 2004. While the latter date roughly coincides with the fall of trust in newspapers and television news from 1 in 3 to 1 in 4, most people didn’t trust the media even before the advent of FOX News or Facebook. Social media and conservative alternatives didn’t kill trust in media. They just piled more dirt on the coffin. There is no turning back the clock to Cronkite.
And there is no clearer way of validating conspiracy theories than by conspiring to suppress them.
Totalitarian regimes create artificial monopolies on narratives by controlling the news, but these monopolies only breed black markets in conspiracy theories. Totalitarian countries don’t inspire total faith, but total disbelief, even by government loyalists, in truth and facts. Every development is parsed for hidden agendas even when they don’t exist because no one really believes in anything anymore. Even the most implausible accusations gain traction because everything, except the official story, appears more plausible when there are no longer any norms of credibility, only extremes of outrage.
That should sound familiar.
Totalitarian governments appear externally omnipotent even while they are internally incompetent. The complete mismatch between their propaganda and their capabilities breeds an even deeper distrust.
Instead of the people believing that everything is fine even when the wheat harvests don’t come in, nuclear reactors melt down and caucuses collapse, they accept both the evidence of their own eyes that everything is a mess and the propaganda that says the authorities know what they’re doing, and combine them into conspiracy theories that assume competence and bad intentions.
It is only when people finally realize the true incompetence of the regime that revolutions take place.
When political elites insist on their institutional competence and on monopolizing narratives to protect that illusory competence, they generate the conspiracy theories that create the crises of credibility that they seek to fight by monopolizing narratives. Instead of bringing into being a belief in their greatness and goodness, the combination of their corruption, incompetence and propaganda convinces the public to constantly read between the lies and assume that their incompetence conceals deeper conspiracies.
The only way out of the cycle of propaganda and conspiracy theories is to stop the propaganda.
The credibility crisis reflects a profound disconnect between institutions and people. Propaganda is the means by which institutions try to manipulate people into following their agendas, rather than remaking their agendas to be relevant to the people they are meant to serve. As institutions grow detached from people, they talk at them, they propagandize, rather than listen to them, and challenge themselves.
That is the true source of the disconnect and the credibility crisis of the country’s institutions.
Institutions, as the Founding Fathers understood, derive their credibility from the people. Not the other way around. Tyrannies reverse this with cults of personality, collectivism, and tribalism. The American Left is trying all of these without ever having learned from history what these do to a nation’s spirit.
Every major Communist country has experimented with all three to utterly disastrous long-term effect.
America’s political system and frantic media pace make cults of personality into passing things. A decade after women were fainting at Obama speeches, he’s just another hack on the corporate lecture circuit. Americans are too selfish to make good collectivists and tribalism in a multicultural country leads to a boom in racism, racial nationalism, sanctioned discrimination, violence, and even genocide.
Stalin, despite not being Russian, could invoke Russian supremacy to justify Soviet dominance. The People’s Republic of China uses Han chauvinism to maintain its own ethnic empire. But America doesn’t have a racial majority that can be utilized that way and never will. Diversity pits minorities against the construct of a white oppressive majority through revisionist historical conspiracy theories like the 1619 Project an obvious updating of the class warfare of Das Kapital with black people as the working class.
But where Communist ethnic tribalism was a tool of social stability, diversity only disrupts and destroys. Tribalism causes people to overlook the abuses of the ruling class, but diversity’s diverse tribalisms only overlook abuses when they are directed at other groups and at the fading white majority. Its limited stability can only endure as long as a white majority does. Paradoxically, diversity requires a white majority to struggle against. Without that white majority, there is no axis of social stability to sustain it.
The American experiment is being destroyed by a radical movement that controls its leading institutions, but has never grasped the central crisis of the American Revolution which was not, as it now insists, about slavery, but about maintaining institutional credibility by building institutions around people.
That is what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had set out to do. That’s America.
The great leap from the Tea Party to the Declaration of Independence was the realization that the problem was not King George III, nor even the British monarchy, but the general principle that governments derive from the governed, and that their government violated that fundamental rule.
American government came to violate that rule as its elite institutions, first financial, then cultural, became distant from the people. The politics of big government was an expression of that distance. The growing distance between people and institutions created crises, fertile ground for radicalism, that tore apart the country, led to a series of domestic clashes, the most prominent of which was the Civil War, and paved the way for growing leftist dominance over American life in the next century and this one.
Progressive institutions began by reversing the Founders’ formula, governing without consent for their own good. Progressive figures and institutions could be brilliant and noble, they brought much that was great and beautiful into the national life, but they were the products of a chasm between the elites and the people, and when their work was done, that chasm lay between the institutions and the people.
The detachment of progressive institutions meant to reform people from the people they were reforming gave way to the takeover of those institutions by radicals and extremists who traded tribalism, class warfare, racial warfare, gender warfare, and other identity politics, for meaningful connections with other people. That’s why Identity politics didn’t restore institutional credibility. Each assertion of identity politics progress, e.g. the first black man, the first woman, had to be quickly undercut by the vision of an overwhelming oppressive majority on which diversity depended.
No matter how much institutional headway identity politics made, the institution could never become truly credible because diversity’s credibility had to be sustained by discrediting even its own institutions. The quotas and ideologies of identity politics did not make institutions meaningful to most people, including minorities, because these were a hybrid of elitist ideologies and local tribalism that appealed to few. This new activist ruling class, embodied by Obama, was a mule, a sterile hybrid of two dead ends. Its primacy in politics has radicalized the country without creating any meaningful progress.
After Obama, the credibility crisis became a runaway inferno consuming politics and culture. Culture wars haven’t created meaningful institutions. Anger is just another way of describing disconnection. The Overton window opening wider doesn’t indicate progress, as Obama insisted with his invocations of a right side of history, but anger and desperation at the failure of existing institutions and solutions.
A window that never shuts isn’t opening on Utopia, but on Armageddon. Societies don’t rage their way to stability. Radical anger at institutional failure just leads to worse institutions and worse failures. Institutions either represent the people or they represent targets for the people’s anger. Every failure to choose the former instead chooses the latter and its inevitable cycle of revolution and repression.
The Founding Fathers had found a way out of this cycle. They built a nation that escaped this prison. But we are living out this cycle now. Our political, cultural, and economic institutions are oppressive and alien entities that few Americans, of any political stripe, find credible. And our politics revolve around anti-establishment movements based on burning down these institutions, either to remove them on the Right or replace them with even more onerous institutions on the Left, because they don’t work for us.
The crisis is reaching its moment. It can’t be escaped without asking people what kind of institutions they want, instead of asking institutions what kind of people they want. Elites have been using institutions to ask themselves what kind of people they want for too long. And the inevitable answer that eventually comes to all elites is that what the people really want a world without their institutions.
After generations of reshaping society, of listening to its own experts envision the kind of people that would best serve their institutions, political, cultural, and economic, that is a hard answer to hear. But all that reshaping has alienated people, divided them, deprived them of agency, of meaning, and purpose. Vast fortunes have been spent, intentionally and unintentionally, on breaking the nation and its people.
When life has no meaning, then purpose is reclaimed with radicalism, and agency with anger.
Conservatives and leftists have two fundamentally different answers to the crisis of institutional credibility, to build bigger institutions, or allow people to be defined by the institutions they build.
The crisis of institutional credibility can only end when institutions relinquish control over people.
Slavery debilitates both slaves and enslavers, slaves lose their reason and enslavers rationalize all, both pursue cruelty and violence to seize or hold on to power, while losing the middle ground of morality. And when the dust settles, there are only broken lands, broken cultures, and broken people. That is true of Africa, the Soviet Union, or, increasingly, more and more parts of the United States of America.
There is only one solution to power. It is the solution that made King George III hail George Washington as the greatest man in the world. It is the only American solution. And that is to give up power.
George Washington did what King George III could not. He gave up power and trusted the people.
The institutions that dominate this nation have lost their credibility. They have corrupted the country and alienated its people. A great nation with purpose and meaning has been rotted by its ruling class. The institutional ruling class can cling to power at all costs, convinced, like George III, that the peasants would perish without their guidance, or they can follow George Washington and relinquish power.
In their place will rise smaller local institutions, those of the neighborhood and the community, free of the heavy hand of national regulation, through which the people of a wounded nation can rebuild.
If institutions instead go on consolidating power, then they will pass into the twilights of tyranny or anarchy. The mobs are already in the streets. Anger is already everywhere. The credibility of the institutions that control the country is lost. Fighting to protect them will destroy everything else.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment