Category Archives: The Passing Scene

Jefferson as Post-National Prophet

15 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by in American Federalism, American History, Devolution, Federalism, The Passing Scene, Uncategorized

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Jefferson-Memorial

The Jefferson Memorial (Photo: Courtesy of SamsonSimpson20)

A recent column in Vox explores the decline of dominant American identity and the ways that this identity could be rebuilt amid widespread demographic division and economic distress.

Ezra Klein, the author, contends that the vibrant, effusive American identity that prevailed throughout the 20th century was forged primarily on the basis of two world wars and the 70-year threat of Soviet communism.

I’m inclined to take a slightly different view. The modest imperial standing America acquired in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War formed a critical component of 20th century America identity too. Millions of Americans were carried on a wave of imperial euphoria, confident that the acquisition of a modest, backwater empire heralded our virtually unimpeded ascent to national greatness. And much of this was bound up in the war’s success in re-enlisting the defeated South in nation- and empire-building that followed in the aftermath of this war.

Up to that time, many people in the former Confederate states spent the Fourth of July commemorating the fall of Vicksburg rather than celebrating American Independence.

At the turn of century, some 35 years after one of the bloodiest struggles in history, the South reasoned that if it couldn’t have its own nation, it at least could participate in the building of a nation destined to ascend to the front ranks of global leadership.

This was a fortuitous turn of events for the American national enterprise: The post-Civil War South ended up supplying this nation not only with a significant share of its patriotic ballast but also a generous portion of men and women to guard the outposts of the global American empire that emerged after World War II.

Yet, we seem to be reaching an critical juncture, if not a major impasse, in defining American identity. And one wonders: How much practical value is derived from doubling down on one-nation rhetoric and insisting on more dialogue?

In the view of a growing number of heartland Americans, the only rhetoric deemed unifying by our ruling classes is that which conforms to the agenda of the left.

Moreover, another vital adhesive of American identity, centralized federalism, seems to be losing its efficacy too. Americans seem less inclined than ever to operate off the same page on issues that were once seen as vital to national security, such as regulating immigration and guarding our borders. Some on the left are even calling for the elimination of the Immigration and Customs Service (ICE).

Perhaps most disturbing of all, though, we seem to be rapidly approaching a cultural impasse that surprisingly few pundits have considered: namely, how this country will manage to soldier on when it is no longer regarded by ordinary Americans as standing at the pinnacle of the world’s most successful and exceptional nations.

So much of American unity and national identity is bound up with its perceived greatness and singularity.

A recent study ranked tiny Finland and several of the other Scandinavian countries as the world’s happiest, although the United States failed to rank in the top ten. Indeed, the results of the study point out a remarkable anomaly: Despite the United States possessing the world’s largest economy, millions of its citizens grapple with rising levels of obesity, substance abuse and high rates of depression, not unlike the problems that plagued the Soviet Union in the years leading up to its collapse.

Some on the left have expressed a desire to build a new national identity on the basis of socialism and identitarian politics, with the long-term goal of ridding the country of what they characterize as a historically evil and malignant white patrimony that has existed since the nation’s founding.

Given all these deep divisions over how to define the American enterprise in the future, perhaps we will return to some version of Thomas Jefferson’s 18th century vision of an American Empire: a continent of smaller states, either loosely tied or wholly independent of each other, sharing some degree of historical and cultural affinity.

Jefferson, it seems, may prove to a prophet of post-national American unity. At least, one can hope, amid all of this national division and rancor, that we can muster some semblance of mutual affinity and continental unity.

Whatever the case, a socialist, identitarian America should hold no appeal for any decent person, irrespective of race or ethnicity, who cherishes ordered liberty and constitutional government.

But if, God forbid, such an America emerges in the next 30 years, I suppose I’ll be one of those passing my autumn and winter years in a socialist gulag, at least, deriving a measure of solace that I will be living among what remains of sane people in America.

The Limits of Identitarianism

08 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by in American Federalism, Devolution, The Passing Scene

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Photo: Courtesy of Pax Ahimsa Gethen.

I have consumed a lot of  blog space lately discussing the horrifying totalitarian undertones of identitarian politics.  And I’m surprised by the increasing number of left-of-center news outlets that have been cornered into confronting the implications of this ideology.

One of the more prominent ones, The Guardian, recently served up a reasonably balanced exploration of this topic.

What many ordinary Americans simply do NOT get  – yet, at least – is that the expansion of identity politics virtually assures the end of the civil society that has held this uniquely American experiment in self-government together for roughly the last quarter millennium. (Read Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” for more details.)

The left has predictably hoisted itself on its own petard. It’s one thing to talk about equality under the law – to express a wish to be assimilated into the broader American matrix, which was Martin Luther King’s officially expressed view. But when exclusivist rhetoric, reflected in the demonization of other groups as a means of refining and enhancing identity, becomes the quasi-official policy of a major political party and the orthodoxy of the predominant culture – well, you can rest virtually assured that things are going to take a very ugly turn.

We are approaching a point similar to the post-WWI abandonment of the Hapsburg monarchy, the symbolic adhesive that kept sundry tribes at peace among each other within the bounds of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.  And this has brought us to a crossroads.  We either undertake a systemic reform of the American federal system to reflect the new realities in this country – namely, the deep cultural, political and ethnic divisions that threaten to sunder us apart – or we prepare ourselves for a new centralized and increasingly authoritarian order aimed a keeping these highly fissiparous tendencies in check.

Yet, as history has demonstrated time and again, the second option ultimately runs against the grain of human nature.  It will only engender more tribal animosities, which will spark calls on the left for more educational efforts, coupled with more subdued (or, as the case may be in the future, overt) forms of authoritarianism to redress these increasing divisions.

Reflecting on all of this, I recall an observation posited some 35 years ago by one of my graduate school professors, a self-described Marxisant.  As he observed, federal policymakers and jurists in the mid-1960’s operated on the premise that while they could never alter the hearts and minds of racists, they could legislate changes in overt behavior.

We seem to have moved a long way past this.  Our ruling class seems to think with with a doubling down of cultural warfare and federal policy we can still finesse this – we can still make it work.  Even in the face of rankly exclusivist ideology, we can somehow still manage to inculcate future generations of Americans, particularly whites, with new hearts and minds.

We’ve been down this road before.  We appear to be confronted with a zealotry that bears more than a passing resemblance to the one that gave rise to efforts toward building Home Sovieticus.

In the end, though, this whole project is inimical to human freedom, at least, as freedom historically has been understood within the Anglo-American context. And it runs against the very grain of human nature.  And one must remember that rank-and-file Soviet citizens came to regard efforts to build new Soviet man with profound cynicism and contempt.  Sooner or later, likely sooner, will prove to the the case here in America, too – of that I have no doubt.

 

Remembering an Academic Outlier

06 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by in American Education, American Federalism, Conservatism, Southern History, The Passing Scene, Uncategorized

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Melvin-Bradford

Melvin E. Bradford. Photo: Courtesy of the Fort Worth Independent School District.

Something got me thinking last night about  one of the nation’s late, great academic outliers and mavericks, the late M.E. Bradford, and how, if he had survived into his 80’s, would be regarded today as a pariah on most U.S. college campuses. Bradford was regarded as a “paleoconservative,” one of the leading intellectual lights of the paleocon movement.

 

He was a student of the old Southern Agrarian tradition and a vocal and intrepid defender of the Constitution and the Old Republic.  He was also a searing critic of the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and the 16th president’s efforts to consolidate the American Republic. And while in intellectual terms he was considered an outlier, Bradford was one of a number of traditionalist conservative academics who, once upon a time in America, were valued for the role they served in leavening and balancing out academic discourse. He taught at several prestigious academic institutions, including the U.S. Naval Academy, and served as president of the Philadelphia Society.

 

I cherish two of Bradford’s works – “Remembering Who We Are” and “Original Intentions: On the Making of the Constitution“ – for providing me with critical foundational bricks in my intellectual development and maturation.

 

A vocal Reagan supporter in the 80’s, Bradford was tapped to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. However, due to fierce opposition from neoconservative elements, he ultimately was passed over for William Bennett, the neocons’ candidate, but not before receiving the endorsement of U.S. Senators from every geographic region of the country as well as by a number of prominent leading conservative intellectuals, including Russell Kirk, Jeffrey Hart, William F. Buckley and Harry Jaffa.

 
Bradford’s ignominious upending by the necons played a key role in deepening the already palpable ideological divide between paleocons and neocons intellectuals within the Reagan coalition that culminated in Pat Buchanan’s insurgent presidential candidacy against George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Bradford died while undergoing heart surgery at the relatively young age of 58 in 1993.  In a sense, he is fortunate not to have lived into his eighties to reflect on the intellectual wasteland that characterizes American academia today.

 

It’s one thing to be an outlier, quite another to be a pariah, which is precisely the way Bradford would be regarded today in America’s toxic academic environment. And this is remarkable considering that scarcely a generation ago, academic mavericks and nonconformists such as Bradford were still afforded a place, even an exalted place, in many American institutions of higher learning, valued for the role they served in refining intellectual inquiry and open discourse.

Reaping a Cultural Whirlwind

05 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by in Devolution, The Passing Scene, Uncategorized

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Protester opposing “Trump/Pence Regime” in Portland. Photo: Courtesy of “Old White Truck.”

I’ve been something of a conservative cultural warrior for the last 30 years, albeit a weary and, at times, a very reluctant one.  For a long time, I essentially had thrown in the towel, happy to leave the struggle to younger warriors infused with a bit more zeal and encumbered with far less cynicism.

Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” comment galvanized me.  It reached deep into my psyche and activated some primordial something in me.  I resolved that, armed with my modest financial resources and meager rhetorical skills, I would fight to my dying breath the authoritarian social order that these reckless comments portended.

Actually, I saw where this was heading a long time ago.  A generation ago, I wrote extensively about the controversy over the Confederate flag.  As far back as the 1990’s, I and many others perceived that the left’s rage – or feigned rage – over Confederate symbolism ultimately would lead to an assault of the wider subject of American symbolism and ideals.  In the left’s view, after all, American symbols and ideas are, in moral terms, little removed from the patrimonial, slavocratic Confederacy.

Reflecting back on all of this, I’m reminded of what a prophet the late University of Georgia historian Eugene Genovese has proven to be.

Genovese predicted that in the course of the left’s sowing the wind, the entire nation would ultimately reap the whirlwind.  American society, he feared, ultimately would pay a price, perhaps an egregiously high price, for robbing white, predominantly working-class Southerners of their heritage and, in effect, rubbing their noses in the dirt.

Yes, I know,  a  legitimate argument can be made for eliminating government-sanctioned displays of the Battle Flag, which has all but been achieved within the last few years.  But there’s a difference between creating accommodating public spaces and asserting that Southerners who evince devotion to Confederate symbolism and the Lost Cause are little removed from reactionary racist pond scum.

There comes at point at which the quest for fairness degenerates into hitting below the below the belt.  The Obama administration’s twilight decision to remove displays of Confederate flags on fixed poles from National Cemeteries, even where Confederate veterans are buried and despite a previous decision by Congress not to impose this ban, was a malicious parting shot – a punch below the belt – by an administration sworn to “fundamentally transforming” America.

As Genovese predicted a generation ago, this denigration has only worked to augment the increasing sense of alienation among working-class whites.  They’ve grown weariy of being depicted as this nation’s problem demographic, especially considering that they have borne a disproportionate share of this nation’s imperial burdens, having filled enlisted ranks in every American military outpost in the world.

This sense of alienation will only intensify in the future.   The left has won the cultural war, but as Rod Dreher observes in a recent column, conservatism wields enormous political power and its adherents are still capable of marshaling a helluva lot of obstinance.

And there are lots of mad, obstinate people out there. Dreher cites the growing numbers of white Americans increasingly drawn to white nationalist rhetoric. He quotes extensively from a self-described well educated white intellectual who confesses to being both repelled and attracted to white nationalist rhetoric.

I’m a white guy. I’m a well-educated intellectual who enjoys small arthouse movies, coffehouses and classic blues. If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably mistake me for a lefty urban hipster.

And yet. I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it. It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault.

 

For me, the CNN town meeting about gun violence – all the shouts of “Murderer!” and “Burn her!” – really put all of this into deep perspective.   I suspect it did for a lot of Americans.  I think it underscored to millions of us that a kind of Rubicon has been crossed and that the divisions in this country are only going to grow worse.

Frankly, I am surprised that the soft secessionist sentiment is largely confined to California and isn’t yet being expressed widely in red states. I think this a reflection of two factors: first, the conviction among blue-state “progressives” that they are now the dominant cultural force in America and that such talk is acceptable, so long it’s aimed at affirming and reinforcing progressive dogma; and, second, a stubborn perception among conservatives in red states that all eventually will be worked out – that America remains a singular nation and that we all will finally return to our senses.

In time, though, I think that many red state Americans will conclude that things in this country will become even more untethered – unstuffed, as the case may be – and that some form of devolution, perhaps even some desperate attempt at secession, ultimately may point the way out of this impasse.

And recall that Dreher, the creator of the Benedict Option, is a separatist of sorts.

A generation ago, I wrote extensively about how the South represented the most fertile soil from which a counterrevolution could be mounted. While my this conviction has wavered a bit in recent years, I still suspect that sooner or later, as these national divisions intensify, that the counterrevolutionary struggle will coalesce in the South.

Whatever the case, I think that conservatives should forget about cultural warfare.  Dreher is right to stress that the cultural war has ended with a resounding victory by the left. Our energies at this point should be invested in a devolutionary movement – or movements – not in fighting a rearguard cultural war, which has been irretrievably losts, at least, for the foreseeable future.

Many American Republics Instead of One?

25 Saturday Nov 2017

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Thomas Jefferson

The American Thinker recently painted a disturbing picture of the American future.  We are embroiled in a Civil War – for now, a cold one, though one that bears many hallmarks of one that eventually could run hot.

And from my perspective as a conservative, the left seems implacably opposed to compromise.  And why shouldn’t it be?  They control most of the institutions that define cultural hegemony:  the mainstream media, the arts, popular entertainment and higher education, not to mention, elements of the so-called Deep State.   As I have argued in this forum many times, a Democratic victory last year would have sealed its victory.

The rancorous divisions in this country have prompted some thoughts about an observation Jefferson offered throughout the post-revolutionary period of American history. He presumed that this continent was too big to encompass one American nation. He expected that settlers, as they spanned across broad American continent, would establish several republics, though all of them would share mutual affinities.

That was not to be.  As it turned out, our forebears essentially hewed a kind of middle way between the ideals of Jefferson and his arch ideological rival, Alexander Hamilton. We have tended to place great emphasis on the Jeffersonian fixation with individual liberties, while tacking more closely to the Hamiltonian ideal of a centralized federal union.

And I wonder: Could the case be made that this push toward centralization has simply prolonged the inevitable? Isn’t it natural for a country this big to develop distinct regional identities, even fissiparous ones? Would we be getting along better on this sprawling continent if we had been allowed to develop several polities, albeit with strong shared mutual affinities?

The Great Ethnicity Manufacturing Machine

23 Thursday Nov 2017

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This article could be just as aptly titled “How the Ford Foundation Created an Ethnic Group out of Thin Air.”

And while I am at it, what the hell is “white” – really? Do, say, Italians and Armenians, even though they are Caucasian, share the same American experience and legacy as a WASP family from the historic Beacon Hill section of Boston? 

I even take umbrage with the term WASP. There is arguably not much WASPish about the lumbers (desperately poor whites) who settled much of the American Back Country. 

I think that we all could make a fresh start by resolving that our ruling class will no longer supply classifications to the rest of us.  And, incidentally, this increasingly tangled ethnic American web – this ruling class strategy to pit one group against another – is another legacy of Wilsonian federalism.

Zero-Sum Federalism

03 Friday Nov 2017

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state-flagsOur federal bonds are fraying.

We Americans increasingly are conditioned to view federalism and, along with it, national unity, in zero-sum terms. And why shouldn’t we?  The century-old cookie-cutter-style federalism imposed on this country via Wilsonian progressivism has been stretched far beyond the limits of its design function. It’s grown increasingly threadbare.  It’s no longer equipped to accommodate the world’s largest and most diverse economy, much less a culture that is growing increasingly diverse and divided.

The latest evidence attesting to this fact:  The uproar among several blue states – California, New York, Connecticut and Oregon, to name a few – over the House Republican tax cut plan.

The House bill would eliminate the most widely-used deduction – income tax – and would cap property tax deductions, the second most-used, at $10,000.  Here’s the rub:  Many high tax blue states rely heavily on these state and local deductions.  Consequently, many middle-class families in these states will end up paying more under the plan.

This is a lesson in history repeating itself – and possibly with dire consequences.  This growing dissension among states over tax policy bears remarkable parallels to the vexatious debates over tariff policy in the years leading up to the Civil War.  This dissension contributed mightily to the already toxic relations between the manufacturing Northeastern states, which favored high, protective tariffs, and the agrarian, slave-holding, export-oriented Southern states, which insisted on low tariffs levied only to raise essential federal revenue.

And, honestly, why should blue states be expected to foot tax relief for the rest of the country?

Some here in the red hinterland would argue that states that operate expansive and expensive safety nets have backed themselves into tight fiscal corners and no grounds for complaint.  But isn’t this their prerogative as sovereign states within a federal union?

This brings me to a social media exchange I had with some friends this morning regarding the future of the country and strategies for restoring some semblance of a social policy, one that accommodates all regions and classes throughout country.

I related to them that for the past generation or so, I’ve striven to become an amateur scholar of post-war politics and economics of post-war West Germany.   As a Tory conservative, I believe that there is much that Americans in the highly secularized, post-Christian 21st century can learn from this morally ravaged society.

I especially admire the old West German Christian Democratic party, which strove to restore a measure sanity to a morally and ethically gutted out post-Nazi society. Moreover, I admire deeply the social market economy that emerged after the war. As this term, social market, implies, it was an attempt by the Christian Democratic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his fledgling party not only to stave off socialism but also to build a vibrant post-war free-market economy, albeit one that would provide a reasonably generous safety net and collective bargaining for the working class.

Frankly I would like to replicate some version of the social market to American conditions, but the more I reflect on this, the more it occurs to me that this country is simply to big and diverse – not to mention, badly divided – to implement any such system over a vast scale. What worked – and, to a degree, still works – in a relatively organic society like Germany, simply isn’t tenable in this United States. I could marshal a number of historical arguments for his, but in the interests of brevity, I wont.

Suffice it to say that part of the challenge stems zero-sum views on federalism into which so many of us have fallen.  Blue-state Americans seem to regard any concession to red-state America as tantamount to moral and political betrayal and vice versa.


Under the circumstances, we seem to have drifted far past the point where any kind of humane social order can be established in a nation as large and diverse as the present-day United States.  Indeed, the more I think about all of this, the more inclined I am to adhere to the vision a new constitutional order outlined by the late American diplomat and statesman George F. Kennan.   Maybe the only viable option for American federalism is to heed his call to devolve power to 10 to 12 smaller entities – constituent republics in which citizens share strong historical and cultural affinities.

We could still share a common market and a common defense, but responsibilities for implementing social policies such as healthcare, social security, etc., would be left more or less exclusively to these constituent republics.

Yes, this amounts to a systemic, radical change, but is there really any other choice?  Aren’t many states evolving what amounts to different social and economic systems?  California, which possesses the fifth largest economy in the world, has evolved social policies and even a legal system that diverges significantly from much of the rest of the country.

 Under the circumstances, should we really be surprised that an increasing number of states are coming to regard federalism as a zero-sum game?

A Fishing Expedition, a Fire Bell in the Night

02 Thursday Nov 2017

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Conservative commentators are already characterizing the Mueller indictments as a nothing burger in terms of how this investigation ultimately will pan out for Trump.

Investigators will turn up no significant evidence of collusion, many contend, and much of what’s discovered ultimately will portend serious consequences for the Clintons, whose allies, the Podestas, seem to be deeply invested in their own version of Russian collusion.

But as millions of deplorables see it, this investigation has amounted to a fishing expedition from the very beginning. And that is precisely why I’ve always regarded it with considerable amount of apprehension from the start.  Mueller is likely only getting started, and in time, he may end up nailing Trump on something entirely unrelated to Russia collusion: his business dealings.

Frankly, I’ve never doubted for a moment that Trump is a shady business dealer. I imagine that most New York real estate moguls are.  Likewise, I presume that most of his supporters have drawn the same conclusion. But when have rank-and-file Trumpistas ever been interested in his moral or ethical probity, at least, insofar as his past business dealings are concerned?

As I see it, most deplorables understand that we live in singular, if not desperate, times.  Many have come to draw a distinction between people who get rich from rather specious market deals (i.e., the Trumps) and those who apparently cash in on government service (i.e., the Clintons). For millions Trump supporters,  it simply boiled down to finding a mean, tough avaricious SOB to go mano a mano against all the mean tough, avaricious SOBs who run the swamp in Washington.

To paraphrase an old saying, Trump’s an SOB, but he’s our SOB.

So, what happens if the Mueller investigation turns up little, if any, Russian collusion and nails Trump instead on shady business dealings? I am reminded of Jefferson’s fire bell in the night.  This could turn out to be 21st century America’s version of the ill-fated Missouri compromise of 1820, the implications of which sparked Jefferson’s troubling late-night epiphany. Like the Missouri Compromise, a Mueller indictment of Trump on unanticipated grounds could have long-term consequences for American unity.  It could set off a train of events that ultimately could lead this country into a deep, dark abyss, much as the Missouri Compromise ultimately did.

Tens of millions of rank-and-file Trump supporters are going to perceive the Mueller investigation simply as what it arguably is: a fishing expedition undertaken by the ruling class to depose Trump – and the election results – so that it can get back to the old business of spreading more lilies and alligators throughout the Swamp.

What will follow?   Right-wing retrenchment?  Perpetual government gridlock?  A wrenching and protracted upheaval of American political structure?  Widespread social unrest?

We can be virtually certain of one thing: tens of Americans, certainly in the sprawling red hinterland, will likely emerge from all of this angrier and more cynical than ever.

A Different View of Patriotism

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

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Gen. John Kelly

Gen. John Kelly has predictably ignited a media firestorm for summoning the temerity to state that Gen. Robert E. Lee was behaving like most Americans of his time by choosing state over national allegiance.

“I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” Kelly said in an interview with Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

Sorry if I offend some of you, but I proudly and zealously place state and region over country. I happen to believe that the federal government is a constitutional republic conceived with sharply delineated powers and commissioned by the people of initially 11 (later 13) republics to operate as their common agent.

Modern Americans may even find it astonishing to learn early 19th century students at West Point, including the future Gen. Lee,  studied a constitutional textbook written by  attorney and legal scholar William Rawle and titled “A Constitutional View of the United States” that acknowledge the right of secession.

Of course, many of the nation’s premiere historians are weighing in on these intemperate statements, wondering how a man of Kelly’s immense accomplishments and responsibilities could harbor such antiquarian views.

“This is profound ignorance, that’s what one has to say first, at least of pretty basic things about the American historical narrative,” said David Blight, a Yale history professor. “I mean, it’s one thing to hear it from Trump, who, let’s be honest, just really doesn’t know any history and has demonstrated it over and over and over. But General Kelly has a long history in the American military.”

As for the views of these historians, I call on all of you to consider how all facets of American education, for better or worse, have been transformed within the last 60-plus years, largely as a result of the infusion of federal money and the expansion of federal patronage that has followed.

This has been accompanied by what I have come to call a miasmic orthodoxy that has settled on all levels of American education. Under the circumstances, can you see how pluralistic thinking among scholars, especially within the humanities, has been undermined?

 

Reinventing Oxbridge and the Ivy League

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

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The Merton College Mob Quad at Oxford.  Photo: Courtesy of DWR. 

I may be a deplorable, but I don’t deplore the immense strides that the West, particularly the United States and Britain, have made in higher education within the last couple of centuries.

Oxbridge detractors are calling on Britain’s two elite institutions – Oxford and Cambridge – to scrap undergraduate education altogether and to function exclusively as graduate institutions. This, they contend, would eliminate much of the rank and privilege that are bound up in these ancient institutions and that have allowed its graduates to vault to the very highest reaches of polite society.

I personally perceive this as egalitarian sentiment run amok.

As much a I detest the present-day American ruling class, our civilization has derived immense material advantages from elite educational systems, such as Oxbridge and the Ivy League, that have afforded the most intellectually gifted among us not only an exposure to some of the greatest thinkers of our present day but also a critical means of networking. To put it another way, great benefits have been derived from concentrating our cognitive elites in relatively confined locations. And if undergraduate education were scrapped at Oxbridge and, ultimately, at the Ivy League, we would accomplish nothing aside from dispersing this talent across a wider scale and depriving them of these unusually condensed learning and networking opportunities.

Even so, it’s worth pointing out that many of the this country’s Nobel laureates in Medicine and Chemistry no longer come from the Ivy League. An increasing number come from public Research I universities and, in a few cases, from solid liberal arts colleges – a remarkable fact that author Malcolm Gladwell raises in his book Outliers.The Story of Success. These institutions include Antioch College, DePauw University, Holy Cross College, Hunter College and the University of Illinois.

While I am no academic – only a mere laymen who finds these sorts of discussions fascinating – my hunch is that many Research I universities and quite few of our well-regarded liberal arts colleges ultimately will ascend to levels comparable to the Ivy League.

Indeed, I think that one already can make the case that the honors programs at many Research I universities already are producing students with knowledge and expertise equal to or, perhaps in some cases, even surpassing those of their Ivy League counterparts. And in time, perhaps, these institutions will evolve the dense networking attributes that still tend to distinguish the Ivy League from other institutions.

While many institutions in this country and the West arguably are going to hell in the proverbial hand basket, America and Britain, in particular, have developed one of the most remarkably effective – not to mention, adaptive – institutions the world has ever known: higher education.

Instead of dismantling the best of the best of these higher educational institutions, I would like to see governments and other major sources of funding and endowments working to ensure that the advantages of elite education are extended to more remote parts of the United States.