Comments

Changing the rules of the American political game — 76 Comments

1. “…they have figured out that the best way to do this is to change the rules.”

   Well, yes; but an even better way—and with a proven track record!—is (simply) to manufacture the necessary votes—either before or after the actual election—as required.

   (I mean if non-citizens can vote—according to the wise ones in the Democratic Party—then why can’t dead people?)

   Hillary (and the gang that couldn’t vote straight) didn’t have to be as sedulous as she could have been regarding this particular matter simply because she was a shoo-in….

   (You can bet they’re not going to let that happen again.)

2. The most serious threat is “vote harvesting” which flipped all the GOP Congressional seats in Orange County CA to Democrat. All the GOP candidates were ahead the day after the election, then the “late” votes started to come in.\

   The same thing happened in Arizona where the Democrat County Recorder opened “emergency voter polling before the legal election.

   Fontes, a Democrat, noted that it’s not unusual for county recorders to reach out to voters whose signatures come under scrutiny. The Pima County Recorder’s Office believes state law authorizes them to conduct such checks through the Monday after the election.

   “I’m concerned that some folks just don’t want Maricopa County voters to vote, and they don’t want us to help voters get their voices heard. That’s what bothers me,” Fontes said.

   The old “Voter Suppresion ” story,

   The Legislature banned the practice in 2016, and the left keeps trying to over turn the ban on appeals, appeals they have lost,

3. It’s depressing that so many Republicans don’t understand the brilliance behind the electoral college mechanism in voting for a chief executive. The Founders at no time believed in the wisdom of direct democracy. The electoral college was and remains an excellent hedge. We all should read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights once a year, lest we forget what a miracle we inherit.

4. A hot civil war looks more and more likely except for one thing; the left has provided the right with plenty of ammo for the 2020 campaigns. The hitch is will they use it relentlessly and ruthlessly? Murdering babies, ruinous taxes, open borders, allowing non citizens to vote, banning fossil fuels, gun confiscation, and the beat goes on. None of that plays well in Des Moines.

5. The electoral college is another of the compromises in the Constitution.

   It is analogous to the Connecticut Compromise.

   I see no prospect of an amendment to repeal it.

6. Because they apparently think that the “tipping point” has been reached, that the “audience” hearing their message has been manipulated and shaped enough–a couple of generations of young people sufficiently and deliberately mis-educated, blinkered, and propagandized, the majority of the sources of knowledge, information, news, communication, and entertainment occupied by the Left, and under their control, enough leftists elected to Congress, working in the Federal government, as Judges, and at the state, county, and local level, voter rolls sufficiently stuffed with fraudulent voters in enough key precincts, counties, and states and–thanks to Soros and his money and organization–enough Secretaries of State (who enforce and interpret election laws, and who rule on election controversies) elected in enough states–the Democrats have discarded their masks, and they’re now openly advocating for outright Socialism i.e. Communism under very thin disguise.

   Advocating, as well, changing our entire way of electing people to office, so as to give the Left/Democrats a decisive and permanent advantage, and to make conservatives and conservative states and voters into a powerless and permanent minority.

   Funny how everyone talks about how we “need to come together” in this country, and about how the “divide” in this country keeps getting worse.

   Yet, everything that the Democrats say and do, their every policy proposal today, has the effect of repelling, enraging and, now these proposals have gotten so radical–of making conservatives actually fear for their freedom, and for the fate of this country–thus making this divide wider and wider, and deeper and deeper– and fighting back against the Left, and defeating it, even more absolutely imperative.

   It is looking more and more like an even more critical, must win, do or die, Flight 93 election is coming up in 2020.

7. The left has gone off the deep end. Downright hydrophobic.

8. Neo, that is the most entertaining piece of writing I’ve seen in many moons. Thanks for making my day positively sparkle!

   (Good polemic, too. Though I suppose only the choir and those in the front couple of pews will get it, we can hope that the latter will be moved to join the choir. At least on voting day.)

   As to the serious matter, I don’t know what more is to be said. I’ll just add that I too hope that the Electoral College remains in existence, and that we don’t end up with “direct” or “participatory” democracy, with the nationwide popular vote the overriding electoral method — whether de jure or de facto.

   .

   If secession of the states were possible — which I doubt, not without a shooting Civil War whose outcome would be far from certain anyway — do people hereabouts think secession would be a good or a bad thing?

   Personally, at the very least I think it would be heart-wrenching. But then so is watching America go down the tubes.

   And leaving aside a sense of our country as Home, the conditions of anti-individualism, of ever more legal obstructions to letting people live their own lives and say and do as they see fit (while not infringing the rights of others to do likewise), are what will make our country a place no longer so livable and loveable.

9. I think packing the Supreme Court is a splendid idea. Mitch McConnell should introduce a bill tomorrow increasing the number of seats (I think it should follow Eric Holder’s plan, which called for 11, but it might have been more). How many Democrats do you think would vote for it?

10. I *guarantee* you that if the Electoral College favored Democrats instead of Republicans, then the Democrats would be shouting from the rooftops all the arguments currently being forwarded by Republicans.

    (And the Republicans would be using the arguments Democrats now use, in favor of abolishing the Electoral College? — naaahh, Republicans rarely advance abstract political arguments that tend to favor Republicans. They tend to just let things happen.)

11. Yep, I want to vote like a Democrat – early and often. But I will vote for Donald Trump for a second term. After Trump, the deluge.

12. Julie near Chicago on March 21, 2019 at 5:38 pm said: “If secession of the states were possible . . . do people hereabouts think secession would be a good or a bad thing?”

    I’ll answer that question just for *me*. Secession of California has been an ongoing back-burner topic for a while here. I moved to California seven years ago [for the climate and for my wife], and as far as I’m concerned, I favor secession of California from USA, for the simple reason that I am a patriotic American, and removing California from USA

    – greatly enhances the overall *sanity* of USA, and
    – leaves us patriotic Americans with 55 less Electoral votes of left-leaners to overcome.

13. If secession of the states were possible — which I doubt, not without a shooting Civil War whose outcome would be far from certain anyway — do people hereabouts think secession would be a good or a bad thing?

    You might read some of Kurt Schlicter’s novels beginning with “People’s Republic,” which was written in 2016 before the election and assumed a Hillary win.

    Schlicter lives in west LA and has all the cliches and terminology correct.

14. parker correctly summarizes; “the left has provided the right with plenty of ammo for the 2020 campaigns. Murdering babies, ruinous taxes, open borders, allowing non citizens to vote, banning fossil fuels, gun confiscation… The hitch is will they use it relentlessly and ruthlessly?”

    Bingo.

15. Passing bills to disenfranchise your own voters. Wow.

    The Compact will be dissolved the week, nay…the day, after after it benefits a Republican.

16. M J R, thanks. I hadn’t thought about the potential positive effects for the sensible people who live in California. I wish we could ship Chicago and a few other parts of my home state over there to secede with Cal., but I suppose it would hardly be fair on the people like you. :>(

    Mike, I’ve seen a lot of recommendations for the Schlicter books. With your added confirmation, I will now go see what’s what on eBay. Thanks. :>)

    .

    parker and Geoffrey: Bingo indeed. I want to shake them all till their teeth rattle.

    .

    Does anybody know if there are any living fragments of the Tea Party movement? I should think that it could be highly valuable at this particular point. Both in teaching the history of America and of our positive achievements, and in arousing or re-invigorating enthusiasm for the ideals of liberty and for the country.

17. The NPVIC is unconstitutional. A state can’t disenfrancise its voters and circumvent the constitution by a state compact.

    The Dems are just lawless.

18. Yancey Ward has it. What we need to do is encourage every Republican/conservative/sensible person to vote for Trump in 2020, even in places where Trump will win in a landslide. When he wins the popular vote and the NPVIC states have to give him their electoral votes, that will be the end of that.

    Cornhead, I agree that states ought not to disenfranchise their own voters. But what case could be brought in court, and by whom?

19. I don’t see how the compact can even begin to be Constitutional. Article 1, section 10, says

    “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.”

    The Wikipedia article on section 10 mentions the NPVIC and says this clause is “at the center of the debate”. I would think so.

20. What happened to the car load of people here that kept telling me voter fraud didn’t exist for Democrats in 2015, 2014? They just disappear all of a sudden?

21. If secession of the states were possible — which I doubt, not without a shooting Civil War whose outcome would be far from certain anyway — do people hereabouts think secession would be a good or a bad thing?

    What happens before secession is nullification. When New York Nullified federal slave acts about fugitives and what not, that was the cause for many Southern state secession declarations.

22. Kate:

    I don’t think the pact kicks in until a certain threshold number of states is reached, and it hasn’t been reached yet.

23. Yancey and Cornhead capture my thoughts.
    “Passing bills to disenfranchise your own voters.”
    “The Dems are just lawless.”

    “It would be kind of funny if the mainly Democratic states which have enacted this law find that, in some election or other, their electoral votes end up being cast for a Republican even though the state has voted for the Democrat. — Neo

    If the NPVIC were allowed to stand, and the first part of Neo’s hypothetical happened, what do you think would happen? I think those NPVIC electors would simply vote for the Democrat. There would be some excuse.

    Well, it wasn’t a landslide nationally for the Republican was it? So now we choose to adhere to our beloved Constitution and vote Democrat. Or, we care about our state’s voters. The key concept here is lawlessness.

    Opportunist Dems want you to believe that they are improving the rules, but the reality is that they will manipulate them willy-nilly to achieve the result they want.

24. “The Democrats have long been intent on trying to make sure that Republicans never win another election.”

    This was a small topic in the book “America’s First Great Depression.” America’s first Dem president, Andrew Jackson, set the table for the depression, and the second Dem president, Van Buren, messed things up so badly that people were ready for a change.

    The Dems thought that they owned the Executive through their populism. But Whig Harrison played the populism game well enough that he won and unfortunately died after a couple months in office. Fortunately his Whig VP Tyler was competent and was able to clean the economy up.

25. TommyJay on March 21, 2019 at 10:35 pm at 10:35 pm said:
    …
    Opportunist Dems want you to believe that they are improving the rules, but the reality is that they will manipulate them willy-nilly to achieve the result they want.
    * * *
    I am reminded by your example of so many Congressional rules, sometimes even statutes, that are introduced to great fanfare in order to trumpet the wonderfulness of our legislators, and are either ignored or repealed (or eviscerated) after the limelight is turned away.
    Pay-as-you-go, for one; mandating that Congress & staff be subject to Obamacare is another.
    And they routinely exempt themselves from the laws they impose on the rest of the country, dating back to as far as I remember (one specific example from college may make it into a comment someday).

26. By the bye, on the consideration of “would it even work the way they want it to” – I am reminded of a cartoon that often comes up in re potential direct conflict with the Muslim population of America, but in this case will substitute the punchline,
    “We ain’t never played Cowboys and Congress before.”

27. I was just recently trying to debate a young person on FB who claimed to have some kind of Masters degree but who could not string together a coherent argument. On the topic of AGW, she resorted to insults like “old people arguments”, but told me I need to go to “go study my butt off”. I shudder thinking how much of the Democrat’s younger base may be like that. Of course they want the 16 year olds to vote. It seems some of the recent college grads are less educated than mere high school graduates of another decade.

28. Actually (to beat a dead horse), I’m not even sure that Hillary truly (as in “honestly”) won the popular vote.

    Simply because when Jill Stein decided that a recount was absolutely necessary to find out “da trut”—and discovered all that voter fraud in the great city of Detroit—she shut down her crusade pretty quickly (besides, she needed the money donated to her “sacred cause” for, um, other purposes).

    So let’s see: fake votes in Detroit. How many DEMOCRAT strongholds (urban and otherwise) are out there that have yet to—-and will never, ever be—verified?…..

    Ah, Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders, gotta love ’em….. (and be grateful!)

29. Technically, I think secession could be possible through an Article V Convention of the States. Even if Trump is reelected, the day will come when the Dems get the presidency. I don’t see them moderating – do you? Wait till they try telling Texas, Louisiana, North Dakota, etc., they can’t drill for oil. That’ll get the secession fires lit.
    Emotionally, I’m already there – and I enjoy speculating on ways and means of keeping the government of America 2.0 in check. Term limits? Definitely term limits! And no more than one elected or appointed official or media member per immediate family. Enough of these inter married, inter bred elites. A ceiling on total taxes? Just imagine the savings to the individual – and the fun of watching the various government entities scrabbling for their share. And with all the unnecessary Federal expenditures ended – we could probably close out Social Security with the savings!

30. I truly think that most people do not understand the Electoral College. I didn’t until I started studying it nine years ago and I’m 59. I do believe that the College needs to be reformed, but not in the way most people think. I believe that the way votes are apportioned is flawed. There are as many votes as there are members of Congress (both Houses). So why not apportion the College votes in sync with how each Congressional District votes? Would this not be more representative for people across the country? It should ideally make both parties work harder, instead of just dumping money in a few markets.

31. The Dems in New Jersey have already shown the way to fix the National Popular Vote. Just keep the Republican candidate off the ballot.

32. As much as I detest the Democrats for trying to get around the Constitution through either questionable means or means that avoid literal contradiction, and quite openly being in opposition to that, outrage against it from some people who outright demand we ignore the plain text, historical usage, and intent, of the Constitution and subsequent amendments (e.g. petitioning for a convention being interpreted as as a mandated proposal or declaring that the jurisdiction of the United States within the incorporated territory of the same automatically can’t apply to anyone who doesn’t have “natural born citizen” status according to some Swiss cerebral-onanist) does make my eyes roll back juuust a bit.

    As for all reluctant voters who voted against Hillary now being die-hard MAGA fans… The 2018 elections demonstrate otherwise. Oh, not just in Orange County (where there were plenty of shenanigans), but in most other white collar suburban districts in a plethora of states, not only in that election, but in all the special, general, and primary elections between Nov. 2016 and Nov. 2018. This trend was pointed out and then ignored and belittled by doubling down on insulting those voters as “country club cucks”, amongst other less directly offensive names.

    Worst yet, are those die-hard activists who have taken over state and regional parties who believe that simply by celebrating Trump and MAGA enough, that victory will be certain (save for conspiracy theories involving Bill Kristol being an evil wizard) if they just push the most insular MAGA rhetoric, while completely ignoring all the other moderate and marginal voters that they need to win.

    That all being said, the Democrats seem hell bent on doubling-down on all the insanity that would cause those very same moderates and marginal voters to vote against them as they voted against Hillary in 2016.

33. @The Political Hat, many of the seats the GOP lost in 2018 were on a long-term slide away from the GOP: these were seats that used to be the backbone of the party, prosperous, highly-educated (or at least credentialed) suburbanites.

    And of course, there were demographics at work as well: the Orange County losses are in part the product of the changing face of the area–more Hispanics, fewer lower-middle class whites. Heck, I’m old enough to remember when “B-1 Bob” Dornan lost his seat to Loretta Sanchez, a Hispanic woman!

    But these folks also had a specific issue that may have pushed them over the edge: they were disproportionately affected by the capping of the deductibility of state and local taxes and of mortgage interest, both from the 2017 tax bill.

    Incidentally this gives the lie to the usual criticism that tax cuts are only for “the rich.” The 2017 tax act may be the first such bill since at least 1986 where “the rich” took a serious hit as a result of cleaning up the system and the near-elimination of those two deductions.

34. I don’t see the electoral college disappearing thru amendment, at least not at first. I do see more Dem states signing up to the NPCIV.
    They were smart enough to NOT suggest doing something they can already do — split the electoral votes of their state according to votes of the state. If CA votes 60-40, split CAs 55 into 33-22. Of course, doing this in Dem states first, while Rep states continue with “winner take all”, means the Dems never win, so it’s understandable why they don’t want to do it.

    The vote harvesting new technique is frightening — and the Dems will be hugely using it in the next election, and until it is better controlled. The BS about “voter suppression” is enough of fig leaf that many non-political folk will accept it at “Dem Media value”.

    The takeover by anti-American Dems of the elite institutions, especially the academia first, is so important, so sad, so difficult to change back. Reps also need to focus on vouchers and getting more Reps as teachers & professors.

35. Given what their ACTUAL goal is, what argument would work?
    what other choice would they have?

36. The aphorism was there for all to see and to understand.

    Said Alexander Pope’s “Epistles to Several Persons” in 1732:

    ‘’Tis education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.”

    It was so simple really, capture and subvert the Educational Establishment, and then the change it was creating in what people knew, in what they thought was key and important, and how and what they thought would ripple out, gradually permeating every aspect of our thought, debate, decisions, and society and–over a couple of generations–gradually change pretty much every aspect of our society, and influence a growing percentage of our citizens.

    And that is what has happened.

    Absent some apocalyptic change, such radical subversion and it’s consequent result–which started with John Dewey around 1900–cannot be reversed in just a few years, and probably not in few enough years to have any practical effect for those of us living today.

    Even if some people were both willing and able to fight that battle, this intellectual equivalent of urban warfare to take the Academy back–of house to house fighting–is going to take a very long time.

37. The White House issued an E.O. yesterday that takes a shot at the educational establishment.

    Perhaps it’s a shot of the pop-gun variety. Hopefully it’s more of a cannonball.

38. Heck, I’m old enough to remember when “B-1 Bob” Dornan lost his seat to Loretta Sanchez, a Hispanic woman!
    

    Dornan spent most of his time running for president and “Sanchez” is not her married name. She actually lived in Palos Verdes at the time.

    She ran against Harris for the Senate and learned that black trumps Hispanic. Ironically, the leftist whites were the ones that elected Harris.

39. It’s depressing that so many Republicans don’t understand the brilliance behind the electoral college mechanism in voting for a chief executive. The Founders at no time believed in the wisdom of direct democracy. The electoral college was and remains an excellent hedge. We all should read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights once a year, lest we forget what a miracle we inherit.

    There’s nothing brilliant about it. It was a compromise between competing plans. It’s a convention and that’s all.

    The utility of making use of electoral votes right now is that it contains pathologies within state borders. You could abolish the office of elector and just make use of electoral votes as a tabulation convention and you’d still be able to contain pathologies. Without these conventions, we’d have to have a national system of elections administration. In the realm of elections administration. It would without a doubt be a shambles (and biased in favor of the Democrats).

40. Fortunately his Whig VP Tyler was competent and was able to clean the economy up.

    ? I don’t think Tyler was admired by his contemporaries or is admired by any period specialists either. And references to national economic policy in reference to events taking place in 1843 are anachronistic.

41. Speaking of the Electoral College, David Harsanyi does:

    “Democrats Want To Kill The Electoral College Because They Fear The Constitution”

    https://thefederalist.com/2019/03/20/democrats-campaign-electoral-college-just-latest-attack-constitution/

42. How do the reparations crowd intend to account for the fact that blacks as well as Native Americans owned slaves?

43. The Dems have made many blunders that may be helpful to Trump leading to 2020. The latest and biggest IMHO is the decision by many top Dem prez candidates not to attend AIPAC. This comes on the heels on Omars antisemitism and the cowardly resolution which should have condemned it and her. Trump has labelled the party anti-semitic and anti-Israel and he should hammer this point long and hard.

44. It was so simple really, capture and subvert the Educational Establishment, and then the change it was creating in what people knew, in what they thought was key and important, and how and what they thought would ripple out, gradually permeating every aspect of our thought, debate, decisions, and society and–over a couple of generations–gradually change pretty much every aspect of our society, and influence a growing percentage of our citizens.

    Snow on Pine: I was a kid in the 50s and 60s. I remember education, public and Catholic, being full-court press indoctrination into American patriotism and to some extent Christianity. (Obviously the latter more so with parochial school. Though I remember saying the Lord’s Prayer in public school in the early 60s.)

    Yet it didn’t take. Most of the kids I knew plus myself threw patriotism and Christianity off by the time we were 20. Maybe Elvis, the Beatles and Jack Kerouac were to blame.

    The new kids surprise me. Based on my experiences I would have thought they would have rebelled against all the SJW goodthink pushed on them in school. Clearly my model needs tweaking.

45. ‘What was she like, your wife?’ said Julia.

    ‘She was—do you know the Newspeak word GOODTHINKFUL? Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought?’

    ‘No, I didn’t know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough.’

    ***

    Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure,
    struck [Julia] as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. [Winston] wondered vaguely how many others like [Julia] there might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

    –George Orwell, “1984”

46. Art Deco:

    You write:

    There’s nothing brilliant about it. It was a compromise between competing plans. It’s a convention and that’s all.

    Compromises are not necessarily “conventions and that’s all.” The second does not follow inevitably from the first. Most compromises “between competing plans” contain elements of each plan, and these different plans have principles/visions/philosophies behind them. What’s more, compromises are not ordinarily just one from Column A and one from Column B, a pastiche of unrelated elements with no guiding principle behind that pastiche.

    In the case of the Electoral College, the compromise was between (among other things) the populist democrats (small d) and the federalist republicans (small r). It preserves the importance of states as entities, while giving states different weights, mostly according to population. That’s a summary, of course, and there are a lot of other elements today that differ from what the Founders were contending with—such as, for instance, back then there was the need of the North to make sure the South’s disproportionate number of slaves didn’t give the South more power, and also voting was strictly limited to white male property-owners. Federalism was also preserved more than it is today by the fact that the senators weren’t chosen by popular vote.

    Anyway, the Electoral College compromise was hardly meaningless, and abolishing it would mean that one side—the populist, democracy vs. republic side—has won.

47. Huxley–

    As I may have commented here in the past, I was very struck by what my graduate school professor of Chinese History said, when he pointed out that, according to the Chinese Communist Party, every aspect of education was a political act.

    In the sense that, in teaching you had only a limited amount of time to cover a subject and, thus, had to make a series of what should be conscious decisions, starting with the world-view you wanted to present to your students.

    Then, given that decision made, about what and how to teach, what to include and what not to, what to emphasize and what to de-emphasize, or even ignore, and this shaped your approach, the world you described, what you taught.

    What you taught, in turn, influenced and even shaped your students, and eventually that had political consequences—what your students knew, how your students thought, the tools they had to evaluate things, the standards they had to measure things by and against, what subjects they thought about and, in some cases–as it is in far too much of today’s education, what was forbidden—in Orwellian terms “goodthink” and “crimethink”—how they viewed the world and themselves, their values, and the decisions they made.

    Some of this teaching was overt, some was running underneath and through everything, was implicit.

    And I agree that, given the considerations above—when you come right down to it—teaching is a political act.

    But, as I view it, the job of teachers is—as honestly, as even-handedly, and as best they can—to present the facts, and to transmit our Western history, culture, and values to each new generation.

    Educators should not see it as their role to be the “agents of change” that ”educators” like far Left (Ayers is quoted as saying Communist with a small “c”),** unrepentant urban terrorist Bill Ayres—writer of many popular teacher education textbooks, model curricula, and book lists—urges them to be.

    I happen to think that our way, the traditional American way that was taught back then, up through, say, the early 1960s, was and is the best way.

    So, if “educators” are about the business of teaching an ideology, of creating social cohesion around a shared world-view, history, and a core of ideas, ideals, and values—I want them to be actually teaching shared values and cohesion, not Balkanization, I want them to be teaching actual Western history, culture, values and accomplishments, I want them to be teaching real, not hyphenated Americanism, and Patriotism–appreciation of and love for country, not the subversive, slanted, rancid and toxic stew that–from the evidence–so many “educators” apparently teach nowadays.

    ** See https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/10/on_bill_ayers_and_small_c_comm.html

48. “… conspiracy theories involving Bill Kristol being an evil wizard …”

    He may not be an “evil wizard” but by now he is at best an irrelevant fool.

49. huxley; Snow on Pine:

    Please see this about what Allan Bloom had to say about the issue. Here’s an excerpt;

    Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being…In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others the warlike, in others the industrious…Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies men who respect and pursue money, and democracies lovers of equality. Democratic education, whether it admits it or not, wants and needs to produce men and women who have the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime. Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime. We began with the model of the rational and industrious man, who was honest, respected the laws, and was dedicated to the family (his own family—what has in its decay been dubbed the nuclear family). Above all he was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodied it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”…

    But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new…

50. Snow on Pine, neo: I agree that teaching in the large sense, especially of the young, has moral goals and seeks the formation, as Christians call it, of human beings in desired directions.

    What those goals and directions might be or should be is another, longer discussion. Suffice it to say, though that American education has never been a neutral, values-free enterprise. It wasn’t the PoMo-SJWs who changed that.

    However, my point was that for all the power of education that’s not what I saw in my generation. When I was in school it was all salute the flag, say your prayers, America is the greatest country in the world, etc. They were still teaching
    “Americanism vs Communism” in Florida high schools.

    Yet the majority of my peers left the Church and developed a jaundiced eye towards patriotism. We weren’t reading Marx and Marcuse for that. And none of our teachers taught us that way.

51. Snow on Pine, neo: So to cut to the nitty-gritty — are your problems with current education that students are not being indoctrinated as you would wish them to be?

    Is it a Russell conjugation:

    I enlighten.
    You teach.
    He is a foul propagandist.

52. Federalism was also preserved more than it is today by the fact that the senators weren’t chosen by popular vote.

    The Civil War pretty much destroyed federalism and the 10th Amendment. Too bad but it may not be possible to recover that protection short of another secession. Secession talk is not all that recent. I was in eastern Washington state in 1959 and there was serious talk about Washington east of the Cascades seceding from the coastal portion. The new state would be called “Lincoln.”

53. So to cut to the nitty-gritty — are your problems with current education that students are not being indoctrinated as you would wish them to be?

    Gramsci was quite clear about this.

    Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also through ideology. The bourgeoisie developed a hegemonic culture, which propagated its own values and norms so that they became the “common sense” values of all. People in the working-class (and other classes) identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.

    To counter the notion that bourgeois values represented “natural” or “normal” values for society, the working class needed to develop a culture of its own.

    That is what is happening.

54. Mike K: Not getting it.

    Maybe you’d care to take a crack at my question for yourself.

55. huxley:

    There can be no education that doesn’t indoctrinate—or teach values, whether they be moral values or cognitive values such as the importance of objective truth in the pursuit of knowledge.

    It is a fiction to pretend that education has no philosophical and/or moral value, no moral valence at all, or that it should have none or even can have none. The only subjects that probably fall under that description would be math and hard sciences, and even there one must decide (in order to teach them) that truth is important, and that objective truth can be learned. In addition, there’s the question of ethics in science and the use of science.

    The teaching of history, literature, philosophy, government, and all the rest are inherently laden with values and decisions about values. The student must be taught another value: that it is important to question what you learn, to search for objectivity if possible, and to evaluate all you learn in order to get closer to the truth.

    You may prefer to call that indoctrination, and indeed it is a form of indoctrination. And yes, I have preferential forms of learning about values and human rights and government and history and art and about truth and beauty and all those other things that Western Civilization has held dear.

56. huxley:

    Yes, I guess it was you who asked the question. I will go back and correct it so it is addressed to huxley.

    Do you really think that education, particularly in the humanities, can be taught without any sort of “indoctrination:—in other words, without imparting some sort of moral stance about values? That seems an absurd notion to me, an actual impossibility.

57. neo: I assume you are addressing me, not Snow on Pine.

    So your problem is that the young are not being indoctrinated to your preferences. Thanks for a clear response.

    I’m still more interested in why my cohort largely threw off the indoctrination (or whatever) of our educators.

    For conservatives today that ought to be an interesting question, given the current indoctrination works against them.

58. Do you really think that education, particularly in the humanities, can be taught without any sort of “indoctrination:

    neo: I believe I acknowledged that @ 5:18:

    I agree that teaching in the large sense, especially of the young, has moral goals and seeks the formation, as Christians call it, of human beings in desired directions.

59. huxley:

    I just wrote another comment but removed it because I just saw that in the meantime you had answered my question.

60. Huxley—Examining and mulling over what I have been taught, learned on my own, done further research on, and experienced—and comparing these things, one to the other—my judgement is that my general education, and the History and the Americanism I was taught in school was taught pretty much straight down the middle, and with quite a few of our failings and mistakes included and pointed out along the way.

    The sum and substance of we were taught being that the United States–imperfect as all nations have been throughout history–was, nonetheless, a good nation, a beacon of hope, a force for good in the world, and not the evil and voracious author of all the world’s ills, as taught by the Left.

    What I was taught hewed and hews closer to the truth, seemed and seems much more objectively true and more complete that what is apparently being taught today.

    Moreover, that—from the statements, attitudes, and actions of today’s young people, and the texts they are being taught from—the version of such education as taught in many—perhaps most—places today is far less down the middle, is deliberately skewed leftward, contains far more deliberate omissions and deceptions, is far more restricted in view, and contains far more lies, half truths, and distortions than my education did. Our country is portrayed as sleazy, voracious, destructive, immoral.

    So, yes, given the conclusion that, while it is ostensibly just about imparting basic factual information, that what is taught—and not taught, and how it is taught and “framed,” that education is actually about teaching a particular view of the world, a particular ideology—I would rather that my preferred traditional American history, and patriotic ideology were taught in the schools, rather than today’ s transmogrified Leftist version.

    My traditional version taught, that is, if you want the United States—as still presently constituted—to survive and flourish, and not to be “fundamentally transformed,” or even be destroyed–maybe slowly, maybe much more quickly–by a Leftist fomented revolution.

61. huxley:

    To respond to some other points you made earlier, education is hardly the only thing that determines what people ultimately believe. Particularly for the generations of the 60s and 70s, rebellion was a big deal. And whether you yourself were reading Marx and Marcuse, rest assured that those rebels setting the tone of the era for the rebellious young certainly were—Marx and Marcuse and much more.

    I do sometimes wonder whether the young of today will rebel against their leftist education. Some do, I suppose, but it’s still not very trendy or chic to do so.

62. To respond to some other points you made earlier, education is hardly the only thing that determines what people ultimately believe.

    neo: I didn’t say it was, but the original Snow on Pine comment I responded to was a variation of the Jesuit “Give me your child until the age of seven and he is mine forever.”

    I don’t think that’s true and conservatives would do well to consider the game is not over just because the the left rolled them in academia. Or Hollywood. Or rock music.

    Unless your point is that Hollywood and rock’n’roll are the real power-bearers when it comes to persuasion.

    Conservatives lost me when I was young because the whole red-white-and-blue, Howdy-Dowdy, God Bless America line seemed like so much obvious, over-hyped crap, it was easy to rebel.

    Why the kids don’t get the current SJW stuff isn’t another line of crap baffles me.

63. …my judgement is that my general education, and the History and the Americanism I was taught in school was taught pretty much straight down the middle, and with quite a few of our failings and mistakes included and pointed out along the way.

    Snow on Pine: That’s not how I was taught. There was occasional mention of our failings … slavery, civil rights, poverty … but the rest was flag-waving and cross-kneeling. God help you if you got on the wrong side of the martinet at the front of the classroom.

64. huxley:

    And I didn’t say that you did say it. I was just talking about what influences people to believe what they believe.

    By the way, I think I had a basic salute-the-flag, hail-America, kind of education. But it never came across as conveying that America was perfect, just that it was pretty darn good, and particularly good compared to other nations. There was no gratuitous putting-down of America. I went to New York City public schools. I don’t think they overdid it. I certainly don’t recall it that way. It was pretty low-key, actually. And when teachers were martinets–and some of them were–it seemed that it was a personal thing and didn’t have much to do with what they were teaching or not teaching.

    I also had early exposure to relatives who were fanatical leftists. Now, that turned me off. It was patently obvious that Russia was a tyranny, and yet these people defended whatever Russia did. That was an education for me, too, and I rejected whatever I considered to be that sort of fanaticism.

65. And I didn’t say that you did say it. I was just talking about what influences people to believe what they believe.

    neo: And I didn’t say that you did say … whatever. We could do this for a while. I would like you to consider the possibility I have considered whatever possibilities you have in mind in this and other topics.

    By the way, I think I had a basic salute-the-flag, hail-America, kind of education.

    FWIW I don’t think you did. I went to public and parochial schools in 60s Florida and Texas. Perhaps I am mistaken.

    In any event I’m still wondering if education is such a big deal why my cohort discarded our indoctrination so easily and today’s kids can’t escape the clutches of their SJW teachers.

66. I’m also wondering how many college kids today are 1984’s Julia:

    …accepting the [SJW party line] as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

    That George Orwell/Eric Blair fellow could write!

67. huxley:

    I wouldn’t presume to say what you experienced in public and parochial schools in the 60s in Florida and Texas, and I can’t imagine why you would think you know much about what I experienced in school in New York during the 50s and early-to-mid-60s.

    However, I’ll venture a guess as to why or how your cohort (and probably mine as well) “discarded our indoctrination so easily and today’s kids can’t escape the clutches of their SJW teachers.” First of all, I think it’s an excellent question, one I’ve wondered about, too, since I often think about political change and how it works.

    Here are my guesses. The first is that the 60s-70s generation (particularly mine, the Boomers of the 60s) was rebelling against what seemed like old fuddy-duddyness, and what was offered as a rebellious alternative was FUN, the proverbial sex, drugs, and rock and roll. That seems inherently more attractive to teenagers and young people. Whereas today’s kids have to rebel by becoming more conservative, which is a much harder sell.

    I also think that more recent generations have been taught that people on the right who disagree with the left are evil and cruel racist bigots. To cross that supposed line and become a conservative may seem almost impossible for them. On the other hand, although I remember being taught that the Communist governments were evil, I never got any sense from my education as a child that liberals or conservatives, or Democrats or Republicans, or even the people of Russia themselves—were evil. Maybe the far far left or the far far right were, but not ordinary members of each party.

68. Huxley—My experience in K-12 was quite different than yours.

    While I can remember saying the Pledge of Allegiance each morning when I was in grade school in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, I don’t remember having to say it in junior high or in high school.

    And while there was an American flag in the corner of each classroom, and on the stage in the auditoriums during my time in K-12, while rare assemblies opened with the Pledge, Americanism and patriotism were not otherwise pushed in any overt way; it just was.

    I apparently absorbed it through a process of osmosis.

69. Neo–I agree that, given the Left’s thorough hatchet job done on our history, on conservative ideas, and on conservatives, and the historical, political, and economic ignorance they have fostered, it’s a very hard thing for a young person, who may be dissatisfied with the Left–its ideas and its actions–to, nonetheless, decide to join what has been portrayed to him as the totally unworthy, even evil, and uncool conservative side; the no fun, old stick-in-the muds, the fuddy duddies.

70. Snow on Pine:

    One thing we were exposed to in my grade school was a number of patriotic poems, rather soft-sell. I wrote this post featuring one of them.

71. It all boils down to what you choose to believe. According to the left America invented slavery, an institution going back many thousands of year, that resulted in 600,000 American deaths to end. But somehow we are still guilty. The conquest resulting in millions of deaths on the part of the aboriginals, but of course every nation state today resulted in many millions of the death of the original people. Misogyny, well guess what, women were allowed access to the ballot box long ago, unlike the pet darlings of the left’s Islam.

    The hardcore leftists will laugh in your face if you tell the real truth to power. No energy should be wasted in a futile gesture. Learn to reload instead. There is no such thing as too much ammo.

72. David on March 22, 2019 at 7:30 am at 7:30 am said:
    ..

    But these folks also had a specific issue that may have pushed them over the edge: they were disproportionately affected by the capping of the deductibility of state and local taxes and of mortgage interest, both from the 2017 tax bill.

    Incidentally this gives the lie to the usual criticism that tax cuts are only for “the rich.” The 2017 tax act may be the first such bill since at least 1986 where “the rich” took a serious hit as a result of cleaning up the system and the near-elimination of those two deductions.
    * * *
    We got hit by those taxes because of income tax in our state, and we ain’t rich, but I support the reform completely.

73. huxley on March 22, 2019 at 5:27 pm at 5:27 pm said:
    …

    Is it a Russell conjugation:

    I enlighten.
    You teach.
    He is a foul propagandist.
    * * *
    I love all-purpose fill-in-the-blank maxims.
    Franklin’s is one of my favorites:
    “Rebellion is always legal in the first person – our rebellion; it is only in the third person — their rebellion — that it is illegal.”

74. Electoral college can be easily hijacked if AMericans are foolish enough to count migrants in Californian electoral votes.

    Maybe too late on that one…

75. Indeed. And personally, I hate the winner-takes-all rule that most of the states have.

    By the way, there’s an interesting map showing, for each state, who won the vote in 2016, and how many Electoral College votes each has.

76. Oh, sorry. The Great Foot has an article on the E.C. which includes the map:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College

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