Anti-American studies
This will not surprise you:
The 250th anniversary of America’s founding provides an opportunity to reflect on—and fight over—the country’s extraordinary story. Unfortunately, many of the serious scholars who study America—its history, literature and culture—fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country’s complex tale. …
… [W]e found only one part of this narrative presented in most of almost 100 articles we examined from over a three-year period in American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association. Published by Johns Hopkins University, it’s widely considered the country’s premier journal of American studies.
The journal’s scholarship paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the U.S. We found that 80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none were positive. Of the 96 articles we examined, our research identified 77 as critical, focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. Some articles went to absurd lengths to identify sins. One essay posited that thermodynamics—the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature—is “an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.”
Is it any wonder that so many young people are so down on this country? Although I must say that most of the old people I know are also reflexively critical of America.
This would be a good time to revisit a passage written by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, back in the 1980s. In it, he describes an incident he experienced when he was in school in the 1940s. Here you can see the naive origins of the kind of thinking that’s now rampant in academia:
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. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.
And I’ll close with a verse from Robert Frost, first published in 1947:
A CASE FOR JEFFERSON
Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He’s Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he’s Marxian Muscovite.
It isn’t because he’s Russian Jew.
He’s Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.
There any connection between the “openness” discussed by Bloom and the openness raised to the highest virtue by Popper?
Neo quoted a WSJ editiorial: One essay posited that thermodynamics—the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature—is “an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.”
Here’s the paper: https://www.theasa.net/sites/default/files/A%20Forest%20of%20Energy_Open%20Access.pdf
I just skimmed it, but I don’t think it’s as trashy as that WSJ editorial, or the author’s stretch to thermo, makes it out to be.
At a hurried guess it’s only a 1-to-1 correlation Mr. Melchor.
50 years of Culture Marxist Seminaries teaching American youth. It was bound to take hold.
That Frost quote is new to me I think.
Another piece of evidence toward several propositions.
==
A. ‘Interdisciplinary’ programs should be eliminated.
==
1. Among those with the largest quantum of degree awards is ‘women’s studies’. Posit your women’s studies majors were optimally deployed – i.e. you had enough faculty to teach a 42 credit program and the ratio of majors to faculty was about average for an institution and you had the maximum possible number of institutions with a program. You’d have programs at about 5% of the baccalaureate granting institutions in the country. Of course, they’re not optimally deployed. They’re heavily cross-subsidized at the institutions where they sit. If they draw their faculty from various departments, they can freeze faculty hiring in an unprofitable mold.
==
2. They’re often a sinkhole of privileged political interests. That would include all the victimology programs and ‘peace studies’.
==
3. They can function as a refuge for students who cannot make up their mind.
==
4. A selection among them can be reconstituted as subdepartmental majors or departmental majors. You can cross-list courses and have joint appointments.
==
B. Higher education is now a sinkhole of self-aggrandizing twits rather than authentic students of the world around them. People who are not on board with various narratives are screened out at different stages of the process of preparation and disciplines decay into crooked apologetical exercises. People with good minds who might be interested in teaching and research go elsewhere because they’re not welcome.
==
C. Much of our bourgeoisie simply takes for granted the infrastructure around them which makes their life comfortable. (Something to which C.S. Lewis called attention decades ago and Camille Paglia more recently). If they didn’t, they might meditate on who built that and how it was built rather than babbling endlessly about raaaacism.
(Follow-up on my question above: Popper is not in the index to “Closing….”)
If it might be helpful, Bloom addresses Popper directly in the Preface to the 2nd Edition of his Republic translation — here copy-pasted to quote (from page viii in the pdf at this link — https://ia801905.us.archive.org/23/items/PlatosRepublictrans.BloomText/PlatosRepublictrans.Bloom_text.pdf )
“Another theme, not unrelated to music, also suddenly became current
in the late 1960s and remains central to general and professional discussion
about politics: community, or roots. And again the Republic becomes
peculiarly attractive and repulsive because no book describes community
so precisely and so completely or undertakes so rigorously to turn cold
politics into family warmth. In the period just after World War II, no
criticism of what Karl Popper called “the open society” was brooked. The
open society was understood to be simply unproblematic, having solved
the difficulties presented by older thinkers. The progress of science was
understood to be strictly paralleled by that of society; individualism
seemed no threat to human ties, and mass society no threat to meaningful
participation. The softening in this narrow liberal position can be seen in
the substitution in common discourse of the less positively charged term
technology for science, the pervasive doubt about whether the mastery of nature is a very good idea, and a commonly expressed sentiment of lostness and powerlessness on the part of individual citizens.
In the days of thoughtless optimism, Plato was considered irrelevant
and his criticism was not available to warn us of possible dangers. Now it is recognized that he had all the doubts we have today and that the founding
myth of his city treats men and women as literally rooted in its soil.
Everybody is sure that Plato knew something about community, but he
makes today’s comfortable communitarians uncomfortable by insisting that so much individuality must be sacrificed to community. Moreover, they
rightly sense that Plato partly parodies the claims and the pretensions of
community. The uninvolved Socrates, distrustful of neat solutions, does
not appear to be a very reliable ally of movements. Plato, criticized in the
recent past for not being a good liberal, is now shunned for not being a wholehearted communitarian. He is, however, back in the game.”
” They can function as a refuge for students who cannot make up their mind.”
When I was in college we used to joke that we had the space program. It wasn’t about rockets and satellites and astronauts but was a program for people at college who were just taking up space.
Thanks, sdferr! I was pretty sure there had to be a through-line to Saturday’s post by Neo on the goals of G. Soros.
I would say much of this semiotic malware that Bloom first uncovered, then Rufo has followed up, has been toxic to the society, ad in imports like frantz fanon, eduardo galeano and rigoberta menchu, to cite a more recent example in the 80s, debunked in part by david stoll, well some of her more ridiculous claims, it might have been the late hilton kramer, who noted her foolishness first,
you would think a well developed intellect, would shield one from such ridiculous abstractions, chris rufo uncovering them, well that won’t do, where beard and jacobsen
who popularized his analysis as hofstadler did the frankfurt school, howard zinn, and chomsky surpassed them all in influence
“One essay posited that thermodynamics—the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature—is “an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.”
In March 2022 , Britain’s Daily Telegraph and GB News channel both reported that the National Museum of Wales would be relabelling a replica of the first steam-powered locomotive, unveiled by its Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick in 1804. Trevithick had no links to slavery, but the amendment has apparently been included anyway as part of the museum’s commitment to “decolonizing” its collection. In a statement defending what it described as the addition of “historical context,” the museum said: “Although there might not be direct links between the Trevithick locomotive and the slave trade, we acknowledge the reality that links to slavery are woven into the warp and weft of Welsh society.”
I responded to this assertion, and other similar ones, in an article I wrote for Quillette:
https://quillette.com/2022/07/21/steam-electricity-slavery-and-societal-sustainability/
Matt Walsh at The Daily Wire has a new series aimed at correcting the record:
America, was founded to be a “Shining City on a Hill”. Not for its people’s uneven fidelity to those principles but for its having set those principles into law.
“If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.” James Madison
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams
All these hate-America-first academics are, among other things, hypocrites and totally full of s**t.
They have the freedom to renounce their USA citizenship, leave the USA – permanently – and move somewhere they supposedly admire (e.g. Cuba, Gaza, China, Danny Ortega’s Nicaragua, etc. ).
But they don’t.
Then again, the organized provocateurs rioting / demonstrating in MN, are also free to leave; but they don’t either.
Jeez, I wonder why that is.
Laws are the follies of Man exposed to rectification..
Eric Hoffer argued that intellectuals (not all of them, but many) have a deep-seated resentment of the USA because American culture does not assign intellectuals, as a group, very much social status or authority. As a rule, a successful businessman, a popular athlete, an inventor, even an honest blue collar worker sometimes, etc. carries more social weight in America than a generic Ph.D. The hard sciences are a partial exception, but only to a very limited degree.
They want their education to be a source of direct power and authority and status. But America will only grant that conditionally.
To put it another way, to use fictional people as examples: America respects both Archie Bunker (honest blue collar laborer) and George Jefferson (successful self-made businessman) more than they do Michael Stivak.
We might be seeing this in things like the tempest in a teapot about whether it was disrespectful not to use ‘doctor’ as a title for Jill Biden. American culture gives medical doctors a status it does not assign to other doctorates, and many with the other doctorates are resentful, esp. in the humanities and social sciences.
Hoffer argued the intellectuals as a class long for power and authority and respect, for the ability to put their abstract ideas into effect, and America is hardwired to resist that desire. So their resentment builds up and they become ever more alienated.
In modern America, class intellectuals have now managed to become precariously dominant in the Democratic Party…and as they have done so, the popular perception has grown in tandem that the Democrats hate their own country. Hoffer would argue that this perception is dead on accurate.
The same dynamic appears to be operating around world, at least in the Western nation-states. Almost everyone we see a highly educated, highly idea-focused, highly abstract elite class struggling to impose their vision on a resistant general population, and the latter increasingly pushing back.
HC68 on January 27, 2026 at 10:40 pm:
” … a deep-seated resentment of the USA because American culture does not assign intellectuals, as a group, very much social status or authority.”
Thinking about this I had the image of the cargo cult natives in the Pacific building “conning towers” to bring planes in with the industrial goodies that were so amazing to them. Analogously, “look at all those people with college and advanced degrees and see how they are prospering!! Let’s give everyone a degree and they will be prosperous, too! ” And with the rise of DEI, it basically became a self-licking ice cream cone, as positions to employ the otherwise unemployable and unskilled came into being. Until it could no longer withstand the backlash of unreality involved.
“American culture gives medical doctors a status it does not assign to other doctorates, and many with the other doctorates are resentful, esp. in the humanities and social sciences.” And as an engineering PhD I could have been resentful, too, especially when I learned that in the Soviet system engineers were more highly paid than medical doctors. Then again, 12 years ago when I had a mild pain around my belly button*, I was glad my PCP was astute enough to recognize it was probably appendicitis, and ordered the scans and surgical procedures to correct what could have been a much more serious situation if I had neglected to obtain an appointment with him that day.
“… in the Western nation-states. Almost everyone we see a highly educated, highly idea-focused, highly abstract elite class struggling to impose their vision on a resistant general population, and the latter increasingly pushing back.” The Australian blogger Lorenzo Warby (lorenzoofoz.com ) suggests this is because their focus on abstraction and a vision of a better future has no measurements or metrics of success or feedback from said future, while normal folks face real world feedback all of the time and know or learn to rely on the signals it provides. Warby indicts the economics profession in particular for adopting an overly mathematical approach (starting in the 50’s?) and treating all people as interchangeable “econ bits” without regard to the various aspects of human psychology that the earlier students of “political economy” were noticing.
*I.e., not in the lower right torso where I might have expected such pain to occur.