Our findings in this study shed light on a source of Americans’ increasing ignorance about their own history. At the two institutions we studied, the focus on race, class, and gender often tended to crowd out the teaching of other perspectives, and many U.S. history courses failed to provide a comprehensive rendering of U.S. history as a whole. Thematically skewed teaching leads to an incompleteness of knowledge, as recent studies of American history knowledge among students demonstrate. Faculty members at the University of Texas and Texas A&M University teaching U.S. history courses in the semester we studied made assignments that disproportionally favored themes of race, class, and gender [RCG] over all other themes.

The details are startling, even to those of us in other departments on campus:

Major Findings:

• High emphasis on race, class, and gender in reading assignments. 78 percent of UT faculty members were high assigners of RCG readings; 50 percent of A&M faculty members were high assigners of RCG readings.
• High level of race, class, and gender research interests among faculty members teaching these courses. 78 percent of UT faculty members had special research interests in RCG; 64 percent of A&M faculty members had special research interests in RCG.

Faculty in the history department have feigned outrage at this criticism, though I remember history and government faculty bragging thirty years ago about how they had tricked the legislature by turning its requirement that students take a year of American history and a year of American government into a license to teach whatever they wanted.

Here’s a view of how this looks from a student’s perspective. This week, I received a message from a student from my fall semester course about what he’s taking this spring. Here is his message, together with my reply:

• Hey… I’m in US history covering 1492-1865 and am having to read A People’s History of The United States by Howard Zinn which is essentially a sad book about how terrible the United States has been to everyone from the Native Americans, to the Mexicans in the Mexican American War, to the blacks, and the Vietnamese and Koreans and Japanese during world war 2… Basically, the thesis of my history class thus far and to the end of the course is that our country is built upon oppressing other nations and ravaging the world around us through our warped justification of divine right and American Exceptionalism. Similarly, my Sociology class has the same crusade… in fact communism has been presented in a favorable light during sociology and we’ve learned about the U.S. “oppressing” the middle east… Obviously this is a total deviation from your … class in which America was shown in a pretty optimistic and favorable light… So I’m asking you as i try to keep my faith in this country… Should i loathe the United States? What do you think? I feel like a voice in the wilderness holding onto patriotism and the american dream and capitalism and American goodness.

• Hey, …! Good to hear from you!

  Zinn was a communist, and his book, widely used, means precisely to get the citizens of the US to loathe their own country. The Gramscian march through the institutions has been going on for a long time, and departments of history, sociology, anthropology, English, etc., are deeply infected with this kind of thinking.

  I don’t mean to say that bad things didn’t take place. President Jackson’s treatment of the Cherokees, for example, was an outrage. Internment of Japanese-Americans was an overreaction with a profound human toll. I’ve never understood how we supposedly oppressed the Arab world.

  But the US has also freed slaves, freed hundreds of millions to pursue their dreams, tolerated dissent, expanded civil rights, and fought for the protection of human rights.

  Moreover, I see our failings as *human* failings, not the failings of the US or of capitalism or of whatever else people blame. No society throughout the entire history of the world has been free from crime, oppression, and war. Compared to Nazi Germany, the USSR, Communist China, North Korea, and eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain, the US looks positively magnificent. But those are countries in which the far left has taken control. Far from bringing about the promised utopia, they’ve brought about poverty, hopelessness, enslavement, disrespect for human rights, and mass murder.

  This isn’t just because the wrong people somehow took charge. It’s essential to socialism. If wealth and power are to be redistributed, someone gets to redistribute them, and, guess what? They keep most of it for themselves. The “social justice” schtick is for the rubes.

  If you want a dramatic illustration of the results of free enterprise within a constitutional republic as opposed to socialism within a “people’s republic,” look at this series of photographs from Germany: scenes from East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and, then, the same spots twenty years later, after the fall of the Wall.
  http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/photo-gallery-east-germany-s-transformation-fotostrecke-59943.html

  

This Industrial Era approach (public schools were organized in the 19th century on a Prussian model, explicitly to produce obedient, orderly workers) had advantages. But it also had disadvantages. Like interchangeable parts in an industrial machine, students were treated alike, regardless of their individual characteristics and needs. Square peg, meet round hole.

Putting kids together and sorting by age also created that dysfunctional creature, the “teenager.” Once, teen-agers weren’t so much a demographic as adults-in-training. They worked, did farm chores, watched children and generally functioned in the real world. They got status and recognition for doing these things well, and they got shame and disapproval for doing them badly.

But once they were segregated by age in public schools, teens looked to their peers for status and recognition instead of to society at large. As Thomas Hine writes in The American Heritage, “Young people became teenagers because we had nothing better for them to do. We began seeing them not as productive but as gullible consumers.”

When one thinks about the effects of the teenager on our culture at large, the point becomes even more significant. As recently as the 1950s, the dominant culture—as expressed in movies, TV shows, music, theater, and news media—was by and for adults. By the 1960s, that had changed, and our culture became a youth culture, one in which the dominant trends are determined by what appeals to teenagers. The youth culture takes its direction from the preferences of young people who are isolated from the responsibilities of the adult world, get status and recognition from one another, and thus are highly manipulable. The Gramscian march has succeeded as well as it has not only because the Left has concentrated on institutions of cultural transmission but because we have constructed a stage of life during which the influence of such institutions is disproportionately large. We have allowed schools, films, the music industry, and other means of cultural transmission to shape our children, consigning parents, grandparents, and the world of work to the back seat.

This was my primary concern in deciding to homeschool my own children. I wanted to spend more time with them than the standard pattern allows. I didn’t want teachers and peers to get six-to-eight hours a day with my children, while I got a few hours in the evening when everyone was tired. I didn’t want my kids raised to become obedient line workers; I didn’t want them to be indoctrinated with Leftist claptrap. And I didn’t want them steeped in a secular view of the world that turns religion into a matter of personal taste. So, I kept them at home, where we were able to keep up with what they needed to do to be on pace with their public-school peers in two or three hours a day. The other hours? They were able to investigate things they cared about. For one, that was mostly math, science, and computers. For the other, it was baroque music. And they were able to spend a lot more time than their peers just being kids.

Alternatives are coming to higher education in the form of massively open online courses. Indeed, I’ve been blogging so little over the past few months because I’ve been working on turning a course I teach on the 20th century into a massively open online course. I’ve been filming classes, editing the results, and posting them on YouTube as a way of getting ready for a more official and concentrated effort. Thinking about an online course opens up a realm of possibilities. A traditional university course is structured around 50-minute or 75-minute segments, into which the content has to be poured. In an online version, things don’t have to be structured that way. They can be segmented however the subject matter demands. That might involve 2-5 minute definitions of key terms, 5-10 minute discussions of a particular issue, 10-20 minute explorations of a topic, etc. The point is that packaging courses online can lead to innovations with real educational advantages. Will online courses be as good as on-campus courses? They might turn out to be better.

The public schools have by and large decided to follow the music industry in fighting technological innovation, clinging bitterly to an outmoded business model. Ecxpect the same for most of higher education. But a few far-sighted institutions (including, fortunately, my own) are seeing the possibilities and deciding to adapt. Meanwhile, those seeking educations at all levels are voting with the their feet—or, more accurately, with their computers, which put a world of information at their fingertips.

Here are just a few of many examples cited by Inhofe of costly new Obama-inspired regulations that EPA will impose on the economy after Nov. 6:

• Greenhouse gas regulations, including the infamous “cow tax.” The EPA will finalize proposed regulations that will virtually eliminate coal use in electricity generation, thus driving consumer electric bills sky-high. This cluster of new regulations will also impose an annual fee on farmers for every ton of greenhouse gases emitted by their animals. The EPA estimates that 37,000 farms and ranches will have to pay on average a $23,000 annual “cow tax.”

• New regulations will so severely reduce permissible ozone emissions that the EPA estimates the cost to the economy will be $90 billion per year. Other studies put the cost as high as $1 trillion. Split the difference between the estimates, and the result still means the loss of millions of jobs.

• New Tier III regulations will cut permissible sulfur emissions by two-thirds. That will add as much as 9 cents to the cost of a gallon of gas, according to Inhofe.

• The EPA’s new coal ash regulation will cost as much as $110 billion over two decades and destroy more than 300,000 jobs, mostly in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Missouri.

First, the EPA. It’s already claimed the right to regulate carbon emissions. That’s going to accelerate in a second term. Obama promised in 2008 to get rid of coal as an energy source; that’s going to happen early in a second term. (Austin Energy is trying to sell its interest in a coal-fired plant—a move that makes no economic or environmental sense—because they fear that soon the plant will be worthless.) As Obama promised, electricity rates in much of the country will skyrocket. The EPA is going to mandate that coal generation be replaced by renewable energy sources, which are roughly ten times as expensive as running coal plants. They’re also far less reliable. The result: electricity costs are going to soar to three-to-four times their current level, and the electricity grid is going to become far less reliable. Brownouts and blackouts are going to become frequent occurrences. It’s not easy to run on the agenda.

The EPA is also going to crack down on fracking and refining, doing its best to impede the domestic energy industry. That will drive up the price of gasoline—Secretary Chu wants it to double again, to $8-10 a gallon—which will devastate the economy, adding significantly to the price of everything that has to be shipped to market, which is just about everything. Heating oil, natural gas, and other energy sources will all become more expensive. This will have important foreign policy implications, too, keeping us dependent on foreign oil and maintaining a large flow of funds from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia and other countries of the Middle East.

Since this will hit the poor and middle class most of all, expect moves to expand welfare programs. We’re already spending over a trillion dollars a year on welfare. Expect to see that soar further. Subsidies for public transportation boondoggles, such as California’s high-speed rail system, are also going to expand.

All this will make the federal deficit even larger than it is now, with alarming economic implications. Expect Obama to propose tax rates like those Hollande is proposing in France, as well as a Value-Added Tax. An economic crisis will hit soon enough, and Obama is going to use it to impose draconian tax rates, not just on the rich, but on all those who manage to have a job after other elements of his agenda are implemented.

This just scratches the surface, but you get the idea. He does have a second-term agenda. It’s just that these aren’t very effective bumper stickers:

This is hugely important, and not for the reasons that most people think. The first is not just an expression of secularism, which has been integral to the Democratic Party for decades. It’s a full embrace of Rousseau, and a thorough and official rejection of Locke and Jefferson. The Democratic Party, by its own declaration, is no longer a party that endorses a conception of natural rights. It no longer takes its inspiration from the American Founding. It holds that all rights are creations of government. It holds, in other words, that no rights, no dignity, no value inhere in us as human beings. Together with its loud advocacy of abortion rights, it makes it clear that it embraces what the Pope refers to as the culture of death. It is the intellectual heir of the French Revolution, not the American Revolution.

The second tilts the party’s platform sharply toward the Arab side of the Arab-Israeli dispute. But it does much more. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. If it isn’t, what is? The administration won’t say. The Democratic Party cannot recognize simple facts as facts. It refuses to accept as real anything it does not desire. It is now officially embraces denial.

Of course, that’s not a surprise. A party that, once every four years, pretends to be pro-military, to value American strength and exceptionalism, and to expand opportunities for the poor and middle class without having any plan to improve economic growth or reform out-of-control entitlements is already in denial—if it’s not simply a con.

At least they’re saying something new.

“Why,” Beverly Gage and Steven Hayward ask, “is there no liberal Ayn Rand?” Arguably, there are several: Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, John dos Passos, and John Steinbeck—though none inspires the devotion that Rand’s followers feel for her. But their real question isn’t about literature. It’s about philosophy. The conservative movement rests on a series of great thinkers: Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Burke, Mill, Hayek, von Mises, etc. Where are the intellectual foundations of the Left?

Gage herself provides an answer:

Once upon a time, the Old Left had “movement culture” par excellence: to be considered a serious activist, you had to read Marx and Lenin until your eyes bled. For better or worse, that never resulted in much electoral power (nor was it intended to) and within a few decades became the hallmark of pedantry rater than intellectual vitality.

The New Left reinvented that heritage in the 1960s. Instead of (or in addition to) Marx and Lenin, activists began to read Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and Saul Alinsky. As new, more particular movements developed, the reading list grew to include feminists, African-Americans, and other traditionally excluded groups. This vastly enhanced the range of voices in the public sphere—one of the truly great revolutions in American intellectual politics. But it did little to create a single coherent language through which to maintain common cause. Instead, the left ended up with multiple “movement cultures,” most of them more focused on issue-oriented activism than on a common set of ideas.

Let’s start by asking, Who pays how much now? And let’s consider not just federal income taxes but payroll taxes as well. Here are the numbers Ross Kaminsky has derived from the Congressional Budget Office report for 2008 and 2009:

In 2009, the highest quintile (top 20 percent) of earners, with household incomes over $223,500 before taxes, took in 51 percent of the nation’s income but paid 68 percent of all individual federal taxes. The middle quintile — the oppressed middle class, earning between $64,300 and $93,800 — took in 14.7 percent of America’s income but paid only 9.4 percent of federal taxes. And the lowest 20 percent of earners, making less than $23,500, brought home 5 percent of the nation’s income (much of which was transfer payments from the rest of America) but paid only 0.3 percent of federal taxes.

The effective federal tax rates for these groups were: 1 percent for the lowest quintile, 11.1 percent for the middle quintile, and 23.2 percent for the highest quintile.

These are average, not marginal, tax rates. That’s an important distinction, because the history of tax rate changes over the past fifty years has shown that raising the marginal rate does not necessarily raise the average rate; indeed, it can decrease it as people find ways of sheltering income.

Obama’s defenders claim that his “You didn’t build that” remark meant merely that everyone builds on the work of others and therefore owes something in taxes. How do they reconcile that with the fact that the bottom half of the population now pays no federal income tax at all? Don’t those people owe something, too? Are Obama’s supporters willing to follow their own logic? And since the top quintile already pay more than 23% of their income in taxes, why does what Obama said, on their interpretation, have any implications at all for tax rates on the affluent?

To return to the original question: If 23% isn’t enough, how much would be enough? And how do you intend to bring that about?

The Obama administration, bringing that old concept into the 21st century, has excelled at exactly one thing—plunder. Its signal achievement has been the plunder of the public treasury for private gain. The “stimulus” package spent more than $3,000 for each man, woman, and child in America, and what did we get? “Roads and bridges”? Dams? Canals? Power plants? Ships? Aircraft? We got nothing. The money went into the pockets of Obama’s supporters and contributors.

The plunder has been repeated with each subsequent year’s spending, which has increased over and above the extra trillion for the “stimulus.” More than $3,000 from each of us, each year, for absolutely nothing.

Solyndra is a case study in how Obama and his minions plunder the rest of us. More than $500 million went into that company, which famously went bankrupt. How much will the taxpayers get back from bankruptcy proceedings? About $24 million. Against every rule, policy, and precedent, the loan guarantees were structured so that the federal government was last in line to collect anything in case of bankruptcy. The White House was fully aware of that, of the associated risks, which set off alarm bells. So who is collecting?

The main private equity firm here is Argonaut Ventures. This company was put ahead of US taxpayers in recovering funds in the event of a bankruptcy in direct violation of standard Energy Department policy, a fact that administration officials subsequently scrambled to justify.

Argonaut is the investment arm of the George Kaiser Family Foundation. Despite being called a foundation, GKFF is not a nonprofit in the conventional understanding of the term, but an exotic variation that allows the wealthy to park their assets tax-free. The foundation’s namesake is a major fundraiser of President Obama’s. He was often a guest in the White House and even discussed Solyndra with officials there.

Argonaut Ventures? What was that story about the Golden Fleece?

Sadly, Solyndra is only one of many similar instances of plunder. That’s one reason why Obama’s “You didn’t build that” remark has had such power. It points directly at what might be the theme of the entire administration:

ALL YOUR WEALTH ARE BELONG TO US!

There are a lot of [tenured], successful [academics] who agree with me because they want to give something back,” the president said. “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in [colleges] and [universities]. If you’ve got a [book, or an article in a prestigious journal], you didn’t [write] that. Somebody else made that happen,” he said.

Finally, four-and-a-half years later, the news has reached the New York Times:

Scholars on both the left and right have studied this question extensively, and have reached a consensus that it is conservatives who possess the happiness edge. Many data sets show this. For example, the Pew Research Center in 2006 reported that conservative Republicans were 68 percent more likely than liberal Democrats to say they were “very happy” about their lives. This pattern has persisted for decades. The question isn’t whether this is true, but why.

Many conservatives favor an explanation focusing on lifestyle differences, such as marriage and faith. They note that most conservatives are married; most liberals are not. (The percentages are 53 percent to 33 percent, according to my calculations using data from the 2004 General Social Survey, and almost none of the gap is due to the fact that liberals tend to be younger than conservatives.) Marriage and happiness go together. If two people are demographically the same but one is married and the other is not, the married person will be 18 percentage points more likely to say he or she is very happy than the unmarried person.

The story on religion is much the same. According to the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, conservatives who practice a faith outnumber religious liberals in America nearly four to one. And the link to happiness? You guessed it. Religious participants are nearly twice as likely to say they are very happy about their lives as are secularists (43 percent to 23 percent). The differences don’t depend on education, race, sex or age; the happiness difference exists even when you account for income.

Whether religion and marriage should make people happy is a question you have to answer for yourself. But consider this: Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids.

As I said in that first post,

I think it’s likely that happy people are more likely to be Republicans, while unhappy people are more likely to be Democrats, for unhappiness gives one an incentive to seek change, and happiness an incentive to resist it. But the causal link goes in the other direction as well, for Republicans stress freedom and individual responsibility, which lead people to feel in control and take action that changes their lives for the better, while Democrats assign blame to institutions, which makes people feel powerless and discourages them from undertaking ameliorative courses of action.

The dramatic differences between conservatives and liberals with respect to marriage and faith may point to another explanation. Conservatives have more social capital than liberals. Robert Putnam’s investigations into social capital—people’s trust, connectedness, willingness to cooperate, willingness to participate, feeling of involvement, etc.—shows that relatively homogeneous areas of the country have very high social capital, while large cities, especially on the coasts, have low social capital. Compare that to the electoral map from 2008:

Liberals tend to live in areas with low social capital. Conservatives tend to live in areas with high social capital.* Social capital, moreover, correlates closely with happiness levels.

Why do social capital and political affiliation correlate? Part of the reason is that trust, cooperation, involvement, and the like foster a self-reliant, “we can do it ourselves” attitude, while distrust, selfishness, self-involvement, and withdrawal incline people toward reliance on government. But the causal arrow goes the other way as well. Big government undermines and, over time, destroys social capital, while small government encourages and, over time, builds it.

* The two most evident exceptions are New England, which is liberal but has relatively high social capital, and the South, which is conservative but has relatively low social capital. The most likely explanation is that New England is fairly homogeneous, and the South highly diverse, in racial, ethnic, and economic terms.