America’s crisis of civic education is acute, requiring a major change in the way students are taught about the workings of American government and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. So contends David Feith, an opinion editor at the Wall Street Journal, in his introduction to Teaching America, a well-crafted collection of essays from a distinguished and diverse group of authors—progressives and conservatives, policy makers and professors, jurists and political commentators.

The case for civic education—what might have been called “civics” in an earlier generation—is straightforward. Just as, say, doctors who receive defective medical training will be handicapped in the performance of their professional tasks, so too citizens whose civic education is lacking will be less than competent as members of an extended political community. Studying the Constitution—not to mention American political ideas and institutions—can help us all to exercise our rights, respect the rights of others, and weigh the merit of contending policies. More generally, as Feith notes, civic education can nourish a common culture by showing that partisan disputes often reflect conflicting interpretations of a shared commitment to freedom and equality.

Continue reading Peter Berkowitz…

One of the things that turned up, during a long-overdue cleanup of my office, was an old yellowed copy of the New York Times dated July 24, 1992. One of the front-page headlines said: "White-Black Disparity in Income Narrowed in 80′s, Census Shows."

The 1980s? Wasn’t that the years of the Reagan administration, the "decade of greed," the era of "neglect" of the poor and minorities, if not "covert racism"?

More recently, during the administration of America’s first black president, a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center has the headline, "Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics."

While the median net worth of whites was ten times the median net worth of blacks in 1988, the last year of the Reagan administration, the ratio was nineteen to one in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration. With Hispanics, the ratio was eight to one in 1988 and fifteen to one in 2009.

Race is just one of the areas in which the rhetoric and the reality often go in opposite directions. Political rhetoric is intended to do one thing — win votes. Whether the policies that accompany that rhetoric make people better off or worse off is far less of a concern to politicians, if any concern at all.

Democrats receive the overwhelming bulk of the black vote by rhetoric and by presenting what they have done as the big reason that blacks have advanced. So long as most blacks and whites alike mistake rhetoric for reality, this political game can go on.

Continue reading Thomas Sowell…

Ms. Magazine is forty years old. Stanford brought together six prominent feminine journalists to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the magazine in a panel discussion held on January 26, 2012.

Thoughtful Ideas attended the event to learn about the past and present in feminist journalism and concerns about the future of the feminist movement.

An overflow crowd of more than 200 attended. About two-thirds were elderly veterans of the feminist revolution; a third was Stanford graduate and undergraduate students. The panelists’ biggest concern was the lack of money that would enable full-time, paid feminist journalists and bloggers in place of the current part-time, after-hours bloggers who needed a regular day job to support themselves. Monetizing the movement was deemed crucial to its sustainability. Another goal was uniting with other diverse communities to advance the cause of social justice.

Continue reading Alvin Rabushka…

America’s crisis of civic education is acute, requiring a major change in the way students are taught about the workings of American government and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. So contends David Feith, an opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal, in his introduction to "Teaching America," a well-crafted collection of essays from a distinguished and diverse group of authors—progressives and conservatives, policy makers and professors, jurists and political commentators.

The case for civic education—what might have been called "civics" in an earlier generation—is straightforward. Just as, say, doctors who receive defective medical training will be handicapped in the performance of their professional tasks, so too citizens whose civic education is lacking will be less than competent as members of an extended political community. Studying the Constitution—not to mention American political ideas and institutions—can help us all to exercise our rights and respect the rights of others and to weigh the merit of contending policies. More generally, as Mr. Feith notes, civic education can nourish a common culture by showing that partisan disputes often reflect conflicting interpretations of a shared commitment to freedom and equality.

Continue reading Peter Berkowitz…

Back in the 1920s, the intelligentsia on both sides of the Atlantic were loudly protesting the execution of political radicals Sacco and Vanzetti, after what they claimed was an unfair trial. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to his young leftist friend Harold Laski, pointing out that there were "a thousand-fold worse cases" involving black defendants, "but the world does not worry over them."

Holmes said: "I cannot but ask myself why this so much greater interest in red than black."

To put it bluntly, it was a question of whose ox was gored. That is, what groups were in vogue at the moment among the intelligentsia. Blacks clearly were not.

Continue reading Thomas Sowell…

If there was ever any doubt that the Democrats take the black vote for granted, that doubt should have been put to rest when Barack Obama told the CongressionalBlack Caucus, “Stop whining!”

Have you ever before heard either a Democratic or a Republican leader tell his party’s strongest supporters, “Stop whining”?

Blacks have a lot to complain about, not just about this Democratic administration but about many other Democratic administrations, national and local, over the years.

Unfortunately, black voters, like many other voters, often judge by rhetoric, rather than realities. When it comes to racial rhetoric, the Democrats outdo the Republicans by miles.

Even Ronald Reagan, the great communicator, had problems communicating with black voters, as I pointed out years ago in my book “A Personal Odyssey” (pages 274-278).

Continue reading Thomas Sowell…

After Steve Jobs stepped down from his post as Apple’s CEO, his innovative career was enthusiastically celebrated by the media and public alike. Starting with his founding of Apple Computer when he was in his early twenties, Jobs has left his mark on the personal computer, the laptop, the mobile phone, the tablet computer, recorded music, film animation, and several other communication technologies that have brought the people of the world closer together. Some commentators have gone so far as to describe Jobs as a historic figure, not just in business but also in the evolution of civilization.

Along with the celebration of Jobs’ splendid string of achievements has come a flood of speculation about the secret of his success. Which ingredients of character, talent, skill, and/or knowledge accounted for the explosion of entrepreneurial genius that erupted from this young man over thirty years ago? As he took on his new ventures, how did Jobs manage to turn innovation after innovation into astonishingly profitable products that transform the way we work and play? We will never arrive at definitive answers to such questions in the particular case of Steve Jobs, because the mysteries of any one individual life can never be wholly explained. But to address the broader question of how entrepreneurs develop their abilities to succeed is more than just an exercise in idle speculation—it can be a call to action. If we wish to promote (rather than discourage) entrepreneurship among today’s young, we need to gain an understanding of the conditions that favor its development. In addition, we need to make sure that these conditions prevail in places where young people spend their time—most prominently, in our schools and colleges.

Continue reading William Damon…

Until a few years ago, America seemed relatively resistant to the kind of homegrown Islamist terrorism that has plagued Europe for the last decade. Terrorism experts attribute the resilience of American Muslims to their greater integration into society. In Europe, immigrant populations tend to cluster—with Algerians settling in France, Turks in Germany, Moroccans in the Netherlands, and so on, making it easier for ethno-religious groups to remain isolated, spending time only with others like themselves.

Many Muslim immigrants in Europe arrived as unskilled guest workers, and changes in the labor market have made it hard for them to find jobs. Muslims in Europe are far more likely to be unemployed and to receive lower pay for the same work than “native” Europeans. Thus, Muslim immigrants in Europe are often impoverished. For example, 10 percent of native Belgians live below the poverty line—meanwhile, 59 percent of Belgium Turks and 56 percent of Belgium Moroccan are living in poverty.

Continue reading Jessica Stern…

It is fascinating to see how postmodern Western societies react to wide-scale rioting, looting, and thuggery aimed at innocents. In Britain, politicians contemplate the use of water cannons as if they were nuclear weapons; and here the mayor of Philadelphia calls on rappers to appeal to youth to help ease the flash-mobbing that has a clear racial component to it (is the attorney general’s Civil Rights Division investigating?). His appeal is perhaps understandable, but many of the themes of rap music — violence against the police, racial chauvinism, and nihilism—may well be some of the cultural catalysts behind the flash violence, though to suggest as much would be seen as more racist than the racist profiling used by the flash beaters. All these incidents are symptomatic of a general breakdown and loss of confidence in Western society. Such urban violence was of course a constant in 19th- and 20th-century Europe and America, but now it is deeply embedded within modern sociology and no longer seen quite as criminality.

Continue reading Victor Davis Hanson…

We are witnessing a widespread crisis of faith in our progressive guardians of the last 30 years. These are the blue-chip, university-certified elite, employed by universities, government, and big-money private foundations and financial-services companies. The best recent examples are sorts like Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Robert Rubin, Steven Chu, and Timothy Geithner. Politicians like John Kerry, John Edwards, and Al Gore all share certain common characteristics of this Western technocracy: proper legal or academic credentials, ample service in elected or appointed government office, unabashed progressive politics, and a free pass to enjoy ample personal wealth without any perceived contradiction with their loud share-the-wealth egalitarian politics.

The house of a John Kerry, the plane of an Al Gore, or, in the European case, the suits of a Dominique Strauss-Kahn are no different from those of the CEOs and entrepreneurs who were as privately courted as they were publicly chastised. These elites were mostly immune from charges of hypocrisy or character flaws, by virtue of their background and their well-meaning liberalism.

Continue reading Victor Davis Hanson…

The New York Times headline from May could not have been more compelling: "Failing grades on civics exam called a ‘crisis.‘" The accompanying story reported bleak news from the latest National Assessment of Student Progress (widely known as the "nation’s report card"). Among our present crop of high school seniors, only one in four scored at least "proficient" in knowledge of U. S. citizenship. Of all the academic subjects tested, civics and the closely linked subject of history came in last: "a smaller proportion of fourth and eighth graders demonstrated proficiency in civics than in any other subject the federal government has tested since 2005, except history, American students’ worst subject."

Not surprisingly, the story drew appalled reactions from public figures such as Sandra Day O’Conner ("we have a crisis on our hands"). Charles Quigley, a civics educator, noted that "the results confirm an alarming and continuing trend that civics in America is on the decline." He declared that in the U.S. today, "civic education is facing a real ‘civic recession.’" Yet within a week, despite the perception of crisis among those who were paying attention, the story vanished from sight. This may be the most alarming part of the crisis—our society’s seeming lack of awareness of the grave threat that civic ignorance among our youth poses to the future of our democracy.

Continue reading William Damon in Defining Ideas…

In 1941 George Orwell observed, “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.” What Orwell saw as a fashion of the elite has now become widespread in America, where the media, popular culture, and academics have made sneering on one’s own country a sign of cosmopolitan sophistication and intellectual superiority.

This reflexive disdain for anyone showing affectionate pride in the United States has enabled the sort of behavior that recently took place in Pasadena’s Rose Bowl at the Gold Cup soccer finals between America and Mexico. The 90,000 spectators were overwhelmingly Mexican, and they lustily booed the American team and waved Mexican flags. Even the terminally liberal Los Angeles Times wondered, “In what other country would the visitors have home-field advantage?” One fan interviewed about this behavior displayed a bizarre cognitive and moral dissonance: “I love this country, it has given me everything that I have, and I’m proud to be part of it. But yet, I didn’t have a choice to come here, I was born in Mexico, and that is where my heart will always be.”

Immigrants always have been tempted to maintain dual loyalties, so such myopic ingratitude is unexceptional. In the past, though, it was usually downplayed to avoid a backlash from insulted Americans who felt no compunction in telling immigrants bragging about their countries of origin to catch the next boat back. What is new and different these days is the climate that makes some immigrants assume not just that they have a right publicly to indulge such behavior with impunity, but that any protest is itself a sign of xenophobic jingoism, if not outright racism. This climate is a consequence of the psychological freak Orwell identified, and ultimately derives from left-wing ideology. For those of a Marxist bent, America has always been the great enemy––not just for its alleged oppression, inequality, and exploitation, but for the spectacular success of its liberal democracy and free-market capitalism in giving freedom and opportunity to millions of people. For the left, to champion America is to cheer for the country that definitively repudiated leftist claims to possess a superior political-economic order.

Related to this network of ideas is multiculturalism, which grafts identity politics––the notion that identity is predicated on collective grievances that one possesses by virtue of being a member of a historically victimized ethnic group––onto the old Leninist demonization of Western imperialism and colonialism. To the multiculturalist, the white Euro-American is always guilty, his crimes the consequence of a uniquely oppressive culture and history manifested in colonialism, imperialism, racism, and irrational fear of the dark-skinned “other.” Any display of pride in Western culture is unseemly and insensitive, if not racist or bigoted, even as the victim “of color” is encouraged to indulge such chauvinism, since his culture has been victimized by Western crimes and hence is superior and worthy of celebration.

It is incoherent ideas such as these––like all bad ideas, false to human reality and repudiated by history––that account for this elevation of contempt for one’s own country into a mark of superiority and sophistication. And the consequences of such disaffection are much more serious than just the bad manners and ingratitude displayed in the Rose Bowl. As Orwell pointed out about the roots of England’s feckless foreign policy before the war, the “sniggering of the intellectuals at patriotism and physical courage, the persistent effort to chip away English morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life, has done nothing but harm. It would have been harmful even if we had been living in the squashy League of Nations universe that these people imagined. In the age of Fuhrers and bombing planes it was a disaster.” This danger is just a real today, and has been worsened by the institutionalizing of such “sniggering” in our media and schools, and by a President who dismisses American exceptionalism and centers his foreign policy on apologizing for America’s alleged imperfections and crimes.

A people faced with a passionate enemy like terrorist jihadists will find their resolve weakened if they lack a passionate loyalty to the core principles and beliefs that their way of life expresses, and an equally passionate confidence that their country, flaws and all, is essentially good and so worth fighting and dying for. But what Churchill in 1933 called the “mood of unwarrantable self-abasement” he saw among British intellectuals undermines that loyalty and confidence, and creates “defeatist doctrines” such as appeasement. If dangerous then, how much more insidious and deadly such fashionable “self-abasement” is today, when it is widely considered to be the mark of intellectual sophistication to view with indifference or even approval those who disrespect America even as they enjoy its freedom and opportunity.

(photo credit: Jen)

The post-mortem revelations of Osama bin Laden’s daily habits have confirmed the orthodox narrative about the al Qaeda chief. Rather than a traditionalist conservative Muslim, bin Laden has been caricatured as a mentally unstable fringe figure, a narcissistic megalomaniac who “highjacked” Islamic doctrine in order to prey on Muslims traumatized by a lack of economic or political opportunity. Learning that bin Laden enjoyed Coke, watched porn, and was vain about his appearance seemingly confirms that assessment. Yet this kind of thinking reveals more about our own cultural myopia, the way we reduce all human behavior to our own categories and assumptions.

Unfortunately, this mistake leads to our misunderstanding the tactics and strategy of the jihadists. A recent example of this phenomenon is Bret Stephens’ column in The Wall Street Journal about bin Laden’s references to MIT linguist and radical crank Noam Chomsky. Most of the column is an astute dissection of Chomsky’s political rants, which Stephens correctly notes function as pop-cultural commodities and fashion markers for the badly educated young with épater le bourgeois pretensions.

The problem comes with Stephens’ ruminations on why bin Laden would find Chomsky appealing. As a “wannabe philosopher,” bin Laden sought “the imprimatur of someone he supposes to be a real philosopher” who could provide him an “intellectual architecture for his hatred of the United States.” Chomsky’s academic position and celebrity “could only have sustained bin Laden in the conceit that his thinking was on a high plane.” An analysis such as this, focused as it is on bin Laden’s personal psychology and pathologies, misses how shrewdly the jihadists have taken the measure of the West and its left-wing elites, whose guilt and self-loathing make them important allies in undermining our morale.

The usefulness of leftist ideology for jihadists was obvious from the beginning in the work of Sayyid Qutb, “al Qaeda’s intellectual godfather,” according to Lee Smith. Qutb found in communism’s clichés about industrial capitalism’s alienation and dehumanization an idiom of indictment that could resonate with left-wing Western intellectuals. “Look at this capitalism with its monopolies, its usury, at this individual freedom,” Qutb wrote, “devoid of human sympathy and responsibility for relatives except under force of law; at this materialistic attitude which deadens the spirit.” So too the Iranian Islamist Ali Shari’ati, who translated into Persian Frantz Fanon’s 1963 The Wretched of the Earth, one of the most important anti-colonial, anti-Western tracts. Shari’ati and other Iranians adapted the Marxian notion of “false consciousness,” the device by which capitalism fools the proletariat into ignoring their own true interests and obscures the oppressive reality of socio-economic institutions, and called it “Westoxification,” the mind-addling allure of Western commodities and ideas that seduces Muslims from the true faith. The Ayatollah Khomeini, architect of the first Islamic state, likewise adorned his sermons and speeches with anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and Third World revolutionary rhetoric sure to delight European Marxists like Michel Foucault, who indeed celebrated Khomeini as a revolutionary hero.

Today’s jihadists employ the same tactic, linking their theologically inspired hatred of the West to left-wing indictments of the uniquely oppressive and exploitative nature of capitalism, creating what David Horowitz calls the “unholy alliance.” Thus when bin Laden was communicating to Americans, he sounded all these old shibboleths of leftist theory. In 2002, for example, he exhorted Iraqis not to fight for “capitalists, the lords of usury, and arms and oil dealers.” That same year he chided Americans for failing to sign the Kyoto agreements “so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries,” and criticized our law as “the law of the rich and wealthy people.” In an address to American soldiers in 2003, bin Laden told our troops that they were “spilling [their] blood to swell the bank accounts of the White House gang and their fellow arms dealers and the proprietors of great companies.” And before the 2004 election, he warned Americans not to support a war begun “to give business to their [the Bush administration’s] various corporations.” All these statements are indistinguishable from those made over the years by Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn, Robert Fisk, William Blum, or thousands of college professors, pundits, and editorial writers.

That similarity is not accidental, for bin Laden, like Qutb and Khomeini, was seeking allies among an influential class of Americans who could shape public opinion and thus change U.S. policy. For when speaking to Muslims, bin Laden and his theorist Ayman al-Zawahiri focused not on these left-wing clichés, but on Islamic theology. As Raymond Ibrahim points out, bin Laden and Zawahiri “argue to Muslims that Muslims should battle the West because it is the infidel.”

Bin Laden didn’t need Chomsky or anybody else to provide him with an “intellectual architecture for his hatred of the West” or to validate his own thinking. He could find all the “architecture” and support he needed in the Koran and 14-centuries of Islamic theology and jurisprudence. His references to Chomsky and other leftist fellow-travelers of jihadism were, like the jihadists terrorist attacks, tactical, a device for advancing the long-term strategy of defeating the West by eroding our will to fight and exposing the weakness at the center of our civilization––the suicidal self-loathing and failure of nerve that, to paraphrase Lenin, will provide the jihadists with the rope they will use to hang us.

In our previous segment we discussed the political backdrop of George W. Bush’s project of "compassionate conservatism" and promised that in this installment we would explore the intellectual one. The intellectual sources of the notion, just like the political ones, were complex and varied. Two among them stand out, however, because Bush himself has testified to their primacy for him. These were the very different writings of Myron Magnet, on the one hand, and Marvin Olasky, on the other. These represented the two poles of "compassionate conservatism," and between them they reveal the tensions that would continue to haunt the project.

Myron Magnet and the Cruel Compassion of the Welfare State

The first of these books that shaped Bush’s thinking emerged from a wholly secularist milieu. It was Magnet’s The Dream and the Nightmare (1993), which Bush would tell the Wall Street Journal was the most important book he had ever read, after the Bible.

Magnet, a professor of English at Columbia, had moved from studying Charles Dickens’s portrayal of poverty to writing essays in Fortune and City Journal. Dream had arisen from these essays. A powerful critique of the welfare state, it updated arguments made by so-called "neoconservatives" ever since the mid-1960’s. Magnet didn’t question the sincerity of liberal compassion. He insisted, however, that its crowning achievement, the full-blown welfare state of Lyndon Johnson’s "Great Society," had both failed and corrupted the very poor whom it aimed to help.

Continue reading Clifford Orwin at our sister site Defining Ideas…

Political knowledge and interest among the young has been in decline for fifty years. Although some of today’s young are active in civic and political affairs, there are huge gaps in the interest and participation of the broader youth population. Such gaps can be found in voting patterns, political knowledge, aspirations to civic leadership, and attitudes towards public life.

Even in the highly charged 2008 presidential election, only 52% of 18-24 year-olds voted, a mere 4% increase over 2004 and on the low end of trends since 1972 (when 18-year-olds were first granted the vote). Our own research on youth purpose has found that only a tiny fraction of young Americans now aspires to political leadership. What’s more, young people’s attitudes about our democracy are often marked by skepticism, distrust, and lack of interest. Of special concern is that disadvantaged and culturally marginalized populations of youth often express the highest degrees of alienation and disaffection.

Continue reading William Damon…

There is a lot of talk from many people about bullying in school. The problem is that it is all talk. There is no sign that anybody is going to do anything that is likely to reduce bullying.

When politicians want to do nothing, and yet look like they are doing something, they appoint a blue ribbon committee or go to the U.N. or assign some Cabinet member to look into the problem and report back to the President — hoping that the issue will be forgotten by the time he reports back.

When educators are going to do nothing, they express great concern and make pious public pronouncements. They may even hold conferences, write op-ed pieces or declare a "no tolerance" policy. But they are still not going to do anything that is likely to stop bullying.

Continue reading Thomas Sowell…

The Hoover Institution has launched a page on Scribd to provide users—the general public—with the ability to preview, purchase, and browse a variety of Hoover Institution books, journals, essays, and other research material. Scribd aims “to liberate the written word, to connect people with the information and ideas that matter most to them,” said Tammy Nam, senior vice president of marketing and programming at Scribd. Our Scribd page already highlights some of the Institution’s newest publications. The information is easy to access, and Scribd’s more than sixty-five million users can share what they’re reading with their friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. In addition, the Recent Activity feature on Scribd keeps followers informed about Hoover authors’ appearances in print and media.