{"id":805,"date":"2016-01-07T12:15:37","date_gmt":"2016-01-07T12:15:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/conservativehistorian.com\/?page_id=805"},"modified":"2020-10-09T16:14:45","modified_gmt":"2020-10-09T16:14:45","slug":"blog","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativehistorian.com\/blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent Articles – The Supreme Court of the United States: Selected History"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court of the United States: Selected History<\/strong><\/p>\n

September 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n

In July 1990, William Brennan, one of the most liberal justices on the Supreme Court of the United States, announced his retirement. Ill health played a factor in his decision, given that he held his position since 1956. Brennan liked being part of the Court. That year, a Republican, George H.W. Bush, had the oval office and would nominate David Souter to the Court. Though Souter, at the time, was considered a solid conservative, his confirmation vote was 90-9. Neither the retirement of Brennan nor the nomination of Souter as a replacement launched a massive public response. Here is what the New York Times said in 1990 upon his confirmation, \u201cThe balloting came after nearly four hours of speeches on the Senate floor in which supporters said they were confident Judge Souter would preserve fundamental constitutional values, while opponents said too much was not known about his positions on critical issues like abortion.\u201d Contrast that language with that of the New York Times in 2020, 30 years after Souter’s choice. \u201cIn choosing Judge Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the president opted for the candidate most likely to thrill his conservative base and outrage his liberal opponents, drawing sharp lines on some of the most divisive disputes in American life like abortion, religion, guns and health care at a time when voters have already begun to cast ballots in the contest for the White House.\u201d<\/p>\n

To emphasize the difference, most Americans were barely aware of who Brennan was in 1990. In 2020, the press filmed\u00a0Barret and her family getting in the car and going to the nomination announcement<\/em>. Something has changed.<\/p>\n

In article III, section 2 of the Constitution, the role of the Supreme Court is summarized in just sixteen momentous words: \u201cThe judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution.\u201d Yet it was in Article I, intentionally positioned for preeminence, that Congress’s powers vis a vis the Judiciary are spelled out. Article I, Section 8, enumerates Congress’ powers, and then empowers Congress “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers.\u201d So, note the contrast between \u201cmake all laws\u201d and the absence of any such language within article III. These words clarify that it is not the executive’s purview nor even the Judiciary to make laws. But in the latter case, it was to decide whether such laws emanating from Congress were constitutional. One of the progressives’ goals, especially in the early 1900s, was to extend the Constitution into the form of a \u201cliving\u201d Constitution. This movement accelerated under two presidents.<\/p>\n

The first was Teddy Roosevelt, who envisioned the executive’s power to extend into all things. The second was Woodrow Wilson, the first president to reject the concept of the Constitution. Then, just as the executive expanded in the early part of the 1900s, the Judiciary’s power grew in the middle of the century, especially under the activist Warren Court. The original meaning was for the Supreme Court to align its decisions regarding whether they are constitutional, and whether they fit the framework. Unfortunately, in recent years we have seen this power distorted to the point where all things now come under a judicial decision. This change is most represented in the concept of Supreme Court justice decisions. First, two eminently conservative nominees, Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas were assailed for different reasons and the ultimate goal to provide a more moderate voice. Bork did not assume the Justices robes, but instead, Anthony Kennedy, a moderate swing justice, did. Clarence Thomas, however, did survive a chaotic nomination, with Joe Biden as Judicial Chair of the Committee. The goal was to continuance a more progressive court in which decisions, once left to the legislature, would not be determined more often in the Judiciary.<\/p>\n

A recent history of Supreme Court voting practices:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Nominee <\/strong><\/td>\nWhen Assumed Office<\/strong><\/td>\nParty Appointed<\/strong><\/td>\nVote<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
David Souter<\/td>\n1990<\/td>\nRepublican<\/td>\n90-9<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Clarence Thomas<\/td>\n1991<\/td>\nRepublican<\/td>\n52-48<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Ruth Bader Ginsburg<\/td>\n1993<\/td>\nDemocrat<\/td>\n96-3<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Stephen Breyer<\/td>\n1994<\/td>\nDemocrat<\/td>\n87-9<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
John Roberts<\/td>\n2005<\/td>\nRepublican<\/td>\n78-22<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Samuel Alito<\/td>\n2006<\/td>\nRepublican<\/td>\n58-42<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Sonia Sotomayor<\/td>\n2009<\/td>\nDemocrat<\/td>\n68-32<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Elena Kagan<\/td>\n2010<\/td>\nDemocrat<\/td>\n63-37<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Neil Gorsuch<\/td>\n2017<\/td>\nRepublican<\/td>\n54-45<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Brett Kavanaugh<\/td>\n2018<\/td>\nRepublican<\/td>\n50-48<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

As the past 30 years, the continuing ideological narrative championed initially been by the Democrats but now taken up Republicans is to treat Supreme Court Justices not based on the judicial and legal acumen, but rather how they would vote along political lines. The current era of politicization of the Supreme Court began with Robert Bork. Still, in 2020 it has evolved to the point where Supreme Court Justices’ approval, almost a routine exercise a few years, assuming the right legal qualifications, has now become a circus of grandstanding Senators, fear tactics, and downright spurious attacks.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>As with so much of the Constitution, the goal was not creating a government that would rule the people, but rather a government limited and constrained so that it would not rule the people, but rather quite the reverse. In The Federalist Number 78, Alexander Hamilton addressed this concept in his vision for the Judiciary. \u201cThis independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill humors, which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjunctures, sometimes disseminate among the people themselves, and which, though they speedily give place to better information, and more deliberate reflection, have a tendency.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

By \u201cIll humors,\u201d Hamilton suggested that \u201cthe courts of justice are to be considered the bulwarks of a limited Constitution against legislative encroachments.\u201d Sometimes the founders are seen as distant figures wearing funny clothes and, according to individual lights of the left, obsessed with their aggrandizement, including the ownership of slaves. Instead, these men wholly understood the grasping and pernicious nature of men. They knew that the best way for ambitious people to garner power over their fellow humans was through governmental fiat. Knowing this, the founders constructed a system to rein the natural avaricious of their fellow Americans, and the Judiciary was to be one of the primary bulwarks within that system. Again, not to expand the government, but rather to put a limit upon it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>For Hamilton, one of the critical aspects of this independence was a permanent tenure of office. Looking at the legislature of 2020, which has abrogated its most fundamental powers and responsibilities, it is no wonder that the Judiciary has grown in importance. Part of that lies in the legislative\u2019s continued need to get reelected, which leads to two outcomes: Congresspeople will avoid controversial votes, and that they spend their energies on reelection rather than legislation. Thus, proving Hamilton\u2019s contention of tenure of office for the Judiciary but especially the Supreme Court.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

George Will once said of the fourth Chief of the Supreme Court, John Marshall of Virginia, \u201cMarshall is the most important American never to have been president. Because of his shaping effect on the young Republic’s soft wax, his historical importance is greater than that of all but two presidents \u2014 Washington and Lincoln. Without Marshall’s landmark opinions defining the national government’s powers, the government Washington founded might not have acquired competencies \u2014 and society might not have developed the economic sinews \u2014 sufficient to enable Lincoln to preserve the Union.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Much as Washington created the limitations of the presidency’s power and established the crucial term limit that was codified in the 25th Amendment, Marshall made the nexus for what would become the Supreme Court. And arguably, his most famous ruling was in Marbury vs. Madison of 1803.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Historian\u00a0Melvin I. Urofsky, writing for Britannica.com, notes, \u201c the\u00a0U.S. Supreme Court\u00a0first declared an act of\u00a0Congress\u00a0unconstitutional, thus establishing the doctrine of\u00a0judicial review. The Court\u2019s opinion, written by Chief\u00a0Justice\u00a0John Marshall, is considered one of the foundations of U.S.\u00a0constitutional law\u2026In one stroke, Marshall managed to establish the power of the Court as the ultimate arbiter of the Constitution, to\u00a0chastise\u00a0the Jefferson administration for its failure to obey the law, and to avoid having the Court\u2019s authority challenged by the administration.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>The Dispatch columnist David French adds, \u201cJust like that, Marshall recognized and established judicial review, the authority of the Supreme Court\u2014as a necessary implication of Article III of the Constitution investing it with \u201cthe judicial Power of the United States\u201d\u2014to strike down statutes, regulations and other governmental enactments that conflict with the Constitution.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Will goes onto to note, \u201cMarshall made constitutional law a bulwark of the sanctity of contracts, the bedrock of America’s enterprise culture. And by protecting the private rights essential to aspirational individualism, Marshall’s Court legitimized an inequality \u2014 not of opportunity but outcomes \u2014 compatible with a republic’s values.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If Marbury vs. Madison was among the most critical and successful decisions having come before the Court, two decisions, one in the middle of the 19th century, and the second coming at the end, also noted the historical harm that Supreme Court decisions might enact.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The first of these was the Dred Scott decision of 1857.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Formally\u00a0Dred Scott<\/em>\u00a0v.\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0Sandford<\/em>, a legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on March 6, 1857, ruled (7\u20132), with Chief Justice Roger Taney writing for the majority, that a slave who had resided in a free state and territory (where slavery was prohibited) was not thereby entitled to his freedom; that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States; and that the Missouri Compromise (1820), which had declared free all territories west of Missouri and north of latitude 36\u00b030\u2032, was unconstitutional. Here is the actual transcript of the decision, \u201cA free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a “citizen” within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.\u201d This conclusion essentially meant that African Americans would have no rights and justify Scott’s return to slavery. In his 2019 work entitled \u201cDred Scott, An Inside Story<\/em>,\u201d historian David T Hardy notes that Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Southerner and former slave owner believed that the Dred Scott ruling would alleviate the conflict North and South. \u201cIf anything, he saw the opinion he would read as forestalling that very conflict.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But like all of the presidents of the 1950s, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan, it was the appeasement of the South that led to the formation of the Republican Party and a candidate who would unequivocally end slavery. In Buchanan’s case, Hardy notes that he was in collusion with a pro-slavery, fellow Pennsylvanian named Grier. Buchanan was not just lobbying for a specific opinion, but the broad one issued by the Court.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Taney knew of this political alliance. In this case, Taney, and SOTUS, to end a political divide, merely widened the gap.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>In 1896 the Court, consisting of eight Northerners and one Kentuckian, handed down a decision on\u00a0Plessy v. Ferguson, by a seven-to-one majority, with one judge abstaining, to advance the \u201cseparate but equal\u201d doctrine for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>As Brittanica.com noted about this case, \u201cWriting for the majority, Associate Justice\u00a0Henry Billings Brown\u00a0rejected Plessy\u2019s arguments that the act of not allowing Plessy, who was 7\/8 white and 1\/8 black, of riding in the white\u2019s only section of a train car, violated the\u00a0Thirteenth Amendment\u00a0(1865) to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited\u00a0slavery, and the\u00a0Fourteenth Amendment, which granted full and\u00a0equal rights\u00a0of citizenship to African Americans. The Separate Car Act did not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment, according to Brown, because it did not reestablish slavery or constitute a \u201cbadge\u201d of slavery or servitude. In reaching this conclusion, Brown relied on the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling in the\u00a0Civil Rights Cases<\/em>\u00a0(1883), which found that racial discrimination against African Americans in inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement \u201cimposes no badge of slavery or involuntary servitude\u2026but at most infringes rights which are protected from State aggression by the 14th Amendment.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In the book,\u00a0Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation Paperback \u2013 Illustrated<\/em>, published in 2020, writer Steve Luxenberg notes, \u201cThe Plessy case underscores a central fact about the Supreme Court: their decision cannot be viewed in isolation. They follow a string of earlier rulings, and they precede a fresh set of issues that sometimes can be foreseen, but never guaranteed.\u201d The unforeseen result of this is known to most American schoolchildren, a white favoring caste system, the legal definition of African Americans as \u201cinferior,\u201d and Jim Crow. What is an interesting side note is that the lone dissent came from the one Southerner on the Court, John Marshal Harlan who believed that Plessy V. Ferguson was \u201cas pernicious as Dred Scott,\u201d determining that this was in fact, a clear violation of the 14th amendment by creating different classes of citizens?<\/span><\/p>\n

Roosevelt Court Packing\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>On March 9, 1937, just after his landslide election win over Alf Landon, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt went on the radio. He stated the following in regards to the Supreme Court nearly finding his New Deal unconstitutional, \u201cThe change of one vote would have thrown all the affairs of this great Nation back into hopeless chaos. In effect, four Justices ruled that the right under a private contract to exact a pound of flesh was more sacred than the main objectives of the Constitution to establish an enduring Nation.\u201d One might argue that it was the New Deal that was throwing the Nation into chaos. Still, Roosevelt was ever the master of narrative, \u201cWe also became convinced that the only way to avoid a repetition of those dark days was to have a government with the power to prevent and to cure the abuses and the inequalities which had thrown that system out of joint.\u201d Roosevelt justified the form of wishing to avoid \u201canother great depression\u201d carefully omitting that after a full term the current one was still in full swing (and unknowing to the president at the time, would get worse in 1938).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But Roosevelt, especially after his rout of Landon, was confident enough to talk about the use of governmental power. However, those pesky justices, appointed by previous presidents, and that pernicious Constitution were in the way of going even further than during the last term. \u201cThe Courts, however, have cast doubts on the ability of the elected Congress to protect us against catastrophe.\u201d Taking over utilities and farming, imposing harsh regulations on business, and determining prices in an ad hoc manner was not enough. \u201cThe Court in addition to the proper use of its judicial functions has improperly set itself up as a third house of the Congress – a super-legislature, as one of the justices has called it – reading into the Constitution words and implications which are not there, and which were never intended to be there.\u201d Though this was not true, the Court was repealing the New Deal\u2019s extra-constitutional directives, but not even Roosevelt could say he was working outside the founding document. So, Roosevelt was not going to play within the game; he was going to change the rules. \u201cwhenever a Judge or Justice of any Federal Court has reached the age of seventy and does not avail himself of the opportunity to retire on a pension, a new member shall be appointed by the President then in office, with the approval, as required by the Constitution, of the Senate of the United States.\u201d Since six justices were 70 at the time, viola, six new justices, all FDR appointees.\u00a0<\/span>Problem solved; Constitution gutted.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Barbara A. Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia\u2019s Miller Center. \u201cCongress and the people viewed FDR\u2019s ill-considered proposal as an undemocratic power grab,\u201d she says. \u201cThe chief justice (Charles Evans Hughes) testified before Congress that the Court was up to date in its work, countering Roosevelt\u2019s stated purpose that the old justices needed help with their caseload.\u201d \u201cIt was never realistic that this plan would pass,\u201d Perry says. \u201cRoosevelt badly miscalculated reverence for the Court and its independence.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately for us in 2020, times change. When a supreme court justice was appointed by Presidents Harding, Hoover, or even Roosevelt, there were no mass protests, senators making horrific allegations, and no sexual violence accusations. Therefore, when Roosevelt tried his court-packing, the public saw it for what it was, abrogation of the separation of powers. Today it might be seen as the way to governmental justice by those on the left and not set aside of limited government.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Roosevelt was not always at odds with his SOTUS. Cases such as Plessy and, as we will see, Brown V. Board of education get a lot of light. One that does not, showing the challenge with the judicial restraint theory, is\u00a0Korematsu v. United States.\u00a0In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, allowing the U.S. military to declare parts of the U.S. as military areas and exclude specific groups of people. The practical application was that many Japanese-Americans were forced from their homes and placed in internment camps during World War II. Frank Korematsu, a U.S.-born citizen of Japanese descent, knowingly defied the order to be relocated and was arrested and convicted. His case went to the Supreme Court, where it was decided that exclusion orders based on Executive Order 9066 were constitutional. Therefore, his conviction was upheld.<\/span><\/p>\n

The majority essentially stated that wartime exigencies precluded individual rights, something that even the lawyer Lincoln also supported. But as dissenting Justice Robert Jackson noted, such an \u201cemergency\u201d could be used in pernicious ways, as it was in this case. It is also an insightful piece of historiography to note that so many historians condemn the apparent racism in Dred Scott and Plessy’s decisions, but rarely mention Korematsu. Better to keep Roosevelt and his progressivism away from the shame of the racism in his decision. If historians were honest about Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal, failure at Pearl Harbor, the inability to prepare his successor, and <\/span>decisions such as Korematsu, he would not occupy the high perch of acclaim<\/span> that he now enjoys<\/span>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka<\/span><\/em>\u00a0was a unanimous decision of the Warren Court in 1954 that determined that children’s racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. In some regards,\u00a0Brown v. Board of Education<\/em>\u00a0was the beginning of the civil rights movement and helped establish the precedent that \u201cseparate-but-equal\u201d education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all. Arguing on behalf of ending segregation, Thurgood Marshall would later assume a place as the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court in 1967.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But as rightly celebrated, and necessary as this law was and is, Brown ushered in an era in which the Justices began the activism that was anathema to later conservative justices such as Antonin Scalia. David French adds, \u201cIn a series of decisions, the Court established precedents that, among other things, ended school prayer, ended daily Bible readings, blocked displays of the Ten Commandments, and banned the teaching of creationism. Many of those practices dated back to the dawn of the American public school system. At a stroke, they were gone.\u201d Essentially the protestant, non-governmental religious institutes were put on notice that a new religion was in town, and that was the federal government.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Yet the debate between activist and restraint can be positioned negatively by some of these cases. Plessy v. Ferguson could be argued to be judicial restraint based on the fact that the law supported several racial segregation laws at the time. Dred Scott could be claimed to be activist because Taney used it to make rulings not directly related to the case. In many cases, Conservatives may favor activism if the law supports their political view at the time. But inarguably, one of the most activist cases in U.S. History was Roe vs. Wade. A law that is controversial but it\u2019s possibly overturning has fueled the fever dreams of court activists, and subsequently driven organizations donor drives for two generations.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Roe Vs. Wade\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Roe v. Wade<\/span><\/em>\u00a0is a 1973 lawsuit that famously led to the Supreme Court ruling on women’s right to an abortion. Jane Roe, an unmarried pregnant woman, filed suit on behalf of herself and others to challenge Texas abortion laws. A Texas doctor joined Roe’s lawsuit, arguing that the state’s abortion laws were too vague for doctors to follow. He had previously been arrested for violating the statute.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the time, abortion was illegal in Texas unless it was done to save the mother’s life. It was a crime to get an abortion or to attempt one.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>In\u00a0Roe v. Wade<\/em>, the Supreme Court decided two important things:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  • The United States Constitution provides a fundamental “right to privacy” that protects a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion.<\/span><\/li>\n
  • But the abortion right is not absolute. It must be balanced against the government’s interests in protecting women’s health and prenatal life.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    \u00a0<\/span>Writing for the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL) blog, author Paul Stark notes, \u201cRoe\u00a0<\/em>is an epic constitutional mistake. Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion claimed that the “right of privacy” found in the “liberty” protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is “broad enough to encompass” a fundamental right to abortion. There is no reason to think that’s true.\u201d But arguably, the best reasoning for the ongoing problems with Roe, nearly 50 years later, is this \u201cRoe\u00a0<\/em>is undemocratic.\u00a0Roe\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Doe v. Bolton<\/em>\u00a0together struck down the democratically decided abortion laws of all 50 states. They replaced them with a national policy of abortion-for-any-reason, whether the people like it or not. Of course, the Court may properly invalidate statutes inconsistent with the Constitution (which is the highest law). But\u00a0Roe\u00a0<\/em>lacked any such justification,\u201d adds Stark. In the case of same-sex marriage, which the Court found constitutional in Obergefell v. Hodges, decided in 2015, several states, including California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and New York, had already enacted laws. Had Obergefell not existed, legal same-sex marriage would have marched across the country.\u00a0<\/span>In the case of Obergefell, the Supreme was codifying state law. In the case of Roe, the Court was imposing its rule on the states.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    This writer has the same issue with Roe v. Wade as the country itself. Part of my conservative makeup is a strong streak of libertarianism, which would support Roe. But I know of Kermit Gosnell and know of some of the procedures therein. Add to that the typical leftist overreach in terms of the Hyde Amendment’s abrogation and the certitude that not only should abortion be on-demand, but that all taxpayers must pay for it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \u00a0<\/span>The full politicization of the Supreme Court, as we understand that today, began with Bork. On July 1, 1987, just 45 minutes after Ronald Reagan announced his nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court; Ted Kennedy said in the Senate that Bork\u2019s confirmation would mean that \u201cwomen would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens\u2019 doors in midnight raids, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government.\u201d This charge was patent nonsense, but it illustrated the fear that many liberals had of Bork. What makes the timing interesting is that less than a year before Bork\u2019s nomination, Reagan installed Antonin Scalia on the Court with a 98-0 Senate confirmation. And given a distinct similarity between Scalia\u2019s and Bork\u2019s decision-making philosophy, this was far less about the erosion of rights with Bork than a naked fear on the part of liberals that a Scalia and Bork tandem would dominate the Berger Court. “The nomination changed everything, maybe forever,” says Tom Goldstein, publisher of the popular SCOTUSblog, which extensively covers the Supreme Court. “Republicans nominated this brilliant guy to move the law in this dramatically more conservative direction. Liberal groups turned around and blocked him precisely because of those views. Their fight legitimized scorched-earth ideological wars over nominations at the Supreme Court, and to this day, both sides remain completely convinced they were right. The upshot is that we have this ridiculous system now where nominees shut up and don’t say anything that might signal what they think.”<\/span><\/p>\n

    \u00a0<\/span>But of course, it got worse than that. Bork was attacked on the grounds of his legal decisions, but Republican nominees Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh were attacked regarding their previously unblemished personal conduct. In the latter case, a single, alleged instance of sexual assault was made by Christine Blasey Ford. Ford, who believed the alleged incident occurred 35 years before the nomination, could not substantiate either the exact location or the exact time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Additionally, none of Ford\u2019s friends, present at the time, could corroborate her story. None of these scurrilous attacks have been leveled at Democratic nominees, but in the age of Trump and eye for an eye politics, it is merely a matter of time.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \u00a0<\/span>So, what do all of these tales do to inform in 2020? First, the Supreme Court was devised and acted best when it is divorced from and serves as a check of the other two branches’ daily political machinations. This is not to say that the Justices are not \u201cpolitical.\u201d The judicial is a branch of government. Potential justices are nominated by an elected official and confirmed, or not, by 100 elected officials. To say they should keep the politics out of it is Ludacris. Instead, it is the daily political calculations that are harmful. This is precisely why they are not directly elected and why they, unlike elected officials, should not be term-limited.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    The Conservative Historian is a strong advocate of term limits but for elected officials, especially the legislative. But these branches do two specific things, so the rules should vary accordingly. Arguably the best case of this was Chief Justice John Roberts rewriting of the Affordable Care Act to make it legal by declaring that the law was, in fact, a tax, something the Obama administration would not own up to. Roberts did this not as a check on the legislative and executive but rather to support what he believed was the popular will.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Today the Affordable Care Act is a shell of itself. The Republicans would eliminate it, and the Democrats wish to replace it with something more invasive. Regardless, Roberts was wrong for intervening for the reasons given. As Will notes, \u201cThe decision also resulted from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.\u2019s embrace of the doctrine that courts, owing to vast deference to the purposes of the political branches, are obligated to do whatever is required to make a law efficient, regardless of how the law is written.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Second, when the Supreme Court itself turns from a review committee to on that makes decisions that affect, as Hamilton put it, purse and sword, it is detrimental to all three branches. But why would they feel compelled to try to bring efficiency or write laws themselves? The change of the past 30 years brings us to the difference between Souter and Amy Coney Barret, the answer that has led the Nation from a 90-9 vote to our current vote along party lines or, in the case of Kavanaugh, barely voted in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    As French notes of the power of judicial review, \u201cThey are also a consequence of failures at other levels of government, especially the legislative branch. As the Supreme Court has advanced over the past half-century, deciding ever more American life questions, Congress has retreated, steadily and increasingly abdicating its constitutional role. Progress against today\u2019s polarization over the Supreme Court does not just depend on what the justices do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

    I would add the word \u201csolely\u201d before “depend,” but the gist is the same. The ACA was a poorly written law that even Speaker Nancy Pelosi candidly and brazenly stated that they \u201chad to pass it to see what\u2019s in it.\u201d\u00a0That and 400 or so abdications to the executive, and there is plenty of room for an ambitious justice or one who wishes to avoid chaos, plenty of room for intervention. And the ACA was one of the few controversial laws that Congress has attempted. Everything from immigration to the budget to entitlement reform has wallowed as Congresspeople are too concerned about making the wrong decision has led to no conclusion.\u00a0<\/span>But the Supreme Court does make decisions, hence part of the focus.<\/p>\n

    Third, decisions should be viewed as likely but never guaranteed for all of the chaos around the nomination process. David Souter became a trusted liberal vote. John Roberts became an ardent activist court member when he rewrote portions of the ACA to make it legal. And even Gorsuch, an ordinarily conservative vote, went against the conservatives to decide that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay, lesbian, and transgender employees from discrimination based on sex. Several Republican justices move to the center. Liberal appointees tend to stay in their lane, but even here, there are disagreements. The blog Opinion ran a piece, written by Jerret Alexander entitled, \u201cIt\u2019s time to end the liberal love affair with Ruth Bader Ginsburg,\u201d in which the author states, \u201cthe Court also ruled to allow the construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline underneath the Appalachian Trail and to allow the Trump administration to speed up the deportation of asylum-seekers. Both these decisions saw all five conservative justices joined by Breyer and Ginsburg, who is often lionized as the face of the judicial resistance to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Despite what the mugs and tote bags on Etsy might have you believe, Ginsburg isn\u2019t the most dependable liberal vote on the Court.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \u00a0<\/span>The answer is simple and yet near impossible to achieve. As long as government, and by extension, the Supreme Court, furthers its powers in everyday Americans’ lives, it will be antagonistic to the deterioration of our Republic. As long as individuals are content to cede their rights and common sense to government, the Supreme Court battles will continue in this contentious nature. As long as Congress, with its residents more concerned about primary challenges on their flanks than with governance, response to the day’s issues, and writing laws, there will be people trying to influence a court of lifetime appointments. And that can be done only at the beginning, at the nomination process. It is challenging to get a population increasingly dependent on and concern with influencing the government to change. But what we can do is a term limit Congress and send people to Washington who wants to right law than appear on CNN or Fox.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    The Four Pillars of the Modern Academy<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Is this Institution Necessary?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    August 2020\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

    In the newspaper, the Greek Reporter, an article written by\u00a0Nick Kampouris\u00a0entitled, \u201cThe Platonic Academy of Athens: The World\u2019s First University,\u201d states, \u201c\u03a4he Platonic Academy, or simply,\u201d The Academy\u201d, was a famous school in ancient Athens founded by Plato in 428 BCE and located a couple of miles outside the ancient city named Akademeia, after the legendary hero, Akademos.\u201d The article goes onto to describe the Academy in Plato\u2019s day, \u201cThe Academy was not an educational institution as we know it in modern times, but because it had the characteristics of a school and covered a wide variety of topics such as philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, politics, physics and more, it is considered to be the first University in the entire world.\u201d<\/p>\n

    In an article written by Chelsea Shieh for Asia Society, the author states, \u201ci<\/strong>t may sound incredible, but China\u2019s formal education system was established nearly two millennia ago. The imperial education and examination system in China is estimated to have been founded as early as the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE).\u201d<\/p>\n

    According to the website Muslim Heritage, in an article written\u00a0by Subhi Al-Azzawi, and entitled \u201cThe Abbasids\u2019 House of Wisdom in Baghdad\u201d stated, \u201cThe Caliph Haroun Al-Rasheed (also written Harun Al-Rashid), who reigned for 23 years from 786-809 CE, built a magnificent Scientific Academy (Majma\u2019 \u2018Ilmi) in which was housed a huge bookstore (Khizanat Kutub) containing manuscripts and books about various subjects in the arts and the sciences and different languages. In this academy, translators, scientists, scribes, authors, men of letters, writers, copyists, and others used to meet every day for translation, reading, writing, scribing, discourse, dialogue, and discussion.\u201d<\/p>\n

    The University of Bologna website, \u201cThe origins of the University of Bologna go way back,\u201d is considered the oldest university in the Western world. Its history is intertwined with the great names of science and literature; it is a keystone and a point of reference for European culture. In 1088: the Bologna \u201cStudium\u201d was founded by students and students. It is the oldest university in the Western world and the oldest continuing university of all time.<\/p>\n

    The United States University system is built not on decades, nor centuries of tradition, but millennia.\u00a0And not just a Western tradition, but one that comes from all parts of the globe. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 20 million Americans attended a two or 4-year university or college in any given year.<\/p>\n

    In one of the more recent studies of Universities in America, U.S. News, and World Report, \u201cThere were 4,298 degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the U.S. as of the 2017-2018 school year.\u201d In another study by the National Center for Education Statistics that in 1980, there were 4,360. The total number of universities has declined at a rate of one and a half degree universities over 40 years. But this number drops when highly specific universities are considered. For example, this closure list includes the Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Chicago, IL, and the American Beauty Academy in Wheaton, MD. When the For-Profit schools, who were intensely targeted for destruction by the Obama Administration Education Department, are considered, the closure shrinks even more. Writing for Reason Magazine, journalist A. Barton Hinkle wrote in 2016, \u201cThe Education Department has just imposed the death penalty on ITT Technical Institutes, even though the school chain has not been accused wrongdoing. The department carried out the extrajudicial killing by bureaucratic fiat, imposing stringent financial requirements and declining federal aid to new students. The result: 40,000 students left hanging, 8,000 people suddenly without a job, and huge taxpayer liability for federal student loans.\u201d<\/p>\n

    So once the focused vocational schools and the For-Profit institutions are removed, we are left with a handful of traditional, non-profit universities that ever close. They do happen, such as Wheelock College in Boston in 2018 and The College of New Rochelle in 2019. In the case of the latter, financial chicanery played a part. As is often the case, it is not just too many colleges and few students, or even a lack of tuition money now that the federal government has stepped in.\u00a0Instead, colleges often fail because they are just poorly run. Yet these closing are still rare.<\/p>\n

    Contrast the incredible amber-like preservation of colleges with the dynamism of business, \u201cOver 627,000 new businesses open each year, according to SBA estimates. At the same time, about 595,000 businesses close each year (latest statistics as of 2008). The number of new start-ups has fluctuated since 2004, rising to a peak in 2006 with 670,000 openings before declining over the next couple of years. As of 2008, the United States had over 29 million small businesses.\u201d<\/p>\n

    It is not just the preservation of the colleges themselves but the fundamental pedagogy that has endured over the centuries. In work entitled Hypatia Teaching at Alexandria, British artist Robert Trewick Bone, pain in the 1700s, shows the late 4th Century Alexandrian professor lecturing a group of students. If one were to update the format and the clothes, it would not be dissimilar to today\u2019s classroom settings. The 11th century Italian attending Bologna might not see today\u2019s basic teaching methods as different from his time. Since the 1880s, humanity has effectively eliminated famine and disease, including COVID, from 90% of the population. The automobile, the airplane, cement roads, refrigerators, ovens and microwaves, and air conditioning (thank god because it is 91 degrees as I write this) have all been introduced. But university teaching methodology is mostly the same.<\/p>\n

    So why are colleges thus exempt from the usual disruptions and improvements that affect other aspects of life?\u00a0It is because there is a perception of college that is unique and seen, especially in today\u2019s world, as absolutely indispensable.\u00a0We can reject rotary phones in favor of smart technology, say goodbye to Sears, department stores, and shopping malls in support of online purchasing. We can use our smartphone device to conjure an automobile in minutes, abrogating the need for even a driver\u2019s license or a car. But we preserve college.<\/p>\n

    Today\u2019s university exists primarily for four reasons: to prepare and position students for postgraduate careers, for an in-person, social experience, representing the transition from parent\u2019s homes to full independence, the offer of collegiate sports, and learning critical thinking skills that could be applied to vocations, or any aspects of life.<\/p>\n

    In a piece written last month entitled Defund the University, Bryan Caplan, and his\u00a0The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money<\/u><\/em>\u00a0was featured. Essentially the book is about the first pillar of the university, that this improves the ability to obtain a job and launch a career. The problem is that this is not accurate; as Caplan notes, education is not about getting a job, signaling to potential employers your perceived value, and limiting the benefit of those who do not possess certain degrees. Caplan notes, \u201cIf you want to get the best education in the world for free, you can just move to Princeton and start attending classes unofficially. There\u2019s almost no effort made to stop you. You just won\u2019t get a diploma, which makes it nearly pointless because college is more about impressing people than learning useful info.\u201d Caplan also asks a simple question. Do you want the education and not the degree, or the degree and not the education? 99% of truthful respondents will answer \u201cthe degree\u201d because they understand that potential employers will not ask what they learned in their stats class, much less what they learned in Queer Intersectional Studies, but they will surely note, before the interview, whether you have a degree. Meaning the actual content of the college curriculum is beside the point.<\/p>\n

    Now certain professions do need their undergraduates and some postgraduates, to have basic training. Engineering, nursing, and business degrees are just a sampling of these types of crucial practices. The challenge is that colleges ladle onto these majors requirements that parents and students have to subsidize (or taxpayer-paid subsidies pay) for classes that will have no meaning to their professions. Marquette University of Milwaukee, WI, has a well-regarded nursing program. To obtain a bachelor\u2019s of science degree, nursing, a student needs to take courses in English, Theology, Philosophy, and Core courses that are fundamentally about ethics, morality, and society.<\/p>\n

    According to the NCES, \u201cOf the 1.8 million bachelor\u2019s degrees awarded in 2015\u201316, about 331,000 (18 percent) were in STEM fields.\u201d Technically, business training is not STEM curricula. But in business school programs, two things prevail. Regardless of whether you wish to track to marketing or finance, you have to take both, and sales, and I.T., and operations, and strategy. These additional classes are in addition to the aforementioned English or History class that will have absolutely no impact on your business career.<\/p>\n

    Second, the actual information imparted in your business class will likely have no impact on your real business career. Villanova and their celebrated business school describe their training, \u201cThe Villanova School of Business develops business leaders for a better world through the Augustinian values of truth, community, caring and leading through service.\u201d What exactly any of those values has to do with identifying markets, building innovative products, streamlining operations, designing efficient I.T. systems, identifying and hiring the best talent, managing the myriad of legal issues, and managing a group of large egos on a team, is very hard to see.<\/p>\n

    One other factor unknown to those Greeks, Chinese, Arabs, and Italians who pioneered the academy is the impact of online learning.\u00a0\u00a0Though the thought of Plato, with his narcissism, on the Internet should strike fear, he would have embraced the possibilities. Why confine his efforts to teaching Athenians when he could deliver his Philosopher as King messages to Thebans, Corinthians, and even Spartans. And one of the points of universities was to serve as a location for knowledge. But what if knowledge is everywhere and nowhere? Writing for the Smithsonian, Subhash Kak states, \u201cAs a professor who researches artificial intelligence and offers distance learning courses, I can say that online education is a disruptive challenge for which colleges are ill-prepared. Lack of student demand is already closing 800 out of roughly 10,000 engineering colleges in India. And online learning has put as many as half the colleges and universities in the U.S. at risk of shutting down in the next couple decades as remote students get comparable educations over the Internet \u2013 without living on campus or taking classes in person.\u201d<\/p>\n

    The second pillar of the academy is the concept of campus interaction. It is difficult to downplay this critical aspect of the university.\u00a0The ability to successfully transition from the family home to living alone is seemingly attractive. The fundamental problem is with the rest of the narrative of this piece. Without the career training, or critical thinking, what is the value to dollars spent? When a $150,000 is spent on a summer camp or giant service experience, it is not worth it. Additionally, college, going back to Plato, was never intended to serve as a child to an adult transitional point. Though colleges in one form or another have been around for millennia, the concept of perpetual adolescence is a 20th-century construct. It was not considered bizarre that Alexander commanded a third of his father\u2019s army at the age of 16 at the Battle of Chaeronea.<\/p>\n

    Romans believed that children were adults by the age of 18. The reality is that there is a substantial industry within the modern world for the continuance of adolescence. College is chief among them. The concept of parenting is a separate category because it is also a choice. There is no choice in becoming an adult. How many works of art from Shakespeare\u2019s Henry IV\u2019s Prince Hal to the 1980 Dudley Moore film\u00a0Arthur,\u00a0<\/em>or the 2011\u00a0Thor<\/em>\u00a0have featured grown children who needed to become adults? Is it not conceivable that Americans could have their children attend vocational schools or corporate internships, and spend the rest of their lives building relationships? The entire concept of putting this necessary transition on the backs of colleges and then paying a King\u2019s ransom for the privilege must be reconsidered.<\/p>\n

    The third pillar is sports.\u00a0At Stanford, as one example, the university is a strong proponent of sports and physical activity, \u201cFrom its founding in 1891, Stanford University\u2019s leaders have believed that physical activity is valuable for its own sake and that vigorous exercise is complementary to the educational purposes of the university. Within this context for human development, it is the mission of Stanford Athletics to offer a wide range of high-quality programs that will encourage and facilitate all participants to realize opportunities for championship athletic participation, physical fitness, health, and well being.\u201d This all sounds good, but a more accurate statement would be that they offer a narrow range of programs. When colleges talk about college sports, they are only talking about two of them: basketball and football, as those are the only two that make money. Just to put paid to that concept, Stanford recently announced that it \u201cwill discontinue 11 of our varsity sports programs after the 2020-21 academic year: men\u2019s and women\u2019s fencing, field hockey, lightweight rowing, men\u2019s rowing, co-ed and women\u2019s sailing, squash, synchronized swimming, men\u2019s volleyball, and wrestling. If they could get away with it, colleges would consider eliminating everything but the big two. The elimination of these extraneous sports occurred even though Stanford has a $27 billion endowment. If 1\/10th of 1% were spent on sports, or $27 million, those 11 sports could be funded. In a July 15, 2020 article for National Review by Jim Geraghty, the author states, \u201cStanford is representative of perhaps 100 colleges and universities with lucrative football and basketball programs, all of which are now facing an unparalleled funding crisis as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The cancellation of the NCAA basketball tournament this March\u00a0cost schools a projected $375 million in revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Because many large colleges are part of state government, it always seemed unseemly, but logical, to note that in most states, the highest-paid state employee is not the governor or some longstanding university Chancellor who was recruited from Harvard.\u00a0Instead, it is the football or basketball coach. How much?\u00a0The University of Alabama\u2019s Nick Saban, head football coach, will make nearly $9 million. Who is number 2? The University of Auburn\u2019s head coach at almost $7 million per annum. Several of Saban\u2019s assistant coaches cross seven figures. What is the salary of the highest paid, non-sport employee? That would be David Bronner, at $699,000. Now that is a hefty salary in its own right, but Bronner is in charge of investing in the pension of hundreds of thousands of Alabama state employees. All of these people\u2019s future, including their retirement, is in Bronner\u2019s hands. Yet his salary is still 7% of Saban. And what do the players make? The real stars of the event that fans in the stadium and millions on T.V. pay to watch (Saban has not suited up in the past 40 years) get a scholarship.<\/p>\n

    These scholarships can range between $10,000 to $30,000 depending on in vs. out of state. The star running back of Alabama gets about 1\/3 of a tenth of a percent of what Saban gets. Talk about inequality! Over in the NFL, it is a little different. The highest-paid player, Patrick Mahomes, earns nearly $40 million per year. The highest-paid coach, Jon Gruden, gets a quarter of that. And since football and basketball are the only profitable sports on campus, if the players were to begin earning paychecks commiserate with the revenues generated, the system would crumble because, as we shall see later, the margins are not as big as one would think. And what are these revenues? How do universities, who have to raise tuitions, pay for this largesse continually? As Geraghty notes, \u201cESPN paid $470 million per year just for broadcast rights to the college football playoff, and as recently as the beginning of this year was said to be hammering out a $300-million-per-year deal with the Southeastern Conference to broadcast its games.\u00a0USA Today<\/u><\/em>\u00a0calculates that college football\u00a0generates at least $4.1 billion in fiscal-year revenue for the athletics departments at the 50-plus public schools in the Power Five conferences or an average of more than $78 million per school.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Why have universities made what many, myself included, is a Faustian bargain with big-time sports, \u201cAt the highest levels, college football and basketball offer fan experiences on par with the NFL or NBA? They stir campus enthusiasm, provide hours of free advertising, and of course, bring in enormous amounts of money each fall and winter, helping cover the costs of other college sports that don\u2019t bring in enormous revenues.\u201d<\/p>\n

    That last point is a shibboleth. Only the most extensive, most profitable programs, such as Alabama, can generate enough profit to subsidize other programs. Lesser (read non-SEC or Big Ten programs) such as Ohio University, \u201cBy contrast, Ohio University does not make enough from football or men\u2019s basketball to cover the losses by other sports,\u201d according to a Forbes article written by Kristi Dosh. And what is missing from any of these analyses? Any contribution from sports revenues to the other parts of the campus.\u00a0Nick Saban and his team might be able to generate over $90 million for stadium renovations and a $9 million training facility with a state of the art nutrition center, but there is very little left over for anything non-sports. The University of Alabama currently runs a debt of more than $200 million.<\/p>\n

    And for even the biggest of big-time programs, what happens when these sports are no longer able to be played in the COVID era? Armageddon essentially. That $90 million stadium sits empty, and the $9 million training facility could become Coronavirus U.<\/p>\n

    Two of the largest professional sports, baseball, and hockey have gotten along just fine without relying on colleges as their farm system. In the case of hockey, according to the NHL, \u201cToday\u2019s NHL is not the same 24-team League that existed when Commissioner Bettman took office midway through the 1992-93 season. It has grown to 31 teams, from 787 players to more than 1,000. Regular-season attendance in 1992-93 was slightly more than 14 million; this season, it will exceed 22 million. Expansion fees 25 years ago were $50 million. They are ten times that now, at $500 million — a next expansion, should it happen, would carry a fee of $650 million — and franchises today are more valuable than ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

    All of this without colleges. And one other point. We get it. Many alumni are married to the sports team. When some of these colleges can no longer tap into the piggy bank of football, where will they go for funds? If you live in Mobile Alabama but prefer to send your kid to the University of the South, you will soon find out. Why should our Mobile resident have to pay for some Crimson Tide devotee? The entire college sports complex is now facing an unprecedented disaster and is likely to take much of the university, including tuition-paying parents.<\/p>\n

    The fourth pillar was a focus on critical thinking and problem-solving. The Brookings Institute defined critical thinking as \u201cCritical thinking uses the skills or strategies that are most likely to lead to the desired outcome. It is purposeful, reasoned, and goal-directed. It is the sort of thinking we should be engaging in when deciding what and whom to believe, which of two job offers to accept, or whether vaccinations do cause autism. It is different from, but often relies upon, simple recall (e.g., what does five plus seven equal?), unsupported opinions (e.g., I like vanilla ice cream), and automated actions (e.g., stopping at a red light).\u201d<\/p>\n

    Chris Green, Associate Professor at Marshall University, puts it this way. \u201cOver the last forty years, the basic mechanisms and vocabulary of such rational argumentation have become central to higher education. At the same time, the need to demonstrate the utility of higher education has continued to rise as an even wider set of Americans gain access to it.\u201d At Kansas State, \u201cStrong critical thinking skills are important to employers and highlight the value of a degree from Kansas State University,\u201d said Pat Bosco, vice president for student life and dean. And Indiana\u2019s Purdue has a course devoted to it, \u201cThis course is designed to develop reasoning skills and analytic abilities, based on an understanding of the rules or forms and the content of good reasoning. This course will cover moral and scientific reasoning, in addition to everyday problem-solving. This course is intended primarily for students with nontechnical backgrounds.\u201d<\/p>\n

    But what is the reality of the status of critical thinking on the campus today? Derek Bok, the former President of Harvard University, claims: \u201cColleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>According to Bok, students also cannot often \u201creason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, nontechnical problems.\u201d In other words, they cannot think critically.<\/p>\n

    Richard Arum, who wrote\u00a0Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses<\/em>, a study of more than 2,300 undergraduates at colleges and universities across the country, found that many of those students improved little all, in key areas\u2014especially critical thinking. Arum states, \u201cPolicy makers and practitioners have increasingly become apprehensive about undergraduate education as there is growing evidence that individual and institutional interests and incentives are not closely aligned with a focus on undergraduate interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

    This study was released in 2013 and has been widely assailed by colleges. So more recently the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ran an update and stated, \u201cAs recently as May of 2016, professional services firms PayScale and Future Workplace\u00a0reported\u00a0that 60 percent of employers believe new college graduates lack critical thinking skills, based on their survey of over 76,000 managers and executives. Colleges and universities across the country aren\u2019t adequately teaching thinking skills, despite loudly insisting, to anyone who will listen, that they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

    So if colleges are not preparing students for future careers or are teaching critical thinking, what are they doing? They are teaching diversity and inclusion, as they define it. According to U.S. News and World Report, here is their definition, \u201cDiversity often means race, ethnicity or tribal affiliation, but also extends well beyond those factors to sexual identity and orientation, income level,\u00a0first-generation status, cultural background, and gender.\u201d On one level, this sounds like an okay thing, aside from the apparent cost. But note that what is omitted from this definition, and almost every college diversity statement, is the diversity of ideas. Skin color or sexual orientation matter, but differentiated approaches do not.<\/p>\n

    In the case of one university, Yale, there is an Office of Diversity and Inclusion, a Dean of Diversity and Faculty Development, an Office of Gender and Campus Culture, and a dizzying array of similar positions and programs. At present, more than 150 full-time staff and student representatives serve in some pro-diversity role. Again, none of these 150 people are responsible for ideas but instead skin color and sexual orientation.<\/p>\n

    In an article for the Wall Street Journal on August 2, 2019, by Yale Law, Professor Anthony Kronman, the author notes, \u201cthe transformation of diversity into a pedagogical theory has weakened our democracy by undermining the common ground of reason on which citizens must strive to meet. The significant confusion is the equation of a diversity of ideas with a diversity of race, ethnicity, and sexual preference. The hegemony of diversity has several pernicious effects. One is that it encourages minority students, and eventually all students, to think that a departure from the beliefs and sentiments associated with their group is a violation of the terms on which they were admitted to the university. The upshot is that students are lauded for the beliefs and feelings they bring to their school on account of their separate identities, rather than being reminded of what they all stand to gain by being there\u2014the inestimable privilege of joining in a rational inquiry that subjects every one of their sentiments and beliefs to the same rigorous demand for explanation and justification.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Remember that the Villanova Business School goal? This is what is written on that section, not the core university diversity section, the business school section, \u201cVSB will be a leader in creating an inclusive, equitable and diverse community that serves all members and stakeholders and reflects the university\u2019s commitment to equality, justice, and mutual respect. VSB will also seek to increase the representation of underrepresented groups across race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, socio-economic, religious, and other social identities and backgrounds.<\/p>\n

    The video of the dean of the business school talks about inclusiveness and diversity, noting that her staff has \u201cbackgrounds in this.\u201d What does this have to do with creating a profitable enterprise? Impossible to say because in no place on the entire Villanova Business Page will one see the word \u201cProfit.\u201d And just to add some fuel to the fire, Villanova stands to the right of several of these business schools because of its Catholic Augustinian ideology.<\/p>\n

    Another thought, relating to these programs, is their end goal. The ability to teach critical thinking is perpetual, but what if the United States happily achieved a post-racial society in some circles? In the case of Yale, what would those 150 people then do? Essentially, we will never become post-racial because there exists an entrenched bureaucracy that would lose income and power if that were ever to happen. Additionally, when the time came to dismantle such organizations, the cry of racism would resound, and the university presidents would buckle, as the vast majority has, to these charges. The very decency of the American people is used as a cudgel.<\/p>\n

    Imagine if black incomes closed to similar to white ones. As of 2019, there was a $15,000 annualized family gap. Or if wealth, currently around 3% for African Americans, started to close to the relative percentage of 13% matching the black population. If that were to happen, one could use an egg timer in which these same diversity advocates would pivot from incomes or wealth to STEM jobs, or CEOs, or workers in Caterpillar\u2019s Aurora, IL plant where only 50 out of the 800 workers are black. That would be used to show a racist attitude that needs to be fixed. By whom? By the very diversity workers now so endemic in Universities for one.<\/p>\n

    Regarding critical thinking, As Kronman goes on to state, \u201cToday our colleges and universities are doing a poor job of meeting this need, and the idea of diversity is at least partly to blame. It has become the basis of an illiberal and antirational academic cult that undermines the spirit of self-reliance and the commitment to truth on which higher education, but the whole of our democracy, depends.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Colleges do not fundamentally help with the vast majority of jobs and careers. Universities are not crucial in providing a new or unique social platform. Other sports leagues seem to survive and prosper without colleges.\u00a0And colleges do not provide critical thinking. Instead, they substitute leftist indoctrination in place of rigorous academics.\u00a0We always hear about a raging desire to transform this and transform that. It is just curious why the whirlwind of transformation still seems to stop at the door of the academy. The reason is that the left already knows the answer, and that is, we no longer need the university system.<\/p>\n

    Heroes, History, and the Woke Left<\/strong><\/p>\n

    August 2020<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

    In the\u00a0Iliad<\/em>, the epic poem by Homer, we are introduced to the age of heroes. And foremost among them is the great Achilles, \u201cbeloved by heaven,\u201d who says to his patron goddess Athena, \u201cfor the gods ever hear the prayers of him that obeys them.\u201d And In his introduction to the Barnes & Noble, leather edition of the\u00a0Iliad<\/em>, Michael Dirda writes of the great Achilles, \u201cWhile sulking, the killing machine diverts himself playing on a stolen lyre and singing the feats of heroes.\u201d Even the heroic, or semi-heroic, Achilles wants to sing of heroes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Heroes and heroism are an indelible part of history. At the beginning of civilizations, many tales involve them: the Sumerian Gilgamesh, the aforementioned Greek Achilles, or the Anglo Saxon Beowulf. What is also endemic about these tales is the notable flaws of the heroes. Gilgamesh ends indirectly killing his best friend by violating the will of the gods. As compared to Hector, the real hero of the Iliad, Achilles comes across more like a petulant teenager than a heroic protagonist. And in Beowulf, Hrothgar preaches to Beowulf against the sin of pride. Why would Beowulf choose to fight the monster Grendel without weapons? Because he is a borderline narcissist. These heroes have one thing in common; their storytellers knew how fast heroes could become arrogant pricks.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    History\u2019s heroes have always continued to depend on the writer and the reader, more than the figures themselves.\u00a0To Republic era Romans, the hero of the age was Alexander of Macedon, who had conquered the Persian Empire, and more, by the age of 33. For the militaristic Romans, there could be no higher standard. Certainly not the Carthaginian Hannibal, who had the temerity to be better than the Romans at their own game.\u00a0<\/span>Later, Julius Caesar became the model Roman based on his militaristic success. Still, for the Gauls, it was Vercingetorix martyred for the cause of freedom (!), or the ability of his native Averni to lord it over the rest of the Gauls. Ashoka, once rediscovered, took on heroic aspects in India. Han Xin, principle general of Liu Bang, helped the latter establish the Han Dynasty.\u00a0And then there are more colloquial heroes such as the Arab Khalid ibn al-Walid, or the \u201csword of god,\u201d and the Spanish Ed Cid. The former for pushing Islam across borders, the latter for pushing Islam back.<\/p>\n

    Actual evil in history has always been at hand but harder to find when one looks below the surface.\u00a0When asked to name such scurrilous figures, many of the same appear. Attila, Genghis Khan, and Ivan the Terrible, to name but a few. But whereas Attila gets all of the press, Theodoric the Ostrogoth, a more successful conqueror of the era, gets little note though he also cut a swath of destruction through the dying Western Roman Empire. Genghis was a brutal conqueror who put whole cities to the sword, but so did his successor Tamerlane. There is a New Delhi because of what Tamerlane did to the old one. But Genghis\u2019 scale of conquests lasted generations after his death, whereas Tamerlane\u2019s died out immediately. Ivan was an effective Tsar until his decent in madness and the murder of his son. But of course, forgiving Ivan of his prolicide reminds of the quote uttered by John Kenneth Galbraith. Upon being told that Herbert Hoover would have been a great president, not for the Depression, responded, \u201cyes, but Switzerland would be a flat country if not for the Alps.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    And then there is Hitler.\u00a0So many 21st century writers, activists, and politicians like to apply charges of fascism to their opponents because the vileness of Hitler\u2019s acts are so undisputed. Yet his contemporaries Stalin and Mao also directly orchestrated the mass murder of tens of millions of their people. However, no one evokes Mao as the archetype of evil with the same repetition as Hitler. Part of this is the strange affinity many in the academy harbor for Marxism.\u00a0 Another was Mao\u2019s focus on keeping his bloodthirsty nature safely confined within China\u2019s borders. Had he tried to export his Great Leap Forward, history might be more accurate to his nature than today. Stalin is even more difficult. There he is, sitting on Roosevelt\u2019s right at Tehran and sitting next to the left of the ghost of FDR at Yalta. Despite his predations, including the purges, the mass murder of Ukrainians and Cossacks, and Eastern Europe\u2019s conquest, a war-weary west was not about to confront, either militarily or historically, the man whose country had done the most to defeat Nazi Germany. Even this evilest of villains had a layer. What would World War II had looked like if 3 million Wehrmacht soldiers were in France when the allies came ashore at Normandy instead of Russia. That Stalin kept Russia in the war is part of his legacy along with his vile acts.<\/p>\n

    And whereas Hitler is a glaring example of depravity, his German predecessor, the Kaiser, is not so easily pegged. For one, where Hitler had absolute power, the Kaiser was, in many ways, a figurehead. Though Allied propagandists morphed the Kaiser into some evil figure, World War I reality is more nuanced. France was spoiling for a fight with Germany after the ignominy of the Franco Prussian war debacle. England wanted Germany to take down a peg or two for the hubris of challenging England\u2019s hegemony on the seas. Russia entered the war, not to directly fight Germany, but rather defend its perceived paramount position in the Balkans and continue to pursue its dream of taking Constantinople, Turks are damned. And the Austro Hungarians were a once-great power blown around by the winds of change. In other words, World War I was not about heroism or villainy, but rather about naked, national self-interests.<\/p>\n

    In World War II, the Japanese military government of the mid-20th century also perpetuated war crimes, mainly against the Chinese, but without that central villain. Tojo was the leader, but not the progenitor of Japanese racism and imperialism have become Prime Minister in 1941, well after Japan had begun the conquest of China.\u00a0In the late 1500s, the Japanese, under the banner of racial superiority, had attempted to conquer Korea with an eye towards China afterward. It was one of those historical anomalies that, at the moment, Korea would produce arguably the greatest admiral of all time to send the Japanese packing. So Japanese designs were not the result of a single villain.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Throughout the history of the medium of movies, which has had a lasting effect on the 21st century\u2019s minds, those featuring heroes are always of the greatest box office material, whether looking at total box office numbers or inflation-adjusted numbers, heroes reign.\u00a0The Avengers, the people of Nabu in\u00a0<\/span>Avatar<\/span><\/em>, or in the 1950s, Moses in\u00a0<\/span>The Ten Commandments<\/span><\/em>, with a few exceptions, the heroes are the archetype for how a person should conduct themselves. And even in those without a clear hero, such as\u00a0<\/span>Titanic<\/span><\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>Gone with the Wind<\/span><\/em>, there are heroic figures such as Jack who gives his life to save Rose or Scarlett O\u2019Hara, who finds her inner strength.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    In some movies, the concept of the hero and the villain is more nuanced. Is Batman\u2019s tactics in\u00a0The Dark Knight<\/span><\/em>, making him all too similar to Joker? Is the paramount Avenger\u2019s foe, Thanos, pure evil, or rather a galactic eco-warrior with a Malthusian outlook? And of the many great things in the epic star wars-well at least the first three movies-was that the line separating the \u201cgood\u201d Jedis from the bad was not ocean wide. Darth Vader, an archetypal villain who is strangling people left and right, and blowing up whole planets in the first movie, saves his son\u2019s life by the third, by giving his own in return. Roger Ebert used to say that the villains made James Bond movies. This supposition is only partially correct.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Thunderball<\/span><\/em>\u00a0was good, but the villain Largo is just so so. And I loved the villain Drax but the movie,\u00a0<\/span>Moonraker<\/span><\/em>, ugh. <\/span><\/p>\n

    Whenever real-life movies are made today, it is not hard to discern who the villains will be. \u00a0In 1992\u2019s\u00a0True Lies<\/span><\/em>, it was a Pakistani. No more. And China, As noted in the Washington Examiner, \u201cIn 2012, for example, a leaked script of \u201cRed Dawn\u201d prompted outrage from Chinese state media as the film was set to depict an invasion of the U.S. by China. In response, MGM scrubbed references to China, substituting North Korea as the villain bent on taking over the U.S.\u201d When Disney gets nearly 15% of its box office from China, the heroes are Chinese such as Mulan; the villains are Asian steppe tribes.\u00a0 Whenever a real (non-space opera, non-men in spandex) movie is made in 2020 the odious villains are \u2013 corporate CEOs!\u00a0 And why not.\u00a0 China locks up a million of its people based on ethnicity and religion. \u00a0But a CEO tries to make money for themselves and their shareholders.\u00a0 And in doing so creates jobs for their employees and things that people wish to buy. When I think about that I just want to go to Wall Street, find one of those guys and punch them in the nose.\u00a0 Then go post a video of Tic Tok. Yeah. <\/span><\/p>\n

    But where nuance and ambiguity exist in most, not all, of history, In 2020, the woke left see themselves clearly as the heroes of today freeing African Americans from their oppression or liberating women from male-dominated bondage. One of the reasons that woke leftists continually evoke the hateful legacy of slavery is it is just that, heinous and evil and without nuance.\u00a0 I have noted that there are example of truly depraved history without question.\u00a0 The Holocaust is one, slavery is another.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    But what of the roles in 21st black inequality? It is easy to condemn a single police officer such as Derek Chauvin, but what of the liberal mayors and governors and their personally appointed police chiefs? What role of the liberal-dominated big education complex that for 50 years has continued to deliver unequal outcomes for students? What of black leaders such as Barack Obama who rail against inequalities and yet purchase $15 million homes in mostly white enclaves such as Martha\u2019s Vineyard? What is the role of a culture that almost denigrates two-person households, something that even Obama celebrated? These are debatable, nuanced discussions, not the stuff of good vs. evil. Not the thing of heroes and villains.<\/span><\/p>\n

    What is so concerning about the woke left is not their motivation. As a conservative, I share some of them, albeit with the notable difference of creating equal opportunity vs. equal outcomes. What is concerning is their certitude, and in that certainty lies the justification for a burn it all down, transform all of it mentality. How many heinous acts have been committed throughout history in the name of certitude? The perpetrators of the Roman proscriptions, the Spanish inquisition, the Russian pogroms, and the Holocaust were all quite certain that what they were doing was correct. None of these was completed in the heat of the moment or a people gripped by passion.\u00a0Instead, they were thought out, planned, and formerly executed. <\/span><\/p>\n

    To question something, such as asking whether African American travails are the stuff of police discrimination, is the soul of reason. Blind faith is the stuff of certitude. The nuanced and sometimes scurrilous history of the United States? Burn it down and replace it with something else. The Declaration and the Constitution? Written by slaveholders, so trash them both and replace them with something else. Lincoln?\u00a0 Even the \u201cGreat Emancipator\u201d is now seen as flawed and needs to be put on the trash heap. The earlier evocation of The Dark Knight movie was intentional.\u00a0The real difference between the characters is the one wishes to reform but save what is already good. The other wishes to burn it all down. That is evil.<\/p>\n

    But what of the conservative ethos preached in this podcast and on the pages of this website? The desire for smaller government is so that the certain cannot have grand power to achieve their aims, beneficial though they perceive them to be. The desire for liberty is to contain and challenge the certitude of others.\u00a0 And the wonder of capitalism is that it channels the natural inclination of individual choice, and mutual benefit to a successful end. And what of other certitudes held by this conservative? I am certain that free trade is better, but better with the current Chinese regime? I am certain about federalism, but does not COVID provide an example, or war, where a national response from a centralized entity may be better? I am certain that immigration is a good thing. We need the workers and their effort. But is this current wave becoming part of the melting pot or a country within a country and access to the entitlement state? And I am certain that a woman should have control over her body and support free choice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    But is that not a life? <\/span><\/p>\n

    A conservative\u2019s goal is not to conserve a given place in time or a regimented belief system never open to change.\u00a0 Slavery was with us for 4,900 years.\u00a0 Now it is considered despicable.\u00a0That is good. Instead, as a conservative, I wish to preserve the basis of individual liberty so that these issues can be worked out. I am not sure about how other people should live, but I am confident we should be free to work that out, for ourselves, and as a society with as much equality of opportunity as possible. The heroes of history are flawed creatures, and so are we.\u00a0But what was the best thing about our heroes? Washington held slaves but was also instrumental in the creation of the most prosperous republic of all time. Jefferson owned slaves but wrote the most exceptional single document capturing the concept of freedom in history. At one point, Lincoln conceived of a country in Africa where the slaves could return, but later, did more than any other human to free over 3 million human beings. Martin Luther King Jr. had views on gays that would not be acceptable today.\u00a0But more than the 20th-century figure articulated a vision that led to an African American becoming the most powerful man in the world in 2008. Flawed, but heroes all.<\/p>\n

    But for these heroes on the left, there is no such doubt; they do not own flaws. And for these heroes, there needs to be a villain.\u00a0What would Al Sharpton, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Robin DiAngelo do if we were in a post-gender, post-racial society?\u00a0Because none are general activists, but instead committed to a single cause, with a single explanation, white racism. There can be no discussion, no debate, and no reasoning. At some point, the Spanish Inquisition ceased to be about religion and became more about conformity and power. But the priests could never admit this because that would be to lose their hold on morality and power. So many leaders of leftist movements in the United States simply can never get to a post-racial society. There are too many votes to be had, too much money to make, and too much heroic acclaim to collect. Without a villain, there is no hero, and with the particular villain of white perpetuated, systematic racism, they would be just ordinary people, not heroes. And within this divisiveness lies the current, real villainy.<\/p>\n

    Systematic Racism \u2013 A Different View<\/strong><\/p>\n

    June 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Over 30 years ago, I participated in two protest movements. The first was the anti-apartheid movement, and the second was to show solidarity between the protesters in Tiananmen Square. In both cases, we were fighting to have two authoritarian governments overthrown. South Africa\u2019s system was based on racial inequality. China\u2019s structure was positioned on political dominance and oppression perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party. The endings were different. F.W. de Klerk, the president of South Africa in 1993, led the dismantlement of apartheid and later, Nelson Mandela, the leader of opposition to Apartheid, led the government itself.\u00a0 And he governed with a surprising absence of recrimination and acrimony. This moral leadership is why Mandela is one of the great men of the 20th century.<\/p>\n

    In contrast, China cracked down, and in 2020, under president for life Xi Jinping, China is as oppressive as in 1989, just with a much better economy. One thing is clear in hindsight. My participation had very little if nothing to do with these fates. All of those showing solidarity with those at Tiananmen was an exercise in smugness, virtue signaling, and a certain kind of sanctimony against those who were not part of the movement. How dare they sit out indeed. The economic sanctions and pariah status imposed upon the apartheid government had much to do with the fall of that heinous system. And so did the moral underpinnings that Mandela brought to the African National Congress, and the movement itself. Any impact by Wisconsin college students sullying the campus green with Soweto type shanties was ephemeral and delusional.<\/p>\n

    The reason for this brief, personal history is I am wondering, at a time in which the George Floyd murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer will engender real change. Part of this is the horrific nature of George\u2019s death. But did the lockdown decision in response to COVID, which had an adverse effect on minorities, play a factor?\u00a0 There are three outcomes to Floyd\u2019s murder. Much of the nation will move on as it did after 1967, 1968, 1975, 1993, and 2015 and the current regime that has been in place since 1965 will hold sway. Second, the nation will double down on its present, left word, progressive tilt with \u201creforms\u201d such as reparations, identity politics, victimology, defunding police, universal healthcare, and rejection of capitalism in favor of socialism. This leftward tilt seems likely given the tenor of the demonstrations, the media coverage, and the general dialog.<\/p>\n

    As Barton Swaim notes in a June 9th, 2020 article in the Wall Street Journal, \u201cBeginning in the mid-1960s they (liberals) began the creation of a massive panoply of welfare agencies and programs. These have steadily grown in number, power, and cost to the taxpayer and an array of social and political practices has formed around them: affirmative action, political correctness, identity politics, and, more recently, woke capitalism and cancel culture. Yet after decades of ceaseless activity and trillions of public dollars spent, why are we left with intractable and, perhaps, worsening racial resentments?\u201d<\/p>\n

    There is a third way that will receive scant attention but will hopefully be considered by an influential few. And this third way has three steps. First, admit that the past 50 years\u2019 liberal policies have failed, and it is time to look for something new. Second, conservatives must understand that there is a system that perpetuates racism, so the actual language is correct. And finally, THESE liberal programs, in and of themselves, but especially education, are the system of racism that maintains inequality.<\/p>\n

    Part of this system is buoyed in the successes of individual African Americans since the 1960s that maintain the status quo.\u00a0As of 2020, the United States has had a black president, a black attorney general, a black secretary of state followed by another black secretary of state, and two black supreme-court justices. In addition to these federal-level offices, the city of Detroit has had one white mayor since the 1970s. Philadelphia had as many black mayors as white ones in the past 40 years. Of the previous five mayors of Chicago, three have been African American. The highest-paid comedian, athlete, musician, and actor are all African American. The most famous astrophysicist in the world is also black. If racism is worse than it was in the 1960s, what good did all these people do? Barack Obama, who famously was so intelligent that he was bored all his life, did not heal the racial divide in this country after being President of the nation for eight years. What about Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and all of the other highly compensated activists. Yet there is a commonality to all of these leaders-they are almost to a person, liberal. The counter-argument is that the Republican Party is not open to blacks and that the election of Donald Trump proves that.<\/p>\n

    Trump won for several reasons, notwithstanding the incredible weakness of his opponent, but what is the argument then around the Bushes. The one African American on the Supreme Court is a conservative stalwart appointed by George. H.W. Bush. His son, George W. Bush, appointed the first black secretary of state, and then, after Colin Powell resigned, replaced him with a black female, Condoleezza Rice.\u00a0This is something for which liberal memories are notably deficient regarding crediting Bush.<\/p>\n

    The trope that the Republican Party is racist is incredibly convenient as it abrogates any discussions on conservative beliefs vs. liberal ones. It omits real dialog about globalization, regulation, taxes, immigration policy, debt and deficits, healthcare, the Supreme Court\u2019s role, and the American foreign policy. This charge against the GOP precludes any debate about those factors that still maintain race inequities after 50 years of liberal policies. A progressive need not offer a defense for any positions on any of these critical issues because simply to say racism eliminates the dialog.\u00a0 By equating policy with morality, the moral person always wins. As one protester said, \u201cthere is only one side.\u201d<\/p>\n

    But in the range and scope of American politics, there is are a host of African American voices, when they are allowed to break through the wall constructed by activists, the media, and the academy, that fundamentally disagree with this premise. In an email from Barnes and Noble, individual books were proffered for suggested reading. All of the offered recommendations featured liberal writers.\u00a0 Absent were works written by Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Jason Riley, Larry Elder, or Ryan Bomberger.\u00a0Maybe it is time for a REAL change and starts listening to THESE African American views.<\/p>\n

    Breaking the System\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

    One can start with two of the largest, policing and education, for those who may wish to look at an alternative to the systems that maintain racial inequities. Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd, had been cited multiple times, but he was still on the force, and was training two of the officers with him on that fatal day. So how does this happen? In Baltimore in 2015, there was a black mayor. In Chicago during the Laquand McDonald fatality, there was a white mayor, but he was the chief of staff to Barack Obama. In Tacoma, the mayor, Mayro Victoria Woodards, decries the death of Manual Ellis at the hands of the police department that she oversees. Keisha Lance Bottoms has been the mayor of Atlanta for the past three years. But she is not taking accountability for the police actions in the killing of Rayshard Brooks.<\/p>\n

    If these police officers operating as independent actors, then the concept of police systematically hunting black people is false. However, if there is a system involved, why are not the people running the system, the mayor who oversee police departments, accountable? Are these people, liberals all, supposed to be in charge? And if they are not, then who is? One answer is the public sector unions, which are significant contributors to their campaigns and help maintain them in their posts. It is time that these unions got a much closer look. In his article entitled \u201cIt\u2019s Time To Bust Police Unions, written on June 3rd, 2020, Peter Suderman states, \u201cOver and over again, unions have defended poor policing and bad police. In 2014, for example, New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo put Eric Garner in a chokehold for selling loose cigarettes. As a result of Pantaleo\u2019s chokehold, Garner died. Garner\u2019s last words were, \u201cI can\u2019t breathe.\u201d<\/p>\n

    An NPR article entitled \u201cPolice Unions and Civilian Deaths,\u201d written by Cardiff Garcia and published on June 3rd, 2020, states, \u201cEconomist Rob Gillezeau studies the history of police killings and the protests that often result from them. He and his co-authors, Jamein Cunningham and Donna Feir, have been collecting data on how police unionization has affected police violence against civilians\u2026its findings are clear: After police officers gained access to collective bargaining rights, there was a substantial increase in the killings of civilians \u2014 overwhelmingly, nonwhite civilians.\u201d Union contracts are not negotiated on a national level but a local one.<\/p>\n

    This all makes a solid case for reform of the police through the reduction of power, or elimination of the public sector unions that protect bad actors.\u00a0 But would this prevent the inequities of opportunity of African Americans in the U.S.<\/p>\n

    The problem is the actual scope of these fatalities. It is a frequent political trick to equate incidents with trends. Both sides participate in these narratives, but what do the numbers say. Heather MacDonald has some damning evidence for those who believe, that overall, police are targeting. In a column published in the Wall Street Journal on June 3rd, 2020, and entitled\u00a0The Myth of Systemic Police Racism.\u00a0<\/em>MacDonald states, \u201cHowever sickening the video of Floyd\u2019s arrest, it isn\u2019t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal justice system concerning arrests, prosecution, or sentencing.\u201d The writer cites some statistics, \u201cIn 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. According to a Washington Post database, the police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015.\u201d<\/p>\n

    It goes without saying that if reforms prevent these killings, they should be enacted, but would the prevention of 9 unjustified killings end systematic racism? Is it reasonable to transform society based on these numbers? These killings are a good case for better policing. It is not a good case for the radical proposals now making their way around the country. One example is the Black Lives Matter website, which espouses disrupting \u201cthe Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and \u201cvillages\u201d that collectively, care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.\u201d\u00a0This seems less about racial inequality and more about instilling the concept of socialism. Note the term collective.<\/p>\n

    So if we were to eliminate every unarmed African American killed by police (we presume the white killings are not as relevant given the backlash over \u201call lives matter\u201d), we would save about ten lives in a country in which 2 million Americans die of all types of fatalities from disease to homicide. In other words, we would not eliminate the system. So let\u2019s look at a system that can make a difference – Let\u2019s look at education.<\/p>\n

    According to the Department of Education\u2019s \u201cTrends in High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States: 2018\u201d The ACS status dropout rate in 2016 was nearly double for Black students (7.0 percent), then for those who were of Two or more other races (4.8 percent), White (4.5 percent), and Asian (2.0 percent). The graduation rates were also disproportionate; according to governing.com, \u201cNationwide, black students graduated at a rate of 69 percent; Hispanics graduated at 73 percent; whites graduated at a rate of 86 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

    The liberal argument is this is more about racism, but their prescriptions mostly consist of more funding than some reform. The concept of the need for more money is a fallacy. In 2016, Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States in 2015\u201316 amounted to $706 billion, or $13,847 per public school student enrolled in the fall (in constant 2017\u201318 dollars). This number puts the United States at number five behind Norway, Switzerland, Austria, and Luxembourg but ahead of Sweden ($12,000 per student), the U.K. ($12,000), and South Korea ($12,200), all of whom have higher comparison tests than their U.S. counterparts.<\/p>\n

    The numbers do change when the race is involved but not the way the disparity in outcomes suggests. Washington D.C., which has a mostly African American population in its schools, spends over $19,000 per-pupil education. The result of this spend? Only 74% of blacks graduated on time in D.C. as compared with 85% nationwide. New York, which has the highest spend in the land at over $22,000, is over 26% African American, twice the number of national representation.\u00a0Liberals, as they have for the past 50 years, will continue to throw money at the problem. The problem is not the money; it is what is done with the money.<\/p>\n

    In a WUSA9 Channel, February 2020, article written by Lorenzo Hall entitled, \u201cThis DC School is Changing the way students of color are educated\u201d quotes Shawn Hardnett, a founder of Statesmen school, a charter school in the district, \u201cBoys in Washington DC in our nation\u2019s capital, where resources are better than they are in other places, were struggling more than in other places where there are considerably fewer resources.\u201d The answer? \u201cThe more male and the more Brown you are, the more difficult you\u2019re going to find it to be successful in a traditional school, in a public school of any sort.\u201d There is currently a long waiting list for Statesmen.<\/p>\n

    In an October 3rd, 2019 article entitled \u201cWhat Success Looks Like,\u201d author Naomi Schaefer Riley noted, \u201cNew York officials revealed that an entire class of eighth-graders at Success Academy Bronx 2 aced the Algebra I Regents exam. In a school where 90% of students qualify for free lunch, such results are unheard of. But for anyone who has followed the trajectory of Success Academy, the largest charter school network in New York City with over 40 schools and 14,000 students, these scores will not come as a surprise. The network\u2019s test scores continue to surpass those of the wealthiest districts in the state.\u201d The common refrain against charter schools, advanced by the teacher\u2019s unions, is that charter schools cherry-pick the best students to achieve their success. Excepting that many of the charter schools operate on a lottery system where randomness is part of the selection process.<\/p>\n

    In a Manhattan Institute study of Charter Schools, released in 2019, the following findings were published: \u201cOf 41 urban areas estimated that charter schools provide black students in poverty with an additional 59 days of learning in math and 44 days of learning in reading per year. In a review of 15 randomized control trial studies on academic effects of urban charter schools, 12 showed significant benefits for reading and math, three showed no impact, and none showed adverse effects. Studies in three states have demonstrated that attending charter high schools boosts college entry and persistence. Studies in two districts have shown that attending charter schools decreases criminal activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

    In a 2019 poll, provided by Democrats for Education Reform found something startling: The minority groups that politicians say are being harmed by charter schools are most likely to support charter schools. \u201cAmong black and Hispanic Democrats, support for charter schools held steady from 2016 to 2018. But among white Democrats, approval tanked, dropping from 43 to 27 percent. Democrats in New York opposed expanding charter schools by a margin of 72 to 19 percent; black Democrats supported expansion 52 to 41 percent.<\/p>\n

    There could be several explanations for this data. It could be the direct response of white Democrats to the Trump administration and lightning rod Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos. But it could also be that whites are generally happier with the districts, and oppose the integration that charters may bring. And part of it is that unions\u2019 continued opposition is primarily made up of white teachers. For all of the conversation around latent racism, especially as regards the GOP, Democrats control education. Because school districts are local, the actual power, fortunately, of the Department of Education, is limited. And it is a conservative principle that if there were political muscle to eliminate the department, it should be done. Whether it be mayors, schools district chairpeople, or the all-powerful teacher\u2019s unions, there is simply no argument that the left runs the schools, and for minorities, the schools are not delivering.<\/p>\n

    Obama era Department of Education Arne Duncan, in his book entitled\u00a0How Schools Work<\/em>, admitted that the current educational system is ill serving minority students. In speaking of one such student, Calvin, Duncan states, \u201cThe lies told to Calvin were not told to torture him. . . . More often than not, they existed to protect resources, safeguard jobs, or control what kids were taught and how or whether they were tested on what they knew.\u201d Duncan, at the supposed head of the educational system, could do nothing. The real leader of the system is the National Educational Association and the American Federation of Teachers. When Mr. Duncan was in charge of the Chicago Public School system, he learned that 5% of the teachers were helping their students cheat on their exams. \u201cIf I\u2019d asked Mayor [Richard] Daley to fire 5 percent of all Chicago teachers, then there would have been hell to pay,\u201d writes Duncan. If the American people are learning how difficult it is to fire corrupt police officers, it is easier than firing a lousy teacher. In a 2016 study conducted by the74million.org, 75 of the 58,000 teachers were fired, one-tenth, of one percent. We are to assume that the remaining 99.9 of New York teachers were the best that the district had to offer?<\/p>\n

    When former Obama Chief of Staff and resident Chicago Mayor tough-guy Rahm Emanuel took on the Chicago Teacher\u2019s Union, the results were not favorable. The city agreed to increase teacher salaries, hire more educators to support existing teachers at elementary schools. All of this cost the taxpayers of Illinois another $450 million on top of the $5.6 billion already allocated, or $15,000 per student.<\/p>\n

    We hear a lot about systematic racism.\u00a0 In education we are seeing a system that does not, and has not for the past 50 years, benefitted minorities despite a colossal amount of money that has been thrown at the problem.\u00a0 Police reform will not solve this. \u00a0Black Lives Matter does not mention this.\u00a0 The teacher\u2019s union do not want people looking at this.\u00a0 If African Americans, and their white supporters, are serious about changing the system that impedes their access to opportunities, it is time to look at conservative beliefs such as the opening of more charter schools, the delivery of more power to local districts to hire and fire teachers, and the closing of under performing schools.\u00a0 50 years is long enough.\u00a0 It is time that we tried it our way.\u00a0 The conservative way.<\/p>\n

    David Brooks and the American Family<\/strong><\/p>\n

    May 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n

    In an essay published on March 15, 2020, for The Atlantic<\/em>, entitled, \u201cThe End of the Nuclear Family,\u201d David Brooks provides a number of theories in regard to this vital societal structure. \u00a0There is much in this essay to recommend itself. There are also points that do not hold up well to scrutiny.\u00a0 One of Brooks\u2019 first conjectures is \u201cOver the past century\u2026We\u2019ve made life better for adults but worse for children.\u201d Really? According to the National Institutes of Health, \u201cIn 1900, 30 percent of all deaths in the United States occurred in children less than 5 years of age compared to just 1.4 percent in 1999.\u201d\u00a0 In 1900, there were no dishwashers, no laundry machines, no vacuum cleaners, no electrical appliances, no refrigeration, no microwaves and, in many cases, no electricity, which made home upkeep a never-ending all-day ordeal and the children were very much expected to participate. House upkeep was just one of their activities.<\/p>\n

    Children on farms were expected to pitch in as well and prior to Child Labor Laws, they were employed in factories and mines.\u00a0 The newsletter \u201cChildren\u2019s Lives at the Turn of the Twentieth Century\u201d, states \u201cStudents today would be surprised at the sparseness of the classrooms 100 years ago\u2014there were many fewer books and what we today consider school supplies. Rather than markers, scissors, glue sticks, paper, computers, and more, students in the early twentieth century probably had only a slate and chalk. Discipline could be rather strict, and learning was frequently by rote memorization. There was no school lunch program; instead, students carried their lunch to school, often in a metal pail.\u201d In almost every material way imaginable, children are better off than they were 100 years ago.<\/p>\n

    This is not to say that society has not changed.\u00a0 Brooks\u2019 history is strong in showing the family at one point more like a clan than the nuclear family we know in 2020.\u00a0 \u201cWe\u2019ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Brooks notes the rise of the nuclear family in place of a more clannish structure in the post war years, \u201cFinally, conditions in the wider society were ideal for family stability. The postwar period was a high-water mark of church attendance, unionization, social trust, and mass prosperity\u2014all things that correlate with family cohesion. A man could relatively easily find a job that would allow him to be the breadwinner for a single-income family. By 1961, the median American man age 25 to 29 was\u00a0earning nearly 400 percent more than his father had earned\u00a0at about the same age.\u201d<\/p>\n

    But here Brooks errs by making the statement that, \u201cIn short, the period from 1950 to 1965 demonstrated that a stable society can be built around nuclear families\u2014so long as women are relegated to the household.\u201d Brooks\u2019 is mistaken in thinking that the existence of typical family is predicated on a stay at home spouse. A nuclear family can survive with both parents working but that is the key-both parents.<\/p>\n

    Per the disintegration of the nuclear family, Brooks looks to everything from declining wages to a baby boomer ethos of liberation even citing popular music.\u00a0 Here, Brooks errs again by missing one crucial point by consigning the focus of marriage to child rearing, \u201cEli Finkel, a psychologist and marriage scholar at Northwestern University, has argued that since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the \u201cself-expressive marriage.\u201d \u201cAmericans,\u201d\u00a0he has written, \u201cnow look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth.\u201d Marriage,\u00a0according to the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, \u201cis no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Marriage itself is not exactly a new institution.\u00a0 In Elisabeth Meier Tetlow\u2019s Women, Crime, and Punishment in Ancient Law and Society<\/em>, the author describes the laws governing marriage from Uru-inmgina, a Sumerian King who ruled in the 24th<\/sup> century, BCE, \u201cwhen a woman and a man loved each other they should live together.\u201d\u00a0 Though the rituals and the words have changed, the concept was still the same.<\/p>\n

    Marriage is an institutional way to channel the natural sex drive and keep civilization in check by focusing young people\u2019s energies.\u00a0 This is something the ancients new all too well. In the Epic of Gilgamesh it takes poor Shamhat a full week of love making to tame the wild Enkidu. But marriage is also about economics and time.\u00a0 Two parents are better than one. The same Sumerian King also speaks of the concept of possessions, \u201cHer field and well would become his field and well.\u201d\u00a0 That is arguably one of the salient points about society.\u00a0 There have been two reasons why traditional divorce rates have been low.\u00a0 The first is life spans. The constant toil for survival left little time for pre-1850 humans to \u201cfind themselves.\u201d\u00a0 Additionally, when the average life span is 50 years, there is also little time for \u201clove to die.\u201d\u00a0 A spouse was there for daily toil and occasional pleasure, not for internal fulfillment.\u00a0 The other reason divorce rates were typically lower was economic necessity.<\/p>\n

    And here is the great challenge for our society, \u201cwhile more than four-fifths of American adults in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey said that getting married is not essential to living a fulfilling life, it\u2019s not just the institution of marriage they\u2019re eschewing: In 2004, 33 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 were living without a romantic partner, according to the General Social Survey; by 2018, that number was up to 51 percent.\u201d Brooks writes.<\/p>\n

    It is that this point that Brooks, and so many sociologists go off the rails, \u201cFinally, over the past two generations, families have grown more unequal. America now has two entirely different family regimes. Among the highly educated, family patterns are almost as stable as they were in the 1950s; among the less fortunate, family life is often utter chaos. There\u2019s a reason for that divide: Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up.\u201d And Brooks goes onto to name dreaded conservatives (an ideology he used to purport), \u201cAffluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back for having stable nuclear families. They preach that everybody else should build stable families too. But then they ignore one of the main reasons their own families are stable: They can afford to purchase the support that extended family used to provide\u2014and that the people they preach at, further down the income scale, cannot.\u201d<\/p>\n

    This is akin to saying New York does not need stop and frisk because crime is down.\u00a0 Rather, conservatives favor two person households because that provides the means for affording additional help.\u00a0 Not the other way around.\u00a0 Two people paying a single rent, sharing household duties and often producing two incomes is going to out earn the single parent household.\u00a0 As much as progressives like to equate marriage to some sort of past cultural norm, marriage is less about culture then it is about economics. This is why everyone from the Sumerians to 1950s Americans got married. \u00a0Here is another case of Brooks confusing his cause and effect. \u201cPeople who don\u2019t have prosperous careers have trouble building stable families, because of financial challenges and other stressors. The children in those families become more isolated and more traumatized.\u201d Again, it is the other way around.\u00a0 People with a spouse can afford to put in the necessary time to build a prosperous career.\u00a0 And note that the argument for two-person parental structures does not necessarily have to be a man and a woman.\u00a0 Whether it is two men, two women, or a man and a woman, two is better than one.<\/p>\n

    At what point did Americans feel they could do without marriage?\u00a0 Brooks comments that \u201cover the past 50 years,\u00a0federal and state governments have tried to mitigate the deleterious effects of these trends.\u201d But, once again, it is the other way around.\u00a0 Is it a coincidence that many of these trends began in the era immediately succeeding the passage of much of the Great Society programs?\u00a0 Everything from education to healthcare to school lunches are now the purview of the government.\u00a0 In 2012, the Obama campaign ran an ad called Julia\u2019s World that existed as a promotor of the all of the government largesse available to Americans, courtesy of the progressives. As Charles Krauthammer noted in 2012, \u201cJulia\u2019s world is an Obama campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived. It\u2019s a series of cartoon illustrations in which a fictional Julia is swaddled and subsidized throughout her life by an all- giving government of bottomless pockets and \u201cQueen for a Day\u201d magnanimity. At every stage, the state is there to provide \u2014 preschool classes and cut-rate college loans, birth control and maternity care, business loans and retirement. The only time she\u2019s on her own is at her grave site.\u00a0 Julia\u2019s world is totally atomized. It contains no friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She\u2019s married to the provider state.\u201d In his 8000-word essay, Brooks never once mentions the correlation off the growth of the state to the deterioration of marriage.<\/p>\n

    People who grow up in two parent households are likely to marry, and stay married by a significant margin over those who grow up in a single parent home.\u00a0 They see first-hand the advantages and they replicate.\u00a0 This is why Andrew Cherlin was correct when he stated that \u201cIt is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged.\u201d And so, do their children.<\/p>\n

    One book that Brooks did not cite, perhaps to spare the readers of The Atlantic<\/em> from too much contrarianism, is Charles Murray\u2019s Coming Apart<\/em>.\u00a0 Because of the racial controversies from his previous work, The Bell Curve<\/em>, Murry used only white families for his comparisons and found out that \u201cfamily structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. Whether the parents remarry or remain single while the children are growing up makes little difference. Never-married women produce the worst outcomes. All of these statements apply after controlling for the family\u2019s socioeconomic status. I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties.\u201d<\/p>\n

    The other piece that Brooks fails to mention is life span.\u00a0 When the average life span was 50, the concept of the extended family looks very different.\u00a0 Up until death, grandma and grandpa were expected to deliver their fair share.\u00a0 With the advent of Medicare and Medicaid, which now account for nearly 50% of all federal outlays, 15-year retirements are not an exception, they are considered the normal, an entitlement.<\/p>\n

    Towards the end of his essay, Brooks celebrated the extension of the black family.\u00a0 But the numbers belie the traditional concept of family.\u00a0 Two-thirds of African American children lived in single-parent families in 2018, compared with a quarter of white children. This was not always the case, in Research by John Iceland, a professor of sociology and demography at Penn State, suggests that the differences between white and black family structure explain 30 percent of the affluence gap between the two groups. According to study entitled \u201cAfrican American Marriage Patterns,\u201d conducted by Douglas J. Besharov and Andrew West, \u201cIn the 1950s, after at least seventy years of rough parity, African American marriage rates began to fall behind white rates. In 1950, the percentages of white and African American women (aged fifteen and over) who were currently married were roughly the same, 67 percent and 64 percent, respectively. By 1998, the percentage of currently married white women had dropped by 13 percent to 58 percent. But the drop among African American women was 44 percent to 36 percent\u2014more than three times larger.\u00a0 The declines for males were parallel, 12 percent for white men, 36 percent for African American men.\u201d<\/p>\n

    One explanation for this dichotomy is called the Wilson hypothesis.\u00a0 In 2019, a piece in Vox<\/em> entitled \u201cIncarceration, Unemployment, and the black\u2013white marriage gap in the US\u201d written by Elizabeth Caucutt, Nezih Guner, Christopher Rauh, stated, \u201cWhy do black individuals marry at lower rates than white individuals? Wilson (1987) suggests that characteristics of the black male population, and in particular the lack of marriageable black men due to high rates of unemployment and incarceration, are an important factor contributing to the black-white differences in marital status.\u201d A counter argument to the Wilson hypothesis is presented by Robert D. Mare and Christopher Winship who \u201chave estimated that at most 20 percent of the decline in marriage rates of blacks between 1960 and 1980 can be explained by decreasing employment. And Robert G. Wood has estimated that only 3-4 percent of the decline in black marriage rates can be explained by the shrinking of the pool of eligible black men.\u201d<\/p>\n

    And yet neither of these theories work.\u00a0 Rates of single parent households are on the increase in both white and Latino populations despite lower incarceration rates.\u00a0 When affluency is taken into account, the rates between the races begin to converge.\u00a0 The decline of marriage is not due to race, but rather the economics inherent in a two-person household, something wealthy progressives intuitively understand. And, with the exception of a few short periods, such as 2008-2010, unemployment rates have been below 6%.\u00a0 This is too low to fully account for the single parent growth rates.<\/p>\n

    This is not to say that one should marry someone to avoid economic challenge.\u00a0 But what is more plausible; that a loving, mutually beneficial relationship arises out of a strong economic situation, or that economic challenge deteriorates caring and affection?\u00a0 At Least Brooks properly calls out the hypocrisy at the center of white progressives. \u201cProgressives, meanwhile, still talk like self-expressive individualists of the 1970s:\u00a0People should have the freedom to pick whatever family form works for them.\u00a0And, of course, they should. But many of the new family forms do not work well for most people\u2014and while progressive elites say that all family structures are fine, their own behavior suggests that they believe otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

    In many regards, this gets to the core of the conservative argument. Highly educated progressives intuitively understand the very thing they diminish with their pro-government, non-familial definitions.\u00a0 \u201cAs the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has pointed out, highly educated progressives may talk a tolerant game on family structure when speaking about society at large, but they have extremely strict expectations for their own families. When Wilcox asked his University of Virginia students if they thought having a child out of wedlock was wrong, 62 percent said it was not wrong. When he asked the students how their own parents would feel if they themselves had a child out of wedlock, 97 percent said their parents would \u201cfreak out.\u201d Marriage is not just the center of the family, it\u2019s the center of a successful life.