Academics: Failing in Classrooms, Government

Liberal academics from institutions of “higher learning” and graduates they indoctrinated have been infiltrating government for years.

Believing that learning about things is the same as doing them, they dismiss the possibility that anything they’ve taught, thought and learned may be wrong.

Exporting those false assumptions to the public arena has harmed everyone – including many who prospered in the private sector after shedding or avoiding institutional indoctrination.

The real world isn’t a faculty lounge, an academic exercise or a lab experiment. The real world is inhabited by billions of people whose trillions of large and small daily personal decisions affect their/their families’ chances of surviving in an indifferent world.

But the world is no more indifferent to them than are most academics and their “intellectual” progeny.

Americans have long been victimized by wrong-headed academic influences in government.

In fact, President(ish) Joe Biden’s administration is full of self-styled know-it-alls who lack private sector experience, yet imagine themselves capable of making decisions for and setting policies affecting everyone.

But, the modern American notion of liberal intellectual political hegemony began with President Woodrow Wilson (1913-21), a “progressive” Virginia Democrat and first post-Civil War Southerner to win the White House. A Ph.D., former professor and president of Princeton University, Wilson, was the first president to reject America’s founding principles.

From Larry Arnn’s book “The Founders’ Key”: “Woodrow Wilson said (the U.S. Constitution) was obsolete, written for an age that believed in the theories of Isaac Newton and regarded government as a mechanism.”

Wilson considered that age superseded by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, that “government is a living organism, one that must change over time.”

Wilson’s antipathy to America’s founding principles and his progressive spending and fiscal policies helped create the almost forgotten Depression of 1920-21, an economic downturn cured by the austerity imposed by Wilson’s successors, Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

Harding cut the federal budget 48 percent from 1920 to 1922. Coolidge continued Harding’s fiscal prudence. Together, the two produced nine years of budget surpluses and the world’s best post-war national economy.

But, until 2009 and today, the greatest example of governmental disasters was engineered by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era, academic appointees, the “Brain Trust.”

Beginning as a recession, the Great Depression was escalated to full depression by Brain Trust policies that then deepened and prolonged it.

There was no guiding economic principle behind the New Deal Other than the Brain Trust’s natural instincts to impose recovery-destroying tax increases and follow the misguided Keynesian admonition to spend indiscriminately.

When asked to describe the political and philosophical underpinnings of FDR’s approach to government, like other New Dealers, Raymond Moley, a Brain Trust member, cited “pragmatism.”

In fact, FDR’s governing philosophy, as incessantly parroted by his Brain Trust acolytes, was “experimentalism.”

Historian Eric Goldman wrote “(FDR) trusted no system except the system of endless experimentation.” FDR himself made the point repeatedly: “This country needs bold, persistent experimentation … above all, try something.”

Dismissing history and the successful common-sense policies of Harding and Coolidge, FDR and his highly credentialed, but inexperienced and inept Brain Trust approached governance like a campus lab class. They experimented – tinkered – with America, and failed.

The unwitting irony in the smirking condescension of modern progressives’ unearned sense of superiority toward the normal Americans they mock and dehumanize is that, like Wilson, FDR and his Brain Trust whom they still celebrate, liberals imagine themselves to be intellectuals who embrace change and reject dogmatic adherence to the past.

In reality, American liberals cling obstinately and anti-pragmatically to the “ideals” of FDR’s 90-year old New Deal despite the evidence of its faults and failings, the demographic, financial and actuarial unsustainability of its social legacy, and the failures of the Biden administration’s tax, spending and social policies that mimic the New Deal.

Furthermore, today, their sense of entitlement allows them to expect that non-degreed, working-class taxpayers, already burdened by massive inflation, and responsible people who repaid theirs will pay off the student loan obligations willingly assumed by privileged degree-holders, including many in government.

In his satirical book “Animal Farm,” George Orwell wrote, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

And: “The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others. With their superior knowledge it was natural that they should assume the leadership.”

Somewhere, Orwell is smiling…

https://www.pottsmerc.com/2022/08/29/jerry-shenk-academics-failing-in-classrooms-and-in-government/