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by Mike Gray In an article on Pajamas Media, Victor Davis Hanson says that all is not lost:
Societies can sometimes implode abruptly, like the Mycenaeans from mysterious causes, the Aztecs before Cortés, or the Zulu nation in 1879 — or gradually and insidiously, such as Rome in the latter fifth century BC or Britain between 1946 and 1960.
I don’t believe America is in inevitable decline or will falter, but I am starting to see things, superficially, that I have not observed in the past.
After an informal tour of the deteriorating California he knows well, Hanson gives us his random thoughts on pressing social and political entities such as high federal taxes (to “gorge the beast”), fearful federal and state judiciaries, a lawsuit-happy federal government, an academic elite that has become “bankrupt” (“And by that I mean utterly mendacious”), with an excursion into what he calls “[m]y favorite elite trope of the day … ‘Cordoba,’ as in the ‘Cordoba Initiative.’”
He finishes with 11 “eccentric suggestions that would have far more positive repercussions than we think”: a flat tax, ending academic tenure, raising the Social Security retirement age, natural gas usage, maintaining defense spending, ending affirmative action, a national school exit test, providing “incentives for clean living,” getting tough on illegal immigration, and freezing federal spending. (Read his article for the 11th suggestion.)
Hanson’s “eccentric suggestions” are all meritorious, but I am not as sanguine as he is about how such reforms can or will be implemented. To get several or even just one of them accomplished in today’s pass-the-buck political environment would virtually require the leopard—that is, your average public policy maker—to change his spots and give up meat.
You really need to work on clarity in your posts.
When you wrote that Hanson suggests “a national school exit test” I immediately thought, ‘He wants to nationalize public education, and require every student in America to meet standards set in Washington DC?!? Well that pretty much tosses the notion of federalism, and local control of education into the sh*tter’
Then I went to Hanson’s post and read the following, “Insist on a national exit test for BA degrees. A simple test of common knowledge would do. When Johnny does not know what the Parthenon is, but thinks Harriet Tubman, not Grant and Sherman, won the Civil war, we are in deep trouble.” (emphasis added)
That is a far cry from nationalizing K-12 education, which your comment strongly implies. I’m still skeptical that national standards for college degrees will bear the fruit Prof. Hanson would like to see, but at least he’s not pushing to kill local control of K-12 education (like some “conservatives” do).