The Outstater: Toward a Better Political Climate
THE LEGISLATIVE SESSION is ending and you need to know it was for naught. Our situation, our competitive position vis-a-vis other states and nations, our existential prospects, remain unchanged by the lawmakers’ tiny, calculated baby steps in this direction and that.
And know this as well: Hoosiers have elected many fine legislators in recent years. There were more than enough this session to make the necessary changes had the political climate permitted. But the democratic process, alas, is overrated. Let the economist Milton Friedman, a rare combination of genius and common sense, explain what goes wrong:
“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”
The solution, then, in a constitutional republic such as ours, is for other branches, the executive especially, to step up and change that climate of opinion, which, to my mind, will require restoring confidence in Western Civilization generally and Hoosier know-how in particular. They call it leadership.
It is discouraging to have to call for something that should be so obvious, but considering the last couple of decades it would be a historic shift, a systemic change. At minimum, it would require the governor and the small number of experts around him to drastically, heroically, reset political priorities and expectations.
But they know that already, the realigning of punishment-reward systems that is. Hey, it’s what they do. And fortunately there’s an easy place to start.
A provision was put in the budget bill this week that gives the governor full control of the Indiana University Board of Trustees. That’s big, and it’s about time. The Gallup people tell us that our universities enjoy only 32 percent favorability, up from 20 percent during the pro-Hamas campus protests. Other polling shows that students not only are not being taught the tenets of Western Civilization but have never been in the same room with them.
What are those tenets? Some of us believe that the Declaration of Independence does a perfect job of delineating them — and in only 1,300 words. This foundation’s mission statement highlights the constitutional primacy of the individual in addressing public concerns and, brace yourself, a recognition that equality of opportunity is sacrificed in pursuit of equality of results.
In regard to a university curriculum, you might hope for a more nuanced understanding of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, noting the lost but inviolable property traditions of the Southern Agrarians. Maybe even a cursory awareness that the New Deal and Great Society were idiocy. An honest attempt would be welcomed to pinpoint where the Civil Rights Movement went so horribly wrong. Finally, if the budget permits, a course on what frauds were George W. Bush and Barack Obama while thanking heaven that neither Richard Lugar nor Mike Pence ever reached the highest office.
Sorry, I got a bit overwrought there.
Indiana students need a more complete telling of their forefathers’ miraculous agricultural settlement of the Midwest and Great Plains (1830s through 1880s). It was the economic bolster for the Monroe Doctrine and made modern America possible — made it “great ” even. (Let’s leave the immigration disaster alone for now; it is becoming self-evident.)
How about a sprinkling of appreciation for the economists Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Fredrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, IU’s own Elinor Ostrom or Purdue’s Vernon Smith? Or what about requiring that a distinction be made between privilege and achievement, incentives and outcomes? Do they know about the Laffer Curve? What are Charles Murray and Steve Sailer really saying? Can students accept that envy by itself is the most predictive theory of social behavior? Militarily, who won the Vietnam War, and won it decisively? Does the Battle of Cowpens ring a bell? Is “Modern Times” or “A Study of History” on their bookshelves?
Overall, students need to be aware that there is more to American society — much, much more — than the self-absorbed pleadings of various sex, race and religious groups. Yes, that includes those of Blacks, Jews, Muslims and Feminists, but now also those of Hispanics, Asians, East Asians, unreconstructed Apaches, Caribbean-French mulattoes, random Afghans, Polynesians, the homely, the undersized, the grossly overweight and what have you, (Note that violent transvestites, Internet pedophiles and culturally excused rapists having fallen out of favor recently for some reason.)
It would be encouraging if a DEI-free faculty condemned to ignobility the racist-Marxists for being the phony, vile opportunists they are. Throw out their affirmative-action, safe-space, root-cause, reparations and disparate-impact hogwash with them.
Granted, we wish for too much. Let us be content with an alternative curriculum built within Indiana University alone. The governor can now divert (dry up) the funds of the propagandist humanities and their apparatus there. The money can be used to juice budgets in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. (Close the Kinsey Institute and the Maurer School of Law.)
But since all of this has to be done extra democratically, that is, within the workings of the executive and its bureaucracy, how will we know when progress is being made?
Simple. The headlines in the Indianapolis Star and the Capital Chronicle will be ablaze with outrage, anguish and, one can only hope, despair. Columnists James Briggs and Mike Hicks will become clinically apoplectic. Dunn Meadow will fill to overflowing with faculty and student protestors, a few actually from Indiana. They will erect gallows and guillotines, some of them functional, before trying to burn Bryan Hall to the ground.
Historic shifts are never pretty. — tcl
Comments...