Over at The American Spectator, Matthew Xiao analyzes why college professors lean left.
Maybe it’s the nature of the academic environment that it encourages an “insulated echo chamber.”
Maybe the university is a good place for “half-baked ideas” because the university never has to make its ideas work.
Maybe “Professors are typically individuals who exhibit high levels of openness to experience” and left-wing ideas “generally advocate for new, unconventional ideas and behaviors.”
Maybe “the sense of authority and superiority conferred upon professors who champion liberal policies” just encourages them to come up with ideas that the “anointed” know are good for the “benighted.”
Then there is F.A. Hayek:
Hayek noted the growing desire among intellectuals to dismiss the input from ordinary citizens and control society according to their own vision. Instead, Hayek urged his fellow intellectuals to be more humble and realize the limits to their knowledge.
But I say: go bigger.
I say the whole idea that the intelligent and the knowledgeable ought to direct traffic goes back to the Enlightenment and the various Enlightenment thinkers. The center of their project involved replacing the existing ruling class of feudal warrior lords and/or absolute monarchs with people like them; thus the Enlightenment thinkers concentrated on thinking about how to delegitimize the politics of the old warrior aristocracy and legitimize the politics of ideas. We may describe the world that the Enlightenment thinkers created as the Educated Ages.
That is what Marxian socialism and American Progressivism are all about. Marx takes it for granted that a new perfect egalitarian society will appear on its own; Lenin decided the perfect future needed a bit of help from an intellectual vanguard of the proletariat. The Progressives believed that an educated administrative bureaucracy should replace the “spoils system” then ruling the United States. In practice the whole thing comes down to the political rule of an intellectual elite that runs the government and gets to decide everything, from the design and operation of the economy to the nature of the family.
Obviously, just as kings needed universities to train their priests for the state church, modern states run by the intellectual elite need a boot camp to train their state functionaries into the state ideology and identify up and coming leaders. Thus the modern research university that gets a lot of its day-to-day money from the state and an overwhelming amount of research money from the government. Of course universities are overwhelmingly supportive of the current regime and dutifully exclude anyone that doesn’t recite the proper responses to the state catechism.
Now, this is a brilliant idea, except for one thing. And that is the idea of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. If he is right then politics always reduces to fighting the enemy and gifting your friends with loot taken from the enemy. Anything the government does that does not involve fighting an enemy and gifting its friends is not going to do well. In fact, I argue, it will Make Things Worse.
Schmitt identifies two or three additional distinctions in human society. There is the religious distinction between good and evil. Notice that good people might not necessarily be friends, and evil people might not need to be labeled as an enemy. So maybe, most of the time religion can operate free of the government and act without fighting the enemy. Then there is the legal and the economic. Notice that everything other than the political operates on a principle that tries to solve problems short of compulsion, fighting, and violence.
Notice another thing. Because the political is the distinction between friend and enemy there will always be a temptation, when a government program goes wrong, for government officials to imagine that the reason for the failure is that there is an enemy at work. A recent example is the notion that “greedy bankers” were responsible for the late real-estate meltdown in 2006-08. Maybe that is true, or maybe the idea of zero-down real-estate loans pushed by the government is not a good idea. Another recent example was the idea put about by the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump that he was “colluding” with the President of Russia.
In fact, human projects are always a mess and always run into problems and need to be fixed. In normal human affairs, people get together to fix things, or they fire the manager, or the company goes bankrupt and its assets are sold off to the highest bidder. That is difficult to do in government when the government leader symbolizes the nation, and any national failure is almost like a defeat in war. Humans are notoriously hesitant to admit a mistake; politicians almost never admit a mistake.
Therefore we should expect that any project conducted by a government that does not require fighting and defeating an enemy will probably not go well. Moreover we should expect that if there is no identifiable enemy, the project will reduce to a program to transfer benefits to the supporters of the regime. However, if the project does not go well, then the reason will be the actions of an enemy of the regime.
The solution to all our problems is simple. We need to dismantle the power program of the educated elite, starting with the research university. We need a new Amendment to the US Constitution, as follows:
Congress shall not originate any Legislation without a declaration of War against an Enemy, and no declaration of War shall obtain except with the concurrence of the executive Power and the judicial Power.
That is all. We are experiencing the Autumn of the Educated Ages, as the once bright legitimacy of the educated class recedes into shame and darkness, and it is time to limit the power of the educated, as the power of nobles and kings was limited in the olden time.