Just a partial list: http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index:
Just a partial list. Much more at the link: http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index
7. mikemcdaniel:Dr. Hanson: Fine and insightful post, as always, and please allow me to thank you for the opportunity to participate in an informed, but practical and common sense commentary community.
I see an interesting thread running through your five issues: Merit, and the liberal hatred of it. In order to buy socialism, which is above all an unshakeable belief in the necessity of equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity, one must utterly ignore individual merit, and where it cannot be ignored, it must be attacked in every possible venue. America, a capitalism democracy was actually built on individual merit, and whenever we have, as individuals, businesses, schools, institutions, a people and a government, tried to ignore it, unpleasantness has occurred.
Illegal Immigration: We cannot even call illegal immigrants illegal immigrants, but “undocumented this or that.” Because everyone must have the same outcome–American citizenship and all its benefits–liberals cannot consider merit, even as the elite of the elite push the idea that American citizenship is absolutely nothing special. Thus an illiterate former drug runner with no marketable skills should receive the same immigration consideration as a college educated engineer. That America is reaching the point California long ago reached–that there are no longer enough meritorious, productive citizens to provide unlimited equality of opportunity (endless entitlements) for those without merit–is never considered by liberals because acknowledging it would undermine their entire belief system.
War/Heroism: Heroes–and there have been many in the last decade- plus, including at last count, two women who have won the Silver Star, the only two since WWII–are the epitome of merit, but they must be studiously ignored lest the virtue of merit become obvious. As a high school teacher, I’ve discovered that my students cannot name a single decorated military hero of their lifetime (something I endeavor to remedy), though most are pretty much on top of the most recent American Idol contenders. On the positive side, they don’t know who John Kerry, the military, pseudo-hero poster boy of the left, is either. In the same way, America’s success in war cannot be lauded, because, again, this inescapably reveals skill and incredible martial merit, and America, as our post-American president has made clear, is just another of the many nations, without particular merit in any way. To remedy this, I tell my students of the battle of 73 Easting. Perhaps the Haitians will have a different view of the relative merit of our military in the days to come, though I doubt our president will.
Affirmative Action: This issue is all about merit, and the tacit admission by the proponents of affirmative action that those they seek to advance are not smart and capable enough to succeed on their own, and with affirmative action, they need expend no effort to become such. They will always lack that which must never be spoken. Thus has the Obama Justice Department filed suit against the New Jersey State Police because they require a written test for promotion to Sgt. on the laws they must enforce. Too many whites are being promoted, you see, so the test must, ipso facto, be discriminatory. Merit can never enter into such equations. Presumably society would like to employ police supervisors who actually know and can discourse at some length on the laws they are charged with enforcing and teaching to their subordinates, but then, that would require that merit be considered. Left to its own devices, New Jersey would prefer to do that. Our DOJ disagrees. Oh yes, let’s keep in mind that many liberals absolutely hate the police in general, considering them only slightly above frozen lobster on the relative intelligence and morality scale, yet they labor to lower the level of the general police intelligence pool. Being forced to ignore human nature and merit has all kinds of interesting contradictions and consequences.
Elite Schools: The confluence of all of these issues is in our elite schools where lunatic speech codes reign supreme and political orthodoxy rather than merit is the primary, indeed, even the sole, hiring and tenure granting criteria. Liberals scorn Gov. Sarah Palin because she graduated from some little school in Idaho and actually attended several schools before graduating. As she pointed out in her book, she and her contemporaries often had to take a semester off to work to earn enough money to continue, yet did continue, and left college with a degree and without crushing debt. This is, to most Americans who are free to consider the reality of such things, meritorious, but of course, cannot be taken into account as merit does not exist in the liberal worldview, thus we end up with Cornel West, Ward Churchill, Michael Mann and similar hucksters. My undergraduate degree transcript includes credits from four separate institutions, and I too worked while attending school. I suspect this is not at all unusual in most colleges, but may well be in the Ivy League. The fact that I earned that degree in 2.5 years and made the dean’s list every semester would be meaningless because I did not graduate from an elite school, and anyone who did, though they majored in beer and barely passed, would be considered my superior in every way. And of course, affirmative action ensures that far too many people will attend college, people who are simply not ready and/or intellectually capable of genuine college level work, and who will quickly drop out, or worse, will eventually be granted a degree in the name of equality of outcome rather than individual merit. Society is schizophrenic in this. We dare not suggest that some are not capable of college level work, that some people are just smarter than others, but we don’t bat an eyelash over the reality that only a select few will inhabit the ranks of the varsity football team. Sports–which many liberals scorn–seems to be our sole exception to the practiced ignorance of merit.
Middle East: Merit applies here again, for the Israelis have done something that no people who live in that part of the world (with the very limited possible exceptions of the Lebanese and the Jordanians) have done: Made the desert bloom. Not only that, they’ve established a modern, thriving, technologically advanced society that rivals any in a region that is, for the most part, still living in the 7th century. Note the contortions, the blatant lies that must be advanced to ignore the merit of Israel and her citizens. So caught up is the world, and these days, our government, that America seems willing to allow a second Holocaust rather than admit that merit matters, that Israel has it, and that her enemies are essentially 7th century barbarians with modern weapons who would be only to happy to murder us when they’re done with the Jews. People who produce nothing, who build nothing, who live only to destroy, are lauded by the elite, the intellectual, the nuanced, when the Israelis, who seek only to live in peace, and failing that, preserve their lives, are scorned.
There are hopeful signs, however. Having been exposed to Obama and his functionaries, more and more Americans are coming home to the idea that merit matters and that not everyone, for example, should live in their own home because they just can’t afford it. Most Americans understand that this is why we have apartments and do not look down on those who live in them. Still, in the understanding and acceptance of the importance of merit, lies at least part of our salvation. Now if only the congressional Republicans would believe it and act on it rather than behaving like slightly more civilized versions of liberals…
ping for further reading. I LIKE this guy!