Equality in Servitude

The American Mind ^ | 10/21/21 | Joshua Mitchell

[PoliticallyShort]

When competence is your goal, neither guilt nor victimhood should have a place. Standards and goals must be respected and maintained. When the co-dependency of guilt and victimhood metastasize in your university, you ask of your students something anathema to education – that each day they deepen their awareness of their own victimhood, and that they pay ever more tuition to the army of mental health administrators and woke professors who fatten off of their misery. Seek to produce competent students, and you honor your commitment to higher education; seek to produce innocent victims, and you transform your university into an institution of higher infantilization—an exercise in therapeutic redemption, not education. “We, the Board Directors of this once-hallowed university, certify that you were admitted, not because of your grades or SAT scores, which are racist, but because you saw yourself as an innocent victim or knew what sort of social-justice-genuflecting would be necessary if you were not; and we certify that you graduated not more competent but more righteous than when you arrived. Now go forth and subdue the earth, enchained by your student debt and your frailty.”

Today, not only our universities, but indeed in the whole of America, we are engaged in a fateful struggle that revolves around the answer to one question: Does our nation go forward committed to what, in American Awakening (Encounter Books, 2020), I have called “the politics of competence,” or to “the identity politics of innocence,” whose false promise of justice has captivated fully half of the America population? Through the identity politics of innocence, we will amplify misery, division, and strife. Through the politics of competence, we will build a world together that we can scarcely imagine. These are our two alternatives.