Soul of America

A Chinese spacecraft landed on the far side of the moon,

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The U.S. offered a peace plan in the Middle East they pretended was Israel's, Israel sort of pretended it didn't outrage them, and everyone pretended they weren't laughing at American amateurism.

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Boeing's Starliner canceled again.

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Soul of America

An article on liberalism. progressivism, grade infltion, higher education and America's social ills appeared in the WSJ through an interview with Harvy Mansfield. This is pieced together out of it.

Harvey Mansfield is 92, and he taught at Harvard for well over half a century, retiring from the government department only last year. A scholar of Machiavelli and Tocqueville, he is a lifelong conservative. He says he leaves behind a department with only one professor “who isn’t a liberal or progressive.”

How does Mr. Mansfield define the difference between a progressive and a liberal? A progressive has a “loathing for his country. It goes beyond embarrassment to real dislike of America, and in a way, therefore, of themselves, because after all they’re Americans.” Theirs is a kind of “fanatical penitentialism.” The liberal, by contrast, believes America is imperfect but remediable “or even worthy of pride—in the things, for example, that have been done contrary to white supremacy, as they see it.”

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He believes that any solution to the ideological mess in American universities will likely come from “dismayed liberals.” ...“Conservatives believe in propriety,” he says. “We don’t demonstrate in the streets and occupy campuses. There are no conservative tantrums.” (For that reason, he says, “Donald Trump is not a conservative. Propriety is something he violates, or seeks to impress people by violating.”)

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In “America’s Constitutional Soul” (1991), he describes his countrymen as “a constitutional people,” and he insists that we are still that way “in practice, though our parties seem to differ over this.” The Republicans, he says, “are the party of the Constitution.” Since the Democrats “can’t reject the Constitution politically, they call it a living Constitution, which is a kind of rejection, but not in name. I call them the party of bathrooms and pronouns.” He complains that law schools “only teach the amendments. They don’t teach the actual structure of what makes the government work.”

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He sums up the problem as an inversion of authority: “The less wise, who are the students, rule over the more wise, the professors.” This leads to what he calls “the most nagging of my lost causes, which is grade inflation.”

He then talks about grade inflation which he thinks is very important. “...a professor is unable to pass judgment on a student. And what that turns into is a desire to be rid of judgment altogether and to pass judgment against those who pass judgment. The result is an aggressive relativism.”--The origin was the Vietnam War where students were supported by anti-war professors. and the rise of affirmative action admissions whose students were not going to be allowed to do poorly.-- “Three papers in a semester becomes two, the reading goes down, and students realize that they’ve got a lot of extra time. Suddenly, their lives become filled with extracurricular activities, which explains the present glut in activism.”--"The grade-inflated young embark on an intense search for “commitment, by which you embrace a position without reasoning your way to it.”

And this has a significant social impact, according to him. Ostensible success in school “doesn’t tell employers whether the graduates of college are good at something. It robs us of necessary information.”

That’s bad for democracy, Mr. Mansfield says, “because it makes society attempt something—or satisfy itself that it’s done something—that is impossible, which is to do away with human inequalities.”