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The United States has been shaped by three sweeping political revolutions: Jefferson’s revolution of 1800,” the Civil War, and the New Deal. Each of these upheavals concluded with lasting institutional and cultural adjustments that set the stage for a new phase of political and economic development. Are we on the verge of another upheaval, a fourth revolution” that will reshape U.S. politics for decades to come? There are signs to suggest that we are. James Piereson describes the inevitable political turmoil that will overtake the United States in the next decade as a consequence of economic stagnation, the unsustainable growth of government, and the exhaustion of postwar arrangements that formerly underpinned American prosperity and power. The challenges of public debt, the retirement of the baby boom” generation, and slow economic growth have reached a point where they require profound changes in the role of government in American life. At the same time, the widening gulf between the two political parties and the entrenched power of interest groups will make it difficult to negotiate the changes needed to renew the system. Shattered Consensus places this impending upheaval in historical context, reminding readers that Americans have faced and overcome similar trials in the past, in relatively brief but intense periods of political conflict. While others claim that the United States is in decline, Piereson argues that Americans will rise to the challenge of forming a new governing coalition that can guide the nation on a path of dynamism and prosperity.
Shattered Consensus is well worth the money and an insightful read on a number of topics tracking the origins and evolution of thinking on the left and right. In the latter half of the book the author tracks over the last several decades the bizarre cancer like transformation of our higher education from a healthy system striving to inculcate an open liberal attitude in graduates to one focused on closing down analytical thought and imposing far left ideological ‘woke’ talking points. However, the author pretty much leaves out any practical solutions to this problem.How did this shift happen? They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The expansion of leftism tracks the growth and availability of easy money for student loans intended to help as many as possible attend college. But offer unlimited free money (it’s free to the schools who in the current system suffer few if any consequences for facilitating what often become ‘bad’ loans) and that leads to schools’ incentives shifting from striving for teaching excellence and scholarly reputation to pleasing (and retaining) customers (students). Even though the schools are front and center in this shift the role of easy loan money in facilitating this has gone unnoticed.Student loan programs have had a structural flaw from inception - they focus concerns for repayment on two beneficiaries, the taxpayers and the students/borrowers, when there is an important third. Ignoring that third beneficiary, the schools themselves, is the root cause of rampant creation of too many loans, so many graduate burdened with obligations that many can never repay, and for the taxpayer being left to pay for ever more defaulted loans. There’s simply no incentive for schools not to make a loan. By the time the issue of nonpayment arises their former student (the customer) is long gone. And it’s this lack of consequences that led to the loss of standards as schools competed to drop standards to please their customers and also allowed the proliferation of the many new woke departments teaching useless classes, topics and majors.The remedy is simple. While we probably politically speaking cannot shut down the system of student loans we can achieve a better balance by adjusting incentives so that the system heals itself and by heal I mean we stop feeding the cancer and begin forcing it to shrink. Schools in order to participate in the loan program should become liable for some percentage of any eventual future defaults for loans their students borrow. This could be 5%, or 25%, or more. The consequence will be that schools will turn their attention from short term considerations such as making students happy to considerations of quality, or in other words whether the student and the student’s program of study are likely to ensure repayment of their loans, or, in other words whether the loan represents a worthy risk of their (the school’s) resources. Too many bad loans will eventually mean bankruptcy for most schools.If the system is re-structured so that there is a cost to graduating a woke indoctrinated product that can’t think and won’t ever earn compensation (as a valued employee or a value generating entrepreneur) sufficient to repay their loans (i.e. a bad investment for the student, taxpayers and, under this new system, also for the school) the newly aware school management will be incentivized to care very much that they invest in employable graduates. School management in order to survive will impose controls on what is taught and quotas on numbers of majors. Loans for Physics or Chemistry majors will be approved but pretty much any major in any leftist topic area will be deemed too risky i.e. costly. The solution won’t happen overnight but then the cancer took decades to metastasize, but with time the cancer will be starved and die out not only in the schools but in every nook and cranny of our society.