Mark Steyn joined Chris Buskirk today on the Seth and Chris Show to discuss many ways the Left’s long march through the institutions has undermined American education and worked to erode civic trust. This has had a bad effect not just in America, but even in terms of the example America sets for the rest of the Western world:
With a lot of the malign social trends in the world—when you talk about, you know, the socialization of healthcare or whatever—Canada and Western Europe are often years ahead of where the United States is. In the corruption of education, America is actually the pacesetter—the insanity on American campuses is of a different order. And Canada, Britain, France and the rest are actually scrambling to catch up; and I think it’s a tragedy what’s happened. I also think it’s actually wicked. We are actually corrupting and hollowing out the next generation of citizens…Education is an absolutely critical battleground.
We are doing an an “affirmatively bad job” of educating the next generation, Steyn said, because it’s not just that our children are ignorant of the glories of Western civilization, it’s that we are actually teaching them to hate those things. We are doing a kind of violence to ourselves in promoting a kind of “civilizational self-loathing” that is “audacious and ambitious” on the part of the Left. They act with audacity and ambition and we, unfortunately, tend to respond with impotent protests on behalf of reason. We respond to this nihilistic movement as if it will care to debate us.
The identity politics of the Left inevitably results in a kind of suppression of thought from which we are sure to get a “culture of snitching” as we see in today’s politics where neighbor is turned against neighbor for the purpose of exposing what is supposed to be an “incorrect” or unsavory political point of view. We’ve seen this movie before, says Steyn, in Eastern Europe. But our historical memories are short and, as a result, we have lost all sense of shame and fear about this kind of censure.
Be sure to listen to the whole interview and check back often for more from Mark Steyn. In the meantime, you can find more of his work here.