Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America’s Postwar Political Order

James Piereson “Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America’s Postwar Political Order”, Encounter Books, 2015, 358 pp.

What a terrific thought-provoking book.  Of particular interest is the section concerning education at our universities and college.  Because I am afraid some readers may forgo my extensive notes on this book, I have placed this education section out of order at the top of my note section because of the importance of the subject.

Author James Piereson, president of the William E. Simon Foundation, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute is one of the leading conservative philanthropists in America.  His essays appear in many newspapers and magazines including the Wall Street Journal.  This present book contains many of those past essays going as far back as 2005 and continuing up to 2015.

In “Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America’s Postwar Political Order,” Piereson argues that America has undergone three profound political transformations in its history: (1) the Jeffersonian Democratic-expansionist regime from 1800 until 1860, when it dissolved in the midst of the slavery and secession crisis; (2) a Republican-capitalist regime from 1865 until 1930 when it was brought down by the Great Depression; (3) and lastly, a Democratic-welfare regime from 1932 until the present, albeit with faltering support during the Regan and Thatcher years.   “In each period, an old order collapsed and a new one emerged.   Today, looking out at our paralyzed and polarized polity, Piereson argues, we are on the brink of yet another collapse.

My Notes:

Pg. 301: Chapter 17 - 18 “What’s Wrong with Our Universities?”

After reading these chapters I have concluded that one should avoid any school with a good football team and preferably choose one with no team, their expenses and spending have little to do with education.  And, don’t bother taking courses in humanities, do this on your own time to obtain better results.  (Pursue personal education in humanism through “The Great Courses” videos, etc.)

In 2014 more than twenty million students will enroll in the four thousand or so degree-granting colleges and universities now operating in the US.  College tuition and expenses have grown by five times the rate of inflation over the past three decades.  Ninety percent of colleges and universities admit any applicant with a high school diploma and the means to pay.  Universities, and not a few colleges, have layers of highly paid executives presiding over complex empires that encompass semiprofessional athletic programs, medical and business schools, and expensive research programs along with the traditional academic departments charged with providing instruction to undergraduate students.  Yet colleges and universities have great difficulty defining what their enterprise is for.  What is a college education?  What are students supposed to learn during their four years on campus? 

The central purpose of higher education, and of the liberal arts in particular, is to turn students into thoughtful and interesting human beings, but colleges and universities have weighed themselves down with so many ancillary activities, from technical research to varsity athletics, that they have lost sight of their basic mission.  Seventy percent of all college teaching is performed by adjuncts, graduate assistants, and other non-faculty personnel (p. 307). 

To correct these education problems and lower costs to affordable levels, it has been proposed to end tenure and sabbaticals for professors, emphasize teaching over research and publishing in all aspects of undergraduate education, curb the exploitation of adjunct professors, spin off university medical schools and research programs, eliminate varsity athletics, spread resources around to more institutions beyond the ‘Golden Dozen’, reduce the costs of administration, and take advantage of new technologies to improve classroom instruction. (p. 310)

Pg. 313:  College Learning Assessment (CLA):

The CLA is a standardized test given to more than three thousand students at different institutions upon entry into college and then again at the end of their second and fourth years of undergraduate work.  The test asks students to examine a complex problem, such as an argument in a political campaign about how best to reduce crime, and then to write up their assessments of different approaches along with their own recommendations.  The test purports to measure critical thinking and complex reasoning as well as writing ability.

The results have found that large numbers of students show little improvement in these skills during their college years.  According to this study, 45 percent of the students showed little evidence of improvement after two years of college and 36 percent showed little improvement after four years.  The performance gap between blacks and whites, already significant upon entry into college, widened further during the undergraduate years. 

The authors of this study locate the sources of these disappointing outcomes both in the culture of student life and in the lack of rigor in college curricula.  Students spend the bulk of their time socializing with peers rather than studying, reading, or discussing academic subjects; students spend on average only about thirteen hours per week studying (p. 314).   (when I was in school the norm was two hours study for each credit hour taken each week).  The Council for Aid to Higher Education reports that forty percent of students entering college do not read, write or perform math at a college-ready level.  It seems that 40 percent of the students going to college are not prepared for the experience and that faculty and administrators are dumbing down their curricula to make it possible for these students to pass the requirements.  (p. 315)

Pg. 333:  Today, among the four thousand or so colleges and universities across the country, Columbia is among the very few (less than 10 percent) that offer a core curriculum in which students are required to pass through a structured course of study in the liberal arts. The other 90 percent are much like Harvard and have what is called a distributional system* (students are given great leeway, if not total, in choosing their subjects—there is little or no core).

Still, even Columbia has a problem as many senior professors there are not interested in teaching the Core Curriculum because it does not contribute to their research interests, leaving many sections to be taught by junior faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and adjunct teachers.  The growing specialization of academia makes it ever more difficult to recruit the kinds of generalist who can effectively teach sections of the Core.  (I have found evidence of this problem when sitting on a barstool at the local pub and trying to engage the person next to me in a conversation, also this happened once while waiting at a red light).

*Educational Distribution requirements  (taken from Wikipedia):

Some colleges opt for the middle ground of the continuum between specified and unspecified curricula by using a system of distribution requirements. In such a system, students are required to take courses in particular fields of learning, but are free to choose specific courses within those fields.

Other institutions have largely done away with core requirements in their entirety. Brown University offers the "New Curriculum," implemented after a student-led reform movement in 1969, which allows students to take courses without concern for any requirements except those in their chosen concentrations (majors), plus two writing courses. In this vein it is certainly possible for students to graduate without taking college-level science or math courses, or to take only science or math courses. Amherst College requires that students take one of a list of first-year seminars, but has no required classes or distribution requirements. Similarly, Grinnell College requires students to take a First-Year Tutorial in their first semester, and has no other class or distribution requirements. Others include Evergreen State College, Hamilton College, and Smith College.

This book references Clinton Rossiter’s 1955 definitions of conservative thinking as concerned with order, tradition, and authority; and, liberalism as dedicated to equality, democracy, and restless change. (P. 135).  I’m a bit confused as I believe I am for all of them except “restless change” which I have no understanding of what it is.  In any event, the author maintains that liberalism is mostly a thing of the past—what he calls “Leftist” have taken over but still use the name “Liberals.”

Pg. 279:  In the decade or so after 1965, the American university fundamentally changed.  The political and cultural upheavals spurred by the civil rights movement and opposition to the war in Vietnam, combined with the demographic explosion, brought about a second revolution in higher education and created an institution that was more egalitarian, more ideological, and more politicized in its preoccupations, while being less academically rigorous than was previously the case.  It was in this period, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, that the left university emerged in place of the liberal university.

In that short period of time, single-sex colleges all but disappeared; college regulation of student morals disappeared as well; government regulation of employment expanded, putting pressure on institutions to hire women and minorities for faculty positions; the line between teaching a subject matter and advocating political positions was blurred or even eliminated altogether as the new campus radicalism asserted that all teaching is political in nature; core curricula were eliminated at most institutions in favor of ‘open curricula’’ the liberal underpinnings of academic culture—the freedom to teach and conduct research—were attacked and eroded in the name of political correctness; the unifying character of the humanities was subverted and discredited when they were said to represent an oppressive tradition formed by white European males; new fields, usually with ideological preconceptions, were created outside the traditional departments and areas of study, thus expanding the positions available for radical faculty; serious academic requirements, including foreign language proficiency, were softened or eliminated.  Faculty opinion, already skewed in a liberal direction the 1950s and 1960s, moved decisively to the left. 

End of Educations section

Pg. xiii:  A major theme of this book is that unsettled transitional periods of the kind we ae now living through have happened before in American history—in the 1850s and 1860s, for example, and later in the 1930s and 1940s.  In each period an old order collapsed and a new one emerged out of an unprecedented crisis, and in each case, the resolution of the crisis opened u new possibilities for growth and reform. 

Pg. xiii:  American capitalism has evolved in distinct chapters, not in cycles or in an orderly sequence as Marxists or developmental theorists would have it.  The US has had three such chapters in its history: (1) the Jefferson-Jackson era stretching from 1800 to 1860, when slavery related territorial issues broke the prevailing consensus apart; (2) the capitalist-industrial era running from the end of the Civil War to 1930, when the regime collapsed in the midst of the Great Depression; and (3) the post WWII welfare state that took shape in the 1930s and 1940s and extends to the present, but is now in the process of breaking up.  Each of these regimes accomplished something important for the US; each era lasted roughly a lifetime; and each was organized by a dominant political party: the Democrats in the antebellum era, the Republicans in the industrial era, and the Democrats again in the post WWII era.  The sectional conflict was a crisis of America’s constitutional system, while the Great Depression was a crisis of capitalism.

Pg. xv:  John Maynard Keynes argued that the old order of nineteenth-century capitalism had been destroyed both by the Great War of 1914-18 and by the evolution of capitalism from a system organized around small producers and local markets to one increasingly dominated by large corporations and labor unions. Later, during the Great Depression, he worked out the theoretical argument for government to take a leading role in stabilizing the market economy with the aim of full employment and maximum output.

Pg. xvi:  Piereson criticizes the recent extremely popular work of Thomas Piketty “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” attribution of inequality to something intrinsic to the capitalist order.  In fact, Piereson points out, the inequality of today is more closely linked to specific elements of the postwar regime, especially in the expansion of global markets and the explosion of asset prices.  From 1980 to 2012 the value of world stock markets increased from $2 trillion to more the $50 trillion, an unprecedented development that was bound to produce inequality as one of its side effects.  (Note: I reviewed Piketty’s book some time ago; also, in the US per capita income increased about sevenfold from 1945 to the present time: footnote p. 27)

Pg. 3:  While the institutions of government inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been designed to check the power of the state for the purpose of protecting liberty, Keynes proposed new power to the state in order to promote stable economic growth and full employment.

Pg. 5:  The Great War of 1914-18 demolished the foundations of European civilization.  The old order in Europe had been built upon a network of interlocking principles and ideals: Protestantism and Victorian morals in culture; nationalism, empire, and monarchy in politics; laissez-faire free trade, and the gold standard in economics.  (I think mercantilism belongs in this list!)

Pg. 22:  Though Keynes’s theories were temporarily in retreat during the 1980s and 1990s, they never really lost currency among academic economists, and the recent financial crisis provided a new occasion for their application.  (Note that Keynes insists that consumption and debt, rather than thrift and saving, are the keys to prosperity: p. 33).

Pg. 40:  The Keynesian consensus began to come apart in the 1970s when inflation and unemployment provided openings for conservatives and market-oriented economists to question the effectiveness of Keynesian policies and point to ‘big government’ as a cause of the nation’s economic troubles.  In that decade both Hayek and Friedman won Nobel Prizes in economics for work that challenged Keynes’s theories and the consensus that had formed around them.  Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan moved that debate to a higher plane in the 1980s as they implemented policies to reduce marginal tax rates and free up the British and American economies from regulatory burdens. 

Pg. 53:  The New Deal was erected in an unprecedented calamity with the American economy at a near standstill.  Between 1929 and 1932, unemployment rose from 3 to 25 percent, national output fell by more than 30 percent, the dollar value of US exports fell by more than two-thirds, the stock market dropped close to 90 percent, and more than a third of the nation’s banks failed.  No one knew what to do about it, certainly not FDR who had campaigned on a platform calling for a balanced budget.  (Unemployment remained high, never going below 14 percent until the nation began to mobilize for war in 1941: p. 56).

Pg. 56:  Causes of the Great Depression.  Several interconnected factors appear to have combined to turn a serious stock market correction in late 1929 into a full-scale depression by 1932: (1) A ill-advised tariff policy passed by Congress in 1930 to protect US manufacturers had the unintended effect of shutting down international trade and US exports.  (2) A monetary policy adopted by the Federal Reserve raised the discount rate and allowed the money supply to shrink through 1932 even as the economy faltered.  (3) A cascade of bank failures wiped out savings and credit for large swaths of the economy.  (4) A mountain of international war debt destabilized exchange rates, undermined the prewar gold standard, and impeded economic growth in debtor countries.  These factors worked together in a reinforcing process from 1930 to 1933 to send the world economy into a downward spiral.

Pg. 91:  There are three reasons for thinking that America’s third regime is in the process of fading out or collapsing: debt, demography, and slowing economic growth, compounded by political polarization and inertia.  Within a decade, these factors may overwhelm the system of politics under which we have lived since the 1930s.

1. From 2001 to 2011, federal spending grew at twice the rate of economic growth.  In 2014, the US government spent around $3.8 trillion, of which about one-sixth was borrowed.  The national debt (as of 2014) stands at nearly $18 trillion, a sum slightly greater than the nation’s annual gross domestic product. 
2. The demographic trends now unfolding are likely to make a difficult situation worse.  According to the 2010 census there are about 40 million Americans age 65 and over; in 2014 there were about 48 million people drawing benefits from Medicare and about 58 million drawing Social Security benefits of one kind or another.  In the future we could easily have between 80 and 90 million people drawing benefits in twelve to fifteen years.  This does not include the 66 million or so people now drawing Medicaid. 
3. On top of all this, there is the problem of slowing economic growth, which is the most fundamental challenge of all.  The US needs a rapidly growing economy to produce the wealth to pay for its expensive social programs.  If we factor in the recession of 2008 and 2009, GDP grew at a rate of 1.7 percent per year for the whole decade.  (During the 1950s and 1960s real GDP grew by an average of 4.3 percent per year).

Pg. 99:  From the late 1930s to the late 1950s, roughly 50 percent of the members of the House and Senate were ‘moderates’ as measured by their voting records.  Today less than 10 percent could be so described on the liberal-conservative scale.

Pg. 138:  A significant political development in the US over the last half of the twentieth century was the rise of conservatism to rival liberalism as the nation’s most influential public doctrine.  There are now more self-described conservatives in America than there are liberals.  A Gallup poll conducted in 2013 found that about 38 percent of Americans classified themselves as ‘conservative’ while only 23 percent identified as ‘liberal.’  It is especially noteworthy that one would be hard-pressed to identify an influential book or essay that sets out the principles of contemporary liberalism as they relate to feminism, multiculturalism, diversity, or economic planning.  A very influential book putting forth the conservative view, for example, is “The Road to Serfdom” by Hayek (the next book on my to-read list).

Pg. 149:  American conservatism is an unusual movement in the modern world.  Its various affiliated groups promoting liberty and free markets, lower tax rates, religion, traditional morality, patriotism, and national strength are largely unknown elsewhere in the world. 

Pg. 164:  Liberalism has passed through at least four separate stages and is now well into the  fifth.  It first appeared under the banner of progressivism, which held that new political institutions had to be established to regulate industrial concentrations and to mediate conflicts between business and labor.  Progressivism flamed out during WWI but liberalism revived itself during the 1930s in a New Deal variation, which preserved some themes of progressivism.  When New Deal liberalism ran out of steam because of WWII and the prosperity of the postwar period, liberalism transformed into a Cold War version, which was more technocratic than its predecessor but also staunchly anticommunist in foreign policy.  It was in this form that liberalism achieved new peaks of popularity and influence during the Kennedy-Johnson years.

The rebels and protesters of the 1960s authored a fourth chapter by introducing the theme of liberation on various cultural fronts.  They politicized matters relating to family life, sexual mores, and religion.  Their agenda displaced the traditional liberal objective of providing economic security for the working man.  As liberalism morphed into leftism, it strengthened its appeal to the educated classes but lost its broad support among middle and working class voters—the ‘Archie Bunkers.’ 

The leftist then began to recast the reform ideal, turning it from an instrument of progress into one of punishment  In particular they sought to punish the wealthy and the middle class for winning success at the expense of higher ideals or designated victim groups.  From this idea flowed compulsory school busing, race and gender preferences, the cossetting of criminals who were painted as victims of society, and a legal culture based upon the idea that every wrong can be remedied by a lawsuit.

Pg. 170:  Today’s agendas of liberalism—environmentalism, feminism, homosexual marriage, income redistribution—are dissociated from the practical aspirations of average Americans.  The liberal vanguard once claimed to speak for the middle classes but now it seldom even pretends to do so.  The Democratic Party has turned into a coalition of ideological liberals, ethnic interest groups, public sector unions, and beneficiaries of public programs.

Pg. 197:  After Kennedy’s assassination, the character of American liberalism changed from a doctrine of programmatic reform (think New Deal) with an emphasis on economic security and national defense, to one of cultural criticism with an emphasis on liberation from traditional mores.

Pg. 217:  Kennedy proposed in 1962 to cut tax rates across the board by some 30 percent, with the highest rate to be reduced from 91 percent to 65 percent—the largest tax cut ever proposed.  He pushed for this bill in the belief (later vindicated) that a cut in tax rates would stimulate economic activity to the point where tax revenues would actually increase.  His tax bill was passed in 1964.

Johnson, in the eighteen months following Kennedy’s assassination, pushed through the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Medicare and Medicaid programs, and countless other pieces of reformist legislation.  Kennedy’s death and Johnson’s skillful handling of the transition provided the necessary momentum for these liberal victories.  Yet these legislative successes in 1964 and 1965 turned out to be the high water mark for post-war liberalism. (p. 243)

Pg. 286:  The main threat facing American power is not from external aggression but rather from internal fragmentation, polarization, and dissolution.  For several decades, the US has been dividing into hostile political and cultural camps, with the political parties controlling different states and regions, conservatives and liberals getting their news from different sources, and Americans dealing on a daily basis only with like-minded people  In the best of worlds, the university might have evolved as an institution where these different factions could come together to exchange views and work out their differences in a spirit of toleration.  That has not happened—and is not likely ever to happen.  The American university has joined the ‘left nation,’ and has successfully walled itself off from the views of the ‘right nation’ in an effort to render them illegitimate.  By promoting polarization and fragmentation, the left university is both a symptom and a cause of the fraying of America’s postwar order.

Pg. 337:  Humanism is the name given to the various intellectual movements that have developed since the Renaissance that emphasize the secular achievements of man in the fields of art, literature, philosophy, and politics, using as a starting points and models for study the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome.  Though humanism originally developed out of medieval Christianity, its main purpose then and afterward was to demonstrate the dignity and creative power of man.  The major intellectual movements that shaped the modern world, including most especially the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, arose out of humanist ideals.  Reason, science, free inquiry, the power of the human intellect—these have been the watchwords of humanist movements through the centuries.  Humanism—or the humanities—has long found a home in the great universities of Europe and North America.  Until quite recently, the ideals of the university have been indistinguishable from those of humanism.

Pg. 354:  Beginning around 1980 the Democratic Party gradually turned themselves into a government party that relies on public employee unions for votes, money, and organization, and on government spending (along with high taxes) to maintain cohesion among the party’s various constituent groups.  The Democratic Party maintains internal coherence through government spending and regulation rather than through principled political appeals.