One gets the distinct feeling that this presidential election is about to blossom into a very serious and substantive debate about voter choices on the future of this country.  Unfortunately at present, there are only hints of this meaningful battle beneath the surface of the frivolity involving such inanities as Bain Capital’s outsourcing, the “made in China” U. S. Olympic Team uniforms, the continuing mind-numbing demagoguery about how to “pay for” the continuation of the Bush tax rate cuts for “the rich”, and Mitt Romney’s tax returns.

Several astute observers (not to be confused with what passes for mainstream coverage of the issues), including Yuval Levin in The Weekley Standard and Jay Cost in National Affairs, have recently written that, in effect, the entire American social contract that has been in place since World War II is now up for grabs, and I agree.  Levin says it this way:  “We have a sense that the economic order we knew in the second half of the 20th century may not be coming back at all…….We are on the cusp of the fiscal and institutional collapse of our welfare state, which threatens not only the future of government finances but also the future of American capitalism”.  Cost offers this take on it:  “The days when lawmakers could give to some Americans without shortchanging others are over; the politics of deciding who loses what, and when, and how, is upon us……Neither party yet fully understands the implications of this shift……….”

Finally, in a thoughtful essay in The New Criterion, James Piereson makes the point that we may very well be on the verge of what he calls “the fourth revolution”, after the first three American political revolutions–the election of 1800, the Civil War, and the New Deal–because the crisis we now face is far deeper than the overhang from the recent “great recession”.  Rather, as he says, almost parroting Levin and Cost, “The deeper causes lie in the exhaustion of the postwar system of political economy that took place in the 1930s and 1940s……….That system is now unwinding for several reasons, not least because the American economy can no longer underwrite the debt and public promises………The urgent need to cancel or renegotiate these debts and public promises on short notice will ignite the fourth revolution”.

Beyond a few well-intentioned and courageous individual initiatives (Congressman Paul Ryan comes to mind), as a body politic we haven’t come anywhere close to engaging these issues and their ramifications with the depth and intensity that they deserve.  Nor do I think that we have yet come to grips with what the answer will mean for our republic and our constitutional order.  Needless to say, there are very different worldviews at odds in this debate and very different ideas about the future of the current model, which is clearly no longer sustainable.  Whether or not the American people are willing to face that reality and make the necessary transformation to a new model will depend on the quality of the coming debate and the skill of the opposition party and its leader in making the case.  A fourth revolution?  I don’t know, but I do know that this is a very big deal.

Readers who have been with The Texas Pilgrim for awhile know that I have shared a love/hate relationship with college athletics in several essays, primarily surrounding the issues raised by the reports of the Knight Commission on intercollegiate athletics.  I have been a huge fan of college sports and close follower and supporter of The University of Texas for most of my life and no one wants success for my alma mater more than I.   That’s the “love” part.  The “hate” part that is so well described by the Knight Commission in its reports has to do with the corrupting elements–the out-of-control commercialization, the undermining of the academic mission, the myth of the “student-athlete”, and related problems, mainly involving football.

Now we have the Penn State/Sandusky child abuse case, and in my mind nothing in the Knight reports remotely touches the deep-seated corruption here.  Some say it is about the money.  Wish it were so, it would be easier to fix, and maybe it is a factor.  But this is primarily about the breakdown of authority and the corruption of moral judgment by a system that favors procedure over substance.  Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn said it well:  “You can’t write prudence and judgment into a code…..When a code tries to cover every possibility, it ends up shifting power from the college president and trustees to the compliance officers.”  Simply put, the “cops” in the form of the NCAA are incapable of dealing with this kind of breakdown.

Many say that competitive sports build character.  I have always disagreed with that.  Sports don’t build character, they reflect it.  Similarly, many say that colleges and college athletics reflect the nature of the society and the culture.  That may be so, but it shouldn’t be; they should be better than that, they should rise above it with much higher standards.

Legacy?  Penn State will never be the same, or let’s hope so.  Same for college athletics across the board.  We’ll see.

The advance of technology in delivery is transforming higher education in America.  Approximately one-third of current higher education students are enrolled in at least one online course, and the number is growing at a significant rate.  Ron Trowbridge of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity thinks this trend will expand into radical reform and what he calls “disruptive innovation” in higher education, much like Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction”.  I agree and I applaud this phenomenon because I see the absolute necessity of expanding distance learning for a variety of reasons, not to mention its inevitability, but I am concerned about two aspects of this trend: one, its growing emphasis on the purely vocational attributes of postsecondary education and two, the decline in many of the benefits offered by the traditional higher education experience, particularly in the liberal arts.

In the first instance, we who are heavily involved with elementary and secondary education are in a continuing debate with those who would predestine many of our students to a vocational pathway that is void of the rigor necessary for success in the 21st century workplace, which is synonymous with postsecondary success on either pathway–college or career education leading to industry certification.  The motto on this issue for my organization, the Texas Institute for Education Reform, is “one standard, multiple pathways, equal rigor”.

In the second instance, higher education is about much more than vocational preparation.   A purely vocational curriculum deprives our students of the necessary grounding in many of the verbal, analytical, and communications skills that are honed by an immersion in the liberal arts, not to mention the study of the founding principles and cultural literacy of America which are necessary for responsible citizenship.  These groundings are best absorbed in exchanges with other students and mentors in an interactive setting.

So I am supportive of the initiatives to enhance the accountability of higher education for the progress of its students and the advancements in technology and productivity in its delivery, and I am hopeful that the hybrid online/classroom capabilities and the enhancement of interactive content quality in online delivery proceed at a pace that will mitigate my concerns.

Maybe it wasn’t the politically adept thing to say at the time and place, but Mitt Romney won some points with me and no doubt others in his truthful remarks on his trip abroad about the comparative cultures of Israel and Palestine and what this means in terms of the welfare of their respective people.  He had the comparative GDP numbers wrong, but here is what he said in a speech in Israel about the reason for the significant disparity in economic vitality:  “If you can learn anything from the economic history of the world, it’s this–culture makes all the difference.  You notice a stark difference in economic vitality between Israel and the Palestinians.  And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.”

And in so saying, he cited the book on this subject by David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, which spells out in detail the cultural attributes that define and are necessary for economic success as well as those that hinder it.  And in the latter case for the entire Arab world, those were outlined in painful detail by a team of Arab intellectuals in a 2002 United Nations report which essentially paralleled the Landes findings.  With the possible exception of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share an island, probably no two peoples in close proximity better illustrate the divergence of these attributes and the difference it makes in higher relief than do Israel and Palestine.  And in both instances it is all about the culture.

Of course Romney’s remarks drew an immediate response from the “Palestinians as victims” hustlers, led by a senior Palestinian official who labeled the comments “racist” and accused Romney of damaging U. S. efforts to restore America’s standing in the Muslim and Arab world.  There were also criticisms by a former Israeli official who bemoaned the damage to the “peace process”.

These criticisms are nonsense and, in fact, are a disservice to large numbers of Palestinians, particularly the well-educated entrepreneurs and energetic workers who know that they and their people are being ill-served by their leaders.  There is no peace process and will not and should not be one until we start with the truth about the respective cultures of these two peoples and the political history and geography of the Israeli/Palestinian relationship and begin to dispel the myriad of myths that surround this conflict.  A couple of years ago, I reviewed The World Turned Upside Down, by Melanie Phillips, which describes and debunks much of this mythology very well.  It’s a good place to start, but in the meantime I applaud Mitt Romney for moving the truth to center stage.  We need more of that.

We do not get to choose if a freedom revolution should begin or end in the Middle East or elsewhere.  We only get to choose what side we are on.–George W. Bush in The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2012 from a speech to the Bush Institute at SMU.

The Bush Doctrine has become a forgotten relic, dismissed by today’s White House, but I continue to believe as Bush 43 does that it or a very similar doctrine will be necessary to free the Muslim Middle East to join the civilized world. What will or should replace it?  For awhile, Barack Obama was forced by circumstances to continue various elements of it, primarily those involving American security, and he certainly deserves credit for taking out Osama bin Ladin.  But the balance of Obama’s record in the Middle East has been miserable, and this is most recently reflected in the utter failure, to the surprise of almost no one, of the U. S. backed United Nations approach to Syria and the obvious backsliding of democracy and increase in terrorist activity in Iraq as a result of premature withdrawal of American troops.  These trends highlight the indispensable necessity of presidential assertion of direct American leadership which has been sorely lacking in this administration, and the President himself seems not to have the inclination for hands on involvement, instead preferring to “lead from behind”.

There is no lack of reasoned strategy advice from an informed group of foreign policy experts outside the administration, most prominently a recent report from the Hudson Institute addressing the overall threat of Islamic extremism.  This report makes the point that, contrary to the Obama administration’s statement that “we are at war with a specific network, al-Qa’ida and its terrorist affiliates”, the U. S. is taking a much too narrow approach to the definition of the enemy.  It maintains that the Bush administration’s broader characterization of the threat remains true, that “the principal terrorist enemy confronting the U. S. is a transnational movement of extremist organizations, networks, and individuals and their state and non-state supporters, which have in common that they exploit Islam and use terrorism for ideological ends”.

So defeating al-Qa’ida in Iraq is not enough.  The essence of the problem is ideological and we cannot solve it by focusing our efforts on a single organization and its affiliates.  And  according to the study, the key is to stimulate and influence debate among Muslims in order to promote interpretations of Islam that do not assert the legitimacy of terrorism.  Will this strategy work?  Not without a definitive plan and certainly not without the committed leadership of the President of the United States.

But this President is not committed to any strategy except for one that favors a worldview dominated by transnational consensus based on the judgment of international organizations.  Meanwhile, there have been over 10,000 deaths among the rebel forces in Syria, Iran continues on the path toward a nuclear capability while assisting in the killing of Americans on every front, democracy in Iraq is deteriorating, and Russia and China continue to block any serious UN response to any of this.  The President has said that “the tide of war is receding”.  Is he looking at the same Middle East map that I am?