Interview: David Gelernter on America-Lite
In 1957, William DeVane, dean of Yale, made a casual statement that no one noticed at the time. But in retrospect it’s remarkable.
Our national leaders for the most part are men of integrity, idealism, and skill; our literary and artistic people command an international respect such as they never had before; our scientists and engineers, especially the latter, are the wonder and envy of other nations; our teachers in our colleges and universities are learned and devoted.
In 1957, Americans were pleased with America and proud of it. They had problems and knew it, but were undismayed.
Less than twenty years later, that proud confidence was gone, crumbled like mud-bricks into flyblown clouds of dust. “No one knows which way to turn and which way to go,” wrote the great essayist (and lifelong optimist, patriot, liberal) E. B. White in 1975. “Patriotism is unfashionable,” he wrote in 1976, “having picked up the taint of chauvinism, jingoism, and demagoguery. A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself.” The nation got over its low spirits, but Americans no longer speak about their country the way DeVane did back in 1957.
– From the opening of Chapter One of David Gelernter’s new book, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats). Today, if an American academic expresses any pride at all in America, he does so by modifying his statement with some variation of “yes but.” Or as an academic-turned-president said shortly after taking office:
I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.
But what caused such a dramatic transformation? That’s the subject of the new book by Gelernter, who is also the professor of computer science at Yale University. During our 25-minute interview, David discusses:
We all know of the isolationist right in America on the eve of World War II. Why aren’t we as familiar with the numerous prominent liberal intellectuals who also opposed America’s entry into that war?- The symbiotic relationship between the liberal intellectuals who dreamed up America’s role in the Vietnam War, and the liberal intellectuals who opposed it. And how opposition to Vietnam essentially predates the war itself, not the other way around.
- The role of what Gelernter dubs “self-hating WASPs,” and the changing role of Jewish intellectuals in the academy over the 20th century.
- How Barack Obama is “the perfect superhero of America-Lite.”
- How a video featuring David earned him 549 “likes” — and over five thousand dislikes from YouTube’ viewers.
- How the higher-education bubble (to coin a phrase) could be the opening for conservatives and other members of the non-Left to take back higher culture.
And much more. Click here to listen:
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There is little doubt that the thesis contained herein is correct.
For if this was not the case (aside from so many other indicators) how does one explain the following evidence – ‘The Muslim Student Association(MSA)…(Islamic) Student Arm Of The Muslim Brotherhood/Muslim Mafia…Huma Abedin Board Member Too..What Does This Mean?’ – http://www.adinakutnicki.com (Aug 15, 2012).
Read it, they you will see its connection to th etopic at hand.
It is obvious the “liberal” American academia and media are constantly working to destroy America from within and are succeeding lecture by lecture, article by article. Unless there is a balance struck between the liberal and American value conservative thinking professors and journalists in the universities and the media, America will continue going down the drain until there is nothing left to drain!!
A good interview, but the book is not to be missed. It is an artful (at times withering) examination of the intellectual distemper of our time. One of its most memorable lines (which is to be found on page 117 of chapter seven, entitled “Today: Airheads and Obamacrats”) is the following: “But after all, these are mere facts, and facts are dog biscuits at the table of world-class intellectuals and the new establishment.” Just so.
Thanks to the wealth of their parents, the ’50s saw a teenage and early ’20s group of people with time on their hands, authoritative ideas that came to trump “old people,” and with not a lick of sense or leavening of experience to back it up.
This continues to this day, where a wholesale transportation of the Third World into America is in play, and the PC libs won’t see the ship is sinking until it’s too late. Abstract thinking and wishing won’t replace the brutal reality of the failed nations and cultures these people come from.
How come we didn’t have a problem with the “wholesale transportation” of Third World peoples into this country before 1923? Sicily, Poland, Russia –places and peoples just as Third World then as Latin America is now.
The answer is that America was confident in its Western Civilization back then; we had no “multi-culturalism” (cultural relativism), and our intellectual leaders were determined to assimilate those backward immigrant peoples. (Also, we didn’t have much of a welfare state back then.)
With the demographic time bomb we have now (baby boomers just now moving in to retirement, with a smaller working age population to pay for their benefits), we’re going to need to increase the immigration rate to help get out of our economic mess. (And, as well, we’re going to need to begin to dismantle our welfare state and our over-bureaucratized, leftist-controlled public school system.)
Let’s not blame brown-skin immigrants for our troubles; it is our very WASPish intellectual elite that is destroying this country.
I liked reading this interview. I take in information better this way, it costs me less time, and sometimes I don’t want to disturb others by playing an audio. Earphones, I know, I know, but they are not always at hand.
About the higher education bubble, there are two websites worth a look, free-clep-prep dot com and khanacademy dot org. The clep test costs about $100 (they are free to ex-military) and allow one to get 3 or 6 hours of college credit for many lower level and some upper level courses. Depending on what university you are with, and there are two or three that will accept unlimited credit by test, you can knock out a huge number of credits towards a degree. I have read of highly motivated seniors in high school who have earned a bachelor degree by the time they graduate from high school, simply by testing. Another person earned a BA in four weeks by testing alone.
All of this to acknowledge that the value of a college degree has been greatly eroded, yet it has become almost as necessary as a high school diploma. The universities were supposed to equip people to think and be original problem solvers, but have become nearly diploma mills. Credit by testing is merely a way to save time and money, since we are forced to play their silly game.
Sal Khan has a rapidly improving site for free tutoring for math, science, and many other topics by short video. The videos are unique, and the man has a gift for teaching. Do not spell the name as K A H N, that will lead to a rip-off site that is not free.
Civil Forfeiture Highway Shakedowns in Tennessee
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJd4Q4u5cqU&feature=player_embedded
“…I mean, if you look at where this nation stood in early 1942, when we were losing a war to the Japanese and we didn’t have any — we didn’t have any weapons with which to fight, and we were being thrown back on every front; or a decade earlier, when we were facing a genuine depression and we didn’t know what to do to the economic system to make it work again, we’ve got through much worse times than this…”
I disagree. The threat we faced in 1942 was physical – the threat of invasion – and without turning this into a miltary history discussion, that threat was minimal. Hitler couldn’t cross 20 miles of Channel to invade England, let alone the Atlantic to invade us. Same with the Japanese. But the threat we face today is existential. America is an idea, not an ethnicity or a geographical location – the idea that we are a land of equal opportunity. The idea that today threatens our very existance is that we are a land of equal outcome – the very core of Marxism. And the difference between those two words is the difference between serfdom and freedom, and is measured in the millions of lives. This time is far different than what we faced in 1942. And the issue is very much in doubt.
I disagree also.
Ironically, it may be Islam that re-awakens European Christendom to once again assert without apology it’s right to exist and promote it’s own interests.
The reason the issue is in doubt is because – as opposed to WWII – the enemy is inside the gates. He is over the ramparts and mingled in amongst us. Traitors walk amongs us and control the instruments of culture. Oh yes, this is far worse than 1942.
Gelernter lost me completely at his gushing over Lincoln. That’s always the tell of a fascist and it inexorably taints the rest of his argument.
Give it a rest.
We didn’t just lose the pride; we lost the excellence of which to be proud.
I disagree. We were told that our excellence was nothing to be proud of — we still have plenty of excellent people and accomplishments, we’re just supposed to be ashamed of them.
I agree.
But it is in decline, because of the mediocracy that Leftwingism/socialism/multiculturalism/affirmative action promotes.
In the fifties Americans lived by 2 mottos. “In God We Trust” and “God Helps Those Who Help Themselves”.
Americans prayed and solved their problems themselves. They were self-reliant. They was beholden to nobody. When they needed help, they looked to themselves and NOT to the government (at any level). Churches maintained store houses filled with emergency supplies in case disaster struck. Churches and local charities got us through the Dust Bowl and other catastrophes.
God died in the 1970s.
Today, our new motto is “In Government We Trust”. People who help themselves are condemned as sociopaths.
When catastrophe strikes the charities are gone. The news is filled with how inadequate the government response is (viz Katrina). Americans are no longer self-reliant. They are not proud. They weep and wimper when disaster relief fails.
The Progressives call the last 50 years a half-century of Progress!
Gelernter is wrong here Ed. Same with the late Andrew Breitbart. The Paleos with “it was the Jews! You Idiot!” rote answer are also wrong. No conspiracy, thought-leaders, influence of hair-rays or other people corrupting a mass of innocent Americans is required for the loathing and hating of Traditional America.
Instead, the broad social changes made that as natural for late Twentieth Century Americans as anti-Semitism was for Catholic Germans and Austrians. [Or Irish Catholics for that matter, see Valera, Eamon de.]
After the 1950′s, the corrosive effect of mass market consumerism, and in particular the targeting of women, who make or influence according to marketing dogma 85% of all consumer purchase, created a great mass of people who HATE HATE HATED America.
It was the organic position of women that drove this. With freedom NEVER EVER seen before, anonymous urban living, no social constraints in a highly physically mobile environment, easy and cheap contraception, and a mate market that lasts decades if not a lifetime, there is no surprise that the HATE HATE HATE of traditional America is not the result of any evil conspiracy but the mass movement of women in America. Who were vastly pre-disposed to hate the traditional America — because tradition produced beta males who were dutiful, loyal, faithful, and thus unsexy to the liberated woman who did not need a supporter.
Think about it. How did rejection of limiting tradition in favor of extreme radical automony come about? Why millions and millions of women seeking the sexiest of men!
That is the logical outcome socially of the pill, condom, television, and a consumer mass market. Places with everything prior BUT a consumer mass market: Russia, East Europe, to an extent Japan, are far more socially conservative and reject radical individual (which amounts to only attractive/young female) autonomy.
As anyone in sales can tell you, you cannot sell something to someone that they don’t already want. You cannot create desire. Merely offer your goods and services as the best satisfaction of the existing desire.
The hatred of the traditions and past of America, the dislike of all its (male) institutions, and hyper-liberalism and extreme radical autonomy (for women only, no one wants or needs unsexy beta males) is as logical a consequence of technology as Gutenberg kicking off the Protestant Revolution (because Bibles could be so cheap nearly anyone could own one and read for himself what was written therein).
There is this fantasy that if we can “just unmask” the evil-doers we can fix America. There are no evil-doers, in a conspiracy, just ourselves. There is no fixing. Or certainly nothing easy. Women are not going to surrender total, radical sexual autonomy and freedom for … boring beta males and the entire traditions, values, and cohesion that traditional America brought. The only “cure” is radical poverty, hardship, war, personal violence at every turn, buying protection from beta males who stick around at the cost of not having fun sexy times with Alphas who don’t. In short, life on the Frontier circa 1625-1895.
THAT prospect leaves me with the horrors. Depressing but there is no getting around the social changes of technology.
Thank the Soviets for all of this.
Before Hitler attacked the USSR, all loyal American communists were directed to rail against US intervention in the war raging in Europe. Everything changed when Uncle Joe’s buddy Adolph, unleashed Blitzkrieg on an unsuspecting proleteraite.
If you believe what General Pacepa has to say about the campaign in the East to discredit the West, then you understand what institutions had to be torn down in order to make it all happen.
Despite the fact that the Soviet Union and its satellites no longer exist, the legacy that has been left behind has become the gift that keeps on giving.
We have to also mention the Frankfurt School, and the Venona papers.
Or as an academic-turned-president
An adjunct instructor is not an “academic”. The Indonesian Imbecile has the mathematical sophistication of a slow 8th grader, the English skills of a high schooler in remedial classes and has never even come close to publishing anything that doesn’t induce laughter. Don’t even joke that he was ever an “academic” of any sort. Barky’s a stone cold idiot who has no skills and has never done anything in academia beyond being voted onto the Harvard Lawn Review and penning one nearly illterate note in it.
HBO’s NEWSROOM Opening scene “Why America’s Not the Greatest Country”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEyUWKJFER8
The Triumphant Decline of the WASP
By NOAH FELDMAN
Published: June 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/opinion/28feldman.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all
WHY WERE THERE SO MANY JEWS IN SDS? (OR, THE ORDEAL OF CIVILITY)
by Mark Rudd
http://www.markrudd.com/?about-mark-rudd/why-were-there-so-many-jews-in-sds-or-the-ordeal-of-civility.html
The author Paul Berman, himself a Jewish veteran of Columbia SDS, in his excellent book, “A Tale of Two Utopias,” gives the following data from reliable sources: two-thirds of the white Freedom Riders who traveled to Mississippi were Jewish; a majority of the steering committee of the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement were Jewish; the SDS chapters at Columbia and the University of Michigan were more than half Jewish; at Kent State in Ohio, where only 5 percent of the student body was Jewish, Jews constituted 19 percent of the chapter. I might add a strange statistic which I became aware of in the course of two trips to Kent State to commemorate the events of May, 1970: three of the four students shot by the National Guard at Kent State were Jewish. This, of course, defies all odds.
WASP society is disintegrating
by Philip Weiss on August 14, 2011
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/08/wasp-society-is-disintegrating.html
I was just a little kid in 1957, but I clearly remember my grandfather using the phrase that the country was “going to hell in a hand basket”.
I’ve often thought it was lucky that he died in 1964 or the events after that would have killed him.
Thanks for interviewing Gelertner. Dude is wicked smart.