House of Eratosthenes

Amherst College and a Time of Change
December 13, 2013
Newt Gingrich

Something new and interesting is beginning to happen among America’s young people.

I experienced the change first hand this week.

What if I told you a conservative speaker could have a packed house at a very liberal college (with 750 in the auditorium and over 200 who couldn’t get in).

What if I told you that a conservative speaker could get a standing ovation both going in and coming out.

What if I further told you that after a 45 minute speech, there were an hour of questions and only three were negative.

That is exactly what happened when Callista and I had a remarkable visit to Amherst College this week.

It isn’t just Newtely saying so.

USA TODAY/Pew poll: Obama struggles with Millennials

Millennials have provided invaluable political support to President Obama over the course of his presidency, voting for him by a roughly 2-to-1 margin in his two successful campaigns against Mitt Romney and John McCain.

But as Obama tries to climb out of a 2-month-long malaise that saw his popularity sink with the fumbled rollout of the federal health care exchange, the president appears to have nearly as much work to do with young people as he does with older Americans.

Forty-five percent of 18- to 29-year-old Americans say they approve of the way Obama is handling his job; 46% disapprove of his job performance, according to a year-end USA TODAY/Pew Research Center Poll. The president’s approval rating with young Americans — which stood at 67% just ahead of his second inauguration less than a year ago — now mirrors the general population, according to the poll.

From Political Wire.

I’m vindicated! If only I can find my previous comments about this…until I manage to get that done I shall simply reiterate…

Starting with the part I know I can find easily since I’ve repeated it most often: It is in the nature of people to abandon critical thinking, when they feel like they can afford to. Critical thinking is, however, essential to good decision-making, so when it is abandoned the inevitable result is going to be poor decision-making. Poor decision-making leads to bad results. I would offer some recent news tidbits to help fasten this observation to our current reality, but ya know…that exercise seems redundant and therefore pointless right now. Bad results lead to a diminished position and depleted resources, and/or the prospect of such things, and the worry that goes with it all. Worrying leads to a higher valuation of, and eventually a recovery of, the critical thinking skills that were previously abandoned.

And then as those recovered critical thinking skills are further honed by continuous use, along with the benefits of experience, the decisions improve and then the results improve. Which leads to an elevation of the standard of living and an abundance of resources, which leads…this is the last part, which I really don’t like, but it is the reality of the situation — to a lazy, drunken, stultified “November 5 2008” mindset that suggests maybe critical thinking isn’t that important after all. Go back to step one.

Seems we now have our latest estimate of the worst-case time interval at the bottom part of this cycle, where the critical thinking skills remain abandoned. If it is accurate this time, that would be very good news indeed for this has been a worst-case scenario, involving a “cool” tall smooth-talking stadium-filling salesman, making His pitch to a generation of dumb young people, with bad-salesman-success sufficiently dazzling to quite literally make history, not U.S. history but world history. And this estimate would be: Five years, one month, ten days.

You see, there is hope. The frog does leap out of the pot of boiling water, and relatively quickly. Are we maxed out at five years at the opposite end of the cycle, when we’re enjoying the fruits of good decision-making and hard work that come after a recovery of critical thinking…cresting out, getting ready to lose it again? Oh no, not even close. Between World War II and the election of rock star Obama-like teen idol John F. Kennedy, that was fifteen years, right? But that’s not a good example, it was before my time. I’m sure many an oldster can step forward and rattle off some mistakes the country made in that timeframe, and we could have a discussion about whether such mistakes were due to a widespread cultural malaise of abandonment of critical thinking. Towards which I would be unqualified to contribute much of anything…but we have the Reagan era, that easily surpassed five years, preceded by the Carter era which fell short of the five years.

Our hope lies in the resolve people might have, certainly could have, to say to themselves: Yes things are good now, but I have to keep thinking responsibly, the way I thought back when times were lean, for if I cannot manage that then surely the salad days will end, and soon. To feel this sense of healthy invigorating dread when the immediate material circumstances do not necessitate it. To save for the rainy day, to think like a grown-up.

These waifs just grew up! Poor waifs, that’s a terribly sucky way to have to do it. But you know, the bright side is that the message is likely to stick. And for a lifetime. I’m looking forward to the boats being all lifted in the rising tide that is brought by the hardened generation…the anti-baby-boomers. The adorable munchkins who thought they could fix all the world’s problems just by electing the ethnically-mixed guy with the big ears and golden throat whose dulcet tones made planted whores faint. This will be a great generation.

The kids who went from thinking like a fifteen-year-old, to a forty-five-year-old — and were forced to, by the consequences of their own poor decision-making — in the space of five years, one month and ten days. I would have to imagine that isn’t quite as jarring an experience as having to write a will and then face down a Nazi machine gun nest at age seventeen. It is an entirely different vector, but of a common bearing. The direction is the right one. It’s good for them and good for everybody else too. They’re learning the basics; that the whole point to life is not just to be happy, and things that happen have cause-and-consequence relationships to other things that happen. That “hope” is often not enough. That, as the old saying goes, when you fail to plan you have planned for failure.

Depressions do have a way of clarifying things, don’t they? The WWII generation was one of the most conservative in American history thanks to the Great Depression. Of course, it took fighting a World War to get to the Nifty Fifties….

I’ve always said that most liberals of my acquaintance aren’t actually stupid, they’re just well off, which allows them the luxury of believing –and voting for — stupid things. You can always tell the faculty parking lot at a college, for instance — it’s the one with all the Volvos and BMWs and Benzes in it. Which they use to drive from their nice gated communities to preach Marxism at captive audiences paying $45K per annum.

We’re all about to be a lot less well off. Provided the country survives it, I’m going to be insufferable about twenty years hence. You know Robert Conquest, of Conquest’s First Law? After the Soviet Union fell and the declassified archival stuff proved him right on just about everything he’d ever written about the USSR, somebody asked him if he’d change anything in his book The Great Terror based on the new info. He replied that he’d only change the title, to I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.

I’ll be saying that a lot to my ex-liberal friends.
- Severian | 12/15/2013 @ 14:23
“…After the Soviet Union fell and the declassified archival stuff proved him right on just about everything he’d ever written about the USSR…”

Oh wait, Joe McCarthy as well!
- CaptDMO | 12/17/2013 @ 15:58
I think you’re wrong about the trend. The natural tendency of democracy is towards authoritarian or totalitarian socialism, because people think they’re getting free stuff. Moreover, the kids you spoke to are being marinated in a sauce of hard-core marxist PC, and even if they would like to be libertarian they will have unconscious socialist tendencies.

Ask them about smoking tobacco on campus, or Amherst’s speech codes or Catholic priests.
- Bob Sykes | 12/19/2013 @ 05:03

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Sunday, December 15th, 2013