I grew up with those people, and dropped out of college to go back to their lifestyle, which in my youth felt so tight knit and understandable. Conservatives have lost, scarily understandably , their sense of hope for the future... so many psychological identity anchors are getting nuked... as their financial independence circles the drain. A progressive mindset is fundamentally more at ease with a changing society... I think on a primal level ... one looks to the past and the other looks to the future.... and for many they no longer see their place .... and we hate deep down being useless or not wanted .... I think it’s that existential angst about a role in society and connection that is the real zeitgeist of the ad.... even more deeply troubling because although the ad is cheap political propaganda.... the existential issues are profound and instead of coming together to figure out how we’re gonna get through another industrial revolution - this one even scarier than the last in many ways - all we have is demonization and hatred of each other at the top. Empathy compassion unity if you’re out there please come to planet earth
Smart take, Vince. As you know, my family is working class, and I'm still defined by that culture at the core of my identity. My parents were not anti-education. My father pushed me to get good grades, and my mother supported my interests in reading. But their religious fundamentalism really did draw the line at intellectual curiosity. There were settled convictions that they weren't willing to examine. So my own upbringing represented a kind of paradox. Everyone in the family was highly literate, but mainly used that literacy for things like preaching, Bible reading, and so on. I think they've been generally proud of my academic achievements, but have also been deeply unsettled by my actual intellectual journey. That's the thing about intellectual life: you can't always predict where that search for truth will take you.
But back to your point, the fear and anger coming from lost financial independence is real. That was the environment that gave Hitler credibility, and I find it frightening. My point is not to demonize anyone so much as to point out that affordable college for all would do a lot to alleviate that fear for kids whose parents who feel trapped. A world where someone can dabble in theatre without feeling vilified by their family and without feeling like they're making an enormous financial gamble is a better world. Another reader was commenting a few posts ago about how everyone twenty or thirty years ago used their college electives to explore. Why not try out glassblowing or sports analytics or a German language class without feeling like you're being irresponsible?
I'm agreeing with you. I think the way things are going, outlets for human expression, for creativity ( and isn't that the God spirit - that of creation) is even more important than in years past, when participating in the economic production process was so crucial. I grew up a diehard conservative, but lately it's shocking to realize how empty, how devoid of hope conservative politics has become. Hard to say, but I realize I'm going over to the progressive camp. Why not subsidize state schools and let kids go to college for free? why not let people have more time for art , more time for psycho/emotional health, more time for parenting. heck yes let's give ehe kids some hope that the world can be better... but I do think , if you were gonna do more free college - you would have to complement it with some sort of adult re educational centers where people could get re-trained for 21st century jobs ( 3d printing technician!) for free. Smart, symbolic analyst type people already have a huge advantage in this modern economy.... if we can't bridge that gap and starting working on an everybody included economy, the bitterness and rancor will just increase. rather than universal basic income, let's get serious about a "guaranteed job" - meaning that society will take seriously training it's citizens to participate in the future. Yes these are kinda off the hip ramblings, but the lack of hope bodes ill and reigniting that spark of belief in the future and each other seem to be a challenge of the day
Totally agree! Here's where I sometimes feel like a person without a country, however, because one reader privately pointed out to me that the kind of college education I had (and that I describe here) is not the kind of education that students are getting now. Patricia Hampl said during my summer writing workshop in Prague that we're not reading around the same campfire anymore, meaning that we can't take for granted what "the humanities" includes any longer. The humanities has become so thoroughly defined by identity groups that I wonder if it's the human condition we're accessing so much as one tiny slice of it. I believe that literature and art can bring us together. But the humanities as they are taught now are just as much about insider/outsider identities. If you are white, you can't write characters of color. And so on. I taught literature from a multicultural perspective for twenty years, and my thought was that inhabiting a character's reality helped everyone expand their own frame of reference. To read Momaday's House of Dawn is to try to become, imaginatively, a Navajo war veteran. As I wrote in an earlier post, I felt free -- as a teenager -- to identify with Chaim Potok's Jewish characters, even though I am not Jewish. I don't think that is how anti-racist approaches to literature work. And so at the risk of being redundant, I think everyone could use more education in the humanities if the pedagogy were more attentive to those unifying human qualities of storytelling and imaginative participation in it.
I grew up in a working class family in Slovakia. My folks barely finished high school and worked in steel factories their whole lives. However, both have always read fairly extensively (mostly newspapers which, during communism, were mostly propaganda. Still, they read anyway). They have always displayed reverence for education and educators. I am so intrigued by the popular narrative that positions educators as elitists here in the U.S. and wonder if this is happening elsewhere?
Zuzana, thanks for reading! I had this impression when I was in Prague this summer, and I wonder if it might be a generational thing in Europe. The Czech Republic loved having a playwright as a president, and Czech culture seems deeply appreciate of art. I did learn that some people there are nostalgic for the communist era, and that the country is divided politically in much the way that the U.S. is now. One literature professor told me that when the Soviets left and the previous ban on TV and movies was lifted, people started reading less and began consuming audiovisual media just like Americans have done for decades. This professor's impression was that the same institutional problems I've seen in American higher education that devalue intellectual life (corporatization, skills versus ideas, job-related curriculum) are also present in Czech universities. So it's possible that globalization is eroding some of these cultural attitudes. However, the point of my post was to illustrate how anti-education sentiment has been present in America from the earliest days of settlement. My sense of European, Middle Eastern, and Asian history is quite the opposite, and many immigrants from around the world bring with them a respect for education that is less common in America. Happy to discuss further!
Thanks for taking the time to respond. Some of my colleagues think you are overemphasizing American anti-intellectualism in this piece. They ask "If, as he argues, American culture is so deeply and relentlessly anti-intellectual, how can the historical development of the public education system and the proliferation of excellent private and public colleges and universities be explained?"
I'm somewhat surprised that your colleagues think there isn't anti-intellectualism in America. It's huge. There's thousands more McDonald's than colleges. There are more Wal-Marts than libraries. Where I live -- in the supposed enlightened Northwest -- there are more conservatives spread out in the land mass than liberals or so-called educated elite. The conservatives comprise almost all of Idaho, almost all of Oregon except for Portland and Eugene; and most of Washington, except for Seattle and some other small villages. There are just enough liberals in Seattle and Portland to win elections. With the exception of California -- though I was once told by a clerk that governor Brown was ruining the state -- one can find many more Duck Dynasty followers than those reading Shakespeare, as in millions more.
Somehow I was fortunate to attend an excellent high school in rural Montana. It was funded by timber money and revenue from an enormous silver mine, and because of that school many of us managed to grow up with both the unmatched beauty of the Rocky Mountains and hope for economic mobility. After the timber industry waned and the mine closed, the school I attended has fallen on much harder times, and I'm not sure they're even trying to send their graduates to college anymore.
I'm glad this is sparking some conversation with your colleagues. Responding meaningfully to their question might require a separate essay, but I'll simply say this. The public education system is under relentless attack. This is self-evident. Higher education is also a mess. There are many elite universities in the U.S., but many of them began as church schools and seminaries when ministers were part of the ruling class. Catholic schools are more intellectually-minded, typically, but they have more of a European approach to education than an American one. The relationship between state legislatures and public universities, especially land grant universities, is incredibly volatile and is often driven by capitalist imperatives like getting students jobs rather than encouraging broad intellectual exploration.
I'd be curious what your colleagues believe the primary goal of public education system in the U.S. is. I see little evidence that encouraging intellectual life has ever been the goal. Eleanor Roosevelt made a compelling case for public education as a means to good citizenship, but disagreements about how to define citizenship go back to Puritan New England. Puritan New England was succeeded by two hundred years of westward settlement, during which time the working person came to be seen as the emblem of American identity and educated elites were viewed with suspicion.
But this is mostly an illustration of how there is no singular American identity. America is not a melting pot and never has been. It is, as Mary Louise Pratt says, a "contact zone" where competing ideologies perpetually clash. George Packer captures some of those oppositions in his book Last Best Hope, where he identifies four different Americas. Free America is exemplified by the Ronald Reagan doctrine: more libertarian, more secular, devoted to America's ascent as a global economic power, but also deeply committed to a heroic view of American origins. Real America is more exemplified by Sarah Palin: working class, religious, the most anti-intellectual cultural group -- typically a rural demographic. Donald Trump strangely commands the loyalty of this group even though he is not one of them, as Palin once was. Smart America, according to Packer, represents a more recent group of college-educated people who are moderately liberal, tend to support the meritocratic ideal (equal opportunity for all, but what you make of that opportunity is up to you), and largely make a living in the white collar world. Just America is a branch of Smart America, typically a younger activist demographic that is suspicious of meritocracy and is more concerned with things like institutional racism or ingrained cultural misogyny. Black Lives Matter would be one example.
But I think a lot of this goes back to how one defines the purpose of education or the nature of intellectual life. That definition, for me, rests in the pillars of Western civilization, in the tradition of rational discourse that began with Plato and that resurfaced in the 18th century with Enlightenment. Being "pro-education" to me means being pro-knowledge for its own sake, being curious about history, finding intrinsic meaning in the arts, being awed and humbled by science and trusting the scientific method. Being an intellectual means pursuing truth with humility, grappling with my own ignorance, remaining open to new information, being inherently suspicious of dogma or political slogans. For instance, I think an intellectual conversation about college affordability must begin with the purpose of college (surely it's about more than just getting students jobs) and the reasons why college ought to be affordable for all (or not) before there is any talk about specific policies for avoiding student debt or forgiving the crushing burden that many college graduates have assumed out of necessity.
Excellent article, and in addition to the anti-education sentiments is the fact that these blue collar workers are not paying for someone else's education, some Wall Street financial firm is doing that. So instead of siding with cash-strapped college students, once again clueless voters side with Wall Street.
Perhaps Sallie Mae might take a hit in the pocket book. Cry me a river, I just Googled the company and they have $29 billion in assets. Why don't these people ever get mad at these corporations? It's like the Hillbilly Elegy author, Vance, who blames laziness and drug abuse on rural residents, instead of Sackler family and Purdue pharmaceuticals for putting the opioids into their community in the first place. I don't get the GOP/Trumpians, who always give Wall Street a free pass.
My Facebook feed is full of people in Iowa pointing out the hypocrisy of farmers taking big bailouts but opposing debt relief for college students. The Biden administration did the same with members of Congress who got many more dollars in debt relief for PPP loans than any individual will through this program. So, yes, the double standard is notable.
For the record, I don't like debt relief as a policy. Proactive measures to make college affordable from the outset would be better. I agree with those who see this as throwing money at a problem without fixing the root cause. There's plenty of that with the military, farming subsidies, and other government programs, too. However, getting to the root cause of rising tuition is the reasonable argument that Bennett made back in 1987 and that I think many people are willing to consider now. We can do that without hating each other.
Just discovered you, your Substack, and purchased a subscription. Here is my response to your Sep 16th comment:
President Joe Biden took off the gloves Friday in a speech pummeling Republican lawmakers who backed massive federal subsidies for business owners during COVID-19 but are now complaining about his student debt forgiveness program.
“Who in the hell do they think they are?” Biden asked to applause during an appearance at Delaware State University.
I do understand why he would make these comments; after all we are nearing crunch time and trends are not going his way.
However, the comparison he summons--PPP (Payroll Protection Plan) v. FSL (forgiveness of student loans)--is apples v. oranges and his attack is off-base:
Legality:
1. The PPP was authorized by Congress via “regular order” with a large bipartisan majority; FSL was "authorized" by one member of the Executive that has no constitutional role in authorizing spending;
2. Forgiveness of qualifying PPP loans required that the funds be passed to employees; FSL passes an individual's debt to the taxpayers.
3. And while it is claimed that prior "emergency" legislation from two decades ago legitimizes the Executive's action that position will be challenged in court and will likely fail.
Practicality:
1. 41 million student debtors are vastly outnumbered by 290 million citizens who either never borrowed or already paid off and are now on the hook for the students' loans. This is a seven-fold majority of Americans of all parties and persuasions. This will not work for the Democrats at the polls and many leading Democrats agree (see Begala, etc.). Moreover, very few giftees will move their vote more leftward--no one likes to feel they have been "bought" and while they will take the money and run few will commit the collusive act of changing their vote.
2. DeToqueville was pessimistic about the American experiment long-term pointing out that once the electorate realized it could loot the treasury through voting we would go bankrupt (with debt at 122% of GDP, up from 31% in 1980, are we there yet?).
3. $10/20,000/student? More later? And why not mortgages? Auto loans? Gambling debts?
Morality:
1. A contract to repay was made by each borrower and the moral hazard stemming from mass forgiveness sets an example, indeed an expectation, that such mutual agreements can be abrogated with impunity.
2. With yesterday's payment/interest suspensions, today's forgiveness and tomorrow's time/maximum payment limitations it will occur to even the dullest borrower that further payment on any balance would be foolish--just wait for the next attempt to purchase votes.
3. By expecting more and more from government we breed a dependency that turns John Kennedy's "Ask not. . . . ." inaugural address on its head. Hyek needs a resurgence in curricula everywhere.
This debt forgiveness is a disaster for us as a nation and for Democratic politics. Look to the courts to save us.
Bob, this is smart commentary. I think you'll see that I agree with you near the beginning of my post. The Bennett Hypothesis was based on legitimate concerns, and while that particular assumption hasn't held up, the fear of incentivizing reckless spending is one I share.
At best, the FSL is a stop-gap solution to an ongoing accessibility and inequity problem. The real ongoing solution is to make college more affordable. Some institutions are beginning to do that through their endowments, but that is only possible for the most privileged private institutions. Public education was always meant to be available to all, and it simply is not at the current rates. As I've written recently, culture wars have caused many GOP leaders to actively divest from public education, which only exacerbates inequity.
So I think we mostly agree. And I quite take your point that the 290 million people who did not attend college should not be on the hook for the 41 million who accepted debts they could not repay. However, I'm not certain that the 290 million can expect to pay nothing for affordable public education, and many of them would prefer to divest entirely from public schools. This, as I say, stems from an anti-intellectual strain of thought that dates back to the nation's founding. I'm not sure how to reconcile the conflicts, but I do think it's worth stating them clearly for what they are. Some of the 290 million who don't want to pay for affordable public universities will be shortchanging their kids, robbing them of choices that ought to be part of living in a democracy, at least if we still believe in real American equality.
Yes, totally agree. Higher education never should've been allowed to ramp up tuition and fees greatly beyond the rate of inflation. Yes, I understand state's reduced their support of higher ed, which is wrong, but some cost control by universities was never in place.
I've put this example in place before. By a normal rate of inflation of when I was in college many years ago to today, the actual cost of tuition (not housing, board, etc.) should be $3,200; instead it's $10K. That's not right. So yes, the root cause is still not fixed.
I'm for some debt relief if in turn they come back with fixing overall cost of college. I personally think all state community colleges should be free and all state universities should be half of what they are now. Also, admins always moan about losing on-campus kids. Well, guess what, those dorms for state universities? There's no property tax on them, they're owned by the state. Why not charge a damage deposit fee and food and that's it.
There are lots of things they can do. I've had friends attend private institutions and my niece is now at a very expensive one. I don't know the dynamics of those private school costs well enough to comment on them.
I grew up with those people, and dropped out of college to go back to their lifestyle, which in my youth felt so tight knit and understandable. Conservatives have lost, scarily understandably , their sense of hope for the future... so many psychological identity anchors are getting nuked... as their financial independence circles the drain. A progressive mindset is fundamentally more at ease with a changing society... I think on a primal level ... one looks to the past and the other looks to the future.... and for many they no longer see their place .... and we hate deep down being useless or not wanted .... I think it’s that existential angst about a role in society and connection that is the real zeitgeist of the ad.... even more deeply troubling because although the ad is cheap political propaganda.... the existential issues are profound and instead of coming together to figure out how we’re gonna get through another industrial revolution - this one even scarier than the last in many ways - all we have is demonization and hatred of each other at the top. Empathy compassion unity if you’re out there please come to planet earth
Smart take, Vince. As you know, my family is working class, and I'm still defined by that culture at the core of my identity. My parents were not anti-education. My father pushed me to get good grades, and my mother supported my interests in reading. But their religious fundamentalism really did draw the line at intellectual curiosity. There were settled convictions that they weren't willing to examine. So my own upbringing represented a kind of paradox. Everyone in the family was highly literate, but mainly used that literacy for things like preaching, Bible reading, and so on. I think they've been generally proud of my academic achievements, but have also been deeply unsettled by my actual intellectual journey. That's the thing about intellectual life: you can't always predict where that search for truth will take you.
But back to your point, the fear and anger coming from lost financial independence is real. That was the environment that gave Hitler credibility, and I find it frightening. My point is not to demonize anyone so much as to point out that affordable college for all would do a lot to alleviate that fear for kids whose parents who feel trapped. A world where someone can dabble in theatre without feeling vilified by their family and without feeling like they're making an enormous financial gamble is a better world. Another reader was commenting a few posts ago about how everyone twenty or thirty years ago used their college electives to explore. Why not try out glassblowing or sports analytics or a German language class without feeling like you're being irresponsible?
I'm agreeing with you. I think the way things are going, outlets for human expression, for creativity ( and isn't that the God spirit - that of creation) is even more important than in years past, when participating in the economic production process was so crucial. I grew up a diehard conservative, but lately it's shocking to realize how empty, how devoid of hope conservative politics has become. Hard to say, but I realize I'm going over to the progressive camp. Why not subsidize state schools and let kids go to college for free? why not let people have more time for art , more time for psycho/emotional health, more time for parenting. heck yes let's give ehe kids some hope that the world can be better... but I do think , if you were gonna do more free college - you would have to complement it with some sort of adult re educational centers where people could get re-trained for 21st century jobs ( 3d printing technician!) for free. Smart, symbolic analyst type people already have a huge advantage in this modern economy.... if we can't bridge that gap and starting working on an everybody included economy, the bitterness and rancor will just increase. rather than universal basic income, let's get serious about a "guaranteed job" - meaning that society will take seriously training it's citizens to participate in the future. Yes these are kinda off the hip ramblings, but the lack of hope bodes ill and reigniting that spark of belief in the future and each other seem to be a challenge of the day
The humanities help us understand the human condition. We could all use more education in the humanities. ✅
Totally agree! Here's where I sometimes feel like a person without a country, however, because one reader privately pointed out to me that the kind of college education I had (and that I describe here) is not the kind of education that students are getting now. Patricia Hampl said during my summer writing workshop in Prague that we're not reading around the same campfire anymore, meaning that we can't take for granted what "the humanities" includes any longer. The humanities has become so thoroughly defined by identity groups that I wonder if it's the human condition we're accessing so much as one tiny slice of it. I believe that literature and art can bring us together. But the humanities as they are taught now are just as much about insider/outsider identities. If you are white, you can't write characters of color. And so on. I taught literature from a multicultural perspective for twenty years, and my thought was that inhabiting a character's reality helped everyone expand their own frame of reference. To read Momaday's House of Dawn is to try to become, imaginatively, a Navajo war veteran. As I wrote in an earlier post, I felt free -- as a teenager -- to identify with Chaim Potok's Jewish characters, even though I am not Jewish. I don't think that is how anti-racist approaches to literature work. And so at the risk of being redundant, I think everyone could use more education in the humanities if the pedagogy were more attentive to those unifying human qualities of storytelling and imaginative participation in it.
I grew up in a working class family in Slovakia. My folks barely finished high school and worked in steel factories their whole lives. However, both have always read fairly extensively (mostly newspapers which, during communism, were mostly propaganda. Still, they read anyway). They have always displayed reverence for education and educators. I am so intrigued by the popular narrative that positions educators as elitists here in the U.S. and wonder if this is happening elsewhere?
Zuzana, thanks for reading! I had this impression when I was in Prague this summer, and I wonder if it might be a generational thing in Europe. The Czech Republic loved having a playwright as a president, and Czech culture seems deeply appreciate of art. I did learn that some people there are nostalgic for the communist era, and that the country is divided politically in much the way that the U.S. is now. One literature professor told me that when the Soviets left and the previous ban on TV and movies was lifted, people started reading less and began consuming audiovisual media just like Americans have done for decades. This professor's impression was that the same institutional problems I've seen in American higher education that devalue intellectual life (corporatization, skills versus ideas, job-related curriculum) are also present in Czech universities. So it's possible that globalization is eroding some of these cultural attitudes. However, the point of my post was to illustrate how anti-education sentiment has been present in America from the earliest days of settlement. My sense of European, Middle Eastern, and Asian history is quite the opposite, and many immigrants from around the world bring with them a respect for education that is less common in America. Happy to discuss further!
Thanks for taking the time to respond. Some of my colleagues think you are overemphasizing American anti-intellectualism in this piece. They ask "If, as he argues, American culture is so deeply and relentlessly anti-intellectual, how can the historical development of the public education system and the proliferation of excellent private and public colleges and universities be explained?"
I'm somewhat surprised that your colleagues think there isn't anti-intellectualism in America. It's huge. There's thousands more McDonald's than colleges. There are more Wal-Marts than libraries. Where I live -- in the supposed enlightened Northwest -- there are more conservatives spread out in the land mass than liberals or so-called educated elite. The conservatives comprise almost all of Idaho, almost all of Oregon except for Portland and Eugene; and most of Washington, except for Seattle and some other small villages. There are just enough liberals in Seattle and Portland to win elections. With the exception of California -- though I was once told by a clerk that governor Brown was ruining the state -- one can find many more Duck Dynasty followers than those reading Shakespeare, as in millions more.
Somehow I was fortunate to attend an excellent high school in rural Montana. It was funded by timber money and revenue from an enormous silver mine, and because of that school many of us managed to grow up with both the unmatched beauty of the Rocky Mountains and hope for economic mobility. After the timber industry waned and the mine closed, the school I attended has fallen on much harder times, and I'm not sure they're even trying to send their graduates to college anymore.
I'm glad this is sparking some conversation with your colleagues. Responding meaningfully to their question might require a separate essay, but I'll simply say this. The public education system is under relentless attack. This is self-evident. Higher education is also a mess. There are many elite universities in the U.S., but many of them began as church schools and seminaries when ministers were part of the ruling class. Catholic schools are more intellectually-minded, typically, but they have more of a European approach to education than an American one. The relationship between state legislatures and public universities, especially land grant universities, is incredibly volatile and is often driven by capitalist imperatives like getting students jobs rather than encouraging broad intellectual exploration.
I'd be curious what your colleagues believe the primary goal of public education system in the U.S. is. I see little evidence that encouraging intellectual life has ever been the goal. Eleanor Roosevelt made a compelling case for public education as a means to good citizenship, but disagreements about how to define citizenship go back to Puritan New England. Puritan New England was succeeded by two hundred years of westward settlement, during which time the working person came to be seen as the emblem of American identity and educated elites were viewed with suspicion.
But this is mostly an illustration of how there is no singular American identity. America is not a melting pot and never has been. It is, as Mary Louise Pratt says, a "contact zone" where competing ideologies perpetually clash. George Packer captures some of those oppositions in his book Last Best Hope, where he identifies four different Americas. Free America is exemplified by the Ronald Reagan doctrine: more libertarian, more secular, devoted to America's ascent as a global economic power, but also deeply committed to a heroic view of American origins. Real America is more exemplified by Sarah Palin: working class, religious, the most anti-intellectual cultural group -- typically a rural demographic. Donald Trump strangely commands the loyalty of this group even though he is not one of them, as Palin once was. Smart America, according to Packer, represents a more recent group of college-educated people who are moderately liberal, tend to support the meritocratic ideal (equal opportunity for all, but what you make of that opportunity is up to you), and largely make a living in the white collar world. Just America is a branch of Smart America, typically a younger activist demographic that is suspicious of meritocracy and is more concerned with things like institutional racism or ingrained cultural misogyny. Black Lives Matter would be one example.
But I think a lot of this goes back to how one defines the purpose of education or the nature of intellectual life. That definition, for me, rests in the pillars of Western civilization, in the tradition of rational discourse that began with Plato and that resurfaced in the 18th century with Enlightenment. Being "pro-education" to me means being pro-knowledge for its own sake, being curious about history, finding intrinsic meaning in the arts, being awed and humbled by science and trusting the scientific method. Being an intellectual means pursuing truth with humility, grappling with my own ignorance, remaining open to new information, being inherently suspicious of dogma or political slogans. For instance, I think an intellectual conversation about college affordability must begin with the purpose of college (surely it's about more than just getting students jobs) and the reasons why college ought to be affordable for all (or not) before there is any talk about specific policies for avoiding student debt or forgiving the crushing burden that many college graduates have assumed out of necessity.
Excellent article, and in addition to the anti-education sentiments is the fact that these blue collar workers are not paying for someone else's education, some Wall Street financial firm is doing that. So instead of siding with cash-strapped college students, once again clueless voters side with Wall Street.
Perhaps Sallie Mae might take a hit in the pocket book. Cry me a river, I just Googled the company and they have $29 billion in assets. Why don't these people ever get mad at these corporations? It's like the Hillbilly Elegy author, Vance, who blames laziness and drug abuse on rural residents, instead of Sackler family and Purdue pharmaceuticals for putting the opioids into their community in the first place. I don't get the GOP/Trumpians, who always give Wall Street a free pass.
My Facebook feed is full of people in Iowa pointing out the hypocrisy of farmers taking big bailouts but opposing debt relief for college students. The Biden administration did the same with members of Congress who got many more dollars in debt relief for PPP loans than any individual will through this program. So, yes, the double standard is notable.
For the record, I don't like debt relief as a policy. Proactive measures to make college affordable from the outset would be better. I agree with those who see this as throwing money at a problem without fixing the root cause. There's plenty of that with the military, farming subsidies, and other government programs, too. However, getting to the root cause of rising tuition is the reasonable argument that Bennett made back in 1987 and that I think many people are willing to consider now. We can do that without hating each other.
Just discovered you, your Substack, and purchased a subscription. Here is my response to your Sep 16th comment:
President Joe Biden took off the gloves Friday in a speech pummeling Republican lawmakers who backed massive federal subsidies for business owners during COVID-19 but are now complaining about his student debt forgiveness program.
“Who in the hell do they think they are?” Biden asked to applause during an appearance at Delaware State University.
I do understand why he would make these comments; after all we are nearing crunch time and trends are not going his way.
However, the comparison he summons--PPP (Payroll Protection Plan) v. FSL (forgiveness of student loans)--is apples v. oranges and his attack is off-base:
Legality:
1. The PPP was authorized by Congress via “regular order” with a large bipartisan majority; FSL was "authorized" by one member of the Executive that has no constitutional role in authorizing spending;
2. Forgiveness of qualifying PPP loans required that the funds be passed to employees; FSL passes an individual's debt to the taxpayers.
3. And while it is claimed that prior "emergency" legislation from two decades ago legitimizes the Executive's action that position will be challenged in court and will likely fail.
Practicality:
1. 41 million student debtors are vastly outnumbered by 290 million citizens who either never borrowed or already paid off and are now on the hook for the students' loans. This is a seven-fold majority of Americans of all parties and persuasions. This will not work for the Democrats at the polls and many leading Democrats agree (see Begala, etc.). Moreover, very few giftees will move their vote more leftward--no one likes to feel they have been "bought" and while they will take the money and run few will commit the collusive act of changing their vote.
2. DeToqueville was pessimistic about the American experiment long-term pointing out that once the electorate realized it could loot the treasury through voting we would go bankrupt (with debt at 122% of GDP, up from 31% in 1980, are we there yet?).
3. $10/20,000/student? More later? And why not mortgages? Auto loans? Gambling debts?
Morality:
1. A contract to repay was made by each borrower and the moral hazard stemming from mass forgiveness sets an example, indeed an expectation, that such mutual agreements can be abrogated with impunity.
2. With yesterday's payment/interest suspensions, today's forgiveness and tomorrow's time/maximum payment limitations it will occur to even the dullest borrower that further payment on any balance would be foolish--just wait for the next attempt to purchase votes.
3. By expecting more and more from government we breed a dependency that turns John Kennedy's "Ask not. . . . ." inaugural address on its head. Hyek needs a resurgence in curricula everywhere.
This debt forgiveness is a disaster for us as a nation and for Democratic politics. Look to the courts to save us.
Bob, this is smart commentary. I think you'll see that I agree with you near the beginning of my post. The Bennett Hypothesis was based on legitimate concerns, and while that particular assumption hasn't held up, the fear of incentivizing reckless spending is one I share.
At best, the FSL is a stop-gap solution to an ongoing accessibility and inequity problem. The real ongoing solution is to make college more affordable. Some institutions are beginning to do that through their endowments, but that is only possible for the most privileged private institutions. Public education was always meant to be available to all, and it simply is not at the current rates. As I've written recently, culture wars have caused many GOP leaders to actively divest from public education, which only exacerbates inequity.
So I think we mostly agree. And I quite take your point that the 290 million people who did not attend college should not be on the hook for the 41 million who accepted debts they could not repay. However, I'm not certain that the 290 million can expect to pay nothing for affordable public education, and many of them would prefer to divest entirely from public schools. This, as I say, stems from an anti-intellectual strain of thought that dates back to the nation's founding. I'm not sure how to reconcile the conflicts, but I do think it's worth stating them clearly for what they are. Some of the 290 million who don't want to pay for affordable public universities will be shortchanging their kids, robbing them of choices that ought to be part of living in a democracy, at least if we still believe in real American equality.
Yes, totally agree. Higher education never should've been allowed to ramp up tuition and fees greatly beyond the rate of inflation. Yes, I understand state's reduced their support of higher ed, which is wrong, but some cost control by universities was never in place.
I've put this example in place before. By a normal rate of inflation of when I was in college many years ago to today, the actual cost of tuition (not housing, board, etc.) should be $3,200; instead it's $10K. That's not right. So yes, the root cause is still not fixed.
I'm for some debt relief if in turn they come back with fixing overall cost of college. I personally think all state community colleges should be free and all state universities should be half of what they are now. Also, admins always moan about losing on-campus kids. Well, guess what, those dorms for state universities? There's no property tax on them, they're owned by the state. Why not charge a damage deposit fee and food and that's it.
There are lots of things they can do. I've had friends attend private institutions and my niece is now at a very expensive one. I don't know the dynamics of those private school costs well enough to comment on them.