It’s been great in recent days to read more people saying what I’ve been saying: our problem is bigger than election day. Here’s just one example from AmericanThinker.com:
Twenty-five years ago, Allan Bloom published a book called The Closing of the American Mind, which made a series of stark arguments about what seemed to be happening in higher education. The left was taking over at elite colleges. After Bloom’s lachrymose lamentation, there seemed to be a boom in conservative alarms about the ideological lopsidedness of the academy. Some scholars, such as Dinesh D’Souza, David Horowitz, and, to a certain extent, Victor Davis Hanson, rose to national attention on the issue of liberal academic malfeasance.
Since American universities also train and credential K-12 teachers, not to mention journalists and most media professionals, there was a foreseeable death spiral for conservative thought. Liberalism was destined to attain a frightening monopoly over the culture.
Now that we’re 25 years after Bloom, what has been the result?
Conservatives get a big fat F
In part because conservatives focused too much on controversies at elite colleges and then withdrew into well-funded think-tanks, their concerns remained somewhat parochial in dissemination, discussed only in the company of the already wealthy.