Continued from December 20th’s “How to Prevent Revolts.”
#5. Disrupt and Reform Higher Education
Why are our universities failing to produce competent graduates essential to a meritocratic nation engaged in fierce global competition?
Increasingly, students are politicized, largely ignorant, indebted, bitter, and unable to ensure American preeminence in basic science, technology, engineering, and math.
Easy Solutions:
- Get the government out of the student-loan business that ensures escalating tuition hikes greater than the rate of inflation.
- Eliminate faculty tenure and replace it with five-year contracts that require demonstrable achievement.
- Subject large endowments to taxation on their interest income to curb their wasted spending.
- Allow public schools to hire either those with school of education credentials or one-year master’s degrees that focused solely on academic study.
- Require standardized exit tests, in the fashion of erstwhile SAT and ACT entry tests, for the certification of the bachelor’s degree.
- Force universities to follow the Bill of Rights on campus, regarding due process and freedom of expression
#6. Revive the Armed Forces
Our military, in dire straits, is overcommitted, under-resourced, and without any geo-political strategy other than ad hoc responses without defined objectives.
(Our military) has become politically weaponized and, inevitably, unable to meet recruitment goals. The Pentagon remains obsessed with exorbitantly priced weapons that cannot be produced in sufficient numbers in an age of hostile swarms of cheap, mass-produced drones and thousands of batteries of ground-to-air and shore-to-ship missiles.
The Pentagon has become adept in publishing racial data on every aspect of military service to emphasize disparity and bias—except concerning the combat dead.
Retiring high-ranking officers should refrain from board memberships on contracting corporations for at least five years upon leaving the military.
The uniform code of military justice must be strictly enforced, including article 88 which prohibits retired officers from attacking in personal terms high-ranking elected officials, and in particular their commander-in-chief.
#7. Fix Voting
Our elections are a mess, writes VDH.
The greatest political revolution in our election history has been the change—accelerated under the cover of COVID and the George Floyd riots—in many key states from a 20-30 percent “absentee ballot” vote to 70-80 percent early/mail-in balloting. In a mere four years we have all but destroyed Election Day voting and Election Night final tabulations as we had known them for decades.
Third-party ballot harvesting and ballot curing should be outlawed at the federal level, and we should return to the requirement of requesting absentee ballots rather than automatically sending them out. Otherwise, no future election will again win the confidence of a majority of Americans. And without trust in balloting, consensual government becomes nonexistent.
#8. Drain the Swamp
The Deep State – the Washington nexus of bureaucracies, media, and lobbyists – has created a huge, unelected permanent army of auditors, regulators, investigators, and punishers, all mostly exempt from audit and accountability and without fear of their elected overseers.
Break up the concentrations of power:
- Transfer out of Washington, in this age of zoom and telecommunications, major cabinet departments like Health and Human Services, Energy, or Agriculture into the hinterland.
- Restore the idea that lying to Congress, feigning amnesia, or pleading ignorance under oath to Congress or federal investigators or in depositions is a prosecutable felony with jail time
#9. Upend the Welfare State
The number of those receiving federal and state subsidies is beginning to match the number of those who subsidize them. Workers are scarce whether we are in boom or bust times, claims VDH. “Trillion-dollar COVID subsidies have accelerated the idea that Americans need not work full-time to maintain a living.”
We can easily return to the “workfare” championed by a triangulating Bill Clinton in the 1990s that demanded healthy and able recipients to be gainfully employed upon receipt of state and federal cash. In the context of the homeless, we need to return to pre-Reagan norms of institutionalizing the mentally ill and creating hospitals and safe spaces away from American downtowns to house those who either cannot or will not take care of themselves. Defecating, urinating, injecting, and fornicating on city-streets are not victimless crimes, but assaults on civilized life as we once knew it.
#10. Restore Norms
Our current therapeutic obsessions that seeks to divide Americans into binaries of oppressors and the oppressed is in desperate need of civic education in K-12 that acquaints all children and teens with American institutions, key events like Gettysburg or D-Day, and familiarity with the Constitution and the duties of the citizen.
Like it or not, the nuclear family remains the bulwark of the American nation, which will not survive if current fertility rates of below 1.7 children per woman continue to diminish and age the population. The government must incentivize childbearing and child raising.
Critical race theory, critical legal theory, and critical criminology theory are euphemisms for unleashing lawbreakers upon the vulnerable. We are in a strange cycle in which we deliberately do not enforce gun laws in our cities and then when murder reaches near historic proportions we blame unenforced guns laws rather than the criminals who are exempt in using deadly weapons as the cause.
