An interview of Peter Thiel on The Free Press today quotes him as saying we’d be better off if not so many people voted.
I know what he means. People in America used to not believe every election was an existential crisis. We had faith that even if the bastards won, we’d be okay, and we could throw ‘em out next election.
From a child’s perspective I remember the 1960 election. Of course I was pro-Nixon, because my parents were. It was the first election I was ever aware of, and..I reckon it was kinda scary to have the guy they DIDN’T like win. But I quickly realized it was okay, our country would be okay, life wouldn’t change. I remember the day when Kennedy was assassinated. I got into the car with them, I didn’t know what to say or whether to say anything; they were grimly silent. After a while my sister and I began giggling over something in the back seat, and my mother rounded on us: “There is nothing funny! Our president is DEAD!” I really hadn’t been sure how they’d take it…
Thiel says capitalism hasn’t worked for young people. He says most young people who voted for Mamdani had 2 issues: student debt and unaffordable housing. There has been a breach of the “intergenerational compact”.
Personally I think student debt is the one and only issue.
And I think colleges and universities should all be forced to halve their billion dollar endowments to solve it. They oughta eat it! But it isn’t real anyway. I mean what did they actually expend that they wouldn’t have expended anyway so that so many students could get what turned out to be useless non-marketable degrees? They don’t even feed the students any more.
Housing I have to admit I don’t understand. When WW II ended a man named Levit understood that the returning veterans would want homes. He built ‘em. Isn’t there anybody like him around now? CTFO let’s BUILD those starter homes! Why can’t we? And no no no please don’t blame zoning regulations. It has long been a principle of zoning law at least in Pa and NJ that municipalities MUST accommodate growth.
But mainly what i I want to tell you is: oh, if only we could get back to the time when people had the blithe conviction that our country could and would survive any election!
If government were not so all-pervading, then elections might be less of a focus. When did government start to outgrow society’s ability to tolerate it? Some blame Lincoln, some blame Wilson, all sentient beings blame FDR. Personally, I blame the well-intended environmental movement of the 1970s, which led to the explosion of regulation and economy-sucking lawyers.
But those who benefit from the current excessive government – a huge group, including illegal aliens, the poor, the credentialed, major corporations, lawyers and politicians – are not going to allow government to shrink in a peaceful manner. The only way out is collapse.
But there are examples of societies which have collapsed and, after some miserable generations, have been reborn. That is the optimistic view of the future – a future which hopefully will include very stringent restrictions on who can vote.
If college still did what it’s supposed to do: make sure that the intelligent, bookish young people in our society learn the first thing about everything—I’d still be all for it.
But now a college degree is just a social marker, like high school used to be. And getting one doesn’t mean you have had a broad-based “liberal” ( which I think meant plentiful, generous) education. And I mean, even that would be okay if it weren’t now ruinously expensive. So you spent 4 winters lounging around in the dorms or on the green, bullshitting with people your age—okay, you had a good time. And maybe it was kinda a social equalizer, you learned how to become like your peers, thus likeable to them. All good, but NOT worth $250,000in debt.
Well, he’s either too cowardly or too ignorant to give the real reason: racial/ethnic politics. The majority of foreign-born New Yorkers voted for Mamdani, while native-born New Yorkers voted for Cuomo. So, I guess the native New Yorkers were okay with housing affordability and student loan debt. Multi-culti societies always degenerate into ethnic voting blocks.
But wait, there’s more! It gets even more granular than that. The only reason Jacob Frey won re-election as the mayor of Minneapolis is that the Somali running against him (Omar Fateh) belongs to a different clan (Daarood) than most of other Minneapolis Somalis. Hurrah, the Regime has imported the kind of tribal conflicts that caused civil war in Somalia. Import the Third World, become the Third World.
That’s okay. The reputations of universities and the prestige of the degrees are in sharp decline. Future innovation and intellectual excellence are coming from other places. Smart people will bypass these gatekeepers; their overpriced degrees will be irrelevant.