Oberlin: Generals Fighting the Last War

I don't think that the president and administration of Oberlin College is evil for defaming and libeling the good folks at the Gibson Bakery.

I just think they are fools and knaves. And this is a much bigger problem than we think.

Back in the day, in the Cold War, our liberal friends used to virtue-signal about "generals fighting the last war." That was in the days, if you remember, when Pentagon generals were represented in the average newspaper cartoon as cartoon figures with dark glasses, an expressionless and craggy face, and a chest full of ribbons: military robots.

Not that liberals have ever bothered to educate themselves about war and strategy or anything like that.

Anyone that has thought a minute about war would recognize that it is almost inevitable that generals would be preparing the fight the last war all over again. What else are they going to do until the next war actually starts and they find out what works and what doesn't in the new situation?

Moreover there is the bureaucratic effect, for bureaucracies are top-down entities, designed and implemented to get the poor suckers at the point of the spear to risk their lives for:-- something or other. So no bureaucracy, including an army, is going to change unless forced to by the immediate threat of defeat and disgrace.

Now, I think that in the modern world this "generals fighting the last war" applies to nothing so much as all the institutions of the left and the welfare state. If you come up with a plan for reforming anything that deviates from just spreading out more money you come up against a brick wall of opposition, from everyone. The voters don't like it because they have arranged their lives around the status quo. The politicians don't like it because the voters don't like it, and the bureaucrats don't like it because all they know is how the program works right now and they risk getting the blame if anything changes.

So I look at the women administrators at Oberlin College -- Carmen Twillie Ambar, president; Meredith Raimondo, vice-president and dean of students; etc. -- and understand exactly what is going on. These women are idiots that have acquired their positions without a clue about what in the world a college is for and, more important, what it will have to become in the future. They are just bureaucratic numbskulls that have been carefully taught in the current culture of lefty diversity and inclusion and that is all they know.

Now, because I am a sexist, I believe that women are peculiarly ill-adapted to the governance of institutions. Their culture of complaint and their instinct for manipulation are excellent for the primary function of women, which is to keep their kids alive, and for community-of-women relationships. But women very seldom have any strategic sense -- beyond the obvious one of knowing how to manipulate personal and social relationships.

So if you are a woman administrator at a college like Oberlin you really have no idea, beyond performing the rituals set forth by your liberal predecessors. Intersectionality and diversity and inclusion and safe spaces and microaggressions are the meat and drink of a good little girl that has graduated into college administration and she has no idea, and no inkling of an idea, that she has any responsibility beyond the proper observance of the Elevation of the Host during the liberal Eucharist.

When people express their pessimism about the future of America, I instinctively agree, but I also know, because I have studied it, that rulers that have inherited their thrones -- and their courtiers too -- tend to have no idea what they are doing. They go through the motions of the celebrations of pomp and majesty and they punish dissenters and rebels, but really don't understand what they are doing at a deep level.

Now I think that the founders of the left were geniuses. Marx's idea of forming a coalition between well-born rich kids and the workers was brilliant, especially since the middle class then and now is a tolerant and kindly bunch that can be persuaded to be sorry for the folks that do the dirty work and don't get much in return. And it didn't hurt that the working class was the biggest class.

It was also brilliant for the Frankfurt School to realize that the left needed new recruits as the middle class expanded and workers started movin' on up. Thus women and minorities.

But the problem is that lefty politics doesn't really do much for its clients, other than passing out loot taken from the middle class. It is really cool, of course, for the well-born scions of the educated class, who get to staff the bureaucracy and run the universities. Not only that, but the record of the last century is unequivocal: if lefty politics actually results in a socialist state, it ends in ruin.

And lefty politics works by demonizing the middle class as white patriarchal supremacists, or whatever the pejorative du jour is.

You get to the point where the major institutions of lefty supremacy are run by scions, sons and daughters of the dynastic founders, that really don't have a strategic sense of what they are doing, and how the world really works outside their ruling-class bubble.

It is my suspicion -- nay, hope -- that we are at that point now. That the liberal elite really doesn't understand the way the world works nowadays, and that we are gong to see them flailing around helplessly as the world turns.

And so I think we are going to see more Oberlins: clueless liberal administrators flying up box canyons and terrified when they realize that there is no way out, no way back, nothing but the hope that everyone doesn't get killed when the plane crashes into the canyon wall.

Because the joke about "generals fighting the last war" is a pretty sad joke. Fighting the last war is what all of us do. All of us. even well-born liberals. It is only the crazies and the whackos that can see round corners. And usually they are wrong.