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Jared Kushner for Secretary of State? Really?

Par : Jude Russo
Politics

Jared Kushner for Secretary of State? Really?

Some GOP senators are allegedly in love with the idea of Jared Kushner being Trump’s next secretary of state. You have to wonder why.

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The conventional wisdom is that the core problem for the first Trump term was one of staffing. President Trump’s team did not have the infrastructure in place to fill out an America First administration; chronic personnel shortages and, particularly after Steve Bannon’s departure, a resort to bog-standard GOP staffing pipelines ensured that, even when policies were well articulated, execution was stymied by the lack of non-hostile manpower.

Nowhere was this dynamic more evident than at the State Department. Career officials resigned in large numbers, depleting a diplomatic force that was already understaffed; those that remained were hostile, sometimes openly so. The department was helmed first by the hapless Rex Tillerson, who was for whatever reason ineffective, and Mike Pompeo, who was at best equivocally aligned with the America First foreign policy program. Trump had no Kissinger.

Conservative networks are attempting to build the infrastructure to avoid the manpower failure in the event that he wins a second term—a difficult feat, but more likely than the mainstream press would have you think. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a particularly ambitious effort. Yet these measures will be only as effective as the cabinet-level officials who are responsible for translating the dicta of the Oval Office into plans of action, particularly action in the face of an overwhelmingly hostile career civil service.

This leaves us with the pesky secretary of state question: Who will be Trump’s Kissinger? According to a brief notice in Vanity Fair, the New York-based gossip and fashion magazine, some Republican senators—based on the target demographics of Vanity Fair, we’re guessing South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham is one—are bruiting the name of Jared Kushner, Trump’s own son-in-law. 

The points in his favor are obvious. Family does not (or should not) require the same level of loyalty-testing, so there is (or should be) little concern of the kind of outright defiance Trump faced from some members of his cabinet. The Abraham Accords, perhaps the signature foreign policy achievement of the Trump era, was Kushner’s particular project (accomplished with the aid of, bizarrely, the erstwhile CEO of WeWork and the funniest character in American public life today, Adam Neumann). 

On the other hand, we know a few things about Kushner. As Vanity Fair points out, he’s got a lot of money in Saudi investments, including Saudi investments in Israel. (Kushner’s foreign business is widely thought to have played a role in the difficulties he had obtaining a clearance in the first Trump term.) As George O’Neill has pointed out in these pages, he has no personal connection to Trump’s base or even much of the classic GOP coalition; he has been a Democrat most of his adult life, and was raised by wealthy Democrats in New York. As our own Curt Mills wrote in the same, he is soft on China and hard on Iran. He is hawkish on LGBT rights, something that matters rather more for American foreign policy than you might expect. Family loyalty is all well and good, but you can’t help but feel that maybe Kushner is pushing a vision of “America First” that is an awful lot like Bushism or even Obamaism. 

Would a Kushner tenure at State be the forceful conquest and occupation it must be, or would it be an ideological homecoming for the golden boy? Last March, Phillip Linderman reviewed Pompeo’s not-quite campaign memoir, identifying several points of departure for Trump’s next State chief. Most of these action items pertain to ameliorating the effects of a sclerotically liberal-internationalist Foreign Service—“For a conservative secretary in particular, the much bigger priority…is to ensure that department careerists are not out there making their own policies”—including the acquisition and support of ideologically aligned career staff. Does Kushner have the inclination to do any of that hard work against his natural allies and fellow travelers?

A body has a diversity of members; so do most administrations in basically liberal democratic countries. Coalitions are useful, even necessary. Trump’s son-in-law remains a valuable asset, but probably in a reprise of the role he played during the brokering of the Abraham Accords—a personal envoy whose connection to the president acts as a bond of faith to the involved parties. It seems risky to give him more generalized powers outside his particular projects, either as a cabinet-level appointee or as a utility-player “No. 2.” (One wonders whether things would have played out differently had Trump replaced Kushner with Bannon in 2020, as he reportedly considered.) Personnel is policy, as has been repeated time and again in the past seven years. Kushner, despite his virtues, just doesn’t seem like the man to implement that insight at Foggy Bottom—especially if his biggest cheerleaders are GOP senators talking anonymously to Vanity Fair.

The post Jared Kushner for Secretary of State? Really? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Are Americans Headed Toward a Civil War?

Politics

Are Americans Headed Toward a Civil War?

The cycle Kevin Phillips saw from the 17th century to the 19th may resurface in the 21st.

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Are Americans headed toward a civil war? We’ve already had one, so we know it’s within the realm of possibility. In fact, by one reckoning, the English speakers have had two other civil wars in the last four centuries, spaced out every hundred or so years. Is there some sort of deep cycle at work here? With, er, implications for our own troubled times?

Such questions are brought to mind by a book published back in 1998, Kevin Phillips’ The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America. That volume connects three conflicts, the impacts of which were felt strongly on both sides of the Atlantic: the English Civil War of the 17th century, the American Revolution of the 18th century, and the American Civil War of the 19th century.  

Phillips, who died in 2023, was not an academic, which might explain why he could have a scholarly turn of mind and a keen eye for contemporary significance. Early in his career, he was a Republican politico, albeit one with lots of facts and figures. The book that made him famous as a wunderkind, The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), carefully traced, among other things, the partisan impact of the U.S. Civil War, even as it prophesied that the old Confederacy, once the citadel of the Democratic Party, would be the hub of the new GOP. He similarly foresaw that the Lincoln Republicanism of, say, Vermont would give way to Democratic liberalism. Yet while Phillips was a Tory at heart, he was anything but a Republican triumphalist; in later decades he steadily critiqued the New Right (going back a few New Rights ago), Reaganomics, Newt Gingrich, and the Two Bushes.

Yet whether it was voting patterns of German-Americans in the Midwest or the financial flows of Wall Street, Phillips always wrote with ethnographic knowingness. The Cousins’ Wars sprawls over 700 pages, delighting in detail. For example, he dwells on the continuities between East Anglia (the font of Puritanism, where Oliver Cromwell was born) and Massachusetts (the Puritan capital in North America, home of, to name one revolutionary descendant of Puritans, John Adams).  

Writes Phillips: “The long, wide public greens of Suffolk, Essex, and Hertfordshire—especially notable examples remain in Writtle and Matching, Essex, and Long Melford, Suffolk—were transferred to New England en masse,” to sister-towns across the Atlantic such as Braintree, Groton, Ipswich—and, of course, Cambridge.

Yet if Phillips is good at itemizing the trees, he’s also skilled at overviewing the forest. His larger woodsy argument is that the conflicts of Anglo-America across those centuries followed certain key themes: city vs. country, smugglers vs. tariff collectors, insider economic interests vs. outsiders, and, perhaps most or all, the fervor of faith. Writes Phillips of earlier eras: “Religion shaped the principal texture of men’s minds.” 

Such assertions might seem to put a cap on the contemporary relevance of Phillips’ work. After all, these days, in both the U.S. and the U.K., it can’t be said that Christian religion is the main texture. The decay of Mainline Protestantism is well-documented; less known is the decline of the Southern Baptists. Nearly a third of Americans don’t keep even the pretense of religious attendance. As sage observers have noted, the hardcore MAGA movement is not particularly attached to a church. That’s how an obviously secular figure such as Donald Trump can ride high with the right. Yet over on the left, can anyone say that Barack Obama was any less secular? As for Joe Biden, he takes “cafeteria Catholic” to its à la carte extreme, making all-out support for abortion a centerpiece of his reelection campaign.

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak, the prime minister of Great Britain, is a Hindu who took the oath of office with his hand on the Bhagavad Gita. So much for the Test Act

Yet Phillips, who spent his career making sly appraisals and keen parallels, would have a ready answer to this irreligion conundrum.  Over the last two or so centuries, religion has been transmuted into new textures of ideology, including communism, fascism, environmentalism, and feminism. From ballot boxes to battlefields, these new creeds have been fighting faiths. Hence the wit of the wordplay “Great Awokening.” 

We can see this in the lineage of Puritanism, which morphed into Congregationalism and then into the United Church of Christ—which is now, of course, fully woke. To be sure, the ethnicity of Massachusetts and New England has changed enormously over the centuries; Albion’s seed is now the minority. Still, the people of the Bay State retain their Emersonian energy, forever scanning the horizon for things to either abolish or improve. It helps that on a per capita basis, Massachusetts is the richest state in the union; affluence enables one to climb high on Maslow’s pyramid, all the better to look down.

The spirit of high-minded meddlesomeness animates readers of The Boston Globe and The Harvard Crimson. It’s interesting to recall that, back in 1636, Harvard was founded to train Puritan preachers; today, Christianity is long gone, and the campus still fills with passionate intensity. According to a 2024 repressiveness rating compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, “Harvard University obtained the lowest score possible, 0.00, and is the only school with an ‘Abysmal’ speech climate rating.” The original Puritans—Winthrop, Cotton, and Mather—would be horrified at what Harvardian crusaders are doing today, but they might at least honor the zeal with which they are doing it. 

As Phillips writes, history is not made by class, it’s made by clash. That is, the conflict of one group against another, which can include rich against rich and poor against poor. Just as the Puritans mostly fought the Cavaliers (the forces of Charles I in England, the forces of Robert E. Lee in Virginia), so now the secularized New Englanders, broadened out to Yankees and other denizens of Democratic blue dots, find themselves in conflict with the Republican red zones.   

On the other side of the blue-red divide, contending beliefs flourish, and the reds are duly energized. Committed Christians, evangelical and Catholic, have hardly disappeared amidst the MAGA, and they have all joined together in the GOP. There they have been joined, like it or not, by a smattering of alt-right sectaries, including Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Groypers, and Pepe the Froggers. Just one thing unites this motley crew: antipathy to Blue.  

If we wish to update Phillips, we can see the fighting faiths that could be the basis of—portentous drumroll here—the next Cousins’ War. Will it be actual combat? Or just a lot of angry tweets? Two years ago, here at The American Conservative, this author wrote, “The United States has all the preconditions for a civil war today except one: the willingness to actually fight for the sake of disunity.” I still think that’s true, and I sure hope it is. I’ve written much about how the Diverse States of America could and should agree to a tacit separation, allowing red states to enjoy their reditude and blue states to savor their blueness while all 50 states remain in a loosened union that would leave all with more happiness and property.  

Indeed, as predicted here at The American Conservative on January 26, the Biden administration has chosen to back down on the “barbed wire” standoff in Eagle Pass, Texas. Washington chose to retaliate against the Lone Star State by limiting LNG, not by sending General McDowell. For his part, Texas governor Greg Abbot rallied 24 fellow Republican governors to his side. Evidently, D.C. Blues didn’t want to mess with Texas, or with this emerging Red Bloc. That might suggest hope for a peaceful, if strained, coexistence between Red and Blue. 

Yet Phillips would probably say that history won’t let us down that lightly. The stern motif of The Cousins’ Wars is…wars. As he wrote, the three wars in his chronicle have been “the central staircase” of Anglo-American history. Lest anyone miss his point, he added, “Bloodshed…is to lasting electoral arrangements what carbon has been to steel.”  

The point: Sometimes conflicts are so deep that they simply can’t be resolved through peaceable means. In the 17th century, the Puritans and other hardcore Protestants thought that King Charles I was a tyrant, a secret Catholic, and a lackey for arch-enemy France (and not without reason; Charles was in fact, a believer in divine right and was married to a French Catholic, the sister of King Louis XIII). It’s no wonder there was no middle ground.

Moving along in Phillips’ bloody trinity, the American Revolution, too was a hard nut. As the author and his myriad footnotes sketch out, the American colonies were so large, relative to the mother country—the population of the 13 colonies was about 2.5 million, the population of England, about 7 million—that the Americans had their own culture, economy, and special concerns (nobody at the Court of St. James had to worry about Iroquois raids). The mutual incomprehension was all the more acute because it took two months to get across the Atlantic. Hard to manage either taxation or representation from such a distance. And when King George tried to put his foot down, George Washington put a jagged nail up.  

That right there should provide a lesson to Blue: It’s hard to hold dominion over a peer power. These days, partisan Democrats have the edge over Republicans in Washington, although the real power of Blue is its wielding of the administrative/deep state as a hammer against Red’s folkways, e.g. separate bathrooms for boys and girls. Yet Red has figured out how to fight back, firing figurative shots heard ’round the world. Can Blue accept Red’s right to self-determination? Or will Blue fight to keep control? The fate of an empire hinges.   

Bismarck declared to the Prussian parliament in 1862, “Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided…but by iron and blood.” Not everyone likes military solutions, but was the Iron Chancellor wrong?  Victory in war solved problems for the Germans in the 19th century, and defeat in the 20th century solved problems for Germany’s enemies—as well as for its victims. As Oliver Cromwell explained, sometimes bloody events are a “cruel necessity.” 

Will we, in fact, have a fourth Cousins’ War? To be sure, both sides, Red and Blue, cite a long train of abuses, and without a doubt we have an upcoming crazy train of elections and the inevitable disputes. Yet the Anglo-Saxons were always good at better angel-ing; they might have fought like the dickens, but in the end they stopped well short of outright annihilation and permanent vendettas. So let’s pray that post-WASP America can summon up the same spirit of pragmatism, updating the Puritan dream of a city upon a hill with a new vision: two cities upon the hill.

The post Are Americans Headed Toward a Civil War? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Reconsidering History

History

Reconsidering History

State of the Union: History as a discipline is too important to be left to ideologues. 

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One of the most incompetent and degenerate emperors of ancient Rome will be considered a member of an oppressed and protected class from now on. Elagabalus, a Syriac Roman emperor who was arguably a crossdresser, should have his “pronouns respected,” according to a British museum

Keith Hoskins, who is a Liberal Democrat councilor and executive member for arts at the Lib Dem–Labour coalition-run council, claimed that Elagabalus most definitely preferred the “she” pronoun. “We know that Elagabalus identified as a woman and was explicit about which pronouns to use, which shows that pronouns are not a new thing. It is only polite and respectful.”

In another recent incident, a “study” has discovered instances of “premodern structural racism” after concluding that black women were most likely to die from the London plague. 

These are, of course, comical. 

Elagabalus was a noted deviant, but it is also likely that he was a victim of character assassination; the main source for his rule, the anonymous Historia Augusta, is a farrago of pornographic fiction and satire. Any claim of “crossdressers” being “transgender” calls into question its own premise, as it implies that there is indeed no biological transgenderism; the fad is just a fetish of deviant men dressing up as women. This is pretty much what conservatives claim anyway. Likewise, the idea that black Africans were in London in the 14th century and were victims of structural racism is so absurd that it defies logic. 

Dr. Rebecca Redfern, from the Museum of London, said, “We have no primary written sources from people of colour and those of black African descent during the Great Pestilence of the 14th Century, so archaeological research is essential to understanding more about their lives and experiences.” 

Well, yes, because there weren’t any. It was 14th-century London. The darkest people there were perhaps a few soot-covered Cornishmen.

This isn’t just a British malady. I went to the Lee House in Arlington recently—surprisingly still standing despite the current climate—but the signs of revisionism were there already. Even simple descriptive panels had disclaimers of “missing information”, no doubt to be filled at a later date after consultation with some DEI bureaucrat.

This is also why my colleague and Jarrett Stepman and I have started the History Reconsidered podcast, available weekly on every podcast platform and eventually on this site. 

Sir Roger Scruton said that small acts of rebellion start on an individual level. Instead of moaning about the decline of history, it is an individual’s duty to uphold and create new institutions and platforms. Because History with a capital H, as a discipline, is too important to be left to fanatics and ideologues, whether within the corrupt academy or in ideological museums.

The post Reconsidering History appeared first on The American Conservative.

Want to ‘Reduce Harm’? Try Abstinence.

Politics

Want to ‘Reduce Harm’? Try Abstinence.

State of the Union: Believe it or not, there are ways to reduce drug use that do not facilitate drug use.

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(Photo by Sandy Huffaker for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Supervised consumption sites, where addicts use illegal drugs in the presence of nonprofit workers tasked with reversing overdoses, are the next frontier in the “harm-reduction” movement. The New York Times reports that the federal prosecutor in Manhattan is considering shutting down one of the city’s sites.

The nonprofit group, OnPoint NYC, has reportedly been operating this site with the knowledge of city, state, and federal officials for almost two years. The site they run facilitates illegal drug use.

What’s left to consider?

For context, here’s the Times’s description of the group’s overdose-prevention ”strategy”:

The group’s strategy — known as supervised consumption — is simple, but radical: Let people use illicit drugs at special centers, under the watchful eye of nonprofit workers who can intervene if something goes wrong. The group, OnPoint NYC, said on Tuesday that its two overdose prevention centers have reversed 1,000 overdoses since they opened more than a year and a half ago, at a time when the drug supply contains the dangerous opioid fentanyl in growing concentrations.

There are two ways to prevent overdoses. The first is to prevent people from taking drugs. The other is to allow people to overdose, and administer Narcan to reverse the inevitable consequences of drug abuse.

The latter strategy is predicated upon harm reduction principles, which progressives apply both to risky sex and illicit drug use. Harm reduction assumes people will behave badly, and seeks to minimize the natural and inevitable “harm” associated with those behaviors. For drug users, “harm reduction” entails facilitating drug use and preventing overdose, rather than encouraging or forcing, as circumstances demand, abstinence.

Here’s Sam Rivera, executive director of the nonprofit, on his work:

It is really frustrating that a health issue has become a political issue. What we know is no one ever has to die again of an overdose, ever. They’re preventable.

Of course, whether or not federal law enforcement abets the open violation of federal law is very much a “political” issue. But Rivera is right that no one ever has to die of an overdose. Structured rehabilitation programs that move the user to reduce his use, and eventually embrace abstinence, can prevent overdose and preserve the user’s dignity. Abstinence, adhered to, has a 100 percent success rate.

The post Want to ‘Reduce Harm’? Try Abstinence. appeared first on The American Conservative.

An Opportunity Agenda to Replace ‘College for All’

Politics

An Opportunity Agenda to Replace ‘College for All’

Emerging alternatives to traditional four-year degrees are shaking up the education industry.

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K-12 education issues are often cast today as a story about Americans divided on what we want from our schools, a culture war between left and right. While there are fundamental disagreements, this story is mostly wrong. The result is a collective illusion—a false narrative—that ignores a stubborn fact. Americans broadly agree that we should end what’s been a central goal of K-12 education for many years: “college for all.”

In its place, Americans want a new opportunity program for young people, in which a college degree is one of many pathways to success. Facilitating this “opportunity pluralism” is a common-sense governing agenda for policymakers, based on a more flexible K-12 system. It also empowers the domestic realists of the ideological heartland, led by civic pluralists who nurture civil society by building different K-12 education pathways programs for young people. These programs can develop a young person’s agency by providing him or her with the knowledge, relationships, and networks—profitable knowledge and priceless relationships—he or she needs to pursue opportunity and human flourishing.

The name “opportunity pluralism” suggests broad appeal. What faction, left or right, could argue with a plurality of pathways to success? Yet K-12 education for many years has been dominated by the singular ideal of “college for all.” This model aims to move nearly all K-12 students down the same path, from elementary to middle to high school to college to a degree and, finally, to a job.

Certainly, college degrees are valuable, both professionally and personally. But the fixating on the degree as the golden ticket to employment has led to a harmful phenomenon Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel terms the “credentialist prejudice.” Credentialism describes the bias that makes the college degree the preferred engine of upward mobility and key pathway to a flourishing life—to the growing exclusion of the uncredentialed. Credentialism harms workers and employers by barring people, particularly the disadvantaged, from meaningful work opportunities, and sharply limiting the pool of qualified workers whom employers can hire.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is ample evidence that today many Americans, including young people, no longer subscribe to college for all. There are at least four reasons for this change.

First, the pandemic changed what Americans want from K-12 education. A March 2023 Wall Street Journal-NORC poll found nearly six in ten (56 percent) Americans say a four-year degree is “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.” A “Purposes of Education Index” by Populace, a Massachusetts nonprofit, reports that Americans ranked preparing students for college 47th out of 57 on their list of education priorities, despite having perceived it as one of school systems’ top ten priorities before the pandemic. Americans’ number one priority is for students to “develop practical skills,” but only one in four (26 percent) think students in fact do. This is followed by being able to “problem solve and make decisions,” “demonstrate character,” and “demonstrate basic reading, writing, and arithmetic.” The K-12 education policy agendas of many of the nation’s governors align with these sentiments—further evidence of a growing consensus.

Second, current Gen Z high-schoolers do not see college through the same rose-colored glasses as did prior generations. Five national surveys of Gen Z high schoolers show a collapse in enthusiasm for college. In January 2022, around half (51 percent) said they plan to attend a four-year college, down 20 percentage points down from a high of 71 percent in May 2020. Nearly one-third of Gen Z respondents indicated a preference for post-high school educational experiences of two years or less, rather than a four-year college experience.

Third, employers are turning from degree-based hiring to skills-based hiring, shifting from using college degrees to evaluate a job seeker’s qualifications to using the prospect’s practical knowledge and experience. This approach is used by major companies such as Google, Apple, IBM, Mastercard, and Bank of America. The federal government and some states are turning to skills-based hiring for their personnel needs. This change is popular. A Gallop survey reports that seven in ten Americans believe that employers should hire job candidates based on skills and experience instead of a college degree, though fewer than half say that their employers do so.

Finally, some of the benefits associated with a degree are fading. A Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis study shows that the college income premium declined for recent college graduates, while the wealth premium fell among all cohorts born after 1940. Additionally, for any non-white head of household born in the 1980s, the wealth premium associated with a college degree cannot be distinguished from zero. This is true also for those with a postgraduate degree. As the authors conclude, “the economic benefits of college may be diminishing.”

For these reasons (and more) the credentialist bias at the heart of college for all—which would universalize college and direct young people through a single pathway to opportunity—should give way to an approach that expands the number of pathways to opportunity. Today, civic entrepreneurs are creating different K-12 career pathways programs with better ways of preparing young people to pursue opportunity and human flourishing. They integrate education, training, employment, support services, and job placement—spanning K-12, postsecondary, and workforce development.

These programs include approaches like apprenticeships and internships, career and technical education, dual enrollment in high school and postsecondary education, career academies, boot camps for acquiring specific knowledge or skills, and staffing, placement, and other support services for job seekers. In general, they acquaint students with the demands of the workforce and employers by engaging them in work with adult mentors. Such connections produce new forms of social capital by fostering cross-class friendships, social networks, and information sources among students, teachers, work mentors, and other program supporters. They also nurture the development of local civil society by involving many sectors of the community that, through these programs, help individuals lay the foundation for opportunity and human flourishing.

These education pathways programs are bipartisan. Consider the statewide initiatives created by governors and legislators from both political parties, with Delaware and Tennessee serving as prime examples of well-established initiatives. Similar programs exist in such politically diverse states as California, Colorado, Texas, and Indiana. Local programs feature collaborations between K–12 schools, employers, and civic partners.

Five common features characterize these programs: 

  1. Learning linked to credentials: Programs teach academic and technical skills linked with local labor employer needs. Students receive a credential upon completing a program. As a result, they have a leg up on getting a good job. 
  2. Focus on work and careers: Students explore work and careers beginning early in school, with guest speakers and field trips. In high school, they participate in work placement and mentorships that are integrated into classroom instruction and connect them with adults.
  3. Adult advisors: Advisors help students make informed choices and overcome barriers they encounter, thus avoiding job placements based on race, ethnicity, or other demographic considerations. Advisors help students develop confidence and knowledge so they can make their own choices about their pathways.
  4. Community partnerships: Employers, industry groups, and other local institutions create civic partnerships focused on program success. These include a written agreement clarifying responsibilities, governance structure, and funding sources.  
  5. Supportive laws and policies: Local, state, and federal laws, policies, and programs can (and do) create a framework for program development. This is central to a program’s success. 

There is convincing evidence that these programs succeed. A Fordham Institute analysis showed at least five benefits. First, these programs are not, in fact, a path away from college, as those who take career-oriented courses are just as likely as their peers to attend college. Second, they increase graduation rates. Third, they improve college outcomes, especially for women and disadvantaged students. Fourth, they boost students’ incomes. Fifth and finally, they enhance other skills, such as perseverance and self-efficacy. 

These pathways program create an opportunity program built on two elements, which I call the “opportunity equation” and “opportunity pluralism.” The elements of the equation are knowledge and relationships—what students know and whom they know. Simply put, young people need more to succeed than general cognitive and specific technical knowledge, or habits of mind. They must also cultivate relationships, or habits of association. These habits are the building blocks of individual opportunity. In short: Knowledge plus Relationships equal Opportunity.     

Habits of mind and habits of association are closely linked, as the economics of skill-development illustrates. Harvard economist David Deming showed that the significance of cognitive skills has declined as a predictor of labor-market wage success, while the predictive importance of non-cognitive skills, especially social skills, has increased. As I have written previously, these social skills include “high levels of nonroutine, interpersonal exchanges with others” such as communication, cooperation, collaboration, social intelligence, and conflict resolution.

Further, after age 35, life-cycle wage growth is substantially greater in occupations that entail nonroutine, high variance jobs that are decision intensive and require worker adaptation.

In other words, there’s a clear wage premium to having social skills. Deming writes, “strong cognitive skills are increasingly a necessary—but not a sufficient—condition for obtaining a good, high paying job. You also need to have social skills.” The implications are clear: Students who are able to cultivate interactions and build networks with a variety of community stakeholders will be much better positioned for career success than those who have taken a schooling-only path. We must build pathways on the opportunity equation.

The second part of an opportunity program is opportunity pluralism, offering individuals many different paths to opportunity. This approach is consistent with efforts to help people acquire credentials that are valued in the labor market and that young people begin earning in school. Opportunity pluralism is not about discouraging individuals from pursuing a college degree. Rather, it positions a variety of options as valued credentials—recognizing the ways that knowledge, networks, skills, and experience lead to good jobs and a fulfilled life. It does not try to equalize opportunity on a single pathway (such as college for all) but rather makes the nation’s opportunity infrastructure more pluralistic, valuing both educational and employment outcomes. In short, opportunity pluralism ensures that every young person—regardless of background—has multiple pathways available to reach good jobs, a satisfying career, and a flourishing life.

This new opportunity agenda differs sharply from the vocational education of old, which placed students into different tracks and occupational destinations based mostly on family background. That sorting process often carried with it racial, ethnic, and class biases: Immigrant students, low-income students and students of color typically enrolled in low-level academic and vocational training, while middle- and upper-class white students took academic, college-preparatory classes. The opportunity pluralism paradigm also presents non-degree credentials as building blocks toward associate’s and bachelor’s degrees, rather than as a lesser alternative to such degrees. It allows colleges to “unbundle” the four-year degree into building blocks, or stackable credentials, that are earned while working and, as a career progresses, that lead to an associate’s or bachelor’s degree.

Pathways programs also provide young people with social and psychological benefits. By exposing young people to occupations and having them explore and experience them, students are able to “try on” different futures and envision themselves as productive workers, thereby developing an occupational identity. Students in these programs can also develop a broader sense of clarity about who they are and what their interests, values, and abilities are in life, thereby developing their vocational selves. Finally, opportunity pluralism helps develop a young person’s self-agency, along with the dynamism and innovation that local initiatives and the institutions of civil society nurture.

Opportunity pluralism isn’t simply a good idea. It is also broadly popular, and already beginning to take place. Americans want a new educational paradigm for young people that replaces college-for-all with opportunity pluralism. This approach does not discourage young people from pursuing a college degree but rather offers multiple ways to receive valuable credentials based on habits of mind (the knowledge that pays) and habits of association (the relationships that are priceless). We must cast aside the collective illusion and false narrative of irreconcilable culture war differences in education. This opportunity program recognizes that Americans are creating a new K-12 ideological heartland, a term coined by Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute, that describes not a physical place but rather a shared state of mind.

The ideological heartland is where domestic realists live. It’s the terrain of those not given to ideological political extremes. Domestic realists may lean left or right, or even be part of that forgotten group called moderates, but they care more for practical action than culture-war posturing. The narrative of deeply entrenched disagreement on K-12 issues might lead us to think of domestic realists as a small minority. On the contrary, roughly two-thirds of Americans live in this ideological heartland. Right now, domestic realists are hard at work creating programs that nurture civil society through the new social networks and communities made up of the young people and adults who participate in them. While the full fruits of this growing movement have yet to be reckoned, cumulatively they suggest a sea change in education that will enable people to thrive in the 21st-century workforce.

This article is part of the American System series edited by David A. Cowan and supported by the Common Good Economics Grant Program. The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors.

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The Case for the Washington Football Team

Par : Nic Rowan
Culture

The Case for the Washington Football Team

Washington, D.C. is not the city it was 70 years ago, or even 30 years ago.

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Last week, Magic Johnson, one of the new owners holding a minority stake in the Washington Commanders, said that the capital’s football team may well be renamed again in the next few years. 

“Everything’s on the table, right? Especially after this year. We’ll see where we are with the name,” Johnson told NBC. “We’re going to spend this year understanding what we have in place. The name of the team will come up eventually.”

The franchise’s majority owner, Josh Harris, has also discussed the potential for a name change. While he said that his top priority for the team is winning—a welcome change from the previous owner—he also indicated that he cares about pleasing the fans. And a name change would be a big part of achieving that goal. Within 24 hours of the NFL’s approval of Harris’s purchase, he received multiple requests from fans begging for him to ditch the Commanders’ name. 

Most people, of course, want to revert back to the Redskins. After more than 20 years of controversy, capped by a painful, protracted transition to the new name, the Redskins is still the name by which most Washingtonians call their team. The evidence of its longevity is everywhere: The logo is still plastered on many city playgrounds, as well as the old highway signs indicating the exit for RFK Stadium (whose closure in favor of an all-but inaccessible suburban monstrosity is another sore spot). The Redskins have a powerful pull, not just on the grandpas who wear burgundy and gold polos to church on Sunday, but also on the college kids down the street from my house, who, every weekend in the fall, play beer pong on a table painted to look like the Joe Gibbs–era FedEx Field.   

I am sympathetic to these longings, but, when I consider the proposition practically, I don’t see it becoming reality. Washington, D.C. is not the city it was 70 years ago when the team’s founder, George Preston Marshall, successfully marketed the Redskins as the “team of the South,” bringing with him all the baggage that appellation entailed. It’s not even the city it was a little more than 30 years ago, when, under Jack Kent Cooke’s ownership, the Redskins won their last Super Bowl. In that era, the ’Skins still played in RFK, a formidable inner-city stadium with a dirt field, crumbling locker rooms, and grandstands so small that fans practically participated in the games themselves. 

There’s no going back to that time. These days, D.C. is a big, professionalized town, populated more or less permanently by transplants uninterested in the locals’ backward old ways. Even if, by some miracle, the new owners did toss the Commanders name and revive the Redskins, I suspect it would be in some ersatz, unsatisfying manner. The diminishment would leave fans wishing they had let the dead bury the dead.

Instead, I propose that Josh Harris et al. do something truly bold. The Redskins aren’t coming back, and the Commanders can’t stay. Barring another pathetic attempt at a rebrand (Would anyone really accept the Pigskins? the Redtails? the Red Hogs?) that leaves us with one option, and I think it is the best one: The Washington Football Team.

That name, which we enjoyed only for two years, was not so much chosen as it was bestowed on the team. The strange conflation of a summer’s worth of racial unrest and credible allegations of sexual impropriety in July 2020 finally forced Dan Snyder’s hand, and he dropped the Redskins name. But since the beginning of football season was just weeks away—and Snyder’s legal team didn’t have the wherewithal to secure the rights to another name—he was forced to settle on what most people decried as a bland placeholder.

But even at the time, I saw things differently. Washington Football Team is a simple statement of fact—a plainspoken advertisement for itself, like all great American brands. And the fashion in which it fell upon the city was oracular: the name neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign. (And for die-hard Redskins fans, it was a tabula rasa. When someone said The Team, with a certain emphasis, you knew exactly what he meant.) And the name probably would have stuck around, too, after Taylor Heinicke’s miracle play in the 2021 Wildcard playoff game, had he led the team to victory and ended Tom Brady’s career early. How I wish he did! The thrill of a real win—the team’s first in the playoffs since 2005—would have been enough to make the placeholder permanent. 

It wasn’t meant to be then. But now, with new ownership, there’s time again to make amends. “If one cannot attain to a high standard,” Shirley Hazzard wrote of her time at the United Nations, “the least one can do is to be disappointed in oneself.” That maxim could be applied to Washington and its football team as well. The past 20 years have been a mess of mismanagement, resentment, and wrecked quarterbacks. We’ve been given ample time to be disappointed in our shortcomings. Now it’s time to get back to basics: Washington. Football. Team.

Correction: An earlier version of this article said that the last Redskins Super Bowl was over 40 years ago. It was in fact in 1992, over 30 years ago.

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Farewell, Dan Snyder

Culture

Farewell, Dan Snyder

State of the Union: Dan Snyder, and potentially the Washington Commanders, are on the way out.

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Last Thursday, the NFL approved Dan Snyder’s sale of the Washington Commanders to a group led by investor Josh Harris. The sale represents the end of Snyder’s often incompetent but always entertaining ownership of one of football’s most historic and embattled franchises.

People in Washington will remember Snyder for having fielded a consistent loser. He contributed to the collapse of Robert Griffin III’s career and squandered what, by any standard, was the most talented coaching staff any NFL team has assembled in two decades.

They will also remember him for caving and changing the franchise’s “Redskins” moniker in 2020. Snyder, a lifelong Redskins fan who bought the team with borrowed cash, told reporters in 2013 that the team would “never change the name” on his watch. “It’s that simple,” he said. “NEVER—you can use caps.”

Polling from the Washington Post consistently showed that Native Americans didn’t mind the “Redskins” name. But Native American advocacy groups had long touted studies purporting to show that Native imagery had a negative effect on children’s self-worth, and their cause to ban Indian mascots had gained momentum with the broader embrace of racial and identity politics on the American left.

In 2020, after a black man died in Minneapolis police custody, an array of progressive forces—media, activists, and corporations—insisted that his death “raised questions” about the appropriate use of Native American imagery in sports, and turned up the pressure on the Cleveland Indians, Chicago Blackhawks, Atlanta Braves, Kansas City Chiefs, and Washington Redskins to change their names.

A group of investors, collectively worth more than $620 billion, pressured the owners of Nike, FedEx, and Pepsi to sever their connections with the Redskins organization in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Nike, the NFL’s uniform and primary retail provider, dropped Redskins merchandise from its stores. FedEx threatened to pull its name from Washington’s stadium if Snyder didn’t change the name.

Snyder, sensing the costs of standing his ground, capitulated. He determined the club would be called the “Washington Football Team” until a new name was agreed upon. In 2022, the team settled on “Commanders” as its new nickname.

An ESPN reporter told Rich Eisen there is a “pretty good chance” the new ownership will change Washington’s team’s name again. ’Skins fans may not be able to get two decades of bad football back, but reinstalling their old name would be a bit of poetic justice.

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