AI is the bete noire of America’s Left. The Left loves to hate it because it absolves them of their failures and enables their proclivities.
Nowhere has the Left done a worse job than in America’s education system.
In K-12, through their control of teacher unions, they pushed for school closures during the COVID pandemic, despite the virus being less severe in children, and then fought to keep schools closed as long as possible. The resulting remote learning caused large learning losses that have still not been recouped. The consequences of COVID closures only overlay longer-term lags in learning, as leftist teacher unions push indoctrination over education. As the consequences of indoctrination over education come home to roost in falling test scores, teacher unions push for more resources — notably in administrative positions — even as enrollments drop and absenteeism remains high. And what is the response of the leftist teacher unions? To oppose school choice, which gives children greater access to better-performing schools. (RELATED: Graduated, Not Educated)
As we have seen in disruption after disruption on college campuses, especially the self-proclaimed “elite” ones, the push for indoctrination is even greater; its effects are only blunted by the fact that school choice already exists for colleges.
Unsurprisingly, the result of the Left’s heavy hand in education has consequences. Not the least of these has been a large portion of students arriving unprepared for college, a large portion leaving college unprepared for work, and increasing numbers of students and parents questioning the value of increasingly expensive college degrees. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Rip-off U.)
For America’s Left, AI’s revolution is offering new excuses for their failures…
For the left-dominated education system facing (but not admitting) the consequences of their pronounced and prolonged efforts to make schools laboratories for social policy rather than institutions of learning, AI is a godsend. It is because it absolves the Left of the consequences of their educational policies. Suddenly, the Left can blame AI for taking jobs from newly minted college grads (the students most affected by COVID lockouts and the Left’s strongest pushes for DEI over the “three Rs”) rather than for them making so many grads unemployed. (RELATED: Who’s Teaching Those AI Machines Your Kids Will Learn From?)
However, it is not only education where the Left’s failures seek a technological excuse for their policies’ consequences. Another is their push for unions, which raises the cost of everything they encounter, and for ever-higher minimum wages, as well as opposition to any exemptions for first-time workers who desperately need to learn skills on the job (because they didn’t learn them in school). The upshot of all is an increase in the cost of labor (additionally raised by the Left’s demands for ever higher benefits in areas like health care). Naturally, these higher labor costs are a tempting target for businesses looking to reduce them with AI applications. Once again, the Left can blame AI for taking away jobs rather than accepting the blame that they have consistently pushed for policies that have raised labor costs to uncompetitive levels.
Blaming AI meshes equally well with the Left’s proclivities, too. The Left has always believed in never letting a crisis go to waste and always being on the lookout for the next. Voila! AI comes to the rescue: It serves as their latest crisis.
When the Left finally had to concede that its worst-case climate change scenarios no longer apply, they can now blame AI for excessively using resources and requiring more electricity generation. Sound familiar? Even as the Left lost on its most alarmist global climate change prognostications, AI gives them the opportunity to sound the same alarms but for different reasons.
For their penchant against wealth and the private sector’s growth, AI is minting new wealthy and new successful companies by the day. Both things that the Left can look to punitively tax — as Senator Warren (D-MA) is already proposing.
Because of their penchant for regulation, AI offers vast new areas for it. And because the power to regulate is commensurate with the power of the thing being regulated, the chance to regulate AI offers the Left a vastly greater scope if AI is the revolutionary, penetrating technology claimed.
The Left conveniently forgets that AI is spurring a hiring boom in software engineering. As AI is increasingly adopted, other hiring booms and productivity increases will follow, just as they have in the wake of past technology revolutions.
Preying on fear is what the Left does best. Their’s is a pessimistic mindset: That individuals will fail without government watching over them and without the Left overseeing government. For America’s Left, AI’s revolution is offering new excuses for their failures and new opportunities for their big-government proclivities.
READ MORE from J.T. Young:
Meet the Post-Biden Democrats: Biden’s Democrats
The Left Don’t Love Leo (They Simply Hate Trump)
J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left, from RealClear Publishing. Follow him on Substack.
