One of the more preposterous aspects of the protests roiling American college campuses is the insistence of the students that they be spared any adverse consequences for their actions. They expect no suspensions, no expulsions, and most of all no harmful impact on their precious internships and job prospects. Civil disobedience without penalty is purely performative, and reduces their protests to a juvenile lark, the latter day equivalent of phone booth stuffing or streaking. Had Martin Luther King Jr. written a “Letter from the Birmingham Hotel” it would have lost its moral impact. Suffering the consequences of his actions was the price of his civil disobedience. Avoiding them today renders the actions of student protesters functionally meaningless.
The massive expansion of federal programs … has embedded consequence-free policy decisions deeply into American society.
But spare these kids the usual opprobrium dispensed by their elders. They are in fact acting in accordance with the consequence-free behavior embraced by many of our leading institutions. Students at our top universities endure expensive courses taught by vapid ideologues, tortuous bureaucratic ordeals imposed by incompetent administrators, and witness no penalties for rule-breaking committed for officially approved political causes.
We wish to think that once these young people leave university, the “real world” will impose consequences in the form of a mythic boss who brooks no nonsense. But that is not likely, given their career aspirations. The academic majors of student activists, as noted by the New York Post, are heavy on various “Studies” disciplines, which suggests future employment in the non-profit world, where inadequate performance is difficult to measure and rarely punished. These students avoid the STEM disciplines where failure is obvious and penalized. Non-profits offer “meaningful” employment to activists without the dread prospect of being canned for non-performance. (READ MORE from Karl Pfefferkorn: For the Democrats, It’s the Keffiyehs vs. the Tote Bags)
It would be bad enough if our massive non-profit sector were subject to no consequences for failure. We can endure a National Public Radio that fails to serve the public interest by changing the station. But we have allowed consequence-free behavior to invade institutions from which there is no escape because they literally govern on our behalf.
Consider Mark Milley, who presided over the disastrous withdrawal from Kabul. He was in a position to insist the evacuation be staged out of Bagram, where we had a large defended perimeter, yet he didn’t. Thirteen Marines died, American citizens were abandoned, and Milley retired unrebuked on a nice pension last September.
Consider George Tenet, who assured President Bush that the case for Iraqi WMDs was a “slam dunk” and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his gross intelligence failure. Consider Wendy Sherman, who negotiated the misbegotten 1994 nuclear deal with North Korea, and returned as Deputy Secretary of State. Failure had no discernable impact on these stellar careers. It’s not surprising that students at our elite institutions expect similar dispensation.
The massive expansion of federal programs over the past decades has embedded consequence-free policy decisions deeply into American society. In 1964, a young Joe Califano sold LBJ’s Great Society program as “A Hand-Up, not a Hand-Out,” yet when he became Secretary of HEW under Carter, he conceded that these programs were now an open-ended government handout. The result: a sturdy black urban working class displaced by multi-generational single-mother welfare dependents.
Our urban public schools were once the key to social advancement; now young families flee to suburban school districts for the sake of their children’s future. These grave policy debacles are apparently beyond remediation, with dire consequences for American cities.
Our young elite class has digested a critical lesson: failure is for other people. If you are a lowly high school grad working in a NAPA store and screw up the inventory, you will be fired. If you are a Columbia grad and aspiring mandarin in New York City government, you can anticipate a long career and fat pension without ever demonstrating a benefit to taxpayers.
If you work for a major non-profit, you can neglect to measure the effectiveness of your programs as long as you remain chummy with your fellow alums at the Ford Foundation. Can anyone demonstrate the positive social benefits of the untold millions granted to Greenpeace, or PETA, or the Ploughshares Fund? No, hence their attraction for college grads intent on consequence-free employment.
Peggy Noonan once drew a distinction between the “protected class” insulated from bad policy decisions, and the “unprotected” who suffer them. Those inside the protected-class bubble enjoy guaranteed employment and nice benefits while those outside suffer monthly sales goals and layoffs.
Washington remains the ultimate bubble, full of nice jobs devoted to carving up federal largesse, home to the wealthiest counties in the country, and utterly immune from recession. Unsurprisingly, our young elites draw a rational conclusion: enter that bubble, and enjoy a comfortable, rewarding life. The accumulated impact of all these elite careers protected from consequences is a governing ideology completely ignorant of the need to impose consequences. Criminals who do not fear the police or the courts run wild; predatory states witnessing a feckless withdrawal from Kabul anticipate no U.S. response to their aggression.
Fear of consequences is the guardian of order, both domestically and internationally. Our government is failing to fulfill this fundamental obligation to its citizens by ensuring that malefactors face dire consequences.
Can new policies reverse these ingrained habits? Can we install failure as a consequence for those who govern us poorly?
A good start would be to introduce our protected class to the unprotected by moving them to their neighborhoods. Let’s relocate the Environmental Protection Agency to Tulsa Oklahoma, the Agriculture Department to Ames Iowa, and Health and Human Services to Detroit. These cities could use a nice federal payroll, and agency employees would receive direct feedback on their preferred policies at their local PTA meetings. In the age of Zoom and cheap airfares, there is no reason bureaucrats can’t work at a distance from the capital. (READ MORE: Europe: With Friends Like These …)
We also need to puncture the Washington bubble by inflicting on it the sort of recession endured by other regions, meaning cut federal budgets and impose layoffs. There is no government agency that couldn’t easily lose twenty percent of its headcount and fifty percent of its consulting budget without a discernable impact on the taxpayer.
Bidenomics has engineered an illusory boom with unsustainable trillion dollar deficits, bringing the distant day of fiscal reckoning forward into the near future. We might as well get ahead of our looming federal debt trainwreck by cutting spending now. Dramatic reductions in federal budgets will require our governing elites to relearn the habit of consequences by terminating failed programs and employees. Ideally, the same sort of standards imposed by the manager of your local NAPA store will be endured by our credentialed elites in Washington.
Is this raw populism? Perhaps, but outside of our coastal enclaves, it would surely be popular. Will a future presidential candidate seize on these winning policies? For the sake of the country, one can only hope so.
