Tag: zohran mamdani

The seemingly growing popularity of socialism, and the election of socialist Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s new mayor, have led billionaire Peter Thiel to reprise a 2020 email that explained with “a simple theory” why millennials are attracted to socialism, and down on capitalism. It seems that loads of student loan debt, and exorbitant prices for houses have kept them from achieving the American dream of earlier generations. “If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist,” Thiel told the Free Press. This analysis is superficial and oddly simplistic about what has happened to higher education, which has nothing to do with capitalism “proletarianizing” students–it’s pure bathos, by the way, to describe some of the most privileged young people in history as “proletarians.” For instance, take the complaint about student loans. They were federalized and politicized by Barack Obama, leading to programs and regulations that ignore fiscal responsibility and common sense–the very dysfunctions that created our federal entitlements’ drunken-sailor largess that has led to more and more money spent on entitlements. Indeed, currently we spend more on entitlements than on our military, and on servicing the growing interest on this mountain of debt that will have to be paid for by our grandchildren and their grandchildren. Not even the rapacious demagogues of ancient Athens thought to redistribute the wealth of the unborn. So, how did those students amass so much debt? Aren’t they adults responsible for their bad decisions, including the choice of trendy, useless majors with little value on the job market? Do we think it’s rapacious capitalism’s fault when a spendthrift can’t repay his loan for an expensive car? Or is it justice to strong-arm the dealer to post facto to lower the price, or coerce the bank that loaned the money to reduce the interest rate? But aren’t those adult borrowers the victims of inflated tuition? That’s not capitalism’s fault, given that under Obana student loans create an opportunity for universities with gigantic, tax-free endowments to raise tuition costs and milk the corrupt student loan racket. Making the universities contribute to paying off students’ bloated loans would make more sense and be more just than blaming some cartoon caricature of our free-market economy. The bigger problem with Thiel’s “theory” is that it misses the dysfunctional changes over the last fifty years that have damaged our universities’ legitimate purpose. The cultural Marxist “long march” through the institutions has gradually politicized universities with Marxist ideology, which in turn opened the way for the “higher nonsense”: Postmodernism and poststructuralist ideologies–the idiot bastards of Marx’s malign ideas like “false consciousness” — that have also infected the university with other sophistic ideas such as simplistic, radical materialist determinism and juvenile relativism.