ChemEngineer
Diamond Member
- Feb 5, 2019
- 7,732
- 8,011
- 2,140
The Airhead Ascendancy: How a Cultural Revolution Captured a Nation
America’s great crises are rarely economic or political at their core. They are cultural, educational, and ultimately spiritual. The book you just finished makes that case with relentless clarity: the United States has spent half a century handing its children to an educational establishment that no longer teaches them to think, to remember, or to judge. It teaches them only to conform.
The result is a new ruling class—credentialed, confident, and catastrophically ignorant.
The Long March Through the Schools
In 1940, fewer than a quarter of American adults had finished high school. Yet they built the arsenal of democracy, won a world war, and laid the foundations of the most prosperous society in human history. By 1990, three‑quarters of Americans had diplomas, and millions had college degrees. But the content of that education had changed. Knowledge gave way to ideology; history gave way to grievance; literacy gave way to slogans.
The author calls this new elite the PORGIs—Post‑Religious Globalist Intellectuals. They are not wise, but they are credentialed. They are not learned, but they are certain. And they have captured the megaphones of American life: universities, media, publishing, foundations, and the bureaucratic state.
The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s
The 1960s were not a rebellion; they were a seizure of the cultural high ground. Anti‑Americanism, once the province of fringe radicals, became the default posture of the educated class. The New York Review of Books could publish instructions for making a Molotov cocktail, and the intellectuals applauded. The antiwar movement, as Norman Podhoretz observed, was not anti‑war at all—it simply wanted the other side to win.
This was the moment when the old establishment fell and the PORGI establishment rose. The consequences have never stopped unfolding.
The Rise of the Airhead Generation
The book’s most provocative claim is that Barack Obama represents the first fully formed product of this new educational order: smart, articulate, and profoundly uninformed. He is not a radical in the old sense; he is something stranger—a man whose worldview was prefabricated for him by the institutions that shaped him.
The author calls this cohort Airheads: people who are “smart, educated, ignorant.” They know the correct opinions but not the facts. They possess attitudes but not understanding. They are, in the author’s devastating phrase, “groomed like prized puppies to be good liberals.”
This is not a personal attack. It is a diagnosis of a generation.
Asymmetry in American Life
One of the book’s sharpest insights is that modern American politics is fundamentally asymmetric. The left has an Airhead wing; the right does not. The left is driven by moral vanity, emotional certainty, and the intoxicating belief that theory outranks reality. The right, whatever its flaws, is anchored in respect—respect for limits, for institutions, for the stubborn facts of human nature.
The left wants the government to love its citizens. The right wants the government to respect them. Love dissolves boundaries; respect requires distance. The difference is not trivial. It is civilizational.
The Social Unraveling
Once the cultural revolution took hold, the social fabric began to fray. Courtship norms collapsed. Marriage weakened. Sexual boundaries dissolved. Institutions that once protected children—schools, churches, youth organizations—were infiltrated by ideological crusades or destroyed by scandal. The Boy Scouts, once a pillar of American civic life, were bankrupted under the weight of abuse claims and cultural pressure.
Meanwhile, the intellectual class—so cautious about disturbing the natural environment—showed no such restraint in disturbing the human one. They treated society as a laboratory and children as test subjects.
Historical Amnesia
Perhaps the gravest consequence of the new order is the deliberate erasure of history. Students are not taught that America invented modern democracy. They are not taught that Americans died by the hundreds of thousands to free the slaves. They are not taught that the United States rescued Europe twice and liberated Asia from a regime of unimaginable brutality.
They are taught instead that America is always wrong.
Samuel Johnson wrote that the first requirement of a useful or pleasing mind is “the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong,” followed by “an acquaintance with the history of mankind.” We have denied both to an entire generation. As Hosea warned, “They have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind.”
What Must Be Done
The book ends with a blunt imperative: American education must be taken out of the hands of the Airheads. Nothing else will matter until that happens. Not tax policy. Not foreign policy. Not economic reform. A nation cannot survive if its children are taught to despise it.
The author closes with a paradoxical blessing: that this brave, reckless, sublime nation—this American Zion—may yet rediscover its creed of liberty, equality, democracy, and faith.
We have barely begun to bloom. But only if we reclaim the soil.
America’s great crises are rarely economic or political at their core. They are cultural, educational, and ultimately spiritual. The book you just finished makes that case with relentless clarity: the United States has spent half a century handing its children to an educational establishment that no longer teaches them to think, to remember, or to judge. It teaches them only to conform.
The result is a new ruling class—credentialed, confident, and catastrophically ignorant.
The Long March Through the Schools
In 1940, fewer than a quarter of American adults had finished high school. Yet they built the arsenal of democracy, won a world war, and laid the foundations of the most prosperous society in human history. By 1990, three‑quarters of Americans had diplomas, and millions had college degrees. But the content of that education had changed. Knowledge gave way to ideology; history gave way to grievance; literacy gave way to slogans.
The author calls this new elite the PORGIs—Post‑Religious Globalist Intellectuals. They are not wise, but they are credentialed. They are not learned, but they are certain. And they have captured the megaphones of American life: universities, media, publishing, foundations, and the bureaucratic state.
The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s
The 1960s were not a rebellion; they were a seizure of the cultural high ground. Anti‑Americanism, once the province of fringe radicals, became the default posture of the educated class. The New York Review of Books could publish instructions for making a Molotov cocktail, and the intellectuals applauded. The antiwar movement, as Norman Podhoretz observed, was not anti‑war at all—it simply wanted the other side to win.
This was the moment when the old establishment fell and the PORGI establishment rose. The consequences have never stopped unfolding.
The Rise of the Airhead Generation
The book’s most provocative claim is that Barack Obama represents the first fully formed product of this new educational order: smart, articulate, and profoundly uninformed. He is not a radical in the old sense; he is something stranger—a man whose worldview was prefabricated for him by the institutions that shaped him.
The author calls this cohort Airheads: people who are “smart, educated, ignorant.” They know the correct opinions but not the facts. They possess attitudes but not understanding. They are, in the author’s devastating phrase, “groomed like prized puppies to be good liberals.”
This is not a personal attack. It is a diagnosis of a generation.
Asymmetry in American Life
One of the book’s sharpest insights is that modern American politics is fundamentally asymmetric. The left has an Airhead wing; the right does not. The left is driven by moral vanity, emotional certainty, and the intoxicating belief that theory outranks reality. The right, whatever its flaws, is anchored in respect—respect for limits, for institutions, for the stubborn facts of human nature.
The left wants the government to love its citizens. The right wants the government to respect them. Love dissolves boundaries; respect requires distance. The difference is not trivial. It is civilizational.
The Social Unraveling
Once the cultural revolution took hold, the social fabric began to fray. Courtship norms collapsed. Marriage weakened. Sexual boundaries dissolved. Institutions that once protected children—schools, churches, youth organizations—were infiltrated by ideological crusades or destroyed by scandal. The Boy Scouts, once a pillar of American civic life, were bankrupted under the weight of abuse claims and cultural pressure.
Meanwhile, the intellectual class—so cautious about disturbing the natural environment—showed no such restraint in disturbing the human one. They treated society as a laboratory and children as test subjects.
Historical Amnesia
Perhaps the gravest consequence of the new order is the deliberate erasure of history. Students are not taught that America invented modern democracy. They are not taught that Americans died by the hundreds of thousands to free the slaves. They are not taught that the United States rescued Europe twice and liberated Asia from a regime of unimaginable brutality.
They are taught instead that America is always wrong.
Samuel Johnson wrote that the first requirement of a useful or pleasing mind is “the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong,” followed by “an acquaintance with the history of mankind.” We have denied both to an entire generation. As Hosea warned, “They have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind.”
What Must Be Done
The book ends with a blunt imperative: American education must be taken out of the hands of the Airheads. Nothing else will matter until that happens. Not tax policy. Not foreign policy. Not economic reform. A nation cannot survive if its children are taught to despise it.
The author closes with a paradoxical blessing: that this brave, reckless, sublime nation—this American Zion—may yet rediscover its creed of liberty, equality, democracy, and faith.
We have barely begun to bloom. But only if we reclaim the soil.
