Twenty-five years ago I had one hell of a time selling my deans, undergrad and esp. grad, on the wisdom of multidisciplinary work. Took years of petitioning, and whollotta moolah that came out of my Top Ramen stipend from working campus jobs. When I received my bachelor’s degree, I was the only student of 35K+ to have a multidisciplinary major (instead of major + double-minors). Now, at that school, well over 1,000 students/year graduate with them.

So please keep up the good—if long & tedious—work, and keep the Trojan end up in so doing. And you’re right, it is happening on this blog; not least because you had the guts to debate young Mr. Goldberg democratically, instead of autocratically or, worse still, educratically. (yuck!)

There wasn’t a bit of old style top down thinking for the whole five hours. I guess I’m kind of optimistic that we can get beyond this Liberal-conservative dialectic. We certainly are trying on this blog.

I’m “heartened” by your tips on Sen. Obama’s economic advisors, and agree with your view of the tragic necessity for market economies. However, I’m anthro, not econ, so when in the Roman agora, as it were, I defer to the Romans.

It doesn’t take much to “correct” liberalism. IT DOESN’T WORK. It simply fails. Foreign economies are more liberal, they do not work. I keep saying this, but since 1980, deficits have stopped “progressive liberalism” in it’s tracks.

Then even in academia, one only needs a little rightness to solve the problem. In college, I spent a bunch of time with Austan Goolsbee (Obama’s economic adviser), he’s no liberal. He gets “low taxes” means growth. Dr. Robert Mundell (of Nobel and Letterman fame) single handedly has forced Europe to stop deficit spending (the Euro), and I imagine is doing the same in China.

It doesn’t take much. Free markets aren’t pretty, emotionally they wreck your “heart,” but they alone work and nothing else does.

He ought to be able to do that, but in the real world he can’t—for a host of reasons. And this is not a knock on USC in particular. On the contrary, I think USC is seeing its best days yet (and certainly the Annenberg School is doing). I’m actually thrilled to see the current size of the University’s war chest, and for that and other reasons I happen to hold Dr. Sample in the highest regard. But USC is itself a text of sorts, and in my hypothetical it’s an apt stand-in for the American academy.

Liberalism is an ideology of Progress. Its principal instrumentality is human husbandry. “Education” is its favored instrument.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the United States. No student or faculty member can sustain an academic career by stating these fairly plain truths. Such statements are suicidal not because they are false, but because they are demonstrably true.

Goldberg can say what he says only because he says so from outside the academy.

I happen not to be in what anyone would deem a “low quality school”, but I agree with you that I would have to be in one to write the stuff that Goldberg writes. As a doctoral student 20 years ago I was warned, by the chair of my faculty senate and by a rival of his with three doctorates, not to go where Goldberg has gone.

I see the gist of his book as something other than an economic thesis. It’s actually anthropological, and falls specifically into my odd baliwick, historical anthropology. Because the subject of his book is not economies; it’s religion. Civil religion.

Whoever said in these strings that Goldberg doesn’t deliver on Nazism really is off the mark. That’s exactly where Goldberg goes to show what can become of ideologies when they pretend to theories of history—all of which, as he says, are inevitably theologies of history.

People like Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama want to write history using you and me, and our students and children, as replaceable nibs. If you happen to prefer economics, then consider Human Capital Theory, Jon. We are not that for which resources and capital exist; no, we are the resources, the capital. What’s the erstwhile personnel department at ‘SC called, may I ask?

You and I are rendered, by what JG rightly identifies as a pseudoreligion, as instruments. Our schools—indeed our perverse contemporary notions of “education—are but instrumentalities of an ideology that IS social instrumentalism par excellence.

If publishing that, in depth, at USC won’t get you fired, then you Trojans aren’t as hot as I know you to be.

Historians have the most cause for complaint, but really all the Social Sciences are shown up by his book. Liberalism, which is precisely the ideology of Progress that he says it is, is the orthodoxy of the academy, replete with cosmological elements. Liberalism is indeed a civil religion, and it is America’s civil religion.

That makes Jonah Goldberg nothing less than a blasphemer. He should not waste his time taking his book tour to the campuses. One does not explain water to a fish.