The Death of Ideology

Last fall, David Brooks asked a class of college students at Duke to write an essay on their political philosophy.

Today’s college students, remember, were born around 1987. They were 2 or 3 when the Berlin Wall fell. They have come into political consciousness amid impeachment, jihad, polarization and Iraq. Many of them seem to have reacted to these hothouse clashes not by becoming embroiled in the zealotry but by quietly drifting away from that whole political mode….

For many students, the main axis of their politics is not between left and right but between idealism and realism. They have developed a suspicion of sweepingly idealistic political ventures, and are now a fascinating mixture of youthful hopefulness and antiutopian modesty.

They’ve been affected by the failures in Iraq (though interestingly, not a single one of them wrote about Iraq explicitly, or even wanted to grapple with the Middle East or Islamic extremism). But they’ve also seen government fail to deliver at home. A number wrote about the mediocrity of their local public schools. Several gave the back of their hand to the politics of multicultural grievance.

Many showed a visceral distaste for people who are overly certain or unable to see some truth in the other side. One student, Meng Zhou, quoted one of our readings from Reinhold Niebuhr: “A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice.” Another, Kevin Troy, cited a passage from Max Weber’s essay “Politics as a Vocation”: “Politics means slow, powerful drilling through hard boards, with a mixture of passion and sense of proportion.”

Timely piece for me, because I started a lecture about American ideology in my Intro to Political Science classes last week. Following the outline in the textbook, we went through classical liberalism, conservatism, and communism. Most had never read Mill or Marx before and struggled with reading the original material. A generation raised on power-point lectures and Cliff Notes.

When we reached the American ideology section, I expected that the kids would be in a comfort zone and could easily position themselves on the left/right spectrum. Not so. Most had no idea of the basic definitions of these terms. They did have opinions on issues like welfare and gay marriage, which fit pretty strongly in the libertarian zone.

My upper level students are more aware of their libertarian orientation. Like Brooks, I find that they are strongly practical and less critical of the status quo than I would expect. In my politics of public policy class, I discussed how our system of separation of powers and the growth of the executive bureaucracy puts the breaks on rapid change. There’s the insanely complicated bureaucracy with illogical and redundant systems, as well as the federal system of government with its own insanity. “Isn’t this crazy?” I demanded. I have no patience for rules and disorder in government. They shrugged their shoulders.

Where Brooks sees practicality, I see defeat. Why didn’t my self-identified libertarians look at the mess of responsibilities and offices on the white board behind me and say, “man, that’s fuc*ed up?” They should have, right? Where was the youthful vigor for change of any stripe? Gone.