One of the top stories at the Washington Post website today is about a rape trial at St. Paul’s, one of the most prestigious boarding high schools in the US. The details of the case don’t really matter — the allegations could either be entirely true or entirely false and it wouldn’t be all that relevant — what’s more interesting is the wave of trepidation that goes through liberals over the experience of co-education in practice as it compares to the grand theories that motivated the gender integration project of the 1960s and 70s.

St. Paul’s only became co-ed in 1971. Before that, it was a single sex institution. Like a lot of factors in American life, the hyper-focus on the events of the present tend to demolish memories of even the recent past.

Rather like civil rights and integration were supposed to bring equality between the races — but they devastated dozens of formerly thriving American cities instead — co-education has degraded countless institutions. The same educational institutions dominated by the left at every level have come to be condemned by that same left as honeycombed with wreckers: white male rapists who are ruining the grand integration project with their schemes.

The failures of co-ed are closely related to mass immigration. Because large parts of the native population decided to push both men and women into the workforce — and managerial elites saw immigration as a way to kill two birds with one stone — plug the gap in population growth while improving diplomatic relations with the newly independent third world nations.

President Truman’s commission on American immigration policy laid the groundwork for the abolition of the national quota system. It made the case to the public less in technocratic terms and more in terms of how it fit with America’s longstanding political-philosophical commitments. There was a broad institutional consensus which was also ecumenical. There was also a (false) scientific consensus at the time which concluded that different human races are not biologically distinct from one another.

The rationale for opening up immigration also had a lot to do with the anticipated needs of the progressive economy. Because wartime central planning required the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs (not by the market process, but through dictatorial fiat), the first stages of mass immigration and mass internal migration (especially of rural blacks to the industrial north) were required to meet the demand shock.

Essentially, progressives created enormous quantities of make-work fake jobs, and then proclaimed there was a labor shortage — which there was, to meet the demand of a less efficient, more centrally planned economy. They then pushed enormous numbers of foreigners and women into an economy overburdened with make-work projects, causing all sorts of economic and social chaos.

The Truman commission also made the funny insinuation that Japan may have been offended into launching the Pearl Harbor attacks due to discriminatory immigration policies. This is doubly funny in the light of Japan’s contemporary exclusive immigration policies, which globalists often criticize even today. It was also believed that opening up American immigration was critical to countering nationalist propaganda in the third world as well as Communist propaganda about the corruption of the West.

Few of those are justifications today which motivate ongoing mass integration project are still relevant, but understanding how it all fits together helps to explain why it still has so much institutional support.

By the time that these policies really began to make themselves felt — the 1970s — industry in the US was already becoming less competitive internationally, and the claims that there was a real ‘labor shortage’ began to become more ridiculous.

Tying this back in to liberals horrified by the implementation of coed in practice while extolling it as necessary in theory, liberals often make persuasive arguments for a new policy on a theoretical, debating-hall basis based on a set of shared assumptions about philosophy. These arguments eventually become institutionalized. When the institutions fail to fulfill the promise set out by the dialectic which spawned them, it doesn’t really matter, because the intellectuals who keep the whole tower of words buzzing care more about keeping the dialectic going than actually checking whether or not their premises were correct and if their predictions about their policies have been accurate.

Jonathan Capehart at the Washington Post writes that the rise of populist oligarch Donald Trump spells the death of the GOP — and laments that as something regrettable, because at least two viable national political parties has long been considered a criteria for the health of a liberal democracy — at least internationally.

From the column:

The hate-fueled self-immolation of the GOP would be a laugh riot were the consequences not so dire. Our democracy depends on a thriving two-party system where competing parties and the voices within each vigorously debate ideas and then reach the reasonable compromises needed to govern an enterprise as important as the United States. Since 2010, the Republican Party has succumbed to its basest voices for short-term political gain. Compromise became a dirty word. Lies were peddled as truth and never corrected by those who knew better. Invective was liberally employed against opponents no matter the party and without consequences.

Trump has pledged to stuff his cabinet with fellow oligarchs and experienced operators in the business world, while pledging a grab bag of vaguely phrased anti-immigration initiatives combined with inflationary monetary policy, protectionist trade policy, and presumably more social liberalism. He’s recently praised Japan’s Shinzo Abe as an example of a leader whom he’d like to emulate.

Despite all this, people out to shave off legitimacy from liberal democracy in the US and elsewhere tend to be pleased with this development.

Ironically, the people least pleased with Trump’s popularity in the polls are the ones who have the strongest belief in the righteousness of liberal democracy with universal suffrage. Trump embarrasses this crowd because he knows how to give the masses what they want in a bombastic and entertaining manner. Most of the time, people in the political sphere compete at a lower level than someone like Trump needs to. They’re in a different competitive league — it’s like sending a professional football team to compete with the peewee league.

The critics of universal suffrage claim that it rewards shallow politicians who are willing to tell people what they want to hear in order to get elected. Popular policies are rarely also wise policies. Plenty of unpopular policies are also stupid, counter-productive, or corrupt policies.

Fundamentally, the existing GOP and its auxiliary media organizations act as a legitimizing outer party. Trump, like every other GOP candidate, supports radical progressive initiatives like graduated income taxes, universal education, and the other raft of alphabet agencies instituted during the second Roosevelt regime.

The substance of the candidate’s platform matters less than the demoralization that the campaign inflicts on the Outer Party and the actual administrators of the regime. This is one of the reasons why he’s so entertaining. If Trump wins the presidency and succeeds in creating a lot of internal confusion and conflict within the administration, then that’s mostly a good thing rather than a bad thing.

The permanent marginalization of an alternative party to the Democrats is also a good thing, because the loss of popular legitimacy would make it much harder for progressives to actually administer the country. If the right-leaning hoi polloi realizes that they have no hope whatsoever of influence in Washington, they will be less willing to comply with the raft of other policies — which means greater difficulty enforcing compliance with the regulatory state, more children pulled out of public schools, more people tuning out from the media, and a lot of other positive consequences.

History is full of dead civilizations. Few apart from a few archaeologists much cares about who the Etruscans were or what gods they worshiped, but the Etruscans mattered a lot to the Etruscans before they were destroyed by military invasion. The Etruscans are mostly significant because of the civilization that absorbed them afterwards.

Anyway. No one gets weepy over the Etruscans like they get weepy over dead lions. They’re a long-extinct people.

Some mixture of economic declines and military & naval losses resulted in a string of rolling catastrophes for them which they weren’t able to recover from. They lost their independence and coherence to their stronger neighbors, in stages. It’s certain that the Etruscans were aware that they were in decline, but there was no period of time during which awareness would have made much of a difference at all in their collective fate.

In democratic politics, agitators tend to see raising mass awareness as the critical antecedent to the resolution of some political problem or another. This is so solidly believed that ‘raising awareness’ often becomes the sole end of an agitation. The idea is that the people will ‘wake up,’ demand action, just action will happen, and the world will be improved. It’s often the case instead — just about always — that the demanded action is stupid and destructive, because the enthusiastic masses have no idea how to manage anything at all.

Agitation is usually something that’s better directed against your enemies, which is what it’s typically used for even when some idealistic cover story or another gets adopted. The point of agitation, properly understood, is to undermine the authority of some state or another that you want to destroy. It’s not something that results in an improvement, properly understood.

In a universal suffrage democracy, mass agitation isn’t actually quite so important as it sometimes seems. The way to get a law passed is to bribe politicians to pass the laws that you write, and then those politicians will use the bribe money to agitate the party faithful to keep them in office. Politicians challenge one another for a chance to be a channel for that bribery. They will also sometimes get the chance to serve on helpfully labeled committees and caucuses that tell bribers from different industries whom they should funnel money to, for convenience purposes.

Bribing officials must always happen for private advantage at public expense, because otherwise there would be no motive to do it — and the advantage must come at the expense of some group.

Occasionally, the politicians will create or expand bureaucracies which will actually do the work of governing. Those bureaucracies tend to be immune from the effects of public opinion, even when it’s nearly unanimous. This tension makes it so that the state continually bleeds off legitimacy over time. The politician says “you, the people, are the sovereigns here — I will do what you ask of me in return for your votes.” After the election, the politician is not actually capable of doing what he promised, and the bureaucracies will actually rule.

Politicians have the right to perform ‘oversight’ on bureaucracies, which means that they can hold televised meetings in which they make a big show of ceremonial authority over bureaucracies which they can’t actually execute on.

Popular sovereignty is the legitimizing myth, which the actual process of ruling in a modern state then undermines. After this happens, the people whose job it is to generate that legitimacy — the press — have to stoke up more demonstrations of popular sovereignty. People marching around in the street, yelling, and burning things has come to be identified with popular sovereignty, which, come to think of it, is appropriate considering democracy’s historical record. There’s no such thing as actual popular sovereignty, but it’s easier to pretend that there is when you have mobs of ‘the people’ manifesting themselves to burn things down and complain.

This is a recipe for constant civil conflict, and constant civil conflict weakens a civilization against external enemies, and those external enemies will eventually overwhelm it. Awareness of this does nothing to stop the process.