The 20th century was without a doubt the American century.
The former colonies left the 19th century as a relatively isolated nation, still growing, still searching for its place in a world shaped by centuries of European greatness. After much agony, the United States decided to enter the world stage by throwing its manpower and sizable industrial might into World War I.
Even though the war militarily ended in a draw, historians have written it as a victory for the American side. Right or wrong, the punishment of Germany, penned into ominously historic ink in a train car in Versailles, reinforced the image of American victory.
Having earned the credentials as a global power, the USA began making her presence known beyond the battlefields of war. Thanks to world-class industrial prowess, America exported manufactured products in the 1920s that in many cases had the same effect on Europe that exports from Japan had in the 1970s and 1980s, and China in the 21st century.
With World War II, the U.S. military might gained global reach. Other nations began an economic comeback and caught up with Detroit, Pittsburgh, and other American centers of industrial excellence, but that did not stop the new leader of the world from expanding its economic presence on the world stage. Aerospace engineering, computer science, and world-leading financial services widened the domain of the Stars and Stripes in the world economy.
And, of course, the dollar, which has been the go-to currency for the better part of the post-World War II era.
The end of the Cold War was, in a sense, the epitome of America’s victory lap through the 20th century. There is much to be said about the role that America actually played in bringing down the Soviet empire; we must never underestimate the unending resiliency of the peoples and the cultures who prevailed under the Stalinist boot. Nevertheless, without America as an economic and military giant, the free world would not have been ready to receive the former Soviet-bloc nations.
When the skies of freedom reached out from Saxony to Sakhalin, many believed that America had set the world stage for perennial freedom, prosperity, and peace.
It has been a little more than three decades since that symbolic day of November 9th, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. America is still a world power, but she has lost some of her resiliency. The pursuit of excellence has weakened, and the self-confidence that carried her through the last century is fledgling at best.
There are good reasons to believe that America’s best days are past her. One need not look further than our politics to become depressed, even cynical. On the one hand, the unique political system that has allowed America to keep the same constitution for almost 250 years has served the republic well. Through war and strife, and through times of unabridged prosperity, the founding document has withstood the test of time.
On the other hand, corruption has eaten its way into the core institutions of the republic. The House of Representatives just voted to open an impeachment inquiry into President Biden for allegations of serious, and potentially system-threatening corruption. Former President Trump—whom many predict will be Biden’s rival in the 2024 presidential election—has been charged in criminal cases that are increasingly tenuous. They are a little too reminiscent of the charges against Alexey Navalny, Russian President Putin’s foremost rival.
Another reason to question how America has preserved her excellence has to do with the intellectual dynamism that for so long has characterized her private institutions. Industrial ingenuity built corporate giants like Woolworths and Walmart, which defined the retail industry; Ford, the first to mass produce affordable passenger cars; Boeing, a world-class aerospace company; not to mention IBM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Apple, and other ‘Silicon Valley’ leaders.
America has also shown her intellectual dynamism on the educational stage. Universities in the so-called Ivy League—ten old elite schools—as well as Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CalTech, UCLA, and others, have for decades attracted the world’s foremost academics. Thanks to her outstanding academic institutions, America has earned more Nobel Prizes than any other country.
But recently, especially in the 21st century, the elite-driven, mass-benefiting excellence that is so unique to America, has begun to falter. The image of a political system that is mired in serious moral problems is compounded by a picture of a private sector in trouble. Our industrial might has been weakened, and while some of it is attributable to Chinese economic warfare, there are highly relevant questions to be asked about our corporate culture, and to what degree it is still geared toward excellence.
Bluntly: are the leading minds of our corporations, big and small, still striving for world excellence—or have their jobs morphed into a regular paycheck, guaranteed or threatened (depending on one’s identity) by corporate DEI policies? Or has government become so prevalent in the economy, with its taxes, regulations, and subsidies, that the unforgiving, purifying, and brutally honest forces of the market no longer call the shots of excellence?
The answer, which is affirmative, has made some see doom and gloom in America’s future. What they fail to see is that America’s institutions are beginning to respond to these institutional signs of weakness. Corporations that have spent a lot of money on staff specialized in DEI, or diversity-equity-inclusion, have come to realize that the money does not improve the organization in any way, but may in fact weaken it.
The DEI wave is not the only challenge to American corporate excellence. Congress has launched another one, which includes large amounts of subsidies for selected winners in the corporate landscape. One of the winners is Tesla, the manufacturer of the world’s best-known electric vehicles.
Recently, Tesla was forced to issue a massive recall of vehicles. A recall is an acknowledgment by an automaker that they have found engineering or manufacturing errors in vehicles they have already produced. Such recalls are common, and usually only pertain to minor issues in a limited series of vehicles.
Not so for Tesla. This recall is big:
Tesla is recalling more than 2 million of its vehicles, nearly all its cars on the road in the U.S., after an investigation found its autopilot system was “not sufficient to prevent driver misuse.” The recall includes [models] equipped with Autosteer, a feature Tesla describes as “traffic-aware cruise control.”
Since this applies to practically all its vehicles that have been sold in the United States, this recall is limited only by Tesla’s sales numbers. If Tesla had been able to put 4, 8, or even 12 million vehicles on American roads, the recall would have been scaled up accordingly.
The fix for the recall is not very dramatic—it can be addressed with a software update to the vehicles—but the problem that this recall addresses is a rather serious one. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA, the problem is so serious that drivers could lose control of their vehicles while traveling.
This is the second big recall of Tesla vehicles this year. What drives an auto manufacturer like Tesla to the point where its products are this faulty?
There is no definitive answer to that question at this time. However, it is not far-fetched to assume that their DEI policies could have played a role in workforce hirings, allocations, and promotions within the company. By elevating non-skill-related characteristics of employees, DEI policies automatically reduce skills-related characteristics. Sooner or later, this leads to a reduced level of competence within a corporation.
When DEI is coupled with the lax attitude to corporate finances that comes with massive government subsidies, attention to quality eventually takes the back seat. And Tesla has indeed enjoyed the wealth of subsidies that the U.S. government has poured over the company.
There are remedies for illnesses like DEI and subsidies. Corporate America has just woken up to the DEI problem; there will come a time when government subsidies also lose their lure. Going forward, the world of business is going to see the resurgence of American corporate excellence. It will take time, but it has already begun.
Some of America’s detractors, who see only doom and gloom for her future, point to the decline of America’s academic system. There are undoubtedly reasons to mourn the decline of some of the world’s best universities, especially when witnessing another type of recall, so to speak:
Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned on Saturday—just days after her congressional testimony on antisemitism drew fierce backlash from students, faculty and donors. Scott Bok, the chair of the university’s board of trustees, announced the decision in a letter to the school community. Bok also submitted his resignation.
Magill did not even serve for a year and a half as president of the university. She resigned after having given an absolutely disastrous testimony before Congress regarding what her university does to combat antisemitism on campus. Magill tried to smirk her way through the questions asked by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, whom Magill clearly had nothing but contempt for.
Aside from Magill, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Harvard President Claudine Gay gave equally disastrous testimonies. They, too, are under pressure to resign.
The problem facing these three university presidents is their inability to address rampant political extremism on campus. The reason for their inability is in turn rooted in the infestation of political correctness in the hallowed hallways of America’s academic institutions. It has become so pervasive that it overshadows all other activities at American universities.
In at least one of these cases, Claudine Gay of Harvard, there are allegations that her very ascension to the chief job at the university was not propelled by good scholarship, but by political correctness.
It is easy to see the testimonies of these university presidents, and the culture that they represent, as evidence of the fatal decline in American academia. That, however, is a simplistic analysis that is already being disproved. These university presidents embarrassed their academic institutions before Congress and before the country to the point where wealthy donors want them gone, and in the case of Liz Magill actually achieved that goal.
The reaction from these donors comes with its own problems. For one, it is currently limited to a reaction to antisemitism on campus and does not include the long-standing tradition among university faculty of weeding out conservatives among their ranks. At the same time, the solution to a systemic problem has to begin to work somewhere. By using their financial leverage, university donors have opened the door to letting their money speak a louder language.
Going forward, it is now legitimate for others, donors as well as tuition-paying parents, to actively consider the intellectual, ideological, and confessional climate at a college, before making a financial commitment. As this awareness of the power of money grows, universities will be forced to make changes that they now consider unthinkable.
America has her problems, but she also knows how to solve them. By the end of this decade, American excellence will once again be the envy of the world.
The Return of American Excellence
The 20th century was without a doubt the American century.
The former colonies left the 19th century as a relatively isolated nation, still growing, still searching for its place in a world shaped by centuries of European greatness. After much agony, the United States decided to enter the world stage by throwing its manpower and sizable industrial might into World War I.
Even though the war militarily ended in a draw, historians have written it as a victory for the American side. Right or wrong, the punishment of Germany, penned into ominously historic ink in a train car in Versailles, reinforced the image of American victory.
Having earned the credentials as a global power, the USA began making her presence known beyond the battlefields of war. Thanks to world-class industrial prowess, America exported manufactured products in the 1920s that in many cases had the same effect on Europe that exports from Japan had in the 1970s and 1980s, and China in the 21st century.
With World War II, the U.S. military might gained global reach. Other nations began an economic comeback and caught up with Detroit, Pittsburgh, and other American centers of industrial excellence, but that did not stop the new leader of the world from expanding its economic presence on the world stage. Aerospace engineering, computer science, and world-leading financial services widened the domain of the Stars and Stripes in the world economy.
And, of course, the dollar, which has been the go-to currency for the better part of the post-World War II era.
The end of the Cold War was, in a sense, the epitome of America’s victory lap through the 20th century. There is much to be said about the role that America actually played in bringing down the Soviet empire; we must never underestimate the unending resiliency of the peoples and the cultures who prevailed under the Stalinist boot. Nevertheless, without America as an economic and military giant, the free world would not have been ready to receive the former Soviet-bloc nations.
When the skies of freedom reached out from Saxony to Sakhalin, many believed that America had set the world stage for perennial freedom, prosperity, and peace.
It has been a little more than three decades since that symbolic day of November 9th, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. America is still a world power, but she has lost some of her resiliency. The pursuit of excellence has weakened, and the self-confidence that carried her through the last century is fledgling at best.
There are good reasons to believe that America’s best days are past her. One need not look further than our politics to become depressed, even cynical. On the one hand, the unique political system that has allowed America to keep the same constitution for almost 250 years has served the republic well. Through war and strife, and through times of unabridged prosperity, the founding document has withstood the test of time.
On the other hand, corruption has eaten its way into the core institutions of the republic. The House of Representatives just voted to open an impeachment inquiry into President Biden for allegations of serious, and potentially system-threatening corruption. Former President Trump—whom many predict will be Biden’s rival in the 2024 presidential election—has been charged in criminal cases that are increasingly tenuous. They are a little too reminiscent of the charges against Alexey Navalny, Russian President Putin’s foremost rival.
Another reason to question how America has preserved her excellence has to do with the intellectual dynamism that for so long has characterized her private institutions. Industrial ingenuity built corporate giants like Woolworths and Walmart, which defined the retail industry; Ford, the first to mass produce affordable passenger cars; Boeing, a world-class aerospace company; not to mention IBM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Apple, and other ‘Silicon Valley’ leaders.
America has also shown her intellectual dynamism on the educational stage. Universities in the so-called Ivy League—ten old elite schools—as well as Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CalTech, UCLA, and others, have for decades attracted the world’s foremost academics. Thanks to her outstanding academic institutions, America has earned more Nobel Prizes than any other country.
But recently, especially in the 21st century, the elite-driven, mass-benefiting excellence that is so unique to America, has begun to falter. The image of a political system that is mired in serious moral problems is compounded by a picture of a private sector in trouble. Our industrial might has been weakened, and while some of it is attributable to Chinese economic warfare, there are highly relevant questions to be asked about our corporate culture, and to what degree it is still geared toward excellence.
Bluntly: are the leading minds of our corporations, big and small, still striving for world excellence—or have their jobs morphed into a regular paycheck, guaranteed or threatened (depending on one’s identity) by corporate DEI policies? Or has government become so prevalent in the economy, with its taxes, regulations, and subsidies, that the unforgiving, purifying, and brutally honest forces of the market no longer call the shots of excellence?
The answer, which is affirmative, has made some see doom and gloom in America’s future. What they fail to see is that America’s institutions are beginning to respond to these institutional signs of weakness. Corporations that have spent a lot of money on staff specialized in DEI, or diversity-equity-inclusion, have come to realize that the money does not improve the organization in any way, but may in fact weaken it.
The DEI wave is not the only challenge to American corporate excellence. Congress has launched another one, which includes large amounts of subsidies for selected winners in the corporate landscape. One of the winners is Tesla, the manufacturer of the world’s best-known electric vehicles.
Recently, Tesla was forced to issue a massive recall of vehicles. A recall is an acknowledgment by an automaker that they have found engineering or manufacturing errors in vehicles they have already produced. Such recalls are common, and usually only pertain to minor issues in a limited series of vehicles.
Not so for Tesla. This recall is big:
Since this applies to practically all its vehicles that have been sold in the United States, this recall is limited only by Tesla’s sales numbers. If Tesla had been able to put 4, 8, or even 12 million vehicles on American roads, the recall would have been scaled up accordingly.
The fix for the recall is not very dramatic—it can be addressed with a software update to the vehicles—but the problem that this recall addresses is a rather serious one. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA, the problem is so serious that drivers could lose control of their vehicles while traveling.
This is the second big recall of Tesla vehicles this year. What drives an auto manufacturer like Tesla to the point where its products are this faulty?
There is no definitive answer to that question at this time. However, it is not far-fetched to assume that their DEI policies could have played a role in workforce hirings, allocations, and promotions within the company. By elevating non-skill-related characteristics of employees, DEI policies automatically reduce skills-related characteristics. Sooner or later, this leads to a reduced level of competence within a corporation.
When DEI is coupled with the lax attitude to corporate finances that comes with massive government subsidies, attention to quality eventually takes the back seat. And Tesla has indeed enjoyed the wealth of subsidies that the U.S. government has poured over the company.
There are remedies for illnesses like DEI and subsidies. Corporate America has just woken up to the DEI problem; there will come a time when government subsidies also lose their lure. Going forward, the world of business is going to see the resurgence of American corporate excellence. It will take time, but it has already begun.
Some of America’s detractors, who see only doom and gloom for her future, point to the decline of America’s academic system. There are undoubtedly reasons to mourn the decline of some of the world’s best universities, especially when witnessing another type of recall, so to speak:
Magill did not even serve for a year and a half as president of the university. She resigned after having given an absolutely disastrous testimony before Congress regarding what her university does to combat antisemitism on campus. Magill tried to smirk her way through the questions asked by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, whom Magill clearly had nothing but contempt for.
Aside from Magill, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Harvard President Claudine Gay gave equally disastrous testimonies. They, too, are under pressure to resign.
The problem facing these three university presidents is their inability to address rampant political extremism on campus. The reason for their inability is in turn rooted in the infestation of political correctness in the hallowed hallways of America’s academic institutions. It has become so pervasive that it overshadows all other activities at American universities.
In at least one of these cases, Claudine Gay of Harvard, there are allegations that her very ascension to the chief job at the university was not propelled by good scholarship, but by political correctness.
It is easy to see the testimonies of these university presidents, and the culture that they represent, as evidence of the fatal decline in American academia. That, however, is a simplistic analysis that is already being disproved. These university presidents embarrassed their academic institutions before Congress and before the country to the point where wealthy donors want them gone, and in the case of Liz Magill actually achieved that goal.
The reaction from these donors comes with its own problems. For one, it is currently limited to a reaction to antisemitism on campus and does not include the long-standing tradition among university faculty of weeding out conservatives among their ranks. At the same time, the solution to a systemic problem has to begin to work somewhere. By using their financial leverage, university donors have opened the door to letting their money speak a louder language.
Going forward, it is now legitimate for others, donors as well as tuition-paying parents, to actively consider the intellectual, ideological, and confessional climate at a college, before making a financial commitment. As this awareness of the power of money grows, universities will be forced to make changes that they now consider unthinkable.
America has her problems, but she also knows how to solve them. By the end of this decade, American excellence will once again be the envy of the world.
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