America-Lite
How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats)
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
America-Lite (where we all live) is just like America, only turned into an amusement park or a video game or a supersized Pinkberry, where the past and future are blank and there is only a big NOW. How did we come to expect no virtue and so much cynicism from our culture, our leaders—and each other?
In this refreshingly judgmental book, David Gelernter connects the historical dots to reveal a stealth revolution carried out by post-religious globalist intellectuals who, by and large, “can’t run their own universities or scholarly fields, but are very sure they can run you.” These imperial academics have deployed their students into the top echelon of professions once monopolized by staid and steady WASPs. In this simple way, they have installed themselves as the new designated drivers of American culture.
Imperial academics live in a world of theory; they preach disdain for mere facts and for old-fashioned fact-based judgments like true or false. Schoolchildren are routinely taught theories about history instead of actual history—they learn, for example, that all nations are equally nice except for America, which is nearly always nasty.
With academic experts to do our thinking for us, we’ve politely shut up and let second-raters take the wheel. In fact, we have handed the keys to the star pupil and teacher’s pet of the post-religious globalist intellectuals, whose election to the presidency of the United States constituted the ultimate global group hug.
How do we finally face the truth and get back into the driver’s seat? America-Lite ends with a one-point plan.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his provocative newest, Gelernter (Judaism: A Way of Being), a professor of computer science at Yale, argues that the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s gave rise to Imperial Academia and to a liberal "Airhead Army" that has staged a "coup" on American education. Gelernter uses "American Jews" and a discussion of "mainstream culture" to help trace how the ousting of "the WASP elite" led to the "Great Reform" of America's colleges, swinging them inexorably toward the political Left. He proffers the term PORGIs ("post-religious, globalist intellectuals") to describe those who have taken the place of WASPs, and explains that these "intellectuals" are responsible for the fall of conservative influence on academia, and by extension on America's politics. For Gelernter, President Obama (a leading "PORGI Airhead: smart, educated, ignorant") is emblematic of this descent. Though the book's aim is to "take away" from these "liberal airheads," the author too often relies on simplistic metaphors and propagandist catchphrases. While Gelernter's historical account of American educational reform is intriguing, his unapologetic partisanship will estrange anyone uncomfortable with the term "Obamacrats."
