Thread by @DouthatNYT

I don't think this is an accurate description of the American situation, the evolution of our educational system and cultural priorities, or our traditional strengths. (1/X)

https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507

American society and youth culture have become *much* friendlier to nerds and valedictorians since the 1990s (trust me on this one), and the American educational system expects and demands more extracurriculars and math tutoring and weekend science competitions than ever before.

Nobody hangs out at the mall anymore (because they're all on their phones); the gospel of STEM is preached from every major pulpit; it's the humanities that are hemorrhaging students not computer science or related fields.

It's true that our system could always theoretically become even more intense, along the lines of South Korea -- but so far the cultures that go much deeper into digital meritocracy appear more miserabilist and anti-natalist without being appreciably more growth-oriented.

Are there enemies of excellence in the American system and culture, preventing all this effort from having optimal effects? Certainly, including forces of bureaucratic inertia, political correctness and increasingly a kind of dropping-out encouraged by drugs and very-online life.

But extracurriculars and math olympiads are not necessarily answers to these challenges, especially insofar as the hyper-competitive spirit itself, unleavened by humanism, seems to yield a kind of deadening busywork that makes dropping out (or "getting woke") attractive.

Finally the jock-and-homecoming-queen archetype is just not a major cultural impediment to nerdery and meritocracy; to the contrary, jock culture is itself a traditional source of American excellence and ambition and business acumen and dynamism.

The American Way is a complex jock-nerd dialectic (see e.g. our way of war or the Apollo Project) not some sort of drama of the diligent and gifted nerd simply overcoming jockish ignorance and sloth.

So whatever has gone wrong can't simply be a matter of insufficient application to meritocratic or technical excellence. The nerd's ambition has coexist with and be informed by virtues found in the humanist, the jock -- and even in certain kind of teenage "hanging out." /end