In Defense of the Liberal Arts

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or how civilization was lost in fifth-century Rome and 1930s Germany.

Oh really?

During the 1960s and 1970s, committed liberals thought we could short-circuit the process of liberal education by creating advocacy classes with the suffix "studies." Black studies, Chicano studies, community studies, environmental studies, leisure studies, peace studies, woman's studies and hundreds more were designed to turn out more socially responsible youths. Instead, universities too often graduated zealous advocates who lacked the broadly educated means to achieve their predetermined politicized ends.

That definitely isn't 1930s Germany, is it?

A growing mass below lacks understanding of the present complexity and the basic skills to question what they are told.

As always...
Remember championing democracy & human rights in the company of Czarist Russia first, and Stalinist USSR later? You really had them believe it.

The problem is: no literature or author that cannot be prostituted to the cookie-cutter and instant needs of the gigantic fad machine that is the corrupt and inept contemporary political machine (you have task forces investigating "hate" online, but nobody ever knew about the trillionaire frauds and Ponzi schemes that ruined millions ) is really needed.
All you need are shoddy knee-jerkers about 1930s Germany to explain why the present system is still worth it after all.
What this humanities buff doesn't know is that from 1918 to 1933, Germany was under the rule of a democratic elite of socialists and liberals.
Even the famed articles allowing censorship were planted in the Weimar's constitution by those very same democrats who had evicted the imperial government at the allies' behest.
This history buff doesn't know that the first step Himmler, Heydrich and other brand managers of terror moved were in the basements of the extensive and fool-proof surveillance apparatus of the democratic Weimar Republic.
I remember reading about Himmler's surprise discovering they had the capacity to monitor, record and file every phone call. They even had semi-automated systems to file and retrieve dossiers about dissidents.
No surprise at all, after having in power such people as socialist Noske (The hangman...he said that was a job someone had to do, too) spent so many years orchestrating public repression pro domo of a variety of dissidents, including bloody struggle between the heads of the social-communist hydra.
Why did democratic and eminently social-democratic Weimar usher in Nazism is something historians still muse about, but incompetence and corruption are a good starting point.

The rest are just knee-jerkers from political hacks trying to define 1930s Germany as the twilight of reason, but communists and Bolsheviks as "possibly wrong but terribly romantic".