Once, America had a culture of success. That’s no longer the case. The left encourages failure, and our media and marijuana culture encourage passivity. Vivek Ramaswamy has taken to X to point out the problem.

For almost two hundred years, America was where people could break free of the stifling class restrictions in Europe and other parts of the world and succeed. We Americans forget how stratified the old world was. As Alan Jay Lerner poetically wrote for My Fair Lady, “An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him / The moment he talks, he makes some other Englishman despise him.”

Not only was the class system stultifying, but it was also something that Brits internalized. I vividly remember my British history professor at UC Berkeley, the brilliant Sheldon Rothblatt, telling us that part of why the Victorian economic boom stalled in the UK, while it didn’t in America, was that the British working class, once it achieved a certain measure of economic success, stopped striving. Since the so-called lower orders’ “way of speaking” limited their social mobility, there was no need to work harder.

Image by Grok.

In America, though, there was always a reason to work harder. It was absolutely true that many (legal) immigrants lived horrible lives or just faded into obscurity, but that was the lot of mankind in all times and all places. What made America great was that those who worked hard and perhaps had good ideas and good luck could attain material prosperity and, perhaps, even achieve fame and outsized wealth.

Certainly, the immigrants’ children had a chance in America that they never would have had in their parents’ home country. When one uses the census to trace those immigrants who lived in New York’s Lower East Side at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, something interesting emerges: While the immigrant generation lived in what was often abysmal poverty, the next generation made it to the working class, and the third generation made it to the middle class. That’s the American story.

American culture pushed this narrative hard. Some of the most popular books in America in the second half of the 19th century, after the American Civil War, were Horatio Alger’s “rags to riches” stories about young boys who, through hard work, courage, and moral decency, routinely rose from poverty and even homelessness to become successful.

And yes, I know that Alger was a repressed homosexual who engaged in improprieties with two young boys, leading to a lifetime of self-loathing, remorse, and repentance. That’s irrelevant. What matters is that his famous books were amongst the most read in America, especially by ambitious young men who followed his formula...and many did rise from rags to riches, or at least, rags to economic stability, marriage, and children. This was the American ethos.

But beginning in the 1960s, the hippies (and we know that the Soviet Union was a powerful force behind the movement) brought a different ethos to America. The counterculture encouraged drug use (“turn on, tune in, drop out”), welfare use without guilt, the breakup of marriage, and sexual abnormality, all of which are antithetical to personal and material success.

That movement still grips America. The Democrat party is busy urging people to smoke pot, which destroys emotional development, intellect, and ambition. Every school in America is pushing sexual deviance on children (and, as a matter of pure linguistic accuracy, anything that deviates from the sexual binary and heterosexual, the biological norms, is “deviant”). And the cult of climate change tells young people that everything about Western culture is evil.

The entertainment world also does its bit. Wholesome family fare, where children are taught hard work, respect, patriotism, and honor, has been supplanted by sleazy Disney and Nickelodeon comedies, which tout shiny versions of counter-culture vices.  Moreover, because raising children is hard, especially in communities with few children (e.g., San Francisco) and without safe places for children to play outdoors (e.g., San Francisco), TV is the preferred babysitter.

And that’s where Vivek comes in. I’ll end this post simply by sharing his tweet with you. Some are protesting that he’s too harsh, but I think he’s right in every respect:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.

Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.

“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.

This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.

That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸