Make America Second Rate Again!

For a few weeks now I’ve been waiting to see the news story that European universities and scientific establishments were extending offers to displaced American scientists. This morning The New York Times obliged. It had to happen.

The president harkens to the past, you know when white, non-Jewish, men who were born on third base and told they had hit a triple were celebrated. Having a reverse brain drain to Europe will put that trend on steroids.

You see, the U.S. wasn’t always a scientific powerhouse. World War II (and the influx of Jewish scientists from Germany and countries invaded by Germany) put us on the road to scientific supremacy. After World War II, the sciences got another boost by the importation of the German scientists who had stayed behind. Operation Paperclip scooped them up before the Soviet Union could get them. Yes, many of the Germans transplanted to the U.S. had been members of the Nazi Party and, I’m sure, a sizeable number were true believers. Nevertheless, they became our true believers. They built on the work Oppenheimer and Einstein did that led to the atomic bomb; their science sent us to the moon. As yet, the United States is the only country on earth to successfully sent humans to the moon. And bring them back alive.

Nobody alive remembers when the science, math and medicine—for the most part—came from Europe. (Ironically, North America was on the forefront of vaccine research.) But there was a time when, if you were a student of physics at, let’s say, the University of Chicago, Cal Tech, or M.I.T, you would have to learn German, because that was the language of physics.

And so it will be again. Transforming the always-present anti-intellectualism and distrust of expertise in America from an undercurrent to acceptable mainstream opinion is a death knell to our excellence. It will be the reverse of the post-World War II brain drain from Europe to the U.S.

Make America Second Rate (Scientific Power) Again!