The conservative revolution was supposed to be a revolution. It has not been. It has been an insurgency. And while that insurgency captured a vast swath of open territory, it failed utterly to capture the key citadels of American culture, beginning with American higher education.
The academic left likes to complain about how the conservative onslaught forced it to “retreat” to the ivory tower – but without acknowledging that the ivory tower had become the Gibraltar of American life. For better or worse, an undergraduate degree has become the prerequisite for entry into middle-class life. Academics control the narrow neck through which America’s managers, writers, thinkers, bankers, politicians, and executives must pass, and that passage has acquired an atmosphere, no matter how self-pityingly the academic left likes to deny it, in which Left assumptions are set as the default positions
The academic Left is correct when it pooh-poohs the idea that it conducts a massive ideological de-programming; but then again, it does not need to. It has merely to nudge the standard deviation of the politics of the future ruling class a few clicks to the left for conservatism to seem abnormal. Conservatives made the disastrous mistake of assuming that if they abandoned those tedious and expensive plans to lay siege to the university, they would be free to move on to the larger and more easily-annexed plains of government and finance. They were wrong. Governments change, finances crash, but the faculty is forever.
Because conservatism failed to capture the university, it failed to capture the next key fortress of the Left, which is the media, print and broadcast alike. Much as Americans routinely deplore the unapologetic left-list of the knowledge class, its unwearying capability for saturation bombing eventually erodes the intellectual power to resist. Sticks and stones do indeed hurt bones, but so do names – every Keith Olbermann sneer, every Paul Krugman screed, every sitcom episode in which hedonism suffers no penalty, is a chip at the certainty of the reader and beholder. Without a comparable response, the sheer volume of Left presuppositions carries the feeble flicker of resistance before it. But how could there be such a response when no conservatives owned the journalism schools?
Without a secure position in the university and the media, conservatism had no way to explain itself. There was Fox News; there were conservative programs and conservative professors. But Fox is a soloist, trying to be heard above a chorus. And the programs and professors were of little interest to conservative strategists and donors who wanted a quick bang for their buck instead of the loneliness of the long-distance runner. Without those key installations, conservatives had no place – and sometimes no depth – with which to exegete a basic contradiction in Reagan-era conservative politics, which is the need to use government to dismantle government. Conservatives operated on the premise that what Americans want most is liberty – which is to say, that Americans in the 21st century inhabited the same world of values as the Founders of the 18th.
This was perhaps a mistake. The young people with whom I have worked and lived for the last thirty-two years want security from the demands of self-government, and so they fail in droves to vote or to run for office. (I recall one township council meeting where a visibly-frightened first-time attender confessed that she didn’t realize she was even allowed to speak, much less ask questions). They want security from public service, and so they dodge jury duty, recruit the poorest segments of the nation as their soldiers and behave as though on-campus recruiting was an intolerable threat to their future career path.
The conservative political movement never really learned how to play the game. We wanted too much control of too much territory, too fast; and like Napoleon in Russia, we conquered vast amounts of ground very quickly, only to realize too late that we had fallen, exhausted, just short of the pressure points that really counted. It’s a mistake we did not need to make, and it’s one we can start correcting now by plotting how to redirect our resources (which remain considerable) toward the capture of those pressure points.
Above all, it’s a mistake we had better not make, the next time around. If there is one.
82 responses so far
1 fatezoom // Feb 9, 2009 at 4:32 am
I believe it was Winston Churchill who said “if your not a liberal in your youth you have no heart…if your not a conservative after thirty you have no brains.” seems to sum it up nicely
2 Sk8 Punk // Feb 9, 2009 at 6:38 am
Finally! The biggest problem in America is just this: no intellectual diversity and a corrosion of conformity that has resulted in an Intellectualism that allows stupidity like Churchill and Bellesile’s boondoggle to exist. But aside from David Horowitz conservatives just dont want to pick this fight. Until we do we will still be losing on a cultural level even when we win back the White House or Congress. You simply can’t influence the culture when you have no academic presence.
http://rebelsk8.blogspot.com/
3 bartlettb // Feb 9, 2009 at 7:58 am
The think tanks were supposed to be the conservative substitute for academia. The problem is that they became politicized, stopped doing serious research, and spent most of their resources rationalizing whatever the Republican Party was doing. In the process, they not only lost their credibility, but their allowed the intellectual foundations of conservatism to deteriorate. These days, much of what passes for serious analysis from conservative think tanks is indistinguishable from from the Republican National Committee’s talking points.
4 Stewardship // Feb 9, 2009 at 8:40 am
I once volunteered, at state university in Michigan, to read books onto tape for blind students. The first book I read was Intro to Sociology. When I came to a page that literally blamed Ronald Reagan for the degradation of society, I stopped volunteering for anything related to that university (sports booster, public radio telethon volunteer, adjunct instructor for business).
5 mstokes // Feb 9, 2009 at 8:40 am
bartlettb is really on to something. Many think tanks are still quite good, but when the Heritage Foundation can sponsor Sean Hannity without remorse, something is amiss.
6 narciso // Feb 9, 2009 at 8:54 am
Think tanks became politicized, you mean like Soros’ CAP, whose web portals American Prospect and Think Progress, is where a great deal of these supposed Republicans seem to get their links. The left set up a beachhead in the Academy, thirty five, forty years ago,
Bill Ayers is the signature example of Gramscian infiltration by radicals. Unknowingly, many of the posters
seem to echo these Alinskyite and even Marcusian conclusion and then they ask us to back to the glory days of 1974 or 1976, heady times, Mr. Kabaservice wants us to back to the era of Ogden Reid and the New York Herald Tribune, the fact that both are dead, doesn’t
discourage him one bit.
7 larryo // Feb 9, 2009 at 8:57 am
Don’t you think it has anything at all to do with the fact that conservatives, once they get in power, behave in ways that are completely at odds with their much-vaunted principles? Do you think students studying history cannot see that the advocates of sound fiscal policy spend like drunken sailors without a care for the exploding national debt, that the most ardent promoters of free market capitalism are themselves monopolists, that the champions of limited government are responsible for its greatest growth and that the exponents of personal responsibility refuse to accept any themselves. You don’t think that might have something to do with conservatism’s lack of appeal in academia?
8 larryo // Feb 9, 2009 at 9:17 am
Here’s another possible explanation, gleaned from a letter written (not by me) to the editorial page of our local newspaper: “Republican Senators worked hard to cut education funding from the stimulus package.
And why not? If we had decent public education there would be no Republicans. Global climate change deniers, creationists and stem cell research objectors have only two things in common: Ignorance and their allegiance to the GOP.”
9 JJWFromME // Feb 9, 2009 at 9:35 am
There would be no reason for CAP if it wasn’t for the Republican “think” tank/media machine. And the modern conservative movement isn’t conservative. Exhibit A: http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/15/aei-bush-white-house/
“How did [AEI] get so close tok Cheney? The answer lies in the fact that Cheney has an inquisitive mind, but from the accidents of his career and placement, he was for a long time a thinker deprived of intellectual society. Neoconservatism, as it developed in the 1980s, came to have its own heroes (Robert Bork), its canon of revered texts (Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind), and a set of prejudices delivered in a reasonable tone: hostile to individual liberty, appreciative of modern technology, friendly to religion as a guide to morals and an engine of state power. It was, to repeat, a substitute culture of satisfying density. The AEI along with journals like Commentary and, more recently, The Weekly Standard offer, for those who take the full course, a total environment, an idiom of managerial-intellectual judgment that blends the rapidity of journalism with the weightier pretensions of an academy.
In the Washington of the 1980s, the elder Kristols and the Cheneys were rising together, and they became close friends. This alliance easily passed to the younger generation: William Kristol in 2003 boasted to David Carr of the The New York Times (”White House Listens When Weekly Speaks”) that “Dick Cheney does send over someone to pick up 30 copies of [The Weekly Standard] every Monday”a statement that remains the best clue we have to the number of persons who work for the vice-president. The self-confidence of this substitute culture fortified Cheney’s sense that he had always already heard the relevant views, and that he had come into contact with the best minds…”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22060
Heckava job, “best minds.”
10 sinz54 // Feb 9, 2009 at 9:46 am
Back in the early 1980s, for young people it was truly “cool to be conservative.” Even on college campuses. The young were attracted to Reagan’s message of optimism and freedom. Plus, back then conservatives were proud of their intellectuals–William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, etc. The reason why this never really took root and flourished, I believe, is that the conservative movement soon took a turn away from the more libertarian spirit of the North and California (Reagan’s home), to the Christian social conservatives of the Deep South, which has never been the center of gravity of the university network nor the mass media. We conservatives can never hope to make headway in New York City (center of the three TV broadcast networks), or at Harvard, or Yale, or Stanford, if we position ourselves as anti-intellectual Christian moral scolds. Modern conservatism appears as anti-intellectual, when it flirts with creationism and opposes embryonic stem-cell research. With that, we have lost all the students in all the science departments of every world-class university. The nativism of many social conservatives doesn’t sell on college campuses where students are being exposed to people and ideas from around the world–many of their professors come from foreign countries. And the constant emphasis on Christian moral values, especially abstinence from premarital sex, is a guaranteed turn-off for young college students. Christian evangelism and moral Puritanism are NOT going to sell at Harvard or Yale. On the other hand, a more libertarian type of conservatism, espousing the principles of Milton Friedman, can be popular. (One might argue it’s always been popular; Ayn Rand’s works have always been well read on college campuses. But Ayn Rand was an atheist, and she believed that sex was the highest celebration of human values, not just a way to procreate within wedlock as some Christian fundamentalists do.) If modern conservatism is to flourish on college campuses, it must re-position itself as pro-intellectual, and pro-libertarian.
11 JJWFromME // Feb 9, 2009 at 9:51 am
I’d say conservatives have something to learn from the academy, and not the other way around. For instance, take a look at General Petraeus’s credentials, and who he studied with. Look at the policies he put in place. Then look at the Iraq conflict before and after those policies. Who could learn what from whom? I’d say that the conservative movement could learn something from Petraeus’s alma mater, not the other way around. And did I mention the cost of this mistake? And let me tell you, you’ll never see a conservative honestly making a study of it:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/11/deaths_in_iraq_1.php So as they say, before you go to take the mote out of your neighbor’s eye…
12 sinz54 // Feb 9, 2009 at 9:55 am
One more point: Libertarian conservatism, with its belief that free people can self-organize to create viable societies and economies, can be a natural sell to young people who are growing up in the age of the Internet and Internet-based social networking. The Internet is the ultimate in libertarianism–anybody can set up a website fairly cheaply, and how much they prosper depends on how good their website is, period. Online shopping is an exemplar of laissez-faire capitalism and free trade–you can purchase a product from dozens of countries, as long as the price is right. But social conservatism is more about restraints and constraints on choices, and that is not going to sell.
13 JJWFromME // Feb 9, 2009 at 10:06 am
Also great tidbit from Tanenhaus’s essay the other day: ” It is customary even now to say that the architects of the Iraq occupation failed because they naively placed too much faith in democracy. In fact, the problem was just the opposite. So contemptuous of the actual requirements of civil society at home, Bush’s war planners gave no serious thought to how difficult it might be to create such a society in a distant land with a vastly different history. Those within the administration who tried to make this case were marginalized or removed from power.”
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=9dfd540a-3d44-4684-a333-415ef34efa5b&p=6
Who has what to learn from whom?
14 HollywoodBill // Feb 9, 2009 at 10:06 am
Sinz, you nailed it about the 1980s. Everyone was a Republican. Young people today are floored when they hear it. Reagan even carried San Francisco in 1980. And Reagan was more of a Western state libertarian Republican. We all knew he was pro choice. He signed the most liberal abortion bill in American history in California before Roe. He fough the religious zealots in Orange County, back when there were such things, over the hateful Briggs Initiative, Prop6, which would have prevented gays from teaching in public schools. Reagan actually wrote an editorial that turned the tide in defeating it, knowing that he would need the support of the social conservatives in getting the GOP nomination. But the Republican party has turned into a group of moralizing busybodies who are now being rejected in every region of the country except the South and the Bible Belt. Goldwater predicted that the social conservatives would be the destruction of the Republican Party.
15 larryo // Feb 9, 2009 at 10:18 am
You know, sinz, I agree with almost everything you have said here in principle, but the Republican party began serious, methodical courting of the benighted fundamentalists well before the 1980’s with Nixon’s “southern strategy,” which was deployed in 1968 but really paid off in 1972.
16 sinz54 // Feb 9, 2009 at 10:35 am
Larryo: That is true, Nixon began courting the social conservatives. But back then, social conservatives were just one part of a broad conservative coalition that had revolted against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the various foreign-policy debacles. They weren’t yet the keys to election victory, so they didn’t have that much clout yet. The GOP nominees for President–Nixon, Ford, Reagan–were not born-again Christians, and Christian conservatism was never emphasized in any of their presidential campaigns. (In 1980, Carter was the devout Southern Baptist Democrat running against a Republican from Hollywood!) And notice that none of them was a Southerner either. It was in 1982, *after* Reagan had been elected President, when the newly formed National Conservative PAC (NCPAC) started flexing their muscles, targeting Democratic congressional races based on social conservatism. From then on, the emphasis on social conservatism grew and grew. And it ended any hope of a flourishing Republican presence on America’s world-class universities.
17 sinz54 // Feb 9, 2009 at 10:46 am
When we’re talking about the universities, we’re talking about the culture war all over again. Most of America’s world-class universities are located in the North or in a coastal state, regions that the modern GOP has basically written off. Universities pride themselves on cosmopolitanism, yet the modern GOP seems to be suggesting that cosmopolitanism is somehow unpatriotic. The conservative movement is at a cusp. It has to change to adopt to changing demographics. More and more young people go to college. Fewer and fewer of them hunt moose. And according to the Pew Survey, fewer and fewer of them identify as practicing Protestants (now down to only 51% of the public).
18 ireign // Feb 9, 2009 at 10:52 am
Republicans should insist that the universities stated goal of “diversity” should carried out. The whole point of racial diversity according to the Gratz decision was to encourage a diversity of thought. By stifling ideological diversity, universities are not following the intent of the law. Instead of fighting affirmative action, conseratives should embrace it.
Hollywoodbill, Reagan brought social conservatives into the Republican party and put abortion in the Republican plank notwithstanding his earlier more socially liberal stance. Reagan’s large victory had less to with ideological platform and more to do with Carter’s ineptness and unfortunate circumstances i.e. stagflation.
19 ireign // Feb 9, 2009 at 10:56 am
Sinz54, your argument is incorrect. While social conservatives may or may not make the Republican party less attractive to young people and may or may not cause faculty members to register with other parties, it should have little to no effect on more professors embracing libertarian free market ideals (as opposed to embracing the Republican party) or embracing a more hawkish foreing policy. But in fact with the exception of a few schools, there are very few Milton Friedman disciples at most universities.
20 realconservativ // Feb 9, 2009 at 11:17 am
Hollywoodbill said: “Sinz, you nailed it about the 1980s. Everyone was a Republican. Young people today are floored when they hear it. Reagan even carried San Francisco in 1980.” For your information, Hollywood, Ronald Reagan had 31.8% of the vote in San Francisco County in 1980 (source Wikipedia). You keep making totally false statements. First it was McCain and Palin carried no suburbs (even Dallas). Then it was Palin cost the GOP Michigan, which hasn’t voted for a Republican since 1988. Now, you are totally wrong about SF. Do you ever think before you post? You have absolutely NO credibility.
21 larryo // Feb 9, 2009 at 11:17 am
ireign, the demise of Friedman’s cachet among academics, and in fact the decline of the entire Chicago school of thought in the eyes of economists, are due to the fact that history has disproved Friedman’s hypotheses and revealed Friedman et al to be charlatans.
22 realconservativ // Feb 9, 2009 at 11:34 am
Excellent article. The academy is one of several areas where Republicans/conservatives lose ground. But a more important one is the media. There is nothing unusual about younger people being liberal. Over 50 years ago, Winston Churchill made the famous statement to the effect saying that if someone wasn’t liberal as a youth, there was something wrong with his heart, and if he wasn’t conservative by 40, there was something wrong with his head. Academics are typically liberal because (like those employed by “think tanks”) they are divorced from the real world. I view the media as a much greater problem. A Gallup poll released today indicates a 58% unfavorable rating regarding the way the GOP is handling the stimulus. I trust that even those who rant about social conservatives being the ruination of the GOP will admit the stimulus package in its current form is bad for the country. What is shaping public opinion? The media.
23 JJWFromME // Feb 9, 2009 at 11:41 am
Well larryo, I don’t think they’re taking away Friedman’s Nobel any time soon. But as another Nobel winner, Paul Krugman, has been pointing out, the system is crying out for some adjustments: http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/407?in=00:14&out=41:48
And Winston Churchill wasn’t alive in 2009. Today’s conservatism is pretty cockeyed.
24 realconservativ // Feb 9, 2009 at 11:46 am
sinz54: One major difference between the 1980s and today is the growth of teachers unions, the power they have gained, their shift to the left and the power of the left in general to propagandize beginning at the elementary school level. In the 1980 young people entered college believing they lived in the greatest country in the world and were proud to be U.S. citizens. Much has changed since that time with moral relativism, textbooks that highlight our country’s shortcomings, etc.
25 dragonlady // Feb 9, 2009 at 11:52 am
Sinz54, please do not play into the Leftist dialogue that paints all socons as dim-witted evangelicals. Socially conservative beliefs are completely in line with conservative philosophy that recognizes man’s inherent flaws and limits to reason. It cautions against upending the current moral order for some utopian version of man’s ability to revolutionize his way to perfection. Where some social conservatives depart from philosophy though, is by trying to impose their ideology on everyone else, and I agree that is a perception problem for the GOP. You win socially conservative arguments through persuasion and life experience, not through dogma. Conservatism is not anti-intellectual, but it does not share the Lefts confidence in the intelligentsia leading us to some more perfect union (wasnt it Buckley that said hed rather be ruled by 2000 names out of the phonebook versus the dons of Harvard?). These beliefs (see Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, etc) are completely compatible with a liberal education, which is supposed to reexamine our most fundamental assumptions. Libertarianism will appeal more to youth because well, theyre, youth, but dont rule out the contributions of other conservative philosophers to higher education.
26 JJWFromME // Feb 9, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Today’s conservatism is more about Irving Kristols’ paranoia about a “New Class” than it is Burke’s suspicion of “sophisters and calculator.” Climate scientists, biologists, journalists, teachers, even military professionals like Eric Shinseki are immediately suspect. Critical thinking, when it’s inconvenient, is unAmerican.
27 dragonlady // Feb 9, 2009 at 12:19 pm
realconservative, you’re right that conservatives need to fight the media; it is very powerful in framing the debate and context for the public. But that fight will be continually hobbled if conservatives do not fight against the Left’s monopoly on education. All of the Left’s assumptions and narratives are transferred to folks who become journalists, who tend to graduate with journalism, commmunications, poli sci, or humanities majors. Those departments are teeming with Leftist literature and faculty members.
28 dragonlady // Feb 9, 2009 at 12:20 pm
realconservative, you’re right that conservatives need to fight the media–it is very powerful in framing the debate and context for the public. But that fight will be continually hobbled if conservatives do not fight against the Left’s monopoly on education. All of the Left’s assumptions and narratives are transferred to folks who become journalists, who tend to graduate with journalism, commmunications, poli sci, or humanities majors. Those departments are teeming with Leftist literature and faculty members.
29 JJWFromME // Feb 9, 2009 at 12:20 pm
If the “New Class” bears bad news, off with their heads:
http://seedmagazine.com/news/2006/06/as_science_goes_so_goes_the_na.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BE0rc2aZpc
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/05/opinion/05krugman.html
30 realconservativ // Feb 9, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Dargonlady – I don’t disagree. In fact I am a journalism major, who always worked in marketing. Long ago, when I took journalism courses, objectivity was stressed (except for the editorial page and “signed” columns). Today “advocacy” jounralism is the standard. I am not too worried about today’s J-students because with all the newspapers that have folded or are about to fold, few will find jobs in their profession. I would like to see today’s students become more conservative, or at least more moderate. But, we live in a world of political correctness that exists on today’s campuses, which makes this increasingly difficult. It’s not difficult being charged with hate speech simply for stating the truth about Islam. As stated in a previous post, indoctrination begins at an early age in the public school system.
31 Fitz // Feb 9, 2009 at 12:54 pm
The academic left is not ignorant however. They know the saliency and truth of multiple conservative positions. The problem is they have painted themselves into a corner. They cant speak up against their own far left. Racist sexist and homophobic simply covers too much terrain and is effective.(as it was meant to do)
Think about it those three smear words can effectively shut down any conversation from marriage, to parent hood, to civilization survival, to any prerogatives, priorities and purposes of society.
Believe me I have twisted enough arms among academics to get a few straight answers. They now the blatant destructive trend they are encouraging and abetting. However for a sizable cohort it is fear that rules their lives and mutes their objections. I dont know how this gets authentic conservatism out of the woods in the academy but its a truth worthy of thought and hopefully exploitation. Indeed Judge Bork has written as much, saying at this late date either a religious revival or a sizable defection among are intelligenceia can save us at this point.
32 JJWFromME // Feb 9, 2009 at 1:09 pm
“for a sizable cohort it is fear that rules their lives and mutes their objections.” I know a couple academics, and let me tell you, they are terrified. The modern campus is a regular Totalitarian State. Republicans with their MBA’s are just dying to get into the academy. But no no no. There is a secret conspiracy to keep them out.
33 Fitz // Feb 9, 2009 at 1:50 pm
JJWFromME “The modern campus is a regular Totalitarian State. Republicans with their MBA’s are just dying to get into the academy”
You seem to be being facetious. But I never say there is a conspiracy to keep republicans out nor does the article imply that. Rather as any person with intellectual integrity will tell you, it is not a conspiracy but a consensus. That consensus is to abolish conservative ideas from being articulated in the main among academics. Just ask Larry Summers. If you come even close to any sacred cows of the left you get rode out on a rail. Less conspicuous examples abound of entire careers being stymied because of leftist ideology and the power it has on campuses. I seem to no many more academics than you. Whole fields of inquiry are simply verboten sex differences between men & women being only a single example.
If you cant come near a subject you dont have a very good chance of ever proven a contentious political point premised in that subject matter. Nice try with the straw man there JJWFromME.
34 JJWFromME // Feb 9, 2009 at 2:09 pm
There are sacred cows, not all of them necessarily political. Yes, scholarship that appears to encourage discrimination, even if it may have some truth in it, is taboo. I guess I just don’t find that all that surprising or offensive. So the academy has egalitarian values. So what? –And there are sacred cows on the right in the academy too. What about Walt and Meisheimer’s (sp?) *Israel Lobby*? Why didn’t Juan Cole get a job at Yale?
35 JJWFromME // Feb 9, 2009 at 2:13 pm
The other thing is that there are many cases where scholarship or research just doesn’t have merit. Why can’t Pat Michaels get his climate science published? Not because he’s poor and oppressed and people aren’t recognizing good work. It’s because it doesn’t have merit. It doesn’t rise to professional standards.
36 Fitz // Feb 9, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Sorry JJWFromME your missing the broader picture that the article is pointing to.
This is obvious from the inane use of “So the academy has egalitarian values.” Egalitarianism is a weasel word. its a broad brush that can cover most anything. All children being raise by their Mothers & Fathers is a egalitarian argument. You might as well say “the academy is for freedom” of what not.
No… Political correctness is real. Gender study departments act as the enforcers of a VERY narrow ideology that has to ignore hard science, sociology, anthropology, history, demographics, Indeed has to abandon reason entirely in order to perpetuate its dogmas. At this point I could start pointing to numerous personal examples of what I have wrung out of academics by way of concession. Be it the hollow anti-intellectualism of postmodernism (a cloak and cudgel for relativism) or the aggressive patrolling of narrow minded political correctness. The antidotal evidence is overwhelming. If you dont subscribe one iota to the article above you are either very strident or what Marx called a useful idiot..
37 JJWFromME // Feb 9, 2009 at 4:05 pm
“Be it the hollow anti-intellectualism of postmodernism (a cloak and cudgel for relativism) or the aggressive patrolling of narrow minded political correctness.” You’re preaching to the converted on postmodernism. I think it’s awful, and you can probably find a lot of people in the academy to agree with you on that. Also, I’m sure you can find “political correctness” somewhere, but it’s nothing like it was in the early 90’s. And again, a lot of academics think it’s lame too. You tend deal with this stuff when you have academic freedom of inquiry. But anyway, I think the ideologically driven problems you mention are a mere blip compared to those of movement-conservative-dominated Washington in recent years, which has been the worst kind of brain-dead hackery. I fail to see how the ideologically blinkered conservatism we’ve seen and its disastrous results would be any improvement over *even the worst* aspects of American academy we’ve seen.
38 JJWFromME // Feb 9, 2009 at 4:14 pm
“But Fox is a soloist, trying to be heard above a chorus.” Fox is like World Federation Wrestling. How even a conservative professor could find it intellectually satisfying in any way is beyond me. By the way, this piece is a great analysis of the modus operandi of Fox and conservative talk radio: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/did-talk-radio-kill-conservatism.html
39 Fitz // Feb 9, 2009 at 4:24 pm
As Allen writes “Without a secure position in the university and the media, conservatism had no way to explain itself.” – So we cant say if the movement conservatism you speak of is blinkered or not. Unless the people arguing it have both the safety of the academy & an academy with a genuine commitment to pluralism and liberalism we never see the best idea rise to the top. This is especially pronounced in gender studies a field that allows all discussions relating at all to men, women, marriage, sex, human sexuality, and onand on control the terms of debate.
You seem to underplay the significance of the varying fields this has an effect on. Sure some of the silliness of the early 90s might be gone, but this is at the expense of solidifying their gains in control. A Academic Sociologist I know says his field has ignored the most important sociological event of the century (family breakdown in the West) because of feminist Orthodoxy. So we just dont get deprived of X or Y study and publication, but what X or Y publication would have inspired both academically & politically. The left knows this. My friend works comfortably in the field of race instead, much safer obviously. Likewise another academic who is a self described libertarian says he got three times as many call backs for employment when he removed a single article he published from his resume. He is now a adjunct law professor but because he stood up for students when a brew-haw-haw erupted over disproportionate leftist views at my old law school & because he is open about his conservative viewshe thinks the possibility of his getting tenure is zero, and is busy making alternative career plans. The list goes on. As stated this is specifically present in fields relating to gender. So the entire social conservative argument is stuck in the ghetto of religion outside the university withy the feminist and allied homosexuals making any foray into socially conservative though career suicide despite the overwhelming empirical evidence on that side of the argument.
P.S. You wont get argument from me about Fox or (most) talk radio – But high quality PBS is like the universities…its on lockdown by the left…. I watch EWTN for philosophical substance & C-SPAN
40 ireign // Feb 9, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Good post, professor.
11:17, Larryo-seldom right and wrong again. Even assuming this recent turn of event has proved the error of Milton Friedman’s philosphy (I don’t think it has), that would not explain why five, ten, fifteen years ago, before Friedman was allegedly discredited that there was still few conservatives at today’s universities. The lack of ideological diversity in today’s professor ranks is particularly apparent at today’s law schools. http://www.law.yale.edu/news/1855.htm
JJWFromME, if you find conservative thought so lacking, why are you blogging on a center-right blog?
41 jjv // Feb 9, 2009 at 7:30 pm
How does one pull of a reverse Gramsci? Non-ideological professors vote in leftists who then never vote for non-ideological or conservative professors ever again? Most top schools are too rich to affect through contributions. How do we recaputure acedemia?
42 larryo // Feb 9, 2009 at 8:45 pm
ireign – a little earlier in this thread, on this subject, HollywoodBill said: “Sinz, you nailed it about the 1980s. Everyone was a Republican.” Now you say: “explain why five, ten, fifteen years ago, before Friedman was allegedly discredited that there was still few conservatives at today’s universities.” You guys fight it out – I will stay out of it.
43 chaosDrew // Feb 9, 2009 at 10:58 pm
I’ve long agreed with the position many took in regards to complaints from some in the Black community about how “The Man” or “Whitey” etc have been keeping them down. The response was, in essence: stop complaining, stop looking for someone else to blame your problems on. Do the hard work and achieve for yourself.
IMHO we can apply the same arguments to Conservative claims of persecution in Academia. For a variety of reasons academy has attracted more liberal types then conservative. You want your ideas heard? (actually there are number of institutions from religious grade schools to overtly conservative universities such as BYU, Hilllsdale, Regent in which to teach) You want your conservative ideas heard in the rest of the Academy? Do the hard work. Get your certificate, get your degrees, encourage others to do the same, run for school board, write schoolbooks, join the unions and convince people to change them, band together with other like-minded educators and change the culture. Stop waiting for someone else to do something. Stop waiting for David Horowitz to get the government to mandate Diversity of Thought. Stop merely complaining.
And as to the complaint that “Conservatives aren’t represented in the Media”: horsecrap. Conservatives may not be AS represented as you might like. But between outlets like the WallSt. Journal (higher circulation then NYTimes), Fox News (highest cable news ratings), columns in every major newspaper, unquestioned dominance of talk radio, magazines, web outlets galore, Conservatives have plenty of exposure and with much better message-control then Liberals could ever dream of.
The general public knows exactly where to go to hear the message. Isn’t it just possible they’ve sampled the goods and, at this particular point in history, found them wanting?
44 chaosDrew // Feb 9, 2009 at 10:59 pm
holy hell. Isn’t there some way to mark paragraph breaks?
45 ireign // Feb 10, 2009 at 7:55 am
chaosdrew, other minority groups had affirmative action. Conservatives have reverse affirmative action. While a handful of conservative stars will get offers from places like Harvard and Yale, the average qualified conservative professor will not. I think conservatives are just asking for a fair shake. Nothing wrong with that.
News flash, why should conservative academics have to go to universities like Regent to get a job? Why should right-leaning students at Ivy League schools have to transfer to less prestigious universities just to have some diversity of thought. That’s absurd. To take an extreme example, would you have told African-Americans in the 1950’s that they shouldn’t go to Harvard but they should have to go to Spellman instead?
Your comment about the WSJ is also incorrect. The WSJ is generally considered just as liberal as the NY Times. The only difference is the editorial page of the journal is more conservative. The editorial page (while important) also consists of a few journalists.
46 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 8:13 am
I just recently read Kirk’s “Conservative Mind” recently. If that’s conservatism, I didn’t recognize modern conservatism in it. That’s why I talk below about “movement conservatism” and the “conservative movement”, and distinguish it from actual “conservatism.” I agree with Sam Tanenhaus that there’s more Burke in Barack Obama than there is in the modern conservative movement. Tanenhaus quotes Arthur Schlesinger: “once they leave the stately field of rhetoric and get down to actual issues of social policy, they tend quietly to forget about Burke and Disraeli and to adopt the views of the American business community.” That’s about right. Either the business community or disaffected whites. So sure, there are interest groups in academia, no doubt, but all the shrill rhetoric, paranoia, and cherry picked anecdotes about the academy I think are reactionary, not conservative.
47 larryo // Feb 10, 2009 at 8:36 am
chaosDrew – great post! God forbid that the standards that the “conservatives” insist be applied to everyone else – at least everyone they consider their lessers – be applied to them. And ireign – so true to form. Confronted with the obvious philosophical disconnect, you punt – you just plunge ahead with your poor-us, whining victim routine. The one you despise so much and denigrate so thoroughly when it comes from the less-privileged. Why, they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps! This was just the best way to start the day. Thanks, chaosDrew.
48 Fitz // Feb 10, 2009 at 8:57 am
jjv 7:30 PM (wrote) “How does one pull off a reverse Gramsci? Non-ideological professors vote in leftists who then never vote for non-ideological or conservative professors ever again? Most top schools are too rich to affect through contributions. How do we recapture academia?” – This is the crux of it…and why it is getting worse not better. I have heard it written that the old liberals let the radicals through the door and they radicals shut the door behind them. It impossible to argue with someone who says all dynamics are power dynamics The real work of the revolutionary is not truth or pursuit of knowledge, but to advance the revolution. That why you can never be sure if your arguing with a fair minded liberal who simply needs convincing or a leftist who is simply problematisizing your narrative. Most will simply keep denying what is blindingly obvious. Yale had a student revolt a while back asking Is Yale too Gay . Get thismy Law school family law department was made up of threen polyamorists. Now thats just plain B.S. and they an everyone else knows it but they have the jobs and wont be letting go. Its non-stop propaganda and influence peddling until they get what they want.
49 ireign // Feb 10, 2009 at 9:23 am
larryo, “obvious philosophical disconnect”-Only obvious to you. If any other segment of our population was so unrepresented in academia there would be at least a serious inquiry into why that is.
larryo, you favor extending the payroll tax to everyone, you comment throughout the day, you just posted at 10:30 that this was a great way to start the day, you are very far to the left, so the question becomes do you have a job? It appears that you are either: (a) retired hippy (b) college student who has never worked a day in his life, (c) professor who has never worked a day in his life, (d) a public employee with too many benefits and not enough work.
Which one is it?
50 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 9:54 am
Retired hippie. That’s great. You guys have no clue what’s happening to you. David Brooks was trying to telegraph it to you guys a while ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/opinion/23brooks.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/opinion/04brooks.htm?_r=1
Of course the above articles have the usual stereotypes and resentment-lite that Brooks specializes in. But as with all stereotypes, there’s a grain of truth. Good luck trying to catch up to the twenty first century, GOP.
51 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 10:01 am
I cringe to read those. Again, huge generalizations. But Brooks has it about right.
52 Fitz // Feb 10, 2009 at 10:07 am
Yes – now I see, JJWFromME is just trolling around obfuscating and eliding the argument of this post. Both those Brooks columns are obtuse and silly. (Like Brooks & the idea that he is a conservative) The Nerd column is absolute shambles plus, who says you cant be a conservative or traditionalist nerd? The Defining Moment column is pretending there is no hierarchical order to change these days. The problem is that is not true. This post by Allen Guelzo reveals that indeed leftism & the Democrats have a top down hierarchy and its the Universities. They dictate what social change is and how it is perceived.
53 larryo // Feb 10, 2009 at 10:08 am
ireign – this will come as a shock: You are not the center of the universe, and the time of day is not the same everywhere on the planet as it is where you are. It so happens I am on the west coast and I have an office in my home. Here’s a little glimpse (not that you are entitled to any personal information from anyone): I was a prosecutor – a successful one, by all measures I know – in a major American city for more than 5 years, but that is not important. This is classic, however: When the message humiliates you, regardless of the merits of the message, you attack the messenger.
54 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 10:19 am
“who says you cant be a conservative or traditionalist nerd?” Sure. But they look nothing like the conservative or traditionalist of the usual GOP electorate. I think it’s useful to think of Michael Lind’s description of the Texas of George W Bush vs. the information economy Texas: “Lind’s book is a recounting of Texas history: the story of a divided state with two conflicting traditions. One is the Texas of Lyndon B. Johnson, Ross Perot and Sam Rayburn; it’s “a society eager to embrace the Space Age and the Information Age.” It’s “led, not by good-old-boy businessmen and political demagogues, but by a visionary and earnest elite of entrepreneurs, engineers, reformist politicians and dedicated civil servants. . . . The preferred society of these Texans is a broadly egalitarian meritocracy, not a traditional social order stratified by caste and class.” These folks are “sentimental nationalists” with “little if any sense of Southern identity” or loyalty to their region. They believe in an activist federal government that serves ordinary Americans.
George W. Bush’s conservative Texas is “a society with a primitive economy based on agriculture, livestock, petroleum and mining, with a poorly educated population of workers lacking health protection and job safety. . . . This Texas is a toxic byproduct of the hierarchical plantation system of the American South, a cruel caste society in which the white, brown and black majority labor for inadequate rewards while a cultivated but callous oligarchy of rich white families and their hirelings in the professions dominate the economy, politics and the rarefied air of academic and museum culture.” These folks are attached to “military values unknown anywhere else in the English-speaking world, except in other Southern states.”
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/books/made_in_texas
The second one is the Texas of the modern GOP. The first are mostly Democrats.
55 ireign // Feb 10, 2009 at 10:23 am
larryo, they were rhetorical questions which I did not expect you to answer. That said, assuming you were a prosecutor, you should be aware of how left-wing most law schools are and you should be aware that not everyone was a Republican in the 1980’s. In fact, as Stephen Calabresi notes in his first year class of 80 or 90 students at Yale, only him and one other student at the time voted for Reagan. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_47_15/ai_58283293/pg_2
Given your contempt for those on the right, I do find it troubling that you were given the power to decide who to prosecute. I don’t think the message humilated me, your message just left me wondering who has all that time on their hands and given your inability to distinguish between wealth and income, it made me think that you either did not have a job or you worked in the public sector. It appears that I was correct.
56 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 10:44 am
There are more professionals now, and they tend to be more Democratic (with both a small and capital d) for a variety of reasons: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0743254783/ref=sib_dp_srch_pop?v=search-inside&keywords=craft%20quality%20autonomy
Gramsci has little or nothing to do with it, unless you’re looking at the propaganda pumped by movement conservative institutions:
http://www.thecre.com/quality/2008/20080309_quality.html
57 Fitz // Feb 10, 2009 at 10:45 am
JJWFromME For the love of God. Way paint things in a self serving way. So when you read the Brooks piece you really had in mind the Michael Lind dichotomy between conservative/liberal. Well Thanks for continuing to expose your mindset. It would be much quicker if you just came out and said what you thought. I have seen this kind of Southern bashing all the time & I love the way they draw the contrast The preferred society of these Texans is a broadly egalitarian meritocracy, not a traditional social order stratified by caste and class.” As a said below egalitarianism is two broad a concept to be hijacked on a whim. As for my opinion: Every child being born and raised by their married Mother & Father is a egalitarian position. If this new class exists it is joined with a morally vacuous notion that cant uphold family formation. This is driving a class and race wedge that means brown and black cannot compete in the meritocracy they envision gives them the right to rule. With 50% illegitimacy rates among Hispanics & 70% illegitimacy rates among African Americans they are breeding a caste system of perpetual underclass status.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/marriage_and_caste/
http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_marriage_gap.html
JJWFromME I would truly like to know how that fits into your & Michael Lind belief in your superior morality and its activist federal government that serves ordinary Americans.
58 Fitz // Feb 10, 2009 at 10:59 am
JJWFromME
You are correct “there are more professionals now, and they tend to be more Democratic for a variety of reasons:” Although the idea that they are “small d” democrats is farcical given the big D democrats penchant for judicial activism. Its more apt to say they are vested statis quos who wont challenge the established order or are want to view there government as illegitimate. Its kind of hard to argue that this class is small d democrat while various state courts overturn the popular will on issues like marriage. Gramsci and the Frankfurt school Marxists have everything to do with it when you realize that the professorate who taught this generation of young professionals was indebted intellectually to Marcuse and the boys. Allen Guelzo nails it when he writes
For better or worse, an undergraduate degree has become the prerequisite for entry into middle-class life. Academics control the narrow neck through which America’s managers, writers, thinkers, bankers, politicians, and executives must pass, and that passage has acquired an atmosphere, no matter how self-pityingly the academic left likes to deny it, in which Left assumptions are set as the default positions
The academic Left is correct when it pooh-poohs the idea that it conducts a massive ideological de-programming; but then again, it does not need to. It has merely to nudge the standard deviation of the politics of the future ruling class a few clicks to the left for conservatism to seem abnormal. So THAT is your new professional class principally interested in aesthetics not substance. So they vote for the cool, hip, techno, nerd party.
59 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 11:14 am
” I have seen this kind of Southern bashing all the time…” Well it tends to go both ways. I remember Strom Thurmond saying “the fight against communism is not over. You could say communism came over on the Mayflower.” Nice way to talk about my ancestors, Senator. And I’ll make a mental note of it, too.
60 gerrysh // Feb 10, 2009 at 11:15 am
“Yes – now I see, [troll name deleted] is just trolling around obfuscating and eliding the argument of this post.”
That’s what trolls do. What you should not do is acknowledge them in any way.
61 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 11:20 am
And as for “substance,” the whole “New Class” BS that I’ve mentioned here and other threads, you know the “Scientists, teachers, government employees” that are going to ruin the world. Instead we should have teleprompter-reading, climate change denialist Sarah Palin in charge. That shows real concern for the substance of policy. Yessiree.
62 Fitz // Feb 10, 2009 at 11:38 am
JJWFromME Talk about lacking substance while obfuscating and eliding the argument of this post & my responses meanwhile I post a multiplicity counterpoints and you ignore & then spout the names of Sarah Palin & Strom Thurmond as a (non-substantive) rebuttal. To say there is no “New Class” is to say their was not a mindset change in 1968 among are itlelligencia. Now this is pure Frankfurt school never address the opposition except to call them mentally ill, stupid, or bigots. Not impressive. I do however thank you for the opportunity to flesh out how the two camps operate and submit my posts below as evidence of superior substance.
63 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 11:52 am
I’ve never read the Frankfurt School so I have almost no idea what you’re talking about. I never was assigned them at the liberal college I went to. I think the only reason you know much about them is that they’re weird and German, have something to do with Marx, so they’re a good candidate for paranoia about the exotic and unknown. But hey, did you know that the whole “New Class” theory that forms the basis of a lot of Republican ranting about elites? I bet you didn’t know that. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7043/is_16/ai_n28127660
64 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 11:55 am
Sorry what I meant to ask was, “did you know that the whole “New Class” theory that forms the basis of a lot of Republican ranting about elites is based on Marx?” Personally, I find that a lot more weird than the fact that some students at some point before I was born found it cool to be into some German guys preoccupied with Marx and Hegel.
65 Fitz // Feb 10, 2009 at 12:05 pm
My constitutional law professor had me cornered once in an argument pm evolution – I got frustrated and said “what about new class theory” is that “just a theory” — He laughed and said NO..
Neither talking about the New Class or Frankfurt School is paranoid or far right. Its simply discussing an obvious and agreed upon phenomena about so very influential thinkers and what is called the long march through the institutions. I only learned ONE thing as a philosophy major it matters. However, you are changing the subject again. Care to go after substance?
66 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 12:08 pm
The inventors of the concept of the “New Class”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burnham
http://www.pbs.org/arguing/nyintellectuals_krystol_2.html
67 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Sure it’s an “agreed upon phenomena”, especially if you’re being a politically correct rightie. Sarah Palin is our dear leader. Her critics are elitist New Classers. Criticizing this just proves that you’re politically incorrect, and you must be an elitist new classer. Not too terribly far from being against the dictatorship of the proletariat meant that you were a decadent bourgeois capitalist.
68 Fitz // Feb 10, 2009 at 12:18 pm
The very article you link to uses in its introductory paragraph the term hegemony a term most linked to Antonio Gramsci. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony Now you can use words like Republican ranting about elites – But the very article you link to talks about was an intellectual movement centred around the likes of Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Peter Berger. All former liberals.
Now Daniel Patrick Moynihan was no stranger to the New Class they stepped all over him and the black man to pursue their revolution. So if you still want to avoid substance try avoiding this in your social thoery and my questions below. http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm
How abouut substance??
69 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Yes, former liberals. But you’re conflating Trotskyists with everybody else. I’m not a Trotskyist, nor are any of my liberal friends. The point is that the “New Class” as Irving Kristol explained it had no substance. But it formed the basis for a lot of movement conservative doctrine.
70 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 12:30 pm
And Moynihan split with the Neoconservative movement. He thought they went too far.
71 Fitz // Feb 10, 2009 at 12:35 pm
The substance of the New Class is the Frankfurt school and as Allen Guelzo explains: The academic left likes to complain about how the conservative onslaught forced it to “retreat” to the ivory tower – but without acknowledging that the ivory tower had become the Gibraltar of American life. For better or worse, an undergraduate degree has become the prerequisite for entry into middle-class life. Academics control the narrow neck through which America’s managers, writers, thinkers, bankers, politicians, and executives must pass, and that passage has acquired an atmosphere, no matter how self-pityingly the academic left likes to deny it, in which Left assumptions are set as the default positions
The academic Left is correct when it pooh-poohs the idea that it conducts a massive ideological de-programming; but then again, it does not need to. It has merely to nudge the standard deviation of the politics of the future ruling class a few clicks to the left for conservatism to seem abnormal. So you dont agree with anything in the article and youre here defending the academy as what??? Classical liberals!!!!! Ha – Substance? P.S. Its not correct to say “Moynihan split” its dosent work that way.
72 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Well, I’ve taken you guys as far as I could go. I tried. I remember several years ago I went to a used book store and found a worn Marcuse paperback (he’s Frankfurt School, I think) and the owner was going to just give it to me, saying “no one reads that stuff anymore.” But I read a paragraph of the dense prose (Germans write like that) and I lost interest. I have a feeling if you people didn’t have the Frankfurt School, you’d find something else weird and obscure to get paranoid about, just like Hofstadter said: http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html
73 Fitz // Feb 10, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Fine – Me, Allen Guelzo, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (RIP) will continue to believe that radicals dominate our universities and therefore journalism and elite opinion. As a philosophy major I was mislead in thinking that our thinking is effected by weird and obscure” writers your average person has never heard about.
Crazy & paranoid guys that we are we believe ideas have consequences.
JJWFromME – What about critical theory, have you heard of that one???
74 JJWFromME // Feb 10, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Fitz: “…we believe ideas have consequences.” I couldn’t agree more, or I wouldn’t have posted all the things I did below. John Maynard Keynes once said: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” Especially these days, this seems chillingly true…
75 larryo // Feb 10, 2009 at 11:38 pm
“radicals dominate our universities and therefore journalism and elite opinion.” Well, I guess that depends on how you define journalism. But the figures show that that on the stimulus question the three commercial TV networks and all the cable networks have consistently presented more than twice the talking heads on the right than on the left – that is, for every supporter of Pres. Obama’s stimulus package, two and a fraction critics and/or opponents appear. Clever of those left-wing journalists to disguise their political inclinations so well.
76 ireign // Feb 11, 2009 at 8:43 am
Do you have data to back-up your contention? Of course not, Larryo. You are on the fringe of the political spectrum so everyone appears right-wing to you.
Which gets me to my original point, why are you and JJWFromME constant commenters on this blog? The goal of this blog is to rebuild the Republican Party and possibly center-right ideology. Your goal is to destroy it. Don’t you think what you are doing is pretty juvenile? It likes two adults have a discussion about the Lakers and some unwanted stranger joins the conversation and wont shut up about the Clippers. You have done nothing to add to the discourse on this blog. We all know what left-wingers think, so you reciting psychobabble does nothing for anyone who cares about the Republican party.
77 Fitz // Feb 11, 2009 at 9:12 am
The intellectual lightweight Thomas Sowell has a new column up about the left wing academy thats worth reading:
http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/02/10/de-programming_students?page=full&comments=true
78 JJWFromME // Feb 11, 2009 at 9:38 am
“The goal of this blog is to rebuild the Republican Party and possibly center-right ideology.” I’d like a better Republican party too. It’s like Margaret Chase Smith said in her Declaration of Conscience, it’s not enough to win, but win with integrity and intellectual honesty:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/margaretchasesmithconscience.html
I’ve watched the GOP very closely over the last couple decades, and it seems to me that this has happened less and less. We’d all be better off if that trend reversed itself. Until it does, I don’t see any reason not to continue being a gadfly…
79 JJWFromME // Feb 11, 2009 at 9:45 am
“Today our country is being psychologically divided by the confusion and the suspicions that are bred in the United States Senate to spread like cancerous tentacles of know nothing, suspect everything attitudes.”–a great phrase from MCS’s speech. We’d all be better off if a lot of you “knew more and suspected less.”
80 larryo // Feb 11, 2009 at 11:49 am
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/02/06/senate-cable-stimulus-debate/ Poor ireign – you just cannot stand it that we are all in this together, because you want to be *exclusive* or special somehow. I guess you think you are one of Dr. Seuss’s Star-Bellied Sneetches. Try to get this through your thick skull – it’s all our country and all our economy; if you and yours, your ignorance and your superstition and your xenophobia and your block-headed adherence to reactionary mythology are not confronted and dealt with, if you are not made to see the light at which you refuse to look, then we will all suffer mightily as so many are suffering right now from the logical, foreseeable outcome of the policies you and yours continue to support. There are a number of conservative columnists on this blog saying exactly the same thing right now (albeit rather more gently), but you cannot hear them, can you, ireign? You are too busy trying to keep the infidels out of the club – keep them silent – so you, at least, don’t have to contemplate what they are saying. You are the poster child for disingenuous ignorance, and you don’t want anyone knowing it. Too bad!
81 JJWFromME // Feb 11, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Count me as someone who hopes Nixonland ends– Nixonland being “the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2008/11/05/2008-11-05_did_barack_obama_end_nixonland_no_victor.html
There are no real hippies anymore. There is no “New Class” to be paranoid about. This kind of stuff all should have ended when someone my age left grammar school. Let’s just run the freaking country already–instead of run it into the ground.
82 ireign // Feb 11, 2009 at 12:35 pm
larryo- ” all our country and all our economy; if you and yours, your ignorance and your superstition and your xenophobia and your block-headed adherence to reactionary mythology ”
Reality-I have said nothing that could be construed as xenophobic but your comments indicate your disgusting stereotypes about Republicans.
larryo-”all the cable networks have consistently presented more than twice the talking heads on the right than on the left”
Reality-His sources on the stimulus debate is a very left wing blog. Was Michael Moore unavailable?
larryo-”you just cannot stand it that we are all in this together, because you want to be *exclusive* or special,”
Reality-As I said this is about those who want to rebuild the Republican Party not ones whose interests lie in destroying it. If this blog were designed as a crossfire debate, your comments would be more welcome. As for being in this together, I have no idea what you are talking about. We all want this country to succeed but not everyone wants the Republican Party to succeed. You unfortunately are part of the latter group and your continued posting shows your juvenile nature and is probably indicative of someone who does not have a job.
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