Thursday, September 25, 2008
You Gotta Fight, For the Right
Leave it to conservatives to never give up, never surrender. They won't stop until the entire country has finally seen the light and tilted Right. Or perhaps they are trying to recapture heady days of yore, when the "Contract with America" was vogue and the media actually took seriously these idiots who wore camouflage and ran military exercises on the weekends because they considered themselves the state "militia," and not the national guard?
All kidding aside, conservatives have been stunningly successful at neutering the Left in the country all because the Left failed to take conservatives, and their ideals, seriously. There has been some great books documenting the rise of conservative ideals in a variety of different areas:
Faculty may scoff as such an ideal, but they need only look at what happened with the media and the law to see just how dominating the conservative view may become and what it may mean to their place in the university. The lesson should be to take the threat seriously and look for funding and programs to balance--or to simply not participate in the first place. The fact remains--the conventional wisdom that colleges are hostile towards conservative ideals is a myth, and that faculty who do their job will be more concerned that the student sees a subject from all sides and not just one. Most faculty know this, but must not be satisfied that the public knows this as well. Folks like Horowitz have an easy time garnering media attention to push the fiction that the social sciences is really the socialist sciences.
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All kidding aside, conservatives have been stunningly successful at neutering the Left in the country all because the Left failed to take conservatives, and their ideals, seriously. There has been some great books documenting the rise of conservative ideals in a variety of different areas:
- The Media: In no other area have conservatives been more successful than in pushing the media into adopting the conservative cause all because they feared being called liberal. And given the dearth of evidence that demonstrates no liberal bias in the press, because conservatives have repeated enough, most Americans believe that the mainstream media are liberal, and some even believe they are "dangerously liberal."
- The Law: In this area, as a result of some very well funded legal foundations and think tanks that push such things as "tort reform," conservatives and their ideals have excelled. Organizations such as the "Federalist Society" and the "Heritage Foundation" have pumped millions of dollars into grooming conservative attorneys for the sole purpose of placement in the federal judiciary or in politics, in such places as the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel and Office of Legal Policy. And organizations such as the American Tort Reform Association, or ATRA, have fooled a number of states into believing that the civil judicial system should be abolished because it represents nothing more than a pot of gold for charlitans who feign injury--such as driving with their feet, talking on the phone, and applying make-up at the same time drinking McDonalds Coffee.
- Academia: There has been a concerted effort over the last 20 years to force college campuses to be more conservative by playing on the narrative of the typical college professor, stuck in an ivory tower, who wears hemp and Birkenstocks, and ride bikes or drive tiny little cars with bumper stickers that say things like "Mean People Suck." More so, the college campus is also a place where America, masculinity, God and Country are things to be despised. The typical college course tells the story of how White Men came to dominate the world at the expense of minorities and indigenous cultures. And is also a place where free markets are to be denigrated first and foremost. Thus, there have been organizations such as Accuracy in Academia, created by former Yippie turned Conservative David Horowitz, who wish to expose the Marxist orthodoxy that has seized most college campuses (yet doesn't seem to apply to the business schools, which often are showered with the most money).
Faculty may scoff as such an ideal, but they need only look at what happened with the media and the law to see just how dominating the conservative view may become and what it may mean to their place in the university. The lesson should be to take the threat seriously and look for funding and programs to balance--or to simply not participate in the first place. The fact remains--the conventional wisdom that colleges are hostile towards conservative ideals is a myth, and that faculty who do their job will be more concerned that the student sees a subject from all sides and not just one. Most faculty know this, but must not be satisfied that the public knows this as well. Folks like Horowitz have an easy time garnering media attention to push the fiction that the social sciences is really the socialist sciences.
