Why Did America Move Left?

Why Did America Move Left?

Even if, by some miracle, McCain manages to eke out a victory on Tuesday, it should be apparent from the level of support that Obama enjoys, especially among the young, that America has moved very, very far to the left over the last few years. It is apparent to me that the left's utter control of the academy plays a large part in this. It may not last; once kids get out of school, start working, and start paying taxes, the simple explanations that their professors drummed into them in school start to wear down. Still, the American taxpayers will be paying for having subsidized political indoctrination for years to come.

Unfortunately, during the years when Republicans were actually in control of the government, there was no real effort to question the political monoculture of the academy. Once the Democrats are in complete control, the academy will doubtless become even less politically diverse.

The Republicans are called "the stupid party" for good reasons, and this is one of them. Republicans in Congress looked on dumbly while the left exercised its control over education to make sure that traditional liberals (those that still believe in academic freedom and scholarship over polemics) were cast as "conservatives." And conservatives? They weren't in the academy in large numbers anyway, and have now almost disappeared from the humanities and social sciences. The parallels to another messianic political figure who came out of nowhere, with questions about his ancestry, and substantial funding from the wealthy, are strong:

"When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,'" he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, "I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'" And on May 1, 1937, he declared, "This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing." [William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), 249]

If conservatives (or increasingly, even traditional liberals) want to have any hope for the future, they are going to have to spend the money to create an alternative to the current higher education system. Unfortunately, many private schools that style themselves as Christian universities spend too much time and energy aping the secular system, to the point where the professors there might as well be teaching at Harvard or Berkeley. We are also going to have to find ways to make private education affordable, too, since conservatives aren't wealthy; most struggle to afford to send their kids to public institutions.