Beings I just returned from my freshman year of college, I believe the time is right to look back on a year spent inside the ivory towers of academia.
I entered college life knowing that I would be tremendously outnumbered ideologically. My principle on professors said that they were liberal until proven otherwise. After one year, none proved themselves to be conservative. However, I was surprised to find a couple that were liberal but also intellectually curious. Others held the quite open view that the point of being a professor is to preach from "on high" a political perspective. A year spent in uncharted waters honed my beliefs and attending the hub of the intellectual elite showed me some basics about the intellectual left in America.
First, on any issue on the horizon it is the liberal view that in some way individuals are not capable of fully living their lives, spending their money, or making important life choices. This takes many forms. Many would claim that we are simply too small in the scheme of things. We are so little compared to the big corporations and thus need someone to always help us fight them. On the surface this argument makes sense, due to the fact that in some cases money does equal power. But while that view tended to be the most pervasive, I discovered it was only the first layer of an onion. When you peel another back it reveals another reason individuals are incapable. Coupled with their lack of political power is their lack of civic knowledge. The line would go that the American people don't pay attention to politics. That's why politicians, who presumably follow day-to-day politics, must take a more assertive role. Again this seems plausible due to Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" where random folks can't name the Vice President. Even this reason isn't the end though. If you peel one last layer back you see the real reason individuals are deemed incapable, you're stupid. In the end the first two layers stem from the individual's inherent lack of basic knowledge. They are susceptible to fads, have unreasonable expectations, they have inherent bigotries, etc. They buy a truck even after the elite say they'll kill us all. They buy guns even though they're dangerous. They believe in a God that elite science cannot definitively prove. All of this is the underlying reason why we need a small intellectual elite to make decisions for the large, predominantly dumb populous.
This view of middle America as a bunch of redneck, gun-toting, Bible thumping, bigots was eloquently put in 2008 by an Illinois Senator named Barack Obama, a former college professor himself. All of this leads to the inevitable conclusion that Ronald Reagan said in 1964 on the choice America faced then...
"This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."
This issue continues to be debated today.
Another issue that raised its head was the attack on the free market. I kept hearing how the market has enabled the rape and pillage of land and people. Thus, markets must be severely limited and highly regulated. But the facts that determined the raping of an individual were compared to our living standards in the wealthiest nation on Earth. If a farmer in the Caribbean gets paid 80 cents an hour that must be wrong because Americans get paid upwards of seven dollars. One professor attacked a corporation for paying farmers in Jamaica 40 cents a day to harvest the crops. She acknowledged that prior to the company coming to that country the farmer was paid 10 cents a day. She found a way to attack a 400% increase in pay as unethical. If a corporation made it, it must be bad. Even so, the hypocrisy was wild as she came in with designer clothes every single class.
A third point I learned was the opposite of Mitt Romney's book "The Case for American Greatness". Every day it seemed like American greatness was under attack. Our being a large, wealthy, and powerful country is to blame for almost every ill in the world and we must humble ourselves to be liked again. Again I was drawing comparisons to the former professor in the White House's apology tour in early 2009.
But the final thing I found was an answer to these charges.
On the first point it’s hard to give one. All I can say is that everywhere that individual freedom has flourished, so has society as a whole. Everywhere it is oppressed and eliminated, the society has failed. Americans are an amazing people. Sure, we all make mistakes. Some of us aren’t too smart. But as a people we are capable of great things. Point to the largest innovations of the last two centuries and most were accomplished without government’s help, protection, or involvement at all.
On the free market, we must make clear that no one says there shouldn’t be any basic regulation. Some is needed to keep the market stable, like guardrails on a highway. But if you over regulate, it eliminates the ability of individuals to pursue new endeavors, maybe discover a shortcut on the highway. This is how we persevere as a people. This is how innovations are born.
On American greatness, we must also point to the history of the 20th century and another Reagan quote that makes the point…
“We know only too well that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong; it is when they are weak that tyrants are tempted.”
American success is not something to begrudge, it is something to maintain and expand. Like our individually our nation has not been perfect over the years. But the scars we bear we bear openly for all to see and learn from. Hopefully we will learn as well. The problem comes when people harp on our small number of faults and ignore the wealth of good this nation has done for the world. The growth or decay of our nation mirrors the rise or fall of the values we hold dear. If we are weak than those principles will weaken. Whether we like it or not, we are the world’s arbiter of freedom and it is up to us to keep freedom alive and prosperous.
Let me say that overall my college experience has been a great one. I’ve made new friends, worked hard, and had fun. My point here is only about the political bias in the intellectual sphere of college life, not any one person or institution. Even those who preach a political agenda aren’t evil, they’re just wrong headed.
For now I’ll be enjoying a summer vacation of blogging, tweeting, and maybe even some old features could be resurrected in the summer of 2010. Stay tuned…
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