Warner Todd Huston
The GOP cannot win until...
By Warner Todd Huston
Of course we are all roaming around trying to figure out what will work, what hasn't worked and whose fault it all is. Powell blasts Limbaugh, Limbaugh replies, voters blast McCain, the moderate Republican illiterati try to blame it all on Palin and the social conservatives, the conservatives say the country club set has destroyed us, and EVERYONE knows that the GOP acted like drunken sailors on the spending side... there is enough finger pointing all around, for sure.
But, how are we going to get it all back? How are we going to win at the ballot box? That is the question, naturally. There is a model of how to achieve that victory, though, if we have the good sense to utilize it.
David Frum appeared on the Hugh Hewitt show on December 16 and said that, in his opinion, the "base" of the GOP is no longer enough to get a president elected. He defined the base as comprising white males that make over $30,000 a year and are not college graduates. He said that the more college a voter has the more likely that they will vote Democrat.
Now, Frum is 100% wrong on a lot of things — like Sarah Palin, for instance — but he is dead on with his assessment about what a college "education" does to an American. A college education turns an American into a Democrat for the simple reason that there isn't anything truly American taught in the largest number of our colleges and universities. They are taught to be Euro-like, non-traditional Americans and the main outlet for that ideology is the Democratic Party.
Students don't turn Democrat in college because it is the "smart" thing to do. They turn Democrat because there is a culture there steeped in a visceral hatred of conservatism, American history and the idea of American exceptionalism and is that into which students descend when they enter our system of higher learning. This hatred of everything that "is" American is spoon-fed them from the second they walk on campus. There just is no sense of balance in our universities and colleges for the most part. Communism, socialism, authoritarian leftism, feminism, the sham of gender studies, anti-Jewish and anti-religious bigotry all are du jour in our schools from coast to coast with but few notable exceptions.
Sadly, we send the flower of our youth to these bastions of anti-Americanism then wonder why they come out voting for the least American Party? How could we be so stupid?
So, here is what must happen if we are to ever begin to see an informed electorate that votes with a conservative ideology: we have to infiltrate education.
We already have a model of sorts to show that such a plan can work. In fact we have several, but this one example will do. In the late 1970s and early 1980s it had become painfully obvious that American jurisprudence had become corrupted by a thorough leftism. The flower children had at last realized that their naive ideas based on communalism and socialist theory were a bust. The Summer of Love wasn't so loving and the Age of Aquarius turned out to be a sham. They had figured out that sit ins and anti-war rallies weren't going to work, but they were still true believers in anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism and that America was the great Satan. They had shed their beads and peace signs and settled into academe to work their magic of destroying the USA from within. Some of these hippy-dippies went into the law both as professors and students. The result was that by the 80s, their left leaning ideas had pretty much taken a stranglehold on our theories of law.
At length, many conservative jurists and lawyers had realized that they had to mount a systematic effort to reverse the destructive trend before there wasn't anything American left in our system of law. Hence, several organizations and schools were launched to further Constitutional originalism and other conservative schools of thought. The Federalist Society is most well known but there were other think tanks, law schools, programs, and thinkers that all worked loosely in tandem, but knowingly so not in a slapdash manner.
Eventually, from this movement came famed conservative judges of one stripe or another such as Posner, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and a host of others that slipped in throughout our law establishment — in both the judicial and educational areas — to the utter surprise of leftists everywhere.
This movement wasn't just a lucky confluence of personalities that accidentally brought about an abrupt change in the ideological direction of our considerations of the law. It was all a concerted effort by people mindful of what they were on about. People set out to make this change.
This is the model we must replicate in our education establishment.
The generally un-American state of education, of course, is our fault. We've allowed the enemy to take over the nurturing and teaching of our very own children to be sure. We have routinely and willingly handed our future over to those that want to material hurt our cherished way of life. We have seen the enemy to our way of life thrive, our very Americanness to be threatened, by the hateful leftism that we have allowed to flourish in our schools.
Without a doubt we absolutely cannot win this political battle until we begin to teach our children why it is that conservatism is the true American ideal. It is swimming upstream to take adults and try to convince them that we are right when they've been taught that everything American is bad, wrongheaded, and evil since childhood.
So I suggest the efforts to turn around the law as an example of how to get it back to where it should be. Let's replicate in our schools the efforts made in the area of American jurisprudence. We can talk until we are red in the face and blue in the ballot box but we won't make much headway until we take back our schools.
We put conservatism back in the law. Let's put it back in our schools.
© Warner Todd Huston
December 20, 2008
Of course we are all roaming around trying to figure out what will work, what hasn't worked and whose fault it all is. Powell blasts Limbaugh, Limbaugh replies, voters blast McCain, the moderate Republican illiterati try to blame it all on Palin and the social conservatives, the conservatives say the country club set has destroyed us, and EVERYONE knows that the GOP acted like drunken sailors on the spending side... there is enough finger pointing all around, for sure.
But, how are we going to get it all back? How are we going to win at the ballot box? That is the question, naturally. There is a model of how to achieve that victory, though, if we have the good sense to utilize it.
David Frum appeared on the Hugh Hewitt show on December 16 and said that, in his opinion, the "base" of the GOP is no longer enough to get a president elected. He defined the base as comprising white males that make over $30,000 a year and are not college graduates. He said that the more college a voter has the more likely that they will vote Democrat.
Now, Frum is 100% wrong on a lot of things — like Sarah Palin, for instance — but he is dead on with his assessment about what a college "education" does to an American. A college education turns an American into a Democrat for the simple reason that there isn't anything truly American taught in the largest number of our colleges and universities. They are taught to be Euro-like, non-traditional Americans and the main outlet for that ideology is the Democratic Party.
Students don't turn Democrat in college because it is the "smart" thing to do. They turn Democrat because there is a culture there steeped in a visceral hatred of conservatism, American history and the idea of American exceptionalism and is that into which students descend when they enter our system of higher learning. This hatred of everything that "is" American is spoon-fed them from the second they walk on campus. There just is no sense of balance in our universities and colleges for the most part. Communism, socialism, authoritarian leftism, feminism, the sham of gender studies, anti-Jewish and anti-religious bigotry all are du jour in our schools from coast to coast with but few notable exceptions.
Sadly, we send the flower of our youth to these bastions of anti-Americanism then wonder why they come out voting for the least American Party? How could we be so stupid?
So, here is what must happen if we are to ever begin to see an informed electorate that votes with a conservative ideology: we have to infiltrate education.
We already have a model of sorts to show that such a plan can work. In fact we have several, but this one example will do. In the late 1970s and early 1980s it had become painfully obvious that American jurisprudence had become corrupted by a thorough leftism. The flower children had at last realized that their naive ideas based on communalism and socialist theory were a bust. The Summer of Love wasn't so loving and the Age of Aquarius turned out to be a sham. They had figured out that sit ins and anti-war rallies weren't going to work, but they were still true believers in anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism and that America was the great Satan. They had shed their beads and peace signs and settled into academe to work their magic of destroying the USA from within. Some of these hippy-dippies went into the law both as professors and students. The result was that by the 80s, their left leaning ideas had pretty much taken a stranglehold on our theories of law.
At length, many conservative jurists and lawyers had realized that they had to mount a systematic effort to reverse the destructive trend before there wasn't anything American left in our system of law. Hence, several organizations and schools were launched to further Constitutional originalism and other conservative schools of thought. The Federalist Society is most well known but there were other think tanks, law schools, programs, and thinkers that all worked loosely in tandem, but knowingly so not in a slapdash manner.
Eventually, from this movement came famed conservative judges of one stripe or another such as Posner, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and a host of others that slipped in throughout our law establishment — in both the judicial and educational areas — to the utter surprise of leftists everywhere.
This movement wasn't just a lucky confluence of personalities that accidentally brought about an abrupt change in the ideological direction of our considerations of the law. It was all a concerted effort by people mindful of what they were on about. People set out to make this change.
This is the model we must replicate in our education establishment.
The generally un-American state of education, of course, is our fault. We've allowed the enemy to take over the nurturing and teaching of our very own children to be sure. We have routinely and willingly handed our future over to those that want to material hurt our cherished way of life. We have seen the enemy to our way of life thrive, our very Americanness to be threatened, by the hateful leftism that we have allowed to flourish in our schools.
Without a doubt we absolutely cannot win this political battle until we begin to teach our children why it is that conservatism is the true American ideal. It is swimming upstream to take adults and try to convince them that we are right when they've been taught that everything American is bad, wrongheaded, and evil since childhood.
So I suggest the efforts to turn around the law as an example of how to get it back to where it should be. Let's replicate in our schools the efforts made in the area of American jurisprudence. We can talk until we are red in the face and blue in the ballot box but we won't make much headway until we take back our schools.
We put conservatism back in the law. Let's put it back in our schools.
© Warner Todd Huston
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
