(as promised)
N.B. A look into whether conservatives are driven away from academia or whether academic thought and conservatives simply don’t jive. It’s probably the former, with a bit of the latter, especially when the latter deals with conservative thought in mainstream media, rather than conservative political theory that’s usually confined to the ivory tower.
First, it’s worth spending a bit more time on Lilla’s argument. He makes some good points and even looks into the anti-intellectual movement conservatives are so often tied up in:
There are lessons for conservatives, too. Anti-intellectualism has always dogged conservative tradition (you betcha!), and figures like David Horowitz, who stoke the hysteria, only contribute to the dumbing down. Hopped up on Fox News, too many young conservatives have become ignorant of the conservative intellectual tradition and incapable of engaging civilly with their adversaries. The truth is that a former student of Paul Lyons probably has a greater chance of becoming a serious conservative thinker than a follower of Horowitz does.
Let’s let this stand, briefly, and move on to Lilla’s other points, which are much easier to knock down. Lilla thinks academics don’t pay enough attention to conservative thought, but the very fact that he can separate political thought into conservative and liberal shows that there is, indeed, a distinction. And without that distinction, there would be no such thing as liberal thought—that is, liberal thought is not taught in a bubble; it is taught in the context of the political spectrum, necessarily including liberal, conservative, and moderate thought. Students may be left-leaning, but they tend to be left-leaning because they understand the points of comparison (given, too, that most politically-active students are probably also intellectually active—people might rally for McCain or Obama, but the students who are actually going door-to-door tend to know their politics, at least relatively well). Could it be, perhaps, that the more well-educated tend to understand politics better and steer left because that is the more informed position? The health-care debate certainly suggests so: The conservative anti-health-care movement is largely focused on pure lies—that Obama will kill sick grandparents, that he’s turning the country into a communist hellhole, that universal health care somehow takes away freedom (forced into health care?! they shout). So, in terms of making a case for why conservative politics should have a stronger voice in higher education, today’s Republicans aren’t doing their cause any favors.
Amherst College president Tony Marx said it well when, responding to a question about why the academia is so heavily left-leaning, he answered: Well, we are institutes of higher education.
Lilla’s argument came at a great time wrt to the content of the most recent issue of the New Yorker. (I know bringing up such a hoity-toity, pretentious magazine will drive away even the most moderate conservatives, but sometimes it’s worth losing part of the audience.) Hendrik Hertzberg writes a piece in Talk of the Town inspired by the president’s most recent national speech on health care and the yell of “Lies!” from Republican senator Joe Wilson.
Perhaps it was naïve, and obviously it was optimistic, to hope that once Obama—having been elected by a large and undisputed majority, unlike his two predecessors—took office the nastiness of the assault against him would subside. And so it did, briefly.
But it ended nearly as quickly as it came:
Lies and fantasies about health-care reform swirled together with lies and fantasies about the chief executive himself. Obama is plotting to set up “death panels,” government tribunals authorized to euthanize the old and sick. Obama was born in Kenya and therefore his very Presidency is unconstitutional. Obama will cut Medicare benefits to provide coverage to illegal aliens….Obama is a Fascist.
Hertzberg continues, pointing to the anti-intellectualism at the heart of modern conservative politics:
This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fring, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle….Many Republican officeholders, even some reputed moderates like Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, have obediently echoed the foul nonsense.</span
