Manufacturing Liberals
Larrey Anderson
American Thinker
8/12/2010
Liberals are not insane, as many conservatives believe. Most liberals (I am not speaking here of the political or intellectual class) are ordinary human beings pursuing everyday human lives — just like the rest of us. Here is a brief summary of why most liberals are liberal and what we can do to help at least some of them understand conservative thought:
1) Indoctrination, not education
Polls consistently find that over 70% of college professors identify themselves as liberal. The percentage of liberal faculty members is even higher if one removes responses from those teaching the “hard” sciences. In our prestigious universities, the figure approaches 90%. Both of these reported percentages are probably lower than the real figures [i].
The fact is that America’s universities and colleges are no longer institutions that offer their students various political, social, and economic perspectives. There is no exploration of competing concepts, no real debate. Students are not taught how to think, but what to think. Our universities are indoctrination camps (and our public primary and secondary education systems are not much better) — not campuses for learning and critical discussion.
Almost all of the students who emerge from these indoctrination camps have attended, for years, classes based upon moral, scientific, and epistemological relativism [ii]. Many of those students have never seriously considered, or even been exposed to, alternatives to the propaganda they receive during school. A person cannot change from position L to position C if that person doesn’t know that position C is an alternative — or if the student has been brainwashed into thinking that “C” stands for greed, racism, homophobia, etc.
Yet the hard truth is that conservatives far outnumber liberals in America. It is our fault that we have allowed our educational systems to become indoctrination camps run by the left…
…3) Sympathy, not empathy
Liberals tend to be sympathetic. But sympathy is not empathy. Sympathy is a product of the imagination. Empathy is a result of knowledge acquired through personal experience. Because liberals tend to be sympathetic rather than empathetic, they see other people from two distorted (and imaginary) points of view:
First, liberals tend to see those for whom they have sympathy as victims…
…4) Control, not freedom
As I have discussed at length in a couple of other articles, liberals generally prefer an outside power (the government) to fix those difficulties in life that they cannot personally control. I have used the desire of liberals to establish universal health care — but not universal lawn care — as an example…
Read the entire article at the American Thinker
