Generally speaking, as a conservative, I disagree with what the left wants to achieve. When I do agree with their goals, such as to reduce poverty, I tend to disagree with their methods. Like Benjamin Franklin said, “I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”
However, the left is not always, universally wrong and they’ve done some very fine things in the past. One major effort the left has been particularly successful in is with racism. Racism has been so successfully shamed and crushed by society that people treat racial slurs worse than they do four letter cursing and even blasphemy. You can say “god dammit” on television but you can’t say allot of other things. They’ve been so successful that a new version of Tom Sawyer is being written without the racial slurs in it, even though they’re shown in a mocking light and show young people the reality of some of our more painful history.
Megan McArdle wrote recently in Atlantic’s online site. In that post she wrote about racism and how bigotry can manifest its self:
More troubling is that these volitional arguments are almost always combined with denigration: the out group is stupid, greedy, mean, violent, overemotional, corrupt . . . whatever.
And that tends to be the pattern. The group in power treats its rivals or others outside that group as inferior or unfit for inclusion. Whites treated blacks as childlike creatures with inferior minds. An infamous study out of Harvard in the early 20th century went to great lengths using evolution and phrenology to explain why blacks were genetically inferior, almost childlike creatures. Human, surely, but lesser humans. Remember Margaret Sanger’s ideas were popular with academics and the progressive left back then as well.
What the left has taught us about racism has broader applications than mere ethnic background.
For example, the treatment of women in the past has been pretty poor, treating them as childlike and unable to handle many aspects of life. But its where Ms McArdle goes with these thoughts which is more intriguing. She had written a post about how academia tends to be biased against conservatism in response to a study which showed that most academics and particularly scientists voted for Obama in the last election. She noted that people gave their ideas why this was true:
- Smart people are almost always liberal
- Curiousity and interest in ideas is a liberal trait
- Conservatives are too rigid and authoritarian to maintain the open mind required of a professor
- Education erases false conservative ideas and turns people into liberals
- Conservatives don’t want to be professors because they’re more interested in something else (money, the military)
- Conservatives don’t want to be professors because they’re anti-intellectual
- Conservatives hold false beliefs that make them ineligible to be professors
Which, she points out, fits the pattern of racism with the dominant power group presuming the worst of the non power group. It neatly fits within the well-known, often-repeated, and historically established descriptions and studies of bigotry when applied to ethnic backgrounds or gender differences.
And Ms McArdle is right; academic bias is unavoidable. Anyone who has attended a college or university has felt the full power of presumption, when the profs there assume everyone agrees with their worldview and sometimes even showers contempt on those who disagree with the blind assurance of the zealot.
We’re all in on this, so I can be open with you all, they seem to say.
A recent study by sociologists supports this position. John Tierney wrote in the New York Times about how a gathering of sociologists contained what one described as a “statistically impossible” number of conservatives compared to leftists and moderates. Out of 1000 people, 3 described themselves as conservatives. Even if the other conservatives felt pressured to stay silent, that supports the bigotry and bias charge.
It is the left’s own methods and ideas that condemn them now. They clearly taught us and established how to perceive bias and bigotry, especially in organizations. Now its turning around to bite them.
