Completely In The Dark And That's The Way They Like It

David Bernstein:

[L]iberal students are currently not being well-served educationally by their professors.

In particular, studies show that approximately 40% of American adults consider themselves to be conservatives. I would therefore posit that a well-educated American college graduate should have some idea of what mainstream conservatives think, and why they think it.

Yet the late controversy over Rush Limbaugh and the Rams suggests that many well-educated liberals don’t know the first thing about American conservatism. In particular, I found it extremely troubling that so many columnists, bloggers, political figures, and so on, were gullible/ignorant enough to believe that a mainstream figure like Limbaugh publicly praised the assassination of MLK, or stated that “slavery had its merits,” without any apparent controversy at the times these alleged remarks were made, with no diminishing of his 20 million strong audience, and with no harm to his political standing among conservatives and within GOP circles.

I’m a libertarian, not a conservative, and I’ve probably listened to a total of less then ten hours of Limbaugh in my life, but it was obvious to me that these alleged statements were phony. I would have hoped that they would have at least raised eyebrows among liberal commentators, such that they would have demanded a firm source before attributing them to Limbaugh. But no, apparently a significant fraction of well-educated American liberals, the products of our best universities, thought it unexceptional, indeed, completely congruous, that a mainstream conservative figure would praise slavery and James Earl Ray.

I’m not sure what the solution to this problem is, but I do think it’s clear that many product liberal-leaning institutions, starting with the universities, are sufficiently engaged in groupthink that they lack the most basic curiosity about or knowledge of what their ideological adversaries believe, and are instead inclined to dismiss them entirely as mere evil reactionaries. [And they are sufficiently isolated from contact with conservatives that they don’t have personal experiences to suggest otherwise; it’s easy enough, for example, to go to a top university, on to a major journalism school, and from there to the New York Times or MSNBC or The Huffington Post without every having had a serious intellectual discussion with a conservative colleague or mentor.] That’s not good for the universities, it’s not good for liberals themselves (isn’t easier to defeat one’s enemies if one first understands them?), and it’s not good for America.