From a reader:

You may be right that these liberal newspaper editors are not necessarily the brightest, but they are the ones with the loudest voice to that population. In my opinion, the greatest mistake of the conservative moment of the last decades has been an unwillingness to cultivate a presence on college campuses much less among the public high schools, in particular high school history teachers. You cannot imagine the systematic reinforcement of liberal ideas and candidates that goes on in high schools. If these kids are only told one side of the story – repeatedly, so early – in many cases you have lost them to a liberal bias before they have ever earned their first pay check and have felt the sting of a large chuck of it missing. The history department at my high school has upwards of twenty-four members; I am the only remotely conservative of the bunch. Further, the greatest damage is done by teachers who actually think and project that they are moderate even as they advocate liberal positions. Little Red Riding Hood had a much easier time of it.

Me: I think this reader is basically right, but I should note that there are a large number of excellent organizations that have been doing hard, vital and largely unsung work addressing this very problem. Young America’s Foundation, ISI, the Center for Teacher Excellence and others fight and uphill fight every day. But, it’s uphill for a bunch of reasons. As a generalization (with lots of exceptions of course) psychology of people who go into teaching (and journalism) is basically a branch of liberalism. The professional institutions that control the commanding heights of the educational (and journalistic) spheres are either liberal or outright leftwing. That’s sort of what bothers me about the run-of-the-mill liberal college newspaper editor. He (or she) thinks he’s a rebel when in fact he’s playing excatly the role his professors and future employers want him to.

Update: From a reader:

Jonah,
I disagree with the emailer to a certain extent. I think the heart of the problem is simple. Younger people think they can change the world and are more idealistic than those that have more experience and are willing to admit certain aspects of the world that can’t be changed. I think that is why the percentage of conservatives increases as the age demographic increases, and why you meet many older conservatives who were once liberals than vice versa. I don’t think an increased conservative presence on college campuses would necessarily change these facts.

I think there’s a lot of merit to this point too. But this is clearly something we can discuss at length after Tuesday.