It’s a delight to come across pieces written by honest liberals who speak their minds rather than just saying whatever is calculated to advance the interests of the Democratic party. One of them is Camille Paglia, who dislikes the substance and procedure of the Obamacare initiative. In the midst of this Salon piece, she writes,
But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the US has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those cliches that it’s positively pickled.
Precisely. My friend Mike Munger, who chairs Duke’s poli-sci department (and ran for the North Carolina governorship last year on the Libertarian ticket), says the same thing: Liberal students should feel cheated because all they hear in college are clichés that reinforce their beliefs.
One more point about Paglia’s piece. She writes that she “always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party.” Well, yes, at once that was true, but you’d have to go back to the time of Grover Cleveland.