FWIW (another hill of beans) I have returned to graduate school at the tender age of well over 50, and numerous textbooks brainwash these kids to think that:
a) George W. and the powerful GOP stole the 2000 election and
b) The Electorial College was a grand scheme by slave owners to keep white men in power.
My rebuttal for the “powerful GOP” theory is the “powerful wire services” theory, which goes like this:
- technology transforms things, and it does so through the medium of the companies who pioneer any given technology.
- the telegraph transformed the distribution of information generally, and specifically to the public.
- But the public still got its information from newspapers, and a single dominant company sent information to the newspapers. Namely, the Associated Press.
- As its name implies, the AP is an association of newspapers (and now broadcasters) of news. That means that all major journalists are in cahoots. And they have been, since the middle of the 1800s.
- That means that there is no serious ideological competition among major journalists. And journalists like it that way, and take it for the natural order of things. But that is no reason why any serious, thinking member of the public should allow the cabal of journalists to define the public interest to suit them.
- The effect of a strict focus on “the news” is inherently superficial, because what happened yesterday might not be nearly as important as what happened a while ago (not to say millennia ago, as the bible teaches). And because “news” means deadlines, and deadlines mean incomplete and inaccurate reporting.
- ”The news” is, as a matter of journalistic policy, negative. Bad news sells, if it bleeds it leads, no news is good news. But focus on the bad and not the good cannot but function as an implied criticism of of people who, is some sense, might be thought to have been able to prevent the bad events. And since superficial negativity is cynicism, you would only expect to find cynicism in a superficial, negative business.
- Everyone has faith in something, and everyone is cynical about something. That is inevitable given the limitations on human energy to invest in fully determining all the facts of any given case. Journalists are cynics about the people who actually take responsibility to do things the public needs (read, business), and journalists have faith in politicians who go along and get along with journalists (by also being cynical about business (and the military, and the police).
- Journalists claim to be objective, but the incentive to make themselves look good is very powerful, and hardly to be ignored. Bad news is - bad, for the public. But bad news is “a great story” for the journalist. It is not actually at all difficult to distinguish between journalist’s motives and the public interest.
- Republican politicians do indeed leave something to be desired, as typified by Boehner’s shameful bawling in public over attaining, no the ability to better serve the public good, but the peak of his own personal professional ambition. But the Democrat party is the party of Jonathan Grubers at the top and the very least sophisticated voters at the bottom. If there is a party for the middle class, it is not the Democrat party.
- I am so old that I remember when it was taken for granted that the men, and especially the white men, did society’s work supported by wives who worked hard at home, and/or taught or were nurses. Back then, Martin Luther King was a Republican, and the South was flat-out racist - and equally flat-out Democrat. A transformation occurred in my lifetime, and now white men vote almost 2-to-1 Republican because Democrats, and the Journalism Establishment with which Democrats exist in symbiosis, are flat-out anti-white man. And not all white women appreciate discrimination against their husbands, either.
- Still, the Republican Party which was founded on opposition to slave labor has never at any time been anti black, only in favor of law and order. “Law and order” gets censored by Big Journalism, which describes it as code for "anti-black," but it is only a reference to what the Framers of the Constitution called "domestic tranquility."
- The current rage among Democrats is “white privilege.” This exists.
It is not the current rage to point out that black society is anti-white, and that black men are not acculturated to function in the broader society - or even within black society - in the same way that white men are. A white man has “white privilege” because it is statistically far safer, therefore easier, to trust a white (or Asian) stranger than it is a black stranger. This difference in acculturation - this “white privilege” - is nothing I or George Bush or any other white person can change.
- This “white privilege” - actually it is black disprivilege - is generated by the acculturation of black boys into black men leading to the cults of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, et al. The objection to their deaths is not because blacks don’t know the facts of those cases, it is because blacks don’t care about those facts. After all, all they prove is that Travon and Michael were just acting the way they were brought up. “Understand” it however you will, that is no formula for domestic tranquility. There are people who command respect, and there are people who try to demand that you respect them. It is foolish to comply.