Cal Thomas apparently has missed the fact that 99.9% of the population today has the attention span of a gnat, about 2 seconds.
Takes a lot of time to read anything of substance and the attitude these days is “who got time fo dat?”
That is closer (in my mind) to the root of the problem.
To be a conservative means you have to think. You have to come to the conclusions necessary to be a Conservative. You have to understand it, because many of the choices Conservatives would support, are often counterintuitive to people who just soak up what someone tells them.
The minimum wage issue is the difference in Leftist and Conservative thinking in a nutshell.
When many non-conservative people hear about proposed increases to the minimum wage, that sounds like a great idea to them. They think “Why not? Don’t people need to make enough money to not live in poverty?” or some such other line of thought. And hey...who doesn’t want people not to live in poverty, right? It is a kid, thinking about an issue because someone told him that was the way to think.
Conservatives may hear about a proposed increase in the minimum wage and think about some guy running a pizza joint, spending his life savings to buy a business, and is probably not making a ton of money, and is working his business from early in the morning until it closes at night. We think “What is it going to do to him? “ And we conclude that the real losers will be the young kids with the jobs, the customers, and most of all, Antonio himself,
The kids are going to lose because fewer of them will get hired and learn how to work. That’s not good. The customers are going to lose, because the level of service and the quality of the product are going to decrease. And Antonio himself loses out, because he is going to have to work longer and harder hours to make the same or less amount of money
So, we, as Conservatives, need to think through aspects of a given situation before we take a stand. We don’t always take the correct stand, but most of the time we will, because we are less likely to engage in “One Stage Thinking” as described by Thomas Sowell.
That takes effort. And a lot of people don’t want to expend the effort. It is easier just to accept something emotionally rather than acquire it rationally.
Possibly, or that people rightfully don't want to hear problems but instead want to hear solutions, which too many of these "intellectuals" avoid.