Posted on 08/14/2003 7:49:05 AM PDT by paltz
Things never seem to change. Liberals have never been able to grasp the fact
that sane, responsible men and women might disagree with them for substantive or
even intellectual reasons, and have been trying to dismiss conservatives since
the 1950s as cranks, nuts racists and misfits.
When I was in college in the early 1960s, there weren't that many of us in what
has come to be known as the "conservative movement." There were the folks at
National Review, of course, and there was a small publisher in Chicago that
kept publishing books by NR founder Bill Buckley and a little known professor by
the name of Russell Kirk, but there was no Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute
or American Conservative Union.
Buckley and his friends had conspired a few years earlier to organize a group
calling itself Young Americans for Freedom, but it had at most a few thousand
members and was largely ignored, and there was what was then known as the
Intercollegiate Society of Individualists or ISI, which worked hard to educate
those who began rallying around the flag of the movement.
Young conservatives in those days, however, faced real problems. Insight &
Outlook was published by students at the University of Wisconsin and was one
of the oldest student journals of conservative opinion in the country. But when
we tried to organize a Young Americans for Freedom chapter on campus in the
mid-60s, we discovered that no faculty member was willing to serve as a "faculty
advisor," a prerequisite to recognition as a legitimate student organization at
the time.
We overcame the problem by recruiting the only conservative we could find as our
"advisor." The man was technically a faculty member, though he didn't teach any
classes and signed on with the caveat that he was doing so only because he
actually believed that all views should be heard so that some -- like ours --
might be rejected by an enlightened community.
The problem in those days was not just liberal bias, but the fact that what we
called the liberal establishment rejected the very idea of a coherent American
conservatism. Conservatism was rejected as a political "pathology" that could be
found only among the demented or under-educated in society. Intellectual
journals accepted this view of conservatism and those of us who dared call
ourselves conservatives were dismissed as muddle headed, crazy or just plain
dumb.
Some liberals found us amusing as long as there were only a few of us. Bill
Buckley, for example, was welcome on campus because he was, well, amusing in
those early years. As the movement began to grow, however, that amusement
changed to nervousness and, finally, hatred.
In the mid-60s, I debated a campus leftist before an audience of some 600
students. My opponent, who was later elected to the Madison, Wis., city council,
rose after I finished my presentation, looked at me and said he would not
dignify what I said with a response. "I will say only this," he intoned, "come
the revolution you and those like you will be among the first we execute." The
amazing thing was that these remarks won the man a standing ovation.
There are more of us now. We nominated a presidential candidate in 1964, elected
a conservative to the White House in 1980 and today dominate the politics of the
country. But we are still hated and dismissed as ignorant know-nothings by our
supposed intellectual betters. Remember the Washington Post's dismissal
some years ago of the emerging religious right as no more than a collection of
barely literate and easily led country folk?
Now, we find that federal tax dollars are being spent to dissect us as the
social psychological and political misfits the liberals have always known us to
be. The study, called grandiloquently, "Political Conservatism as Motivated by
Social Cognition," was undertaken by assorted professorial types at Stanford and
the University of Maryland at a cost of some $1.2 million. The National
Institute of Mental Health dished out the money and the results were recently
published in the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological
Association.
It "proved" what liberals already knew. That we conservatives are a rigid,
close-minded bunch with low self esteem who adhere to a political philosophy
marked by pessimism, contempt for others and driven by fear, anger and
aggression. The thoughtful authors of this "study" manage to link George W. Bush
and Rush Limbaugh with not only Ronald Reagan but also Adolph Hitler and
everything that rational, thinking Americans reject.
And all this on the taxpayer's nickel. No wonder the deficit is growing.
You might have to explain to a liberal that the freedoms outlined by the founders which they enjoy were not freedoms from poverty, freedoms from intolerance, freedoms from Enron, but rather FREEDOMS FROM GOVERNMENT.
...looked at me and said he would not dignify what I said with a response. "I will say only this," he intoned, "come the revolution you and those like you will be among the first we execute."
What those fools did not realize was that if such a revolution came, the conservatives would arrive at the "re-education" camps only to see the fools there first.
I read this last night while checking out voting records! Thought it was really good! Maybe some of the "purist" on here should read this and finally realize the history of Republicans.
This is pretty much what I mean when I say "circumscribed" government, which isn't quite the same as "limited" government. Whatever government does, its role should be clearly and concisely defined, and it should confine itself to that role. I believe that's what the Constitution was all about.
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