I didn’t bother reading Kersten’s latest diatribe very closely. Mostly because it’s a series of rehashed conservative arguments about the fundamental liberalism of universities.
Straight white males are pariahs now, I suppose. They’re the only acceptable groups to whom insults can be hurled. Ridicule of other ideologies. And so on.
Setting aside the fact, of course, that insults are hurled at nearly everyone but straight white males in day-to-day life. And ignoring that delicious irony that conservatives who aren’t being propped up by every conceivable institution are essentially complaining about negative self image and low self-esteem (those loathsome, ridiculous liberal goals). And turning away from the strong temptation to remind conservatives that they’re supposed to be the strong, rock-steady, groomed-for-leadership ones, not the ones who cower in the face of unpopularity and peer pressure, political and otherwise. And assuming impossible the notion that, maybe, conservative students on campuses crumble in the face of lefty arguments is because lefty arguments are better than the those offered by the tighty righties, and that maybe just because you raise your children to be your political, religious and cultural clones is no guarantee that that’s how it’s going to turn out (as with affirmative action, you may level the playing field, but that doesn’t guarantee outcomes—which, natch, is a conservative argument)…
Oh, wait… Let’s not just throw those things into the dustbin. Not just yet. Because, you see, what Kersten is complaining about—as are all conservatives, really—is that their God-given grip on power is being questioned. And not in the 1960s sort of neo-natal-neo-conservatives storming the student union kind of questioned. No, this is much more fundamental and much, much, much more dangerous to the conservative hegemony in institutional power. Namely, that conservatives feel they are the scions of the Founding Fathers going all the way back to Jesus, and the rest of us are simply aberrations. We’re illegitimate Americans, barely citizens at all, really. So why should our ideas count?
For Kathy, Universities are a place for free-market economics and the Constitution-in-Exile, because those things are what this great country of ours is founded on. All conservative opinions are to be taken seriously, gravely because conservatives firmly believe in them, your empirical voodoo evidence be damned! Anything else is propaganda, junk science, indoctrination, lies, an attack. Let it be carved in stone above every entrance to our great learning institutions: DON’T TASE ME, BRO’! He was a martyr.
Now, no hegemony in power is ever a very good idea (as we can all see from one-party rule, our own and other countries’). And there certainly should be safeguards against political discrimination on campuses—measures that I’m sure Kersten would be more than happen to extend to socialists, communists, Islamic groups, GLBT groups and the rest. But there is the caveat that drunken 18-year-olds who are only going to university so they can pull down six figures and live in a McMansion—which, let’s face it, is the majority—are probably the least of our national concerns when it comes to granting one another political respect. They’re university students. They are, in their natural habitat, very stupid and self-righteous people, and ones that are gleeful to enforce whatever social order comes along like a pack of jackals. We shouldn’t take cues for political reform from them.
Anyway, that’s all. I have to go to work now. Because, you know, there isn’t a humanities department in this country that has produced anything worthwhile, so they’re not going to start now.
For more information about how much information is being generated about this cause, visit conservativecampus.org.
