Posts Tagged ‘liberal’

Conservatives aren’t the majority opinion

June 3, 2016

Well, the National Review has a whine piece up about the lack of conservatives in higher education. What grabbed my attention was this short bit from the middle of the essay:

Americans start to disregard scholarly work when they correctly perceive that most mainstream institutions have established political and moral perspectives that are wildly out of sync with their own.

It sounds nice and all to conservatives, maybe it’s something they tell each other to feel better about it, I don’t know. A quick google search reveals something, though. The majority of Americans favor marriage equality. A majority of Americans support renewable energy standards. A majority of Americans support a single payer health care system. A majority of Americans are concerned about global warming.

This is just a quick google search for a few hot button political topics. Considering all of these things are typically left leaning positions are apparently favored by a majority of Americans, I’m left wondering how exactly “mainstream institutions” are finding positions “wildly out of sync” with the rest of America. It just seems like bullshit to me when I see groups of polls like this.

Instead, it seems like conservatives are simply a shrinking (though vocal) group in the United States, and that positions that were at one time considered “liberal” are now mainstream. I get it that the right doesn’t like that, but it’s something they should probably accept, at least if they value the democratic process as much as they claim, and want the nation to reflect what the majority actually wants. Of course, that would require less gerrymandering, discriminatory voter ID laws, and the like that attempt to artificially sway elections than to strengthen our democracy.