SOME TIME AGO I wrote a series of posts on a piece of "conservative" propaganda about an economics professor who failed an entire class.
I put the word "conservative" in quotes above, because I don't believe that the message in the email was actually representative of conservative values.
There's a game being played around the whole idea of "conservative" in this country.
The good, normal American citizens who consider themselves conservatives are being told, by talk radio, Fox news, Tea Party lobbyists, and all those forwarded emails, that being a conservative means selling yourself and your children out to Wall Street and big wealth.
But I digress.
Though only a little bit.
Because the same people who are misleading America about what it means to be a conservative are doing the same misleading about liberals.
A reader just forwarded me another email which begins with a similar riff on the same theme.
It consists of two parts: a cunningly crafted and very misleading story, and a list of statements about the nature of "conservatives" and the nature of "liberals".
Here's the story, with some personal reactions, and rational critique:
If only wisdom could be acquired in the classroom alone..
(I agree.)
Father & Daughter Talk
A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be very liberal, and among other liberal ideals, was very much in favor of higher taxes to support more government programs, in other words redistribution of wealth.
(Okay—two things:
- I'm getting tired of the false "conservative" line that being a liberal is a matter of youth and inexperience.
It isn't.
I was a staunch "conservative" in my youth, and it was age and experience (and my conservative values) that convinced me that I had been wrong. - On a more objective note, it's time "conservatives"—by which I mean the propagandists, not the people they aim the propaganda at—time that they stopped referring to wealth redistribution as though it had four letters.
It's a neat trick: label an idea with a phrase, then lie about what the phrase means, and you can get people to never really think about the idea at all.
More on this one later...
Right now, back to the story...)
She was deeply ashamed that her father was a rather staunch conservative, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt that her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his.
(Okay, some nice propaganda technique here:
- The reader is expected to identify with the father, and by making the daughter ashamed of him the writer makes the reader feel sorry for the Dad, and critical of the daughter right off the bat.
But remember, this isn't a documentary—the "conservative" propagandist is inventing this story, so the girl is doing exactly what he wants her to do, to manipulate your loyalties. - The next step is to reinforce the stereotype that all students get their head crammed with liberal nonsense by liberal professors when they go to college.
This is simply not true.
You could sit through the vast majority of classes in almost any college without discovering one thing about the professor's political opinions, and in the few courses where you could tell, you'd get as many conservatives as liberals.
Of course, if you want to believe that conservatives aren't smart enough to get Ph.D.s, that's up to you.
I don't believe that. - The bit about the "evil, selfish, desire" is just thrown in to make us sympathize all the more with Dad, but
- The idea that "redistribution of wealth" applies to the girl's father "keeping what he thought should be his" is pure nonsense.
If her father is not one of the top 2% in this country, he is in the middle class, and one of the people the wealth would be redistributed to, so any belief that he would have wealth taken away is irrational.
On the other hand, if he is in the top 2% which owns half the country, then any idea that all his wealth "should be his" is equally irrational, for reasons which the rest of the story will shortly make clear.
And the story continues...)
Next: The Daughter's Friend...
