If you think our country is politically polarized today, just wait some years.
It’s poised to get far worse.
Last month, The New American reported on the College Pulse’s Future of Politics (CPFP) study, which found not only that college students are the most politicized they’ve been since the late ’60s, but that the male/female voting gap (i.e., men support the GOP; women the Democrats) among them is wider than in the general population. Now another survey has found the same phenomenon — and more.
At issue is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) campus study, which surveyed tens of thousands of students. Among its most striking findings is that 23 percent of them — a figure rising to 28 percent among female undergraduates — claim “LGBT” status. What’s more, as many as half the students at liberal arts colleges such as Smith and Wesleyan “identify” as non-heterosexual.
In fact, what “jumps out most from the survey is how important race, gender, religion and sexual identity is for their politics, and how unimportant their economic situation is,” writes Newsweek’s Eric Kaufmann.
This speaks volumes. It not only reflects how “identity politics” is carrying the day and balkanizing us, but how “An idle mind is the Devil’s workshop.” For if “identity” trumps economics for these students, the logical conclusion is that they’re “fat and comfortable” enough to indulge such nonsense. It’s not the kind of thing entertained by Africans eking out a subsistence living under a hot sun.
At the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology’s website, Kaufmann summarizes FIRE’s survey findings:
- America’s elite university students are more demographically diverse than the general population, but more politically divided along lines of race, gender, sexuality, and religion.
- Minority and female students are far more liberal on campus than in the general population, whereas straight white Christian men are somewhat more conservative on campus than in the general population. Current trends portend a politics in which elite women, minorities, gays, and the nonreligious are more left-leaning while elite whites, males, and Christians remain relatively conservative.
- White Christians tend to cluster in red state [local] flagship universities, which are the most politically balanced in the country and have similar shares of liberal and conservative students. Yet many flagship universities in flyover states with conservative reputations actually have more liberal than conservative students.
- A quarter of students are LGBT, and there are roughly equal shares of Christian and nonreligious students. LGBT, Nonreligious, and Christians are set to become more important political groups among America’s future leaders.
- Liberal arts colleges are the least politically diverse. Many have almost no conservatives, and thus very low viewpoint diversity. But they have high sexual diversity, at nearly 40 percent LGBT.
- Ivy League schools average 10-15 percent conservative and 60-75 percent liberal….
- Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 55-23 margin on campus, and liberals outnumber conservatives 53-21. Elite students are thus two-thirds more Democratic and twice as liberal as the American population.
- Among elite students, there is a 15-point gender gap in political ideology and party identification between men and women. This is 3 to 5 times larger than the gender gap in the general population. It is also 2 to 3 times larger than the gender gap among either the 18-25 or college-educated general population. The campus gender gap has grown steadily since 2004….
- Homeschooled and parochial schooled undergraduates are as or more likely to identify as LGBT or non-binary as those from public or private school backgrounds.
At least part of the explanation for college men’s relative conservatism is that they “are moving to the Right as women shift to the Left, in what appears to be the beginning of a backlash,” as Newsweek wrote in a September article. As for the general drift leftward, many will blame the schools, and an onus does belong on them. But what, then, explains why homeschooled kids are at least as likely to embrace sexual devolutionary “identities” as government-school youth are?
A clue is found in something Kaufmann related at Newsweek. To wit: “Conservative identity, heterosexual identity, and religious identity are tightly correlated, the survey found.” Yet there’s another way of putting this, a way that would be common were moderns oriented toward the objective as opposed to what’s subjective (e.g., “identities”): Conservative identity is tightly correlated with greater virtue (that set of objectively good moral habits) — and so-called leftism with vice.
It isn’t just the schools peddling vice, either. It’s a systemic problem — with entertainment an unappreciated culprit.
As I wrote in the 2014 essay “Influential Beats: The Cultural Impact of Music,” ancient Greek philosopher Plato “asserted that the purpose of the arts was to help shape emotions properly, to take children too young to grasp virtues in the abstract and instill in them a passionate (feelings-based) attachment to virtue, so that they would become instinctively virtuous and fertile ground for the acceptance of reason’s dictates later on…. Unfortunately, attachment to vice can be created in the same way through exposure to corruptive arts — and far more easily.”
In light of this, question: How much good does it do homeschooling a child if you allow him to be exposed, via media, the internet, and peers, to the same moral corruption peddled in the schools? Poison has its effect no matter who administers it.
Therefore, understanding the connection between attachment to vice and modern “liberalism,” it’s clear what I’d do if I aimed to create left-wing foot soldiers:
- Fill entertainment with anti-Christian, anti-American, Anti-Western, anti-virtue, and pro-sexual devolutionary messages. Some should be subtle, too, as it’s what’s assumed that’s learned best;
- Bear in mind that once the young are conditioned to hate, or at least be indifferent about, our culture, history, and traditions, they’ll readily accept their destruction to pave the way “for something better”;
- Include continual doses of moral relativism and its unofficial credo, “If it feels good, do it”; and
- Reinforce the destructive messages in the media, and especially in schools via pseudo-intellectual ideologies to lend them the veneer of academic respectability.
In other words, I’d just keep on doing what’s been done for the last several generations.
Leftism is not really an ideology but, rather, today amounts to movement toward moral disorder. Thus, create people with disordered desires and thinking, and the future is yours.
