Conservative Thought is Alive at Colleges
This week while I was helping my son get registered at college I found myself in an interesting discussion with many scholarly engineering students about the current state of conservatives in America. These 18 to 20 year olds were extremely insightful about the history of the conservative movement.
They complained that many of the current so-called conservative columnists seem uneducated or inexperienced in real life as an example they pointed out that according to several online sources it appears that Rush Limbaugh never passed any college course according to his own mother.
Although Ann Coulter is a lawyer and spent time as a Congressional staffer and Federal law clerk, they point to her self described “polemic” style and apparent more than obvious greed as being more a force to convince people not to be conservatives than being a supplicant for the cause. She is the consumate opportunist for the “ME” generation.
Many of them knew the history of William F. Buckley, who many consider the founder of modern conservative thought. His polite intellectual manner came from a diverse history of travel, education, military service, and respect for humanity. I was surprised that these 18 to 20 year olds knew that the his recent death was a great loss in American politics.
Almost all said the conservative movement needs to pull away from the over zealous religious anti-science and anti-literacy campaign and back to the true Ronald Reagan days of focusing on practical solutions for practical problems. Conservatism is a way to solve societal problems not a vague abstract construct in another dimension. A conservative is someone who speaks not about dogma but evaluates a situation, identifies the important factors causing the problem, and then formulates an answer in a way that others can understand.
American conservative thought is not dead on America’s college campuses.