Universities have a reputation of being bastions of liberalism. Even in my private, evangelically oriented college, there was little evidence that the faculty considered conservatism to have much of an intellectual underpinning. Everything I learned about Edmund Burke I studied in a community college or after entering the work world.
And of course, the epicenter of liberalism is the University of California at Berkeley. So, would you be surprised to learn that Berkeley is adding a course on the study of "right wing movements."
Of course, "right wing" has become pejorative among progressives in the same way liberal has become "the L word." But a major university treating conservative intellectual thought with any amount of seriousness is a major step toward students being exposed to a broader range of ideas.
The diary (American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It, by Paul Lyons) is fascinating and reassuring, at least about our students. Lyons's class was split almost evenly between liberal and conservative students, who had no trouble arguing with each other. They seemed to understand what thin-skinned professors wish to forget: that intellectual engagement is not for crybabies. The students had loud debates over Reagan's legacy, Bush's foreign policy, religious freedom, abortion, even the "war on Christmas" — and nobody broke into tears or ran to the dean to complain. And the more the students argued, the more they came to respect one another. According to Lyons, liberal students learned that that conservative guy was no longer just the predictable gun nut or religious fanatic. And the conservative students learned that they had to make real arguments, not rely on clichés and sound bites recycled from Fox News or Rush Limbaugh.
I think on The Batavian we've had some good debates on healthcare reform recently. Many people of various ideological perspectives have brought some thoughtful arguments and competing facts to the discussion. There has been little rancor. That's how policy should be debated in an open society.
I do think there needs to be a greater understanding among the politically minded of how broad and intellectually diverse the right side of the political spectrum is.
In his essay on the Berkeley course, Mark Lilla wonders how many liberal professors can distinguish between the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute -- three ideologically different think tanks. I wonder, too, how many self-identified conservatives know the difference?
Or that not all conservatism favors intrusions into bedrooms or into foreign countries.
I grew up in the Cold War era. The only thing I knew of conservatism was anti-Communism and "the domino effect." It took Bill Kauffman to expose me to pre-Cold War conservatism and I realized there was a sound conservative argument and tradition for non-interventionist, small military thinking. Lilla observes, too, that conservative thinking changed a lot in the 1950s:
"It is a convenient left-wing dodge to reduce 20th-century American conservatism to Cold-War politics, since it implies that conservative ideas are embedded in a world that no longer exists and never should have. In fact, in the 1930s American conservatives were far more obsessed with Franklin D. Roosevelt and his domestic legacy than with Joseph Stalin, and looked askance at all foreign entanglements, including the Second World War. The anti-Communist cause was first conceived by Cold-War liberals, not by conservatives."
I wonder if Kauffman will be taught at Berkeley?
(The quotes from this essay by Mark Lilla (also linked above). Read the whole thing. Pictured above, Edmund Burke and Robert Taft.)
