- Why conservatives inculcate young thinkers, and liberals don’t (need to);
- Christian pastors in Kentucky want to shield children from LGBTQ books; why not shield them from the Bible? Which influence is worse? It depends on your goals, which are driven by evolution;
- Thoughts about what clear thinking gets you;
- The Onion [a satire site!] about a conservative “proudly frightened of everything.”
Now why would this be?
Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 20 Aug 2025: How conservatives help their young thinkers — and why liberals don’t, subtitled “Liberalism has a serious pipeline problem.”
Let me guess before even reading the article. It’s the flip side of “reality has a liberal bias.” Ideology, including religion, must be taught; it is not out there in the objective world to be discovered. Thus, the children need training, or inculcation. Get them while they’re young.
But what does Zack say?
First, he acknowledges the preponderance of liberals on college campuses. And how the conservative industry has fought back.
One of the founding texts of the postwar conservative movement, William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, is all about how academia is full of socialists who are chipping away at the eternal truths of capitalism and Christianity. Buckley founded National Review as an antidote to what he saw as the liberal tilt of the mainstream American press.
The legacy of Buckley-style thinking is the rise of a conservative ideas industry. A young person nowadays could attend college at right-wing Hillsdale, build their law school life around membership in the Federalist Society, and then get a job writing right-wing papers for the Heritage Foundation — all while getting their news from Fox News and Mark Levin’s radio show.
Thus conservative bubbles.
There is no parallel culture in American liberalism — a function, in part, of liberalism’s longtime intellectual dominance. There wasn’t much of a need for liberal donors to create programs to cultivate liberal thought, as people interested could simply go get a PhD or an entry-level reporting job.
However, these institutions were not avowedly liberal in character. They styled themselves as politically neutral, focused more on quality research and reporting, than as contributing to a particular ideological cause. This means that while liberals in such fields were in left-leaning environments, many were trained to see themselves primarily as professionals working a craft.
Then:
But the conservative intellectual model bridges the philosophy-policy gap. It trains young people in the big-picture ideas, like conservative visions of political morality and religion, and teaches them to connect those things to everyday policy discussions. You aren’t learning about abstract ideas or concrete policy, but rather learning a comprehensive worldview that treats policy issues as downstream of specific values.
You are, in short, learning an ideology.
Bingo. Concluding, nevertheless, that liberalism has a problem.
Liberalism has plenty of brilliant theorists who work at a largely abstract level, and policy wonks who work on the most applied issues. But in the middle area of ideology, one bridging the gap between principle and policy, they’ve basically ceded the field to conservatism. The pipeline problem for young people is a symptom of the movement’s blind spot: liberals, as a collective, don’t care to cultivate a youth ideological cadre.
This might not have been a problem in the past — and maybe even a benefit. Ideological thinking tends to produce rigidity, an unwillingness to adjust one’s policy thinking based on new evidence. The right’s longtime insistence that tax cuts can reduce deficits, or addiction to proposing military solutions to foreign policy problems, are two examples of curdled ideology.
But we’re at a moment where liberalism is in a particular kind of crisis: under threat from new ideologies that challenge not specific liberal policy ideas, but the basic premises of a liberal political system. Liberals need a new and compelling vision: one that explains why our ideas are not merely a defense of an unpopular status quo, but a broader politics that can be used to address cardinal problems of the 21st century.
At this moment, liberals lack the personnel to articulate such a vision — while the right’s radical thinkers, at places like Claremont, seize the field.
\\\
Blinkered conservatism.
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 20 Aug 2025: Christian pastors in Kentucky urge theft of LGBTQ books from Shelbyville public library
Subtitled: Calling it “civil disobedience,” pastors at Reformation Church say a member has already stolen the books so library patrons can’t access them
(Once again, conservatives, including religious folks like these, are driven by the motivations of base human nature, which prioritizes survival of the tribe and reproduction. They will thus demonize any human behavior that they think does not support those goals. Never mind individual human freedoms and rights [they don’t really believe in the US Constitution], never mind that the human population has grown so large we are ruining the planet and don’t need to keep reproducing, and so on.)
Hemant concludes:
It’s telling that these pastors are cloaking themselves in righteousness while spreading lies about books they haven’t even read, all to manufacture outrage and fuel their culture war. They’re not really afraid of “perversion” or “grooming.” They’re worried that a child might read one of these books and realize that love, identity, and family can exist in forms beyond the rigid boundaries set by these men. Instead of expanding their own minds, these pastors have nothing to offer by censorship, theft, and deceit. Because their faith is too weak to withstand any scrutiny.
They’re railing against sin while engaging in it themselves. And the message to the LGBTQ kids in their pews and their community is that their lives are too shameful even to be read about. That’s the legacy of these kinds of men. They’re not heroes or martyrs for their faith. They’re petty, pathetic censors terrified of new ideas, who only want to stand in the way of human dignity by calling it God’s work.
Now, what if I were in charge of the local library in Shelbyville, Kentucky, and decided that the exposure to children of the Bible was crippling their ability to think and reason? After all, they are taught to take the Bible literally, despite all the many absurd, inconsistent, and irrational stories contained therein. This, I have argued, as resulted in a population ripe for belief in irrational conspiracy theories…
And yet, and yet — it depends what your purpose is about. Arguably, insistence on common myths promotes tribal survival through shared mythology. High reproductivity insures against the occasional plague or drought that reduces the population. What does clear thinking get you?
Well, it gets you the ability to solve problems that the individual tribes cannot solve by themselves. Like climate change. Which may be why the religious tribes still don’t “believe” in climate change. Because they have not been trained to understand data and draw conclusions from them; they’ve been trained to believe in stories.
\\\
Once again, my take on conservatives, via Facebook:
The Onion, 20 Aug 2025, reposted from 10 Oct 2022: Conservative Man Proudly Frightened Of Everything
It’s a short piece; I’ll quote just the first two sentences, about half.
FLOWER MOUND, TX—Condemning the “woke left” for what he called the “modern evisceration of masculinity,” local conservative man Hank Daniels confirmed Monday that he was never going to stop being proudly frightened of everything. “I’m proud as hell to be scared of everything, and there’s nothing you can do to silence me about that fact,” said Daniels, puffing out his chest as he spoke from behind a barricaded basement door that he had reinforced to keep out the “terrifying liberals, women, and immigrants who haunt my thoughts, at all hours of the day and night, whether I’m awake or asleep,” which he told reporters he was not ashamed to admit in the slightest.
Again, there’s an evolutionary rationale here. If humanity has survived for millions of years through such caution, then why not continue that policy?
The answer is: because humanity has become smarter, via the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, and humanity now faces existential problems that cannot be solved by fearful people huddling in tribes.
(The Onion is a satire site, if anyone doesn’t know.)
