By Joshua Einstein | The Save Jersey Blog
“You wouldn’t be here if not for progressive policy.”
– Unknown NJ mass transit commuter
At some point in November 2013, Save Jerseyans, I was handing out cards advocating against a NJ ballot initiative calling for a minimum wage amendment to the NJ State constitution that would require yearly minimum wage increases pegged to inflation.
It was part of an initiative by The Coalition to Preserve Jobs and Our Constitution to distribute literature about the job killing effects of the proposal at over 10 major commuter train stations across NJ.
As with all panhandling, political and otherwise, most people I attempted to engage responded with the verbatim forward march of purposeful ignorance. As in all things political activism it was a numbers game. Sift through enough empty ignoring stares and get a few people whose pangs of humanity beat their perturbed indifference to anyone slowing their commute by even only a second.
Most of those with whom I spoke had no notion of the initiative; a number were glad for the work the coalition was doing spreading the word of this amendments dangers to NJ’s teetering economy. Naturally there were the naysayers and negative nellies, however there was one otherwise pleasant woman who said the above incongruous statement as she left for her train.
The statement, as historically ignorant and intellectual barbarous as it is, is illustrative of the liberal mentality that has a large swath of our nation in a mental headlock. There exists a strange breed of historical revisionist which has painted over American history as that of a progressive history solely of political liberal accomplishments. Gone is the intentionally limited government of the founding fathers, banished is the historical fact that abolitionism was a religiously inspired movement, exiled are the uncouth gun tooting Western frontiersmen who were the first to support women’s suffrage, scrubbed from history is the military desegregation and civil rights movement that was implemented and supported by the GOP.
In their stead is a dangerous world-historical view in which everything past was part of the onward march of progressivism. This ahistorical article of faith presents we on the right with a serious issue…
How do we contend with fables?
Everyone knows fables are meant to convey a moral message and are by definition not true stories. There are many fables in our society from the chopping down of a cherry tree by Washington to the notion in the South of the Civil War as a war of northern aggression.
In the contemporary liberal mind there are many dangerous and historically incorrect fables – from the notion that the Democrat Party is the party of equality, that the KKK is a Republican club, that the New Deal ended the Great Depression, that FDR helped the Jews during WW2 (he was, like many of the time, a social anti-Semite and lifted not a finger to help Jewish refugees or bomb the train tracks to the death camps), that the Great Society ended discrimination, that affirmative action creates diversity…..and on and on and on.
The indoctrination of liberal fables into the public mind and zeitgeist has been a multi-decade broad spectrum endeavor using traditional media and academia. If the Gray Lady (the NY Times) and the nightly news shaped the dinner table conversation, it was the failed 60’ revolutionaries who, from their ivory towers, warped the minds of captive generations of Americans.
Higher-education-cum-middle-class-birthright transformed college from a refining school for the upper class to the factory for full future Americans. In this expansion of mediocrity that is the inevitable result of across the board college, mediocre minds of dubious agenda were able to take over.
The media monopoly that progressives have had is over. With new media this dominance is dead and the preponderance of online news outlets and the sky high ratings of FOX News has confirmed this.
In terms of higher “education” the battle remains to be fought. If conservatives have any hope defeating progressive bias we must reorder the collegiate universe. We must become more aggressive in our support of the para-university, the network of organizations focused at college students which brings intellectually challenging speakers and ideas to campus. From YAL to the Young America’s Foundation, the InterCollegiate Studies Institute to the Campus Crusaders for Christ, pro-Israel groups to the conservative alternative campus paper there are many campus organizations fighting the conservative battle on campus and they need more resources and support.
Even more important is changing the rhetoric in lecture halls and university departments. Though uphill and long term, this is a relatively simple enterprise that entails endowing universities with academic chairs and visiting professors in political thought, American history, Western history, civics, etc… – all the foundational intellectual area’s the university has ignored. We have seen the fruit of the liberal effort to take over academia and it’s deleterious but successful impact and we must ape it.
Moreover this methodology is already being replicated, to a lesser extent, by both the Jewish and Islamist communities. Both are funding chairs and departments at universities, from permanent Israel studies professors in Jewish studies departments to entire collegiate institutes supported by the Islamist sheiks, both groups are emulating a successful formula for shaping public opinion.
We will never be able to confront progressive fables and mythology straight on. By their very nature those who use them know they are not true but believe that they SHOULD BE TRUE. But we can ensure, by retaking the ivory towers of academia, the future of our nation isn’t built on the faulty foundation of ahistorical tales and stories but on the solid foundation of Western society. As conservatives, this is our duty.
