Is Republican Opposition To Education Predetermined By Conservatives' DNA? (Plus Bonus: Tonight's Default Vote)

Do you ever wonder why Republicans hate public education? A lot depends on which Republicans you're talking about. The Old Skool Conservatives just don't think wealthy men's taxes should go towards educating poor men's daughters. That kind of defines core conservatism. But the GOP New Skool isn't conservative; it's some kind of sick conglomeration of reactionaries, neo-fascists, racists and nihilists. They fear and oppose modern society in general; it almost makes no sense even discussing issues with them from the perspective of reason. They're pretty much against everything and, unless Limbaugh or Beck explained it within the last 24 hours, they probably can't tell you why. In their new book, Predisposed, academics John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford touch on the Republican anti-education bias while trying to explain that they just can't help themselves; it's in their DNA.

Former U.S. Senator and candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination Rick Santorum once described his country’s universities and colleges as “indoctrination mills” for godless liberalism. These strong words reflect the widespread suspicion among conservatives-- and not just conservatives in America-- that universities are less focused on raising IQs than they are on raising left-leaning consciousness. As long-time college professors, we are dubious. Persuading students to stop updating their Facebook pages long enough to listen to a 55 minute lecture is challenge enough; persuading large portions of them to pledge undying fealty to a particular political belief system strikes us as a fool’s errand.

Still, this does not mean that conservative suspicions about faculty politics are without merit (most academics are left-leaning) nor that there are no historical examples of campus ideological indoctrination. The City College of New York in the mid-twentieth century, for instance, came about as close as any institution of higher education will ever come to fulfilling right-wing nightmares of academia. The faculty, already tainted with a hint of radical leftism, caused a scandal by trying to hire British polymath Bertrand Russell-- who apart from being a genius was a well-known socialist, pacifist and general promoter of avant-garde social ideas (he thought religion outdated and saw nothing morally objectionable about premarital sex). Scandalized citizens worried about Russell spreading his dangerous notions amongst New York’s vulnerable youth and sued to prevent his hiring. Astonishingly, the legal system obliged. State Supreme Court Justice John McGeehan ruled Russell morally unfit to teach, the upshot being that City College students dodged the bullet of taking instruction from a future Nobel laureate.

While successful at keeping Russell out, neither jurists nor citizens could prevent students from attending City College. This was unfortunate for champions of conservative rectitude in higher education; the students, if anything, were more radical than the faculty. Communists controlled the school newspaper, socialists sought the ouster of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, undergraduate left-wingers of various denominations issued manifestoes denouncing capitalism, cuts in education, oppression of the working class, imperialist wars, non-imperialist wars, imperialists in general, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in particular, who was apparently considered by a surprising fraction of the student body to be an imperialist, right-wing, war mongering, oppressor of the working classes who was not doing nearly enough for education.

Ground zero for all this hard left-wing activism was the City College lunchroom, where radicals and political activists of various stripes (though mostly of a leftist hue) gathered to debate the finer points of Marxism, socialism, communism, Trotskyism, the Marlenites, and the Fieldites. The atmosphere and denizens of the lunchroom are fondly recalled in a semi-famous 1977 New York Times Magazine essay entitled, Memoirs of a Trotskyist. Apparently, it was a dive of a place, full of lower- to middle-class Jewish students, mostly sons of immigrants who had brought their left-wing politics from Europe (at the time anti-Semitism led to Jewish quotas at many American universities but not at liberal-minded City; as a result of this anti-Semitic prejudice in higher education City College ended up with such an astonishing concentration of intellectual talent that nine Nobel Prize winners graduated from the place between 1935 and 1954.

In the middle of the lunchroom was a counter selling milk, coffee and sandwiches; at the periphery were alcoves consisting of benches facing low refectory tables in rectangular or semi-circular spaces. There were a dozen or so of these alcoves and each was the turf of a particular political, ethnic or religious group; for example, there was a Zionist alcove, a Catholic alcove and an alcove for the smattering of African-American students. The biggest “political” alcove was Alcove No. 2, home turf of the Stalinists. These were mostly hard core supporters of the type of communism practiced by the Soviet Union. Alcove No. 2 regulars glorified Joseph Stalin and apparently spent a good deal of their time torturing facts and logic into supporting their preferred portrait of Uncle Joe as a benevolent and wise protector of the proletariat. Alcove No. 1, just to the right as you entered the cafeteria, was also a political alcove, and also populated by leftists. These leftists, though, did not impose the same sort of ideological purity test required for admission into Alcove No. 2. They included a group of a dozen Trotskyists, a roughly equal number of socialists, a few followers of miscellaneous –isms and –ites, and a handful of right-wingers, which in this group meant they voted for Roosevelt and called themselves Social Democrats. Radical left-wing politics and ideology was constantly discussed and debated in Alcoves No. 1 and No. 2, and the students doing the debating took their arguments out of the lunch room, periodically mounting protest rallies, and carrying their interpretations of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky into classes taught by low-paid, liberal-leaning faculty.

If you believe conservative worries about higher education’s impact on political beliefs, then surely you would expect students marinating in City College’s left wing stew for four years to infect the body politic with their “godless liberalism.” You could even produce some evidence to support this belief. Julius Rosenberg, communist boogey-man number one of the McCarthy era, was executed in 1953 for passing on atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Before trying to advance the vanguard of the proletariat by giving commies the bomb, Rosenberg had graduated from City College with a degree in electrical engineering. More principled and moderate leftists who were City College alums included people like Irving Howe, who went on to help found the quarterly magazine Dissent as well as the Democratic Socialists of America. Still, Rosenberg’s lasting impact on politics was pretty much nil and Howe, for all his brilliance as a cultural critic, never managed to kick start a movement with any broad or lasting impact on politics.

That is not to say a movement failed to materialize from the radicalized, left-wing atmosphere of City College. A powerful and influential political movement was birthed, not in Alcove No. 2, but in Alcove No. 1 and not on the left but on the right. Alcove No. 1’s most lasting political influence was what came to be known as the neoconservative movement. As such, its alumni and heirs influenced the politics of a generation, reshaped the policy orientations of a major American political party, and played an outsized role in promoting the interventionist foreign policies promulgated by the United States government during the very early portions of the twenty-first century, thereby molding American politics and radically altering other countries, from the USA Patriot Act to the war in Iraq. You see, a key player in Alcove No. 1 was Irving Kristol, described by the Daily Telegraph as, “perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the 20th Century." So great was his influence on politics that one U.S. president joked that anyone seeking employment at the White House should just show up and say “Irving sent me.” That president was Ronald Reagan.

At least two lessons seem to flow from the political legacy of the radicals of Alcove No. 1. First, institutions of higher education cannot indoctrinate leftist political beliefs for toffee, even at a gifted, radicalized, left-leaning place like mid-twentieth century City College. Several City alums who flirted with the politics of the radical left as students ended up all over the political spectrum as they got older and, it is fair to say, their most lasting political influence was not in promoting the left’s “godless liberalism” but in promoting the right’s “we are doing God’s will” nationalism. And regardless of whether they kept to the left like Howe, or drifted rightward like Kristol, their navigation of the political spectrum was not put on automatic pilot by their experience as undergraduates.

The second lesson seems even clearer; politics and political beliefs are fungible. They change based on time and place. The Stalinist-Trotskyist split did not just de-mark who was welcome into Alcove No. 1 or No. 2; it held a central, vehement and often violent place in the global politics of the hard left for decades in the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays? Well, not so much. It is difficult to find a true dyed in the wool Marxist or Trotskyist evangelizing ideology on an American college campus these days. Those who do exist represent either amusing or irritating relics of the past rather than existential threats to the Republic and Trotsky survives in college students’ consciousness mostly in the names of punk rock bands. Moreover, an individual’s preferences can evolve over time. Many giants of neoconservatism started out as liberals who supported the Democratic Party. They ended up as conservatives in the high echelons of the Republican Party.

We generally accept the first lesson; colleges and universities stink at ideological indoctrination. There are enough counter-examples to keep an ember of righteous indignation glowing in certain circles, but you have to look pretty hard to find anyone doing this sort of thing with even moderate levels of success. Those who are any good at it are as likely to be on the right as the left; the academic neocons, for example, turned out to be a pretty persuasive bunch.

UPDATE: Suicide Caucus Enablers Surrender

So the Reid-McConnell deal passed today. First, at 7:30pm, Ted Cruz's half-assed filibuster got shut down 83-16. The die-hards were joined by Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Tim Scott (R-SC) for the final vote, which passed the deal 81-18. The Republicans who may have signed their own political death warrants:

• Dean Heller (R-NV)
• Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
• Ron Johnson (R-WI)
• Pat Toomey (R-PA)

Maybe Rubio too. Now let's see which Senate Republicans, besides Thad Cohran, get primaried by the fringe right-wing groups. At just after 10pm, the House took up the Senate bill and it passed 285-144. Boehner took the unusual step of voting for it himself. He was joined by 86 other Republicans (plus every single Democrat). Paul Ryan, who's in charge of negotiating the budget deal with Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), voted to go into default-- as did 143 other Republicans. 16 Republicans in swing districts who can be defeated next year for voting NO tonight include:

• Justin Amash (MI)
• Kerry Bentivolio (MI)
• Jeff Denham (CA)
• Sean Duffy (WI)
• Scott Garrett (NJ)
• Steve King (IA)
• John Mica (FL)
• Stevan Pearce (NM)
• Joe Pitts (PA)
• Tom Reed (NY)
• Dana Rohrabacher (CA)
• Ed Royce (CA)
• Paul Ryan (WI)
• Steve Southerland (FL)
• Mike Turner (OH)
• Tim Walberg (MI)

Elizabeth Warren has mixed emotions over the votes tonight:

I'm glad that the government shutdown has ended, and I'm relieved that we didn't default on our debt.

But I want to be clear: I am NOT celebrating tonight.

Yes, we prevented an economic catastrophe that would have put a huge hole in our fragile economic recovery. But the reason we were in this mess in the first place is that a reckless faction in Congress took the government and the economy hostage for no good purpose and to no productive end.

According to the S&P index, the government shutdown had delivered a powerful blow to the U.S. economy. By their estimates, $24 billion has been flushed down the drain for a completely unnecessary political stunt.

$24 billion dollars. How many children could have been back in Head Start classes? How many seniors could have had a hot lunch through Meals on Wheels? How many scientists could have gotten their research funded? How many bridges could have been repaired and trains upgraded?

The Republicans keep saying, "Leave the sequester in place and cut all those budgets." They keep trying to cut funding for the things that would help us build a future. But they are ready to flush away $24 billion on a political stunt.

So I'm relieved, but I'm also pretty angry.

We have serious problems that need to be fixed, and we have hard choices to make about taxes and spending. I hope we never see our country flush money away like this again. Not ever.

It's time for the hostage taking to end. It's time for every one of us to say, "No more."