January 15th, 2017
Andrew Yiannakis, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
University of Connecticut
Folks, the best minds, and the best educated people in America are liberals. A lot of research supports this fact and you may check this out for yourselves. Many teach and do research in our best universities, and without their contributions the country would stagnate intellectually and such fields as medicine, technology and space exploration ( among many others) would suffer irreparably. In fact, in our top universities liberal professors outnumber conservative ones by a ratio of 15 to 1. Scientists in the biophysical sciences outnumber conservative professors by an even greater margin of 20 to 1! This means that for every conservative professor, we have approximately 15 to 20 who are liberal in their views. Conservative professors are often to be found in business, accounting finance and management.
The practical side of this is the fact that liberal professors vote Democratic while conservative professors vote mostly Republican.
Is there a lesson in all this for the rest of the country when the smartest and most educated people in America are liberal, and vote Democratic? Do they perhaps know something the rest of us don’t? I was always told that liberal means bad; an orientation to be avoided at all costs. How can this be possible?
Unfortunately Democrats have allowed the Republicans to dominate the public discourse on this issue for decades, without doing anything to set the record straight. As a result Republicans have succeeded in defining liberalism as bad, or undesirable, and managed to advance their own conservative agenda to the forefront. This has caused many liberals to retreat to a less “offensive” label called “Progressivism”, which is a wishy-washy way of saying they are liberals.
The Republican strategy to smear liberalism has had a lot of success, but thanks to Trump, and Republican extremists, they’ve managed to put a lot of dents in the conservative ideology that drives the Republican Party and, we are now beginning to see a resurgence of liberalism. Repealing Obamacare, for example, which will affect over 20 million Americans, is now starting to have significant negative consequences for Republicans and more and more Americans are beginning to question the values that Republicans espouse. One consequence is the fact that more Democrats are “coming out of the closet” and declaring proudly that they are liberals.
To be a liberal means:
1. To be more enlightened and open minded; more accepting of new ideas.
2. Value a good education that helps open the mind by encouraging analysis, critical thinking and the search for evidence. Plato wrote that a liberal education frees the mind from “falsehood and illusion” and a liberal person is a truly educated individual.
3. Further, to be a liberal means to have a caring attitude for others, the animal kingdom, the environment, and an increased level of tolerance for our differences as human beings.
4. Liberalism also stresses innovation, creativity and independent thinking.
5. Liberals tend to be more future-oriented and are more likely to experiment, and adopt new ideas and ways of doing things.
6. Liberals believe in change, and the possibilities of change. Unlike conservatives, liberals are not afraid of progress or change.
7. Liberals are the ones that most often challenge right wing institutions and practices worldwide ( for example, big game hunting in Africa or whaling by Japan, and other nations).
8. Liberals are the ones who are most likely to be interested in traveling and working abroad, serve in the Peace Corps, and in “Doctors without Borders”, among many others.
Notably, what conservatives don’t seem to get (or maybe they do get it and that’s why they become conservatives!) is the fact that conservatism is a helpful ideology for people who feel insecure in the world, especially with the pace of life and the speed with which the world is changing. For conservatives, life is too much change, too fast. Clinging to conservative values, and joining conservative institutions, may then be a coping mechanism that enables them to live in spaces that help slow things down, and help provide a sense of security, stability and predictability.
On a developmental continuum conservatism is an intellectually unevolved state of being because it tends to hold back progress, change, discovery, innovation and social and political advancement. Conservatism is also an ideology that hinders intellectual growth by closing the mind. However, a good liberal education, liberal parents, and friends and relatives who encourage the abandonment of conservative beliefs and ideas, can fix all that. Conservatism is, in reality, an arrested state of individual, intellectual, social and political development that has been promoted, mostly by Republicans, as the preferred ideology to espouse. It isn’t!
Conservatism is driven by fear, insecurity and suspicion and that’s why liberals are seen as a threat.
On an economic level conservatism is also a self serving ideology that promotes and maintains the interests of the powerful and the wealthy, for whom change is seen as a threat to their stranglehold on the economy and the nation’s wealth. After all, if you are among the top 1% that owns or controls 90% of the wealth of a nation, why would you want to give any of this up? Conservatives tend to oppose change because they have the most to lose!
The key to a good liberal education is the idea that to function effectively in this world the individual must develop a sense of empowerment, and faith in one’s own abilities and skills. This includes the confidence to challenge and question; to think critically and analytically; to reject dogma and rigid and inflexible faith-based beliefs;
and to have the confidence to explore, investigate, innovate and take calculated risks.
Only with confidence can one move forward and succeed in life,
and a good liberal education can provide the tools and confidence to do so.
The conservative world, and the ideology it espouses, fails on so many fronts by teaching and perpetuating old ways and practices, most of which are no longer relevant or desirable. These include:
1. Social and economic inequality;
2. Religious fundamentalism and rigidity;
3. Sexism;
4. Aggression and militarism;
5. Control of women’s rights
6. The promotion of greed and selfishness: The notion that it’s OK to exploit workers and pay top CEO’s obscenely high salaries;
7. The exploitation of public lands and the promotion of indifference to our environment;
8. The notion that it’s OK for some corporations like the pharmaceutical or the insurance industries, among others, to jack up prices a thousand-fold for their drugs or services, and the nation be damned;
9. The belief in unbridled capitalism and the exploitation of the American worker;
10. A disdain for programs that help the poor, the old, the weak and our veterans;
11. An obsession with religion, the bible, guns, patriotism, the flag, the National Anthem, football and the issue of a woman’s right to choose;
12. Conservatism also focuses on such traditional values that include:
a. the traditional nuclear family and children, to the exclusion of alternative lifestyles;
b. church membership;
c. attending high school football games;
d. conformity to local community standards and expectations; in fact, conformity is often more highly valued than initiative and independent thinking;
To reinforce the ideology that liberalism is bad, conservatives bandy about terms like socialism and communism to scare people away from liberal values and beliefs. The irony is that most conservatives don’t have a clue what these terms actually mean. Let me clarify. To be a liberal and a socialist has nothing to do with communism; besides it is safe to say that communism is now a defunct political ideology, anyway, but many conservatives don’t seem to know that.
Socialism, or Bernie’s form of “Democratic Socialism”, however, is an enlightened ideology that stresses caring for each other, economic fairness, the environment, and so on. However, some of Bernie’s views threaten the rapacious capitalists that are allowed to make huge profits at the expense of the average American;
It is important to understand that Conservatism is a self-centered and unevolved ideology which demonstrates that people espousing such values have not yet grown, or advanced intellectually or emotionally. Conservatives display a strong need to cling to right wing institutions and practices such as religion, football, the military, the National Anthem, and the National Rifle Association, in order to provide their lives with the psychological security and stability they seem to crave so much.
So, does it still surprise you that the brightest and most educated in the land (most hold Ph.D’s, Ed.D’s, M.D.’s or D.Sc.’s) hold liberal views and vote Democratic?
Do they perhaps know something you don’t?
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