http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110007966

If I were to make sweeping generalizations about the differences between conservatives and liberals, it would be that conservatives tend to believe in individual responsibility and some variation of a sin-nature while liberals tend to believe in more social responsibility and in some variation of the perfectability of man through improved socio-economic factors.

Neither philosophy is a result of a moral, intellectual, cultural, mental, etc. defect. They are simply separate and distinct philosophical stances.

By polarization I mean something else: an intense commitment to a candidate, a culture, or an ideology that sets people in one group definitively apart from people in another, rival group. Such a condition is revealed when a candidate for public office is regarded by a competitor and his supporters not simply as wrong but as corrupt or wicked; when one way of thinking about the world is assumed to be morally superior to any other way; when one set of political beliefs is considered to be entirely correct and a rival set wholly wrong. In extreme form, as defined by Richard Hofstadter in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1965), polarization can entail the belief that the other side is in thrall to a secret conspiracy that is using devious means to obtain control over society. Today’s versions might go like this: “Liberals employ their dominance of the media, the universities, and Hollywood to enforce a radically secular agenda”; or, “conservatives, working through the religious Right and the big corporations, conspired with their hired neocon advisers to invade Iraq for the sake of oil.”

He supports the war in Iraq and would like to see a more united front which seems to be the motivation for the speech, but I think his analysis of the political situation is quite accurate and at least reflects my observations.

It is also here, in a flawed research study at UCLA. Especially in the interpretation everyone seemed so inclined to jump on…that conservatives just can’t handle new ideas. But a more scientific analysis of the research methods is available here.

Thomas Frank, in his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” accuses us of failing to make “certain mental connections about the world.”

After the last election, a headline in a British paper read “How can 59 million people be so dumb?” And, as Denis Boyle’s describes in “Superior, Nebraska,”

Over the next days and weeks, the 2004 election would be “analyzed”–to put it gently–by journalists, pundits, and ordinary left-wing types. Their incredulity blended with hysteria and spread until it was everywhere: cartoon maps of America with big inland seas of dumbness; Internet rants; sociological studies. I was on the phone again, this time talking to a New Yorker toiling in the sweatshops of the global lit biz. I mentioned the 59-million-dumb-people headline.

“Yes,” she enthusiastically agreed, “that’s what I’d like to know. Really, the only reason I can think of that all those people out there vote like they do is that they’re dumb. Can there be another reason? Isn’t what it comes down to is that they’re just stupid?”

(p. 15)

Ye Olde Deluder Satan Wants Our Kids

<a href=”"Ye Olde Deluder Satan Wants Our Kids”
. . .PUBLIC schooling 350 years ago was about driving away demons too, and mostly still is, or should be.

Here are the five home education demons Christian Blogger Dad lists, last to first.
Arrogance.
Lack of commitment.
Denial of reality
Lack of accountability
Not enough structure

Compare to the six public education demons listed in the [public education honors journal] PDK February 07 issue, by professor James H. Nehring:

Unfairness
Lack of commitment (saying yes too much)
Denial of innovations
Top down controls
Too much fear
Too much structure and factory thinking

Sounds to me like Satan and his demons make use of whatever they find lying around, so there’s little hope of salvation in switching places. . .