Conservatives, Obama’s Win is Your Fault

-By Warner Todd Huston

With that headline you may think I am employing hyperbole. If so, you would be wrong. I am absolutely and positively blaming the conservative movement for the rise to the presidency of a man that adheres to a socialist ideology. In fact, in this day and age, I might even blame conservatives for the continued existence of this man’s ideas altogether, though that might be a stretch. No, more directly, conservatives are at fault for the singular fact that many millions of Americans saw no reason not to vote for a socialist. They mistakenly imagined his ideas were still just as American as anyone’s. These voters haven’t the first clue that their vote stood four-square against true American ideas. Unfortunately, conservatives are at fault for this rampant inability of our fellows to understand what is an American ideology and what isn’t. Sadly, we have allowed several generations to pass without being educated as to why Barack Obama’s basic political creed is blatantly socialist.

Leftism got its start in America before the turn of the 20th century but in 1960 a conservative grass roots movement began to form around what later became the 1964 candidacy of Barry Goldwater. His campaign biography, Conscience of a Conservative, captured the minds of hundreds of thousands of Americans yearning for a return to American principles. After only its first few short years the book that bore Goldwater’s name had sold over 3 million copies and has by now gone through dozens of printings.

Still, the conservative movement got a full head of steam and grew at an amazing rate. There were a lot of intellectual heavyweights behind the movement, many of them spurred by anti-communist sentiment and Cold War determination. Magazines like the National Review were started, older ones like Human Events grew stronger, think tanks were funded and began to thrive. Economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek became conservative superstars. Free market capitalism gained credibility and drew acolytes as the New Deal and the Great Society began to fail.

Later in the early 1980s conservatives began to realize that the law was drifting ever more leftward and groups like The Federalist Society were founded to retake the law and begin to reinvest a conservative take into American jurisprudence. At the same time politicians signed onto these ideas and, starting with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatism gained political power. Religious conservatives also reawakened to their political power.

Yet all the while, conservatives neglected the most important resource of the country: our children.

And we still are.

Starting with the disastrous John Dewey, who was at the forefront of a “progressive” system of education that soon went wild, and furthered by actual self-avowed socialists like Charles Beard, a historian that basically posited that the only reason the USA was created was to keep the poor in a perpetual state of poverty, our system of education from top to bottom was remade with a European socialist ideology. And conservatives have sat idly by doing nothing about it.

Conservatives worried about economics. Conservatives set their sites on politics and the law. Conservatives wrote books, white papers, pamphlets and programs on conservative principles. All of these things are good and necessary, of course, but for some reason conservatives also decided not to concern themselves with the education of our children. As conservatives went about dabbling in all those other areas, the enemy to American ideals entrenched itself in academe.

Conservatives have not often thought of sponsoring conservative teachers and professors, unfortunately. What they did not understand is that the left does not care much about facts and truth. The left cares about an agenda that will be promulgated no matter the cost. They also know that for anti-American, leftist ideas to thrive long-term they must instill them in the young.

Pursuant to that leftist agenda, our system of education has been thoroughly infested with people whose very ideals are not American ideals. Feminism, multiculturalism, socialism, redistributionism, the inaptly named ideals of “social justice,” all these things are instilled in teachers from the highest reaches of the Ivy League to the smallest local schools.

Or founders have been systematically removed from textbooks, replaced by the lesser figures from “minority studies.” Our religious traditions have been ridiculed and relegated to scorn. American history itself has been deemed evil by the schools and the ideas upon which this country was founded have fallen into disrepute.

People with ideas antithetical to American principles are firmly in charge of informing and molding our next generation of voters and they have been in this place of power since the 1940s. As our children are brought up on the pabulum of anti-Americanism, it is no wonder that so many millions of Americans hadn’t the first thought that Barack Obama’s ideas are unAmerican at their very core.

Conservatives futilely try to retrain minds when voting age nears, but by then it is far too late for many. Even if America’s kids don’t fully appreciate their socialist educational foundation and feel something is not quite right, they are not imbued with enough knowledge to make an informed decision.

Our schools are why Islamofascism is winning, why our Congress is failing, why our politics is suspect and distrusted, why our history is unknown by our own citizens. Our schools are an internal enemy that controls a battlefield to which conservatives have wholly ceded control.

The conservative movement has taken measures to be heard in politics, the economy and the law, but unless conservatives begin to infiltrate the schools, we cannot win the long war. If our children don’t even have the basic skills to understand why conservatism is the correct American outlook, they simply will be unable to understand it when they become of voting age.

For ignoring our schools, conservatives are losing the battle for America’s hearts and minds at the earliest of ages. And conservatives deserve the defeat for this failure.

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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston