Confident liberals vs. whiny conservatives? By John Silveira
Issue #100 • July/August, 2006

I read a piece on the Net the other day about what kind of kids grow up to be liberals and which grow up to be conservatives. The article begins with a quote from the Toronto Star: “Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative…The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.”

This conclusion was based on a study conducted by Jack Block, a University of California, Berkeley, professor who followed about 100 children over several decades. According to the Star, Block theorizes that insecure kids look for “reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics.” While “The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.”

The beauty of such conclusions, reached “scientifically,” is that liberals don’t have to defend them because Block has shown that liberals are well adjusted, while those who disagree with their politics are suspected to be somewhat immature and paranoid.

Let’s put aside my doubts about the conclusions of the “study” since it was conducted by a professor with a liberal track record at UC Berkeley, a bastion of liberal politics, in a town where over 90 percent of the vote in elections goes to liberal candidates and causes.

Let’s ask: If the conclusions of the study are valid, what do they mean? Do they mean it was confident, resilient, self-reliant kids who grew up to create Big Government? And is this imposing your will on others, some Orwellian way to provide a new definition of “self-reliance”?

Let’s also consider what liberals have accomplished. They have confidently forced what’s “good” for you onto you—whether you like it or not, and they have put in place a system of penalties with which to punish you if you think you’re free enough not to comply with their social engineering.

Let’s face it, it wasn’t conservatives of either party (yes, Virginia, there used to be conservative Democrats) that came up with the income tax or Social Security. It was liberals who put the freedom-depleting bureaucracies out of reach of the voters—and even the legislators. It’s liberals who want to disarm the law-abiding public, and it is they who deny property rights. It’s liberals who turned our money into fiat currency. It’s they who keep inventing new “civil” rights that aren’t gifts from God or nature, but have to be supplied to you by government—at the expense of someone else. It was liberals who pushed for laws saying parents are incapable of caring for and guiding their children on sex and pregnancy matters and that those functions should be handed over to the monolithic state and faceless bureaucrats. It’s liberals who want to micromanage your life.

Conservatives didn’t create the current education system that has failed and is still failing, and it’s not they who claim it can be fixed by throwing ever-increasing amounts of your money at it—after the last several rounds of money thrown at it failed to repair it. And it’s not conservatives who think little kids who make guns with their fingers should be suspended from school. (Yes, if you’ve missed it, that’s actually happened.)

The list of liberal “accomplishments” could go on for pages. But there would be precious little that reflects confidence in the American people or promotes self-reliance.

I say, if it’s self-reliant little kids who grow up to be liberals intent on grabbing our freedoms, give me the whiny, snively-nosed little freedom lovers any day. Yes, I’ll admit, it’s we conservatives who want the authority of the Constitution back and want controls put on government.

Liberals are confident, that’s for sure. They’re confident that you’re an idiot who isn’t self-reliant and can’t take care of yourself. They grew up with a feeling that everything is relative and that includes the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They know what’s best for you. And the irony is, their solutions to society’s problems are never self-reliant solutions. They’re the Big Government solutions that they’ve created.

If the “whiny” kids who supposedly grew up to be conservatives are asking for anything, it’s to be left alone and—irony of ironies—be allowed to be self-reliant. But there they are, those “confident” and “self-reliant” liberal kids, wanting to disrupt their lives with their bureaucratic rules and threats of force.

Of course, the truth is, the attributes these “researchers” were talking about are not confidence and self-reliance. They confused those attributes with arrogance and bullying. Because, even back then, that’s what they were doing. The fact is, the guys who ran the study are idiots.