If college kids’ political views are a clue to the nation’s future, America is headed over a left-wing cliff.
Consider: A recent Chegg/College Pulse poll found 69% of students say they’d vote for a Democrat in 2020, while just 23% back President Trump. Yet for voters of all ages, recent RealClearPolitics poll averages put the president within 7 points of the top Dems (Joe Biden, Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders).
Among kids who lean Democratic, Chegg found, more than half back Sanders (28%) or Warren (30%) — the two left-most wannabes.
Sanders is also the top choice among Democratic and independent undergrads, with 22%, in a McLaughlin poll for Yale’s William F. Buckley Jr. Program. That survey highlighted other eye-opening trends: College kids back the Green New Deal 2-1, and two-thirds want Medicare for All.
And get this: The Yale study says 32% of college kids believe it’s sometimes OK to “shout down” campus speakers, and 31% are actually OK using “physical violence” to stamp out “hate speech” or “racially charged language.” The dangers there are obvious: Who decides what speech deserves to be silenced, even perhaps with violence? And what kind of society are we headed for when that kind of thinking becomes so prevalent?
There’s more: Axios in January found 61% of Americans aged 18-24 have a “positive reaction” to the word “socialism,” beating out “capitalism” (58%). Yet socialism loses among adults on the whole, 39% to 61%.
Sure, the young (notably, those at top colleges) are known for their leftward tilt. As the famous saying goes, if you’re not liberal at 20, you have no heart.
Yet US colleges now push such views. One study notes just 39% of professors identified with the left in 1984, but 72% in 1999.
Last year, Brooklyn College’s Mitchell Langbert found that, among 51 top-tier colleges, 78% of the departments had zero, or almost zero, Republicans. Democratic profs outnumbered GOPers in every single field at every school. The overall ratio: 10.4 Dems per Republican. At Wellesley and Williams, it topped 130-1.
“Political homogeneity is problematic,” argued Langbert: “It biases research and teaching.” Kids come away ignorant of right-leaning views.
Indeed, when they’re not exposed to the ample evidence that socialism routinely brings economic stagnation if not outright disaster, and is often accompanied by totalitarianism and corruption, it’s no surprise so many are open to it.
The rest of that saying suggests people change: If you’re not a conservative at 50, you have no brain. Trouble is, if colleges only offer one political view, America may wind up with a lot of brainless 50-year-olds.