By Jason Schwalm
Today’s Republican Party is like an episode of Pee Wee’s Playhouse … and the secret word is “activism.”
Like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, any time the secret word is spoken, everybody screams. From Majority Leader Tom Delay to the Limbaugh-informed back-porch pundits, activism is the dirty word in contemporary politics.
This activism is further perpetuated by the liberal bias in the media — those pesky newspaper columnists keep insisting on challenging the divinely ordained power of the current political majority. But if a few aggressive op-ed folks are all that’s keeping the current executive from renaming himself “generalissimo,” then I wouldn’t call that liberal at all, but a quite Jeffersonian Republicanism — reference the Declaration of Independence for this founding father’s thoughts on unmitigated sovereign power.
Nevertheless, it seems like every time an editorialist suggests that it might be a bad idea to appoint a federal judge who believes that the Ten Commandments trump the Bill of Rights, it is never because the writer believes that the framers of the Constitution were serious about a separation of church and state, but because of that columnist’s bias against those who believe in God.
As cartoonist Nick Anderson recently pointed out, if the Democrats are so overwhelmingly opposed to the religious, does that mean that every sitting federal judge -— save those the liberal senators are filibustering — does not believe in God?
This bias is part of a larger pattern. Somehow, even though Republicans outnumber Democrats, those sneaky liberals still keep stalling our political mechanisms with their subversive tactics. If I were a Republican, I don’t know how superior I would feel in claiming that a group that I outnumber and out-resource continues to buffalo me and all my friends.
Nevertheless, this pattern extends beyond the media and into our universities. Studies have shown that the preponderance of university professors exhibit liberal political tendencies. Some have claimed that this is because the average conservative student would prefer to seek a job in the private sector, and usually continues in academia to seek a professional degree rather than a Ph.D. as most university professors do. But that in itself is said to be a “liberal myth.”
It is of some interest that, while the study regarding the political persuasions of university professors has been touted in public discussion for the past few months, no similar study has been executed or widely publicized regarding the most common major for conservative undergraduate students. If this study were to show, for example, that the most common undergraduate major for such students is Business, and the most common graduate degree is Law, those facts would seem to go a long way to explain the phenomenon in universities. But I imagine that unfounded conspiracy theory is less time-consuming.
So for now, every time that a Democratic congressperson actually attempts to represent their constituents — yes, the minority party wants rights, too — it won’t be the system working just as the Federalists intended, but vicious “activism.”
And every time a columnist dares insinuate that the right’s agenda might not be the will of God, we’ll all keep screaming “liberal bias!” and do our best to forget that those three years of non-stop Monica Lewinski jokes ever happened. And every time Sen. Frist rails against judicial “activism,” we’ll all scream, “Aggghhhhhh!”
Jason Schwalm is a junior majoring in English and a columnist for The Cardinal. E-mail him at: jschwalm@louisvillecardinal.com
