You cannot reason a person out of radicalism, which is not reasoned into

CNN made history by giving Hugh Hewitt, an avowedly conservative -- not even Fox "fair and balanced," but an out conservative -- opinion journalist, a seat at the table to ask conservative questions -- not just questions conservatives want to ask, but stipulating conservative premises and goals -- of the GOP presidential candidates. This is the future: the long, stupid era of feigned neutrality is finally nearing an end.  Everyone knows the NYT, the LA Times, the national broadcast news shows, are all left. Just like everyone knows the universities are left. And not just the universities but K-12. That's why my wife and I made the decision to homeschool our kids. There's no way we're turning them over to the left California education system. 

“You cannot reason a person out of something he has not been reasoned into.” Jonathan Swift said that. Joseph Epstein, that great American essayist and former leftist, quoted him in his 1988 essay A Virtuecrat Remembers, blasting the left's radical, and dangerous, self-righteousness:  "the Russian Revolution was nothing if not a revolution choreographed, orchestrated, and staged by intellectuals....[I]ntellectuals tend to become highly stimulated by revolution— by the actuality, the prospect, even the idea of it." In America, though, the tools of the revolutionaries were their own undoing: the radical blacks told the radical whites to bug off. So the more pathetic radical whites allowed themselves to be mau-maued as in the Tom Wolfe essay, or to actively disassemble ("deconstruct") western civilization by filling the place in students' minds where it used to go with a series of studiously unstudious "studies" courses.

The left doesn't try to reason people into leftism. It might not be religion in an accurate sense -- certainly, at most, a very poor one -- but it employs many of the tools used to instill religion: a captive audience and a controlled environment with a lack of meaningful choice; identity; and a language of morality: good and evil, praise and shame. Epstein's denunciation of the left sounds in apostasy of one's abandoned religion: 

As someone who wanted to continue to think himself a man of the left, much that was now going on in left-wing circles felt to me very wrong. It was clearly wrong, I felt, for professors beyond the draft age to encourage their students to burn their draft cards as a protest against the Vietnam War. It was wrong for a rather twerpy journalist named Andrew Kopkind, in the New York Review of Books, to instruct Martin Luther King, Jr., that “morality starts at the barrel of a gun.” It was wrong for Lewis Mumford, in the pages of the New Yorker, to link Richard Nixon’s name alongside those of Hitler and Stalin as among the moral monsters of the twentieth century— wrong for a writer who claimed a historical imagination to be so historically ignorant and wrong for a magazine as reputable as the New Yorker to let him get away with such ignorance. It was wrong, and comic into the bargain, that Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein would throw a fund-raising party for the Black Panthers, though fortunate that they were obtuse enough to invite Tom Wolfe to it. It was wrong, and not at all comic, that the radical left would at the first opportunity declare itself anti-Israel (wrong but scarcely surprising, given the guru Marx’s opinion that the Jews were a kind of recurrent international disease produced from the intestines of bourgeois society).

Why does the left fail to see the terrible things it has done, and the false facts they still cling to, unless they are teaching what they think to be knowledge -- which does not expurgate tenets moral and religious, or quasi-religious -- as opposed to bare facts, which do? The left is not interested in arguing so much as converting; not teaching but proselytizing. And so there is no reasoning out of leftism as it was not reasoned into.  On his daily radio show, Hugh Hewitt asks every lefty guest if they believe Alger Hiss was guilty. Those who admit to knowing who he was are split between either declining to state or conceding he probably was. This is a rather large number of people, in other words, among our elite who still carry water in one form or another for a communist spy simply because he was one of their own -- an elite radical.

I say: no need. Carry water in the full light of day for Hiss, Che, X, Carmichael, Newton and the Black Panthers, Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood, etc. They'll do it anyway. Just let the right do the same in their own elections, in their own schools. Unilateral intellectual disarmament is a bad play. It's bad pedagogy and bad tactics. Gear up.

Epstein deserves the last word: 

But it is liberalism which has lost its moorings, and which stands chiefly for tolerance for activities well to its own left and is finally convinced only of its own virtue. When a liberal myself, I used to wonder why people so despised liberals. I used to think it was owing to the liberal’s avoidance of extremes, of his desire always to occupy the middle ground. No longer a liberal, I no longer think liberalism is, in its contemporary incarnation, informed by balance and fairness; I think it is instead motivated by fear and self-righteousness.