If only the damn liberals will have babies!

I read the NY Times column that had a polemical title: Are Liberals Against Marriage? 

I got ticked off.  I am a damn liberal and I have nothing against marriage.  I don't care if it is a heterosexual or same-sex marriage.  If people want to marry, fine.  If they don't want to, fine.  Isn't the whole point of conservatism to leave people alone and not interfere with their lives?

Conservatives want to interfere when they want to.  And, oh boy, there are lots of instances when they love to tell the rest of us what to do!

So ... I emailed the paper a version of the following:

*************

Ross Douthat argues that the downward trend in the fertility rate can be reversed if only the population were religious and conservative. Mr. Douthat assumes that conservative and religious societies favor higher fertility rates, and his entire column is woven around that assumption.

Evidence does not help his case, however. 

In the southern part of India from where I immigrated a long time ago, fertility rates have been considerably below replacement--at 1.6 to 1.7.  This region is not “liberal."  Instead, the more than 250 million in the five southern states, have high levels of religiosity, and with significantly low divorce rates. Yet, very few kids! 

The explanation for decreasing fertility rates comes down to a simple phrase that the conservative pundit Milton Friedman popularized--”Free to choose.”  If women, in particular, are free enough to choose, then, on an average, they choose to have fewer kids, or even forego motherhood entirely.

Ross Douthat should stop chasing the red herrings of liberalism, “out of wedlock”, and LGBTQ activism.

*************

If this topic interests you, here are a couple of posts from the past:

This from 2013, in which I wrote:

Tamil Nadu, where my people hail from, has fertility rates that are lower than the rates here in the US.  Americans, who are long used to images of too many babies in India, might find it a shocking revelation that we in the US have, on an average, more children than women do In Tamil Nadu, or in Kerala, or in Karnataka, or in .... These are not states with small populations either.  As this Wikipedia entry helpfully points out, Kerala's population makes it a Canada-equivalent. Tamil Nadu is like Turkey. With its low fertility rate, Karnataka is really like Italy!

From 2017, in which I argued that immigration will help counter low fertility rates:

As reported by the Pew Research Center, “were it not for the increase in births to immigrant women, the annual number of U.S. births would have declined since 1970.” While immigrants accounted for only one in seven Americans in 2015, a quarter of all the births in America were to immigrant women. “Births to women from Mexico, China, India, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, Honduras, Vietnam, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico accounted for 58% of all births to immigrant mothers in the U.S. in 2014.” Even here in Oregon, births to immigrant mothers have offset what would have otherwise been a decrease in births from 1990 to 2015.

From 2009:

The fascinating aspect to this story of decrease in fertility rates is that it has happened without strict government mandates. While public health messages do advocate for smaller family sizes, there is no strict government-imposed one-child policy, a la China.

All the more why I think that it is a lazy political argument that Douthat has written!

Tyrannosaurus Elderex

It is not unusual for young people coming from traditional Asian and African countries to remark that here in the US we shunt away the old, unlike the importance of elders in their communities.  Pseudo-anthropologists rave about how in traditional societies the elders are asked to weigh in on important issues.

Are you nodding your head in agreement?  If so, well, by now you know that this blogger will have something to upset your stomach, right?

Let us follow up on the post from two days ago.  The presidential candidates are of Medicare-age.  Like I mentioned in that post, one-quarter of the US Senate is at least 70 years old.

That's two out of the three branches of government, right?   You want to start counting the number of old people in the Supreme Court?  The Notorious RBG is 83!  The decider--Kennedy--is 80.  Breyer is 78.  Thomas and Alito are 68 and 66.  Scalia died at 79, else he will be still be there.

On the financial scene, the gazillionaire Warren Buffett is 85, and he continues to make investing decisions as if he has another sixty years left on this planet.

In higher education, too, we often suffer from the tyranny of the senior-citizen faculty.  If old soldiers never die but only fade away, old professors seem to haunt the hallways forever.

Tell me again how we as a society do not listen to our elders?

It is one hell of a tyranny of the old.  It feels like they have a choke-hold on the rest of us.  Here, the elders rule, unfortunately!

"Unfortunate" because I worry that as we tend to become more conservative with age, councils of elders will turn out to be uber-conservative.  Progressive social change requires a lot of people with idealism in their heart.

Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.

That is a quote you have heard/read before, right?

This maxim – variously attributed to Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli and Victor Hugo, among others – neatly captures the common notion that to be on the left of the political spectrum is to be young and idealistic, while to be on the right is to be older and more pragmatic.

But then at the ballot box of democracy, the sheer numbers matter, and can't the idealistic young outvote the old?  "All throat and no vote":

Because Generation Y is the largest generation in American history, it’s a big deal if it remains one of the most liberal generations ever. But there’s a huge, inescapable problem with the viability of Millennial politics today: Young people just don’t vote. Between 1964 and 2012, youth voter turnout in presidential elections has fallen below 50 percent, and Baby Boomers now outvote their children's generation by a stunning 30 percentage points.

So ... unless the young take charge of their government, the rapidly aging societies will mean that the conservative elders will continue to make conservative decisions.  Brexit and Trump are, thus, no surprises.

The endangered conservative professors on American campuses

To the campus faculty, at least in the hallway in the building where my office is, there is only one presidential candidate who matters, and who can change the country--and, thereby the world--for the better: Bernie Sanders.

So much that the prevailing sentiment seems to be, well, let me put it this way: if you don't feel the Bern, then you are an idiot.  I don't feel the Bern, which means ... ;)

The other day, one of the Bernies told me that if Sanders doesn't win the nomination then he would even skip voting for a presidential candidate.  "Even if that means Trump wins?" I asked the colleague.  Such is the Bernie fever on campus.

Even a casual reader of this blog, leave alone this guy who has racked up quite a few frequent-commenter bonus points, knows from my posts that my campus, like most higher education institutions, is loaded with way-left-of-center faculty.  So ideological is the tilt, so out there to the left, that an independent thinking person that I am have been forced off the conversations and told to shut up.  Apparently my "input and perspectives" are met with "disdain."  And I am not even a right-wing conservative!

Given such an ethos, I am even surprised anymore when commentators bother to write about the lack of diversity of thought in higher education.  It is, after all, old, old, old, stale news.  But, they write and I, too, blog about it!

In that liberal rag, the New York Times, the liberal columnist, Nicholas Kristof--an Oregon native--complains about the lack of diversity:

Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents).
In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.

Of course it is far too easy to find Marxists and Socialists among faculty.  Heck, we have two who even contested in elections as socialists!  A Republican social scientist is an endangered species.  For that matter, even the likes of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan might be persona non grata at campuses like mine because they won't be liberal enough!

It is not only the politics, but also the closely related religious beliefs:

The discrimination becomes worse if the applicant is an evangelical Christian. According to Yancey’s study, 59 percent of anthropologists and 53 percent of English professors would be less likely to hire someone they found out was an evangelical.
“Of course there are biases against evangelicals on campuses,” notes Jonathan L. Walton, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard. Walton, a black evangelical, adds that the condescension toward evangelicals echoes the patronizing attitude toward racial minorities: “The same arguments I hear people make about evangelicals sound so familiar to the ways people often describe folk of color, i.e. politically unsophisticated, lacking education, angry, bitter, emotional, poor.”

Over the years, I have had plenty of conservative and religious students work closely with me, confide their angsts with me, even though they know well that I am an atheist and who is largely left-of-center on many issues.  Because, I do not treat them as "politically unsophisticated, lacking education, angry, bitter, emotional, poor" and instead give them the same professional treatment that I give anybody else.  

Kristof concludes with:

Universities should be a hubbub of the full range of political perspectives from A to Z, not just from V to Z. So maybe we progressives could take a brief break from attacking the other side and more broadly incorporate values that we supposedly cherish — like diversity — in our own dominions.

Dream on!  This will never, ever happen. 

Liberal education not the same as education in liberalism

 “Isn’t the purpose of a university to stir discussion, not silence it?”

Isn't it pointless anymore to ask such questions?  The purpose of a university to stir discussion?  Huh?  Which planet is that person from!

A different planet, of sorts, yes.

The person who asked that question is a billionaire.  A billionaire worth many times over, at 33 billion dollars. A rich planet where, to quote from The Great Gatsby, "the rich are different from you and me."

Have you figured out which planet that is, and who that person is?

A short man. An old man. A former mayor.

You got it?  Bingo!

Yes,  it was the New Yorker Micheal Bloomberg who raised that question, during his commencement address at Harvard.  It does seem like he said quite some interesting stuff, especially given that it was a commencement address:

the whole purpose of granting tenure to professors is to ensure that they feel free to conduct research on ideas that run afoul of university politics and societal norms. When tenure was created, it mostly protected liberals whose ideas ran up against conservative norms.
Today, if tenure is going to continue to exist, it must also protect conservatives whose ideas run up against liberal norms. Otherwise, university research will lose credibility. A liberal arts education must not be an education in the art of liberalism.

A wonderful line that is worth repeating:

A liberal arts education must not be an education in the art of liberalism.

It is unfortunate that liberal education has been thus hijacked.  Does it matter that the hijacking has also resulted in silencing of dissenting voices?  And, worse, a near total exclusion of conservative thinking?

"Does it matter if conservatives are scarce in the liberal arts faculty?" asks Steven Hayward.  Who is Hayward and why should we listen to him?  He "was the inaugural visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder."  Yes, a position like this was created for a reason--conservative thinkers are a rare and endangered species, especially at the uber-left campuses. So, why was such a position created?

The Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy is a three-year pilot program supported by private funds. More than 20 donors have raised $1 million to support the program.
“This is a novel idea to further enrich discourse on our campus,” said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. The Visiting Scholar, DiStefano said, “will contribute to the diversity of thought on campus by encouraging debate and discussion, by sharing their scholarship and career experience, and by hosting public events in the campus community and perhaps around the state.”

One has to wonder at the state of higher education if a conservative thinker was not to be found in-house at a large university like UC-Boulder, right?

Anyway, how does Hayward answer his own question,"Does it matter if conservatives are scarce in the liberal arts faculty?"

Well, if we believe that monopoly power is bad in the economic marketplace for goods, why wouldn’t it also be bad for the academic marketplace of ideas? Of course, as serious students of antitrust will tell you, not all monopolies or oligopolies in markets are the result of nefarious behavior; there are lots of reasons they come about, and remedies for market concentration are not always simple or easy. But regardless of the cause, monopolies usually lead to stagnation. The left’s academic monopoly is the chief cause of the stagnation of the humanities and social sciences today.

I am neither a conservative nor one of the loony-left. What I attempt to do in my teaching is pretty much along the lines of what Bloomberg thinks we ought to be doing:

I believe that a university’s obligation is not to teach students what to think, but to teach students how to think. And that requires listening to the other side, weighing arguments without prejudging them, and determining whether the other side might actually make some fair points.

But, really, it takes a billionaire to remind us about this?  A grad school professor, Martin Krieger, always reminded us, it is not what is said but who says that.  If only I were a billionaire? ;)

Liberals give us liberals a bad name!

Over the years, I have come to understand how easily my take on many socio-political issues alienates me from both the right and the left.

Way back in graduate school was the  dawning of this realization, when during a lunch time walking around in downtown Los Angeles, where I was an intern, I came across a pro-life (anti-abortion) rally.  It suddenly clicked in me that I was neither completely in the pro-life camp and nor was I in the pro-choice camp.  To me, aborting a fetus is murder, yes.  But, it is justifiable homicide.  I cannot imagine women going through abortion as if it was no different from having coffee.  I imagine--I have to only imagine, given that I am a male who has no idea otherwise about what it means to be a woman who discovers she is pregnant--an abortion to be a traumatic incident in a woman's life.  Yet, women choose to do it because they know that is the best possible outcome.  Who am I to say otherwise.

But, this take that it is justifiable homicide pisses off most in the pro-choice and pro-life camp at the same time because in most matters like this, people prefer a "either you are with me, or against me" bottom-line.  By not entirely aligning with them, I become their enemy, on this issue.

Over the years, I have proceeded on to carve out my own take on most issues that matter.  Which is also why I managed to piss off many colleagues, and continue to do so.  I suspect that even the couple of friends who tolerate me often wonder when I am going to torch their views, right friends? That is an occupational hazard when rarely is anything so holy for me to accept it as it is.

I like to think that I am a liberal in the old traditions.  Never a conservative who defends whatever just because it was the past practice. One who thinks that Socrates was the ultimate liberal before there was a term called "liberals."

The political landscape is now awfully distorted, with the "liberals" behaving so much like conservatives.  "Liberal" students, brainwashed by their "liberal" teachers and friends, have advised me not to drink the water from the water fountain in the college hallways because of nitrites.  Students, and a faculty on one occasion, have chided me on the plastic water bottle that I use because of BPA.  I routinely make fun of the locavore movement and remind students that true locavores in Oregon then should not ever eat bananas or any tropical fruit. ...

Nothing is sacred.  Nothing is holy. In a Socratic tradition, we poke and prod and explore why beliefs and arguments are weak.  We are not afraid to even throw out our own bottom-line when we find better explanations.

A few weeks ago, when Lori was making sure my teeth and gums are ok, she asked me whether I grew up in an area where water was fluoridated and whether that could be a reason why I am in good dental health despite my bad dental hygiene routines. I have no idea whether fluoride was added to water before it was piped in Neyveli.  Maybe there was enough and more fluoride in the water naturally.  I told her I didn't know.  And then we talked--I, whenever I could, given that she was working on my teeth--about the craziness in the protests against adding fluoride to water.  In Oregon. In Portland, of all places.  The uber-liberal Portland!

Which is why I like how this NY Times writer refers to such liberal left as the New Puritans:

the anti-fluoride coalition in Portland depended more on self-identified liberal voters than on conservatives. But there are key differences in how liberals and conservatives come by their fears. On the right, these mental illnesses stem from fear of government. On the left, their origins are a bit harder to pin down, but as I see it, they stem from an old mix of righteousness and the fear of contamination—from what we might recognize as Puritanism.

Indeed!  When did "liberals" get all uptight and anal-retentive as the conservatives are?  And why?  When did the "liberals" become such reactionary parents?

I am only suggesting that we resist thinking of Puritanism as the only, or optimal, parenting style for liberals, for two reasons. First, thinking that Puritanism—whether a preference for organic foods or natural fibers or home-birthing—is somehow constitutive of a liberal politics is rather insulting to liberalism. Most of the middle-class “liberal” parents I know have allowed lifestyle decisions about what they wear, eat, and drive to entirely replace a more ambitious program for bettering society; they have no particular beliefs about how to end poverty or strengthen the labor movement, and they don’t understand Obamacare, or really want to. It’s enough that they make their midwife-birthed children substitute guava nectar for sugar.
But more important, realizing that Puritanism does not equal liberalism liberates us to think of another way to be liberal: by rejecting the kind of stress that comes from Puritanism. They say hygienic reform; I say the 30-hour work week and not stressing if my children eat Kix. Liberalism, as the political philosopher Corey Robin has recently argued, should be above all about freedom.

I wonder whom I have pissed off with this post; oh well, I am good at least at one thing in life! )

Do you believe in evolution? monkeys-r-us

Wouldn't this be a lovely question to ask every presidential candidate: "do you believe in evolution?"

This question should be featured at every primary--Republican and Democrat. I mean, imagine a Jim Lehrer posing such a question.  I will pay to watch the Republican primaries then :)

And, if the answer is "no" or with a great deal of hemming and hawing, why not follow it up with, as is the case in this video, a question related to antibiotics?  Watch the twisted and ill-informed response from a Republican representative from Georgia. ht

Oh, BTW, the woman threading the antibiotics argument there is the former Canadian prime minister, Kim Campbell--their first, and only, female prime minister.

LSU professor's rant, and the secret videotaping

Apparently a LSU professor was secretly videotaped by "a representative of the group Campus Reform, a project of the Leadership Institute, a Virginia-based group that trains conservative activists."  And then an edited version became a rallying cry about the liberal agenda!


Forget the liberal v. conservative issues.  This does not come across as a good example of teaching at all.  Oh well, I have faculty colleagues who, according to some students, use even the "f" word during the rant lectures.
But, secret videotaping?!!!

This is the full, unedited, and uncaptioned video of Professor Bradley Schaeffer's astronomy class. Watch and judge for yourself.

The conservative Indian-Americans

I am not sure whether there has been any systematic polling done on the political leanings of Indian-Americans--the naturalized and the natural-born.  I would not be surprised if it shows a near even split.

For instance, the politics of Bobby Jindal in New Orleans and Nikki Hawley in South Carolina are not only Republican but with a good chunk of social and religious conservatism as well.  The conservative commentators Ramesh Ponnuru and Dinesh D'Souza also share that social/religious conservatism.

But, it appears that recently D'Souza has swung even further right with his weird psychoanalysis of Obama's politics; what happened to him?

Here is Shikha Dalmia--another Indian-American--writing about D'Souza's thesis (in, of all places, her regular column in Forbes, which had given D'Souza the cover-story privilege!):

What is even more unsettling than D’Souza’s unsubstantiated ideological accusations against Obama are his gratuitous digs at polygamy in Obama’s family. He plays this up repeatedly. What is the point of this except to remind Americans that Obama is a Muslim – the most dreaded of “others”? Ultimately, D’Souza’s rumination reveals less about how Obama thinks and more about how D’Souza thinks. It shows not that Obama is motivated by malice toward America, but D’Souza is motivated by malice toward Obama. How pathetic.

From an an essay that comes across as a little too calm for the usually volcanic Christopher Hitchens comes this note:

For Dinesh D'Souza to label Obama the equivalent of a Kenyan Mau Mau was one thing, but for former Speaker Newt Gingrich to endorse the analysis with such dispatch was quite another. What will they do for an encore?

 Salon has the best place for D'Souza's rant: This week in crazy

His newest, "The Roots of Obama's Rage," is the story of Dinesh D'Souza flailing to find a new and unique way of making a moderate pragmatic Democrat sound like a horrible monster bent on the destruction of America and enslavement of its people. He's recreating the nation in the image of his "philandering, inebriated African socialist" father. He is stealing America's wealth and redistributing it to third-world nations. Sources include, in addition to Obama's memoir about the absence of his father from his life, one obscure paper Obama Sr. wrote, and also something one of Obama's grandmothers said, once.

D'Souza's embarrassing history should've led this book straight to the remainder bin. Instead it made the cover of Forbes. Then Newt Gingrich endorsed it. Then Glenn Beck endorsed it. The book immediately climbed up the Amazon bestseller list.

Now the White House is involved, with Robert Gibbs asking Forbes to retract the numerous factual inaccuracies. All Forbes will say is that facts don't apply in opinion pieces.

D'Souza is enjoying all the attention, of course.

Ahem, time for me to admit that there are some crazy Indian-Americans, too :)

Speaking of crazy Indian-Americans, nobody better than Peter Sellers' Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party:)

The Constitution is not an amendment to the Bible!

Which is why John Hodgman suggests that we ditch the "Con"stitution, and move to a more optimistic title even--the "Pro"stitution :)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
You're Welcome - Constitutional Crisis
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mosque-Erade
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

And Colbert exposes the problems with the freedom of religious belief and expression that the Constitution Prostitution guarantees :)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Weapon of Mass Construction
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

Conservative judges are ruling pro-gay ... cool!

Factoids about the judge who overthrew California's Prop 8 (ht):

Judge Walker was first appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, at the recommendation of Attorney General Edwin Meese III (now the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation). Democratic opposition led by Sen. Alan Cranston (D-CA) prevented the nomination from coming to a vote during Reagan’s term. Walker was renominated by President George H. W. Bush in February 1989. Again the Democratic Senate refused to act on the nomination. Finally Bush renominated Walker in August, and the Senate confirmed him in December. ...
... coalitions including such groups as the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, the Human Rights Campaign, the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force worked to block the nomination.In other words, this “liberal San Francisco judge” was recommended by Ed Meese, appointed by Ronald Reagan, and opposed by Alan Cranston, Nancy Pelosi, Edward Kennedy, and the leading gay activist groups. It’s a good thing for for advocates of marriage equality that those forces were only able to block Walker twice.

How cool is that!  This was the judge whose nomination was opposed by the liberal bastion of the late Kennedy, and Pelosi, when Biden was the Senate Committee's chair ... the successful attorney in this California case is a Republican lawyer who represented Bush against Gore ... even Hollywood could not have scripted this any better :)
But, apparently that is not all:

Josh Green of the Atlantic notes a pattern: the federal judge in Boston who struck down a significant portion of the Defense of Marriage Act, ruling that it denied gay and lesbian couples the federal benefits afforded to straight couples, was appointed to the bench by President Richard Nixon. And the chief judge of the Iowa Supreme Court who wrote the unanimous decision striking down that state’s marriage ban was appointed by Republican governor Terry Branstad, who was just renominated for governor by Iowa Republican voters.

Who would have thought this would be the case!  But then Conservatism that is of the libertarian and states-rights flavor will bring such results, no?

Photo of the day: in the nude

What caught my attention was not the, ahem, bum line-up, but the caption for the photo:
"CALIFORNIA—Near Bakersfield, 1983"

The Bakersfield I know--from 1991 on--was one conservative place.  A couple of years ago, it was rated the most conservative city in California, and the eight most in the country!!!  And this was only eight years before I first got to visit Bakersfield?  Did the transition happen that fast?  Is the caption incorrect?  Hey, anybody from Bakersfield reading this?  Any stories to tell?

BTW, that was not the only photo from "near Bakersfield" ... there are more.  As always, only the best photos from Magnum (via Slate)

Do all professors think alike?

While commenting about Louis Menand's A Marketplace of Ideas , Thomas Benton (aka William Pannapacker) observes:

More provocatively, Menand asks "whether holding liberal views has become a tacit requirement for entry and promotion in the academic profession" in a period in which political commitment has replaced the ideal of disinterested objectivity. He asks whether there is a "code" in academe that extends to "matters of intellectual, pedagogical, and collegial decorum, [that] the entrants are required to demonstrate for admission to the profession ... including personal manner and appearance."

There is only one response I can possibly think of:

"The rot set in with Ronald Reagan"

The best articulation, yet, that I have come across of the state of Conservatism in America:

Traditional conservatives disdain populism and respect knowledge. They believe in balancing the government’s books. And they are pragmatists who are suspicious of ideology. Reagan debased all these ideas – and modern American conservatism is still suffering the consequences.

Rachman writes how this Reaganism has led to Sarah Palin:

The most damaging idea propagated by the Reagan myth is the cult of the idiot-savant (the wise fool). You can see it in the very first line of Dinesh D’Souza’s admiring biography of Reagan, which proclaims: “Sometimes it really helps to be a dummy.” Mr D’Souza recounts numerous stories in which intellectuals – even conservative intellectuals – disdained Reagan. They scorned his tendency to spend cabinet meetings sorting jelly beans into different colours, and his taste for flaky anecdotes. But, Mr D’Souza concludes, the “dummy” was right and the pointy-heads were wrong.
A dangerous chain of reasoning flows from this popular version of history. Reagan was apparently stupid and often startlingly ignorant – but he was vindicated by history. Therefore, goes the theory, ignorance and stupidity are good signs. They show that a politician is in tune with the deeper wisdom of the people. Once you start thinking like that, it is but a short step to Sarah Palin.

Meanwhile, within the storehouses of knowledge--in academia--postmodernism, in a way, legitimized such bizarre descent into stupidity by championing an argument that every interpretation is equally valid.  The idiot savant of Reagan-Bush-Palin is similarly reflected in the challenge in the public domain of how old the universe is, or natural selection and evolution, and even in the fantastic growth of the conspiracy theory industry.  The joke is not on Reagan or Palin, but on us in academia :(

Hmmm.... that was a digression :)  Rachman concludes:

The real Reagan was, in fact, rather more pragmatic than the “Reagan myth” that sprang up after he left office. Real Reagan was willing to raise taxes in extremis, and became a firm believer in arms-reduction talks. Today’s American conservatives, who claim the mantle of Reagan, would regard these ideas as treachery and weakness. Reagan was ultimately a successful president. But he left behind a poisonous legacy for the conservative movement.