I'm opposed to bailouts of big banks and businesses. But the left's remedies for this and other issues are wrong and usually make things worse.

If only it did, outstripp. It means some animals are more equal than others.

The implication is also that some are more pure and without sin. The left has no understanding of human nature and instead thinks that violence, greed, etc. were generated (not brought to heel) by the beliefs and systems of Western civilization.

Bill Whittle says politics is downstream from culture, and therefore to change political outcomes we have to influence and change the culture. I think that's true, especially if school is included in the latter broad category. This excerpt you cite from Huxley perfectly summarizes the college and post-grad culture I witnessed with at first numb acceptance and then horror: "In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate."

Dragged down by the boredom of political correctness and the ennui of race/class/gender, all we talked about at college was pop culture and ways to blast our brain cells to smithereens. 

Social and economic issues are inseparable. The former is the crowbar progressives use to break into our economic and legal  systems to create new hiring mandates and categories of protected classes who receive special treatment. It's also the key progressives use to get inside the treasure rooms of western civilization and ransack them. When we give up broadly on social issues, political correctness rather than the great ideas of western heritage guide the academy. And then we just mint more lefties who oppose capitalism, private property and individual freedom.

Now it's hard to even access the thoughts and assumptions that once made me a liberal. I feel like Rowdy Roddy Piper after he put on the glasses in They Live. I see who liberals really are, and there's no "unseeing" the truth.

Granted my convictions were thin back then, and I think I was at heart conservative. I was living among superficially well educated people in Boston, and liberalism was simply the polite consensus. One professor at Boston College I knew said "conservatives are just ... icky." This is what the conservative movement has to overcome. It's an emotional and visceral aversion. We have the intellectual and historical arguments on our side. The libs are, for now, winning the emotional battle.

A friend recently reminded me of something adman John Wannamaker said: people buy things for two reasons, the right reason and the real reason. The right reason is rational, but the real reason is emotional. I converted from lazy college liberalism for high-flying intellectual reasons -- freedom for excellence, liberty and the fact that Dem policies don't work. But the real reason was emotional -- I was living in Boston when John Kerry lost to George Bush. The bile and hateful words that people there directed at the middle of the country stopped me in my tracks. I said to myself "my sister and her family are in Wyoming, I have many friends in Wyoming, and they voted for George Bush. And they're better people than the liberals in Boston." Though it may sound like a rational process, it was emotional and visceral. Staying conservative has been easy for all kinds of reasons -- I am pro-life, have a family and am firmly in the adult world. Brilliant people like Artur Davis, Tom Sowell and David Mamet also inspire me to help others escape brain dead liberalism.

17, my mang. I'm a Gen Xer, too. 

All. in.

Count my wife and two little girls in as well. I have my college 20th reunion in October, but that will be an Obummer crowd.

Mr. Davis -- not to ask you to play armchair psychologist, but you've met President Obama. Do you think he believes conservatives are as evil and extreme as he depicts them to be -- or does he just avail himself of the most effective (and politically permissible) political tools at his disposal?

A sublimely accurate analysis of the ignoble ways of this administration. Is the President more able to get away with this because the media has never been more compliant? Or has the populace simply taken the emotional thinking of their college years into adulthood? ... I know conservatives must do a better job of making moral and emotional appeals, but I am at a loss about what else can be done.

I have two little girls, 7 and 4, who will be prepared for such a grudge match and (to borrow a Barry Hannah phrase) unscroll the hurt in a few years. The 7-year-old speaks and reads Greek and is learning Latin. Both disciplines sharpen the mind where Leftism dulls it.

Greg,

I'm probably too late to this discussion party, but there's no question you're onto something here. Cheap dodges are being taught in the universities -- and they are being positioned (implicitly through professorial endorsement) as enlightened. 

One tactic might be called preemptive disqualification. What we rightly see as dodges are championed as necessary offsets to centuries of oppression. White males haven't played fair, and the only way they can be stopped from oppressing again is to be banished from the discussion. Therefore, your gender and ethnicity may disqualify you from weighing in on a range of issues. Every white male in history falls into the same category and need not be engaged. In one karate-like leg sweep, students are prevented from being well educated in the name of education.

Another tactic is shame. If you don't agree on an issue, it's a sure sign you are ____ (fill in the blank with a bigot, a hater, backward, Hitler's spawn, etc.).

Finally, there's the rights tactic. Whatever an emotional liberal argues for is in fact a right. A selfish desire is thereby made equivalent to the noble desire of slaves seeking emancipation.

I'm 42, but didn't become a conservative until I was 33. Actually when I left Wyoming for Stanford at age 18 I was a conservative, but by the end of my sophomore year I was beaten into submission by political correctness and the desire not to be called a white male oppressor. Or, more accurately, it was simply more convenient at that age to go with the tide. My self-deprogramming began while working for the federal government in my 20s (gov't work tore away the veil for Tom Sowell, too). What sealed my return to conservatism was living and working in the liberal smug cloud of Boston for seven years, where I listened with horror to the way people described the middle of the country after Bush won. That prompted me to reflect on how my formative educational years were swollen with ideas and philosophies I knew to be untrue (my awakening there was similar, I think, to David Mamet's). I started reading Sowell, Dalrymple, Chesterton and others. Converting to Catholicism brought it all together. Oh and I am, have always been and will always be melanin-challenged.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, and Money by his degenerate-but-still-brilliant son, Martin Amis. Martin Amis based the vain character Lorne Guyland on his own experience working with an aging Kirk Douglas, who evidently was eager to walk around the movie set naked and ask "does this look like the body of a 65-year-old man?" Martin Amis has reported that yes, it did.

I'm with you. It's federal ownership of our lands that allows the coasters to continue the tired slander about westerners being the first in line for government handouts. This would also bring a merciful end to management plans and perfunctory comment periods (wherein the federales say "weigh in folks, although we've already decided what we're going to do."). As an aside, I've always wanted to see what it would be like to dropkick a sage grouse.

cont'd from above:

On the one hand, I feel called to respond with Christian joy. My wife and I homeschool in the middle of a liberal neighborhood, but our neighbors seem drawn by our calm and by the happiness and brilliance of our children. Our neighbors have begun to doubt some of their assumptions, it seems.

On the other hand, I feel like retreating to the hills. I think I will have to withdraw to a degree in order to maintain my sanity. The virtual community Paules mentions is a place I will consider. I own a business, and my kids are bringing the benefits of my wife’s and my good parenting to the kids in the neighborhood. But today they feel like lampreys riding in my wake.

Sorry, that’s a dark ending. One silver lining: we have a deeper bench, and 30 Republican governors. When I lived in Boston in 2004, the liberals felt similarly vanquished when Kerry lost. We will rise. We will rebuild. Because we must.