What’s firstly puzzling about the right’s Ivy League and Ivy League-adjacent hatred, and the belief that so much of what ails us is an effect of what "they're teaching" on campus, is that so many of their own attended Ivy League schools themselves. Tom Cotton attended Harvard and Harvard Law, Ted Cruz went to Princeton before Harvard Law, while Ron De Santis attended Yale before Harvard Law. Trump Supreme Court appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh attended Harvard and Yale Law respectively, while the Trump appointee conservatives most love to hate (Amy Coney Barrett) attended Notre Dame Law.
It's just a comment that conservative disdain for the Ivy League is frequently self-hatred. Somehow so many of the right’s greats emerged from the Ivy League with ideology intact, but supposedly this time is different?
It’s not. Conservative laments about left-leaning universities are as old as universities.
Sorry, but it's just not that bad on campus. If it were, parents wouldn’t send their kids to college, nor would the best of the best corporations routinely devote the majority of their recruiting to the Ivy League schools.
Yet whenever something goes wrong in the U.S., what they teach in universities is blamed. And when it's not universities being blamed, Hollywood is the next stop for the perpetually offended.
Supposedly the movie industry is socialist, except that as director and producer Ed Zwick writes in his recent memoir, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions, "Movies aren't born. They fight their way to existence." In his 2015 book A Curious Mind, film producer Brian Grazer (A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, Splash, Rush, etc.) reported that he's turned down 90 percent of the time. So ruthless is Hollywood about money that Grazer has quipped that “Instead of spelling out the word H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D in the famous sign in the Hollywood Hills, they could have spelled out: N-O-N-O-NO-N-O!” It's a long way of saying that Hollywood is - with the possible exceptions being Silicon Valley and Wall Street - the most capitalistic industry on earth.
Conservatives claim they're the answer to the societal problems created by elite universities and Hollywood, except that when markets healthily corrected in 2008 to the substantial betterment of the economy, it was “limited government,” “free market” Republicans in the Bush administration (George W. - Yale, Harvard Business School, Hank Paulson - Dartmouth, HBS, Ben Bernanke - MIT, Harvard) who demanded the bailouts that were precisely the crisis. And when the Trump administration discovered a coronavirus in March of 2020 that had plainly been spreading for months before, it was the Republicans in the Trump administration (Donald Trump - Penn) who oversaw an economy, freedom, and health-crushing lockdown.
Did the Bushies and the Trumpists listen too much while being educated in the Ivy League, or is the whole thing about U.S. universities and Hollywood teaching us the wrong things a load of nonsense? Hopefully the question answers itself, and hopefully conservatives will quietly cease acting so foolishly. If not, a left winger with a clue may ask conservatives why, if Universities and Hollywood have made us so socialist, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up over 50x since 1982? And if this time is once again different, it's not so different that markets are no longer a look into the future. That they're at all-time highs in no way correlates with rising socialism inside the electorate.
Which calls for conservatives to relax, and look inward. Whining about the universities and Hollywood reeks of victimhood. Worse, it makes conservatives look weak and non-believing. Honestly, what does it say about conservatives when they constantly imply that socialist messaging is more influential than their own?
