Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

COLUMN: It takes a village ... to alienate a child
By Trevor Gleason
Brown Daily Herald (Brown U.)
04/18/2006

(U-WIRE) PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Jack Block, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, recently published a study that traced long-term personality traits. Conducting this study over the course of several decades, Block only recently decided to include a few questions relating to political identification. The results are enough to send even the most iron-skinned Republican into defensive paroxysms - children who had been whiny, paranoid and annoying toddlers had this nasty little tendency to turn into conservatives. Meanwhile, self-reliant and happy children were likely to become liberals. And, though the articles I've seen on the study don't mention it, I'd imagine that members of the Green party were those children who simply ate too much paste.

To be fair, baby conservatives growing up in Berkeley, Calif., who feel that the world is working against them may be justified in their paranoia. If there's a place where four-year-olds would be alienated for their belief in low taxes, limited government and preventing Tinky-Winky from ever being able to adopt, it's Berkeley.

Still, maybe we can gain something from this study besides the speculative jokes about Rush Limbaugh's bad childhood. Conventional wisdom has long accepted that teenagers go through a rebellious phase, but imagine if our childhood dictated our deepest political beliefs. For all of the ideological sparring that takes place on campus, individuals are rarely swayed from their original perspective, be it conservative or liberal. Maybe this isn't so much a matter of stubbornness or poor persuasive abilities but rather the fact that we've been locked into our political paradigms by how pampered we were while in diapers.

Still, this one study doesn't give us the whole picture. It makes some amount of intuitive sense that kids who feel disenfranchised in Berkeley might end up becoming arch-conservatives out of retribution, but surely you'd see exactly the opposite in more conservative locales. Some poor Texas youngster who spends his or her formative years feeling massively alienated might sensibly return the favor by, say, joining a commune and becoming a vegetarian. In some bizarre compromise between nature and nurture, nature chooses our playing field but nurture ultimately decides which team we end up playing for.

Suddenly, politicians have an incentive to keep their supporters' kids content while simultaneously making sure their enemies' children lead miserable lives. Before, politicians usually depended on making sure their supporters got pork barrel kickbacks, but now they have a whole other side of the spectrum to play - actively interfering in the affairs of their opponents to make sure their children wind up switching teams.

Want to maintain a Republican stronghold for decades to come? Find a way to shorten the school day and eliminate the dreaded concept of "time-out." Hand out gold stars to children who make crayon drawings of oil rigs and Jesus. Looking to enact the eventual demise of the opposition party? Put itching powder in all the clothes at Gap Kids and pass a law requiring all public schools to serve lunches composed of meatloaf so as to foil would-be vegetarians.

The beauty of this, of course, is that the children's anger will be directed at their parents. Even though it is the government that's really out to get them, think about it - most adults can't reliably make that distinction. Children, having no one else to thank or blame, are bound to target Mom and Dad. Just try to find a better explanation for how No Child Left Behind is being implemented. All I'm saying is that 10 or 15 years down the road, when an entire generation mysteriously turns out to be nearly wholly Republican, don't say I didn't warn you.

[ Back to Student Voices ]