Surrendering culture to the left

When I was at Canterbury University in the 1990s, the student newspaper featured heated exchanges between left and right-liberals about the value of an arts degree. Right-liberals taking business and engineeering papers dismissed arts degrees as pieces of "toilet paper" with little commerical value. Left-liberals responded by claiming that right-liberals are culturally illiterate and only interested in the narrow commercial value of education.

Whatever the practical or commercial value of an arts degree, most people with arts degrees do get jobs of one form or another and many do get into positions of power and influence, and whether right-liberals like it or not, most people with arts degrees are left-liberals.

In the mid 1980s, right liberals in NZ believed they could negate the influence of the liberal -left by commercialising the state and privatising state assets. They failed to take into account that the culture of the public sector, at both the local and national level, is primarily dominated by the liberal-left.

In state education the liberal-left has gone from strength to strength over the last twenty years despite the best efforts of the liberal right to contain it by fiscal means.

In 1999, I spent a year studying honours level history. At the end of the course the lecturer asked the class about their political views. There were about a dozen people in my tutorial group and I was the only one to claim to have right wing or centrist views. Although some of the group kept their opinions to themselves, most claimed to be left of centre on social and economic views.

Besides monopolising state education, left -liberals are dominant in many areas of international govenrnance, central government, local governmment, public broadcasting, arts management, environmental conservation, mental health (public and private), many areas of the non-profit sector, and in museums and art galleries.

Contrary to the promises of neo-liberal reformers, the state has not been downsized in New Zealand and currently has access to more money and staff than ever before.

In education even commerically orientated courses popular with right-liberals are affected by left-liberal viewpoints. For example, business schools teach the idea that business leaders are "made not born", even though the latest research in psychology and the natural sciences emphasises the genetic aspects of human capabilities.

Left-liberal influence in broadcasting can be seen in the public funding being provided for low- brow programming like prime time soaps and reality television, based on the egalitarian argument that all tastes should be catered for.

Unlike libertarians, traditional and empirical conservatives don't believe that the influence of the liberal-left will simply wither away through fiscal attempts to downsize government. In order to reduce the power of the contemporary liberal left, it will be necessary to carry the fight into the academy and the media to expose its weak intellectual foundations.