Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Follow the herd

This one's just shocking. We definitely never saw this coming, but, thanks to research and studies, we now have definitive proof.

College students find their political leanings influenced by fellow students.

Like we said, just a shocking revelation. We were confident that people formed their views by isolating themselves from the world and digging through whatever news they happened to come across. We were also pretty sure that college students did even less than that, and merely sustained themselves on the nourishing drip of whichever 24-hour news channel they left the television on. But to think that they might actually listen to their peers? Wow.

As a secondary piece of research, the people conducting the study also determined that college students tend to be more liberal in their views, at least during the college years. Apparently there being a larger concentration of liberal groups on many colleges influenced our future leaders by exposing them to ideas. Now we can see why the GOP has been pointing out the "elitism" of the liberal agenda. After all, not everyone can go to college, so obviously those privileged few get exposed to this messaging, while the everyday "Joe Six Pack" never hears of these kind of groups.

But there's hope. It seems that, often, once the students leave the latte-sipping confines of higher education, they start to revert to conservative views on many of the issues. Well thank heavens for that. After all, we'd hate to think of what might happen should those students never readjust their stance on the issues.

For example, we might actually have open and honest discussion about the issues. And we all know that we can never have that.

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