Liberals Never Grew Up

Thomas Sowell examines "Adolescent Intellectuals" today at TownHall.com.

The piece carries a theme I explored a few years ago when I wrote for Toogood Reports. I said that liberals were like children because all they know is their want, their "need," without regard for the wisdom of restraint. In their single-minded pursuit of pleasure and fulfillment, they sound and act very much like petulant, spoiled children.

Just as we get spoiled children who run into trouble when we let our children do what they want, so our society becomes spoiled and problematic when the grownups don't take charge and run things.

Some of the painful consequences of various "liberations" that began in the 1960s have included the disintegration of families, skyrocketing crime rates, falling test scores in school, and record-breaking rates of teenage suicide.

A long downward trend in teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases sharply reversed during the 1960s, starting a new trend of escalating teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases, climaxed later by the AIDS epidemic.

Sometimes bad things happen because of adverse circumstances -- poverty or war, for example. But our post-1960s social disasters occurred during a long period of peace and unprecedented prosperity. Murder rates, for example, were much lower during the Great Depression of the 1930s and during World War II than they became after various "liberating" changes in the 1960s.

Why do we get so many asinine rulings, opinions and pronouncements from the Leftist intelligentsia (which are repeated by their disciples to whom these pearls roll down)? Sowell sums it up well:

Many academics and federal judges are sufficiently insulated from reality by tenure that they never have to grow up.