One More Difference Between the "Left" and the "Right"

From a book review by Robert Farley over at LGM (the book is God's Harvard):

Patrick Henry was established explicitly to counter what its founder believed was leftist bias in the mainstream university community. Patrick Henry isn't so much a college for evangelicals as it is a college for extremely conservative evangelicals directly interested in working for the Republican party. As such, it's founded on a profound misconception about the left and the mainstream American university. While it's true that a large majority of faculty (especially in the liberal arts) are on the left politically, and also true that there is, as Michael Berube argues, something specifically liberal about the liberal arts, there is in my experience simply no counter-part to the Republican political machine that exists at Patrick Henry. Anyone who has spent five minutes on college campus should realize that, whatever may be going on, political action in service of the Democratic Party isn't it. For a time at the University of Oregon, one of the most leftist campuses in the country, there was no Democratic Party organization on campus at all. The Democrats had disintegrated as a result of vicious infighting between various of their elements, for reasons so arcane that the terms "moderate" and "radical" don't supply an accurate description. Even if, as David Horowitz would have it, lefty college professors were trying to recruit soldiers for the coming revolution, that project does not manifest itself in terms of institutional support for the Democratic Party. Patrick Henry, conversely, is directly tied in to conservative think tanks, NGOs, and Republican elected officials.

Those last few sentences are pretty key, I think. As "liberal" as universities are (and I would dispute that claim, even), I think Farley is right in noting that how it plays out is specifically not institutional support for a political party that's almost as beholden to big money as the Republican Party. I wonder why.

I also consider it evidence for my hypothesis that young, bright, motivated folks with views that are at all to the "left" don't, as a generalization, seek out the Democratic Party as their measure of success. They seek out nonprofits, NGOs, and other social and social justice work, often for the aforementioned reason (but certainly there are others).

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to view the Republican Party as an ultimate goal. I think this actually has explanatory power when it comes to explaining why the Democratic Party is full of idiots is being outmaneuvered on both politics and policy in the last decade or so.