Confessions of a Teenage Liberal

I was once a Liberal. It’s true. Before that, however, I was quite conservative, and very patriotic in a naive sort of way.

A thing called University came along, or “Varsity” as it’s called in South Africa. In Australia it’s called “Uni”, so maybe in Ireland they joined the two together and called it Univarsity. In other words, I am twice as educated as Australians and South Africans. But I digress...

In University, it’s very fashionable to be “liberal”, particularly when you don’t know what that means. What it meant, it turned out, is that you couldn’t have any strong opinions on anything because that makes you unreasonable, and university is all about the appearance of intelligence. See the logic?

When you walk through the mighty eighteenth-century archway, across the cobblestones, and into the Bosom of Learning, it is hard not to find yourself of the opinion that “fitting in” might be very important indeed.

One of the reasons it is so easy to become a liberal at university, is that you are taught, rightly, to question your assumptions and to learn to think critically. This is a vitally important part of the education process, and is a confusing time for someone in their late teens, particularly when their most coveted skill is how to remove a bra with one hand.

Critical thinking sets you back, initially, and it is during this delicate time that you may find it very easy to become a liberal. Everyone nods in approval at your sensible utterances, such as “student grants should be increased”, or “the government is at fault, they’re fascists”, or even “we should have an open-door immigration policy” and then back to “student grants should be increased”.

I then found it a slippery slope indeed, as the transition to becoming a Socialist was almost seamless. When my mother first explained to me years earlier what Communism was (“It’s where everyone is equal and has the same amount of money”) I thought it a brilliant idea. But I was around ten years old at the time so fortunately could not vote. In University, it was hard to be anything but a Socialist. We unreflectively wore Che Guevara T-Shirts (Made In China). With all that protesting, banner-waving, leaflet-distributing and pro-anything anti-everything rallies, Socialism was the life and soul of the university.

But that’s all it was. Part of student life. And it took years to grow out of. University itself is a traditional, conservative or “classical Liberal” establishment, with heavy emphasis on learning for its own sake, on becoming responsible citizens, and working hard to get ahead in life. Admittedly there were a few too many butch women doing PhDs in “Feminist Perspectives on Sexual Narrative in Shakespeare’s Othello”, or “Feminist Perspectives on the Use of Animals in Jane Austen’s Earlier Novels”, but by and large, university is an eye-opening experience.

It just happens that the Socialists are there. Waiting. For you to confuse Liberal with liberal, and turn you all into unwashed pinko lefty hippies.