All Politics are Decided in High School

I came across this article and I think there's a lot of truth to it.

Forget liberals and conservatives. The real rivals are nerds and jocks

David Brooks (New York Times - The Gazette, Montreal, May 4th, 2006)

University is still probably a good idea, but everything you need to know about North America you can learn in high school. For example, if you want to understand North American class structure you'd be misled if you read Marx, but you'd understand it perfectly if you look around a high school cafeteria.

The jocks sit here; the nerds sit there; the techies, drama types, skaters, kickers and gangstas sit there, there and there. What you see is not class in the 19th century sense, but a wide array of lifestyle cliques, some richer, some poorer, but each regarding the others as vaguely pathetic and convinced of its own moral superiority.

Similarly, when it comes to politics, high school explains almost everything you need to know. In 1976, Tom Wolfe wrote an essay for Commentary in which he noted that our political affiliations aer shaped subrationally.

He went on to observe that especially when we are young and forming our identities, we make sense of our lvies by running little morality plays in our heads in which the main characters are Myself, the hero, and my Adolescent Opposite, the enemy.

"Forever after," Wolfe writes, "the most momentous national and international events are stuffed into the same turf. The most colossal antagonists and movements become merely stand-ins for My Adolsecent Self and My Adolescent Opposite.

"If My Opposite, my natural enemy in adolescence, was the sort of person who seemed overly aggressive, brutish and in love with power; I identify him with the 'conservative' position. If My Opposite, my natural enemy in adolescence, seemed overly sensitive, soft, cerebral and incapable of action, I identify him with the 'liberal' position."

And so it goes. In every high school there are students who are culturally and intellectually superior but socially aggrieved. These high-school culturati have wit and sophisticated musical tastes, but find that all prestige goes to jocks, cheerleaders and preps who possess the emotional depth of a cocker spaniel.

The nerds continue to believe that the self-reflective life is the only life worth living (despite all evidence to the contrary) while the cool, good-looking, vapid people look down upon them with easy disdain on those rare occasions they are compelled to acknowledge their existence.

These sarcastic cultural types might grow up to be rich movie producers, but they will remember their adolescent opposites and become liberals. They might grow up to be rich lawyers but will decorate their homes with interesting fabrics from the oppressed Peruvian peasantry to differentiate themselves from their jock opposites.

In adulthood, the former highschool nerds will savour the sort of scandals that befall their formely athletic and currently corporate adolescent enemies - the Duke Lacrosse scandal, the Enron scandal, the various problems that have plagued the frat boy Geroge W. Bush. In the lifelong struggle for moral superiority, problems that bedevil yoru adolescent opposites send pleasure-inducing dopamine surging through your brain.

Similarly, in every high school there are jocks, cheerleaders and regular kids who vaguely sense that their natural enemies are the brooding poets who go off to become English majors. These prom kings and queens might leave their adolescent godhood and go off to work as underpaid sales reps despite their coldly gracious spouses and effortlessly slender kids, but they will still remember their adolescent opposites and become conservatives. Theyw ill experience surges of orgiastic triumphalism when Sean Hannity eviscerates the scuffed -shoed intellectuals who have as much personal courage as a French chipmunk in retreat.

The only real shift between school and adult politics is that the jocks realize they need conservative intellectuals, who are geeks who have decided their fellow intellectuals should never be allowed to run anything and have learned to speak slowly so the jocks will understand them.

Meanwhile, the geeks have learned they need to find popular kids to head their tickets because ordinary voters will enver support a former geek. (Bill Clinton was unique in that he was a member of every clique at once.)

The central message, though, is that we never escape our high school selves.

Vote for Pedro.

Edited by flyingzone

Hi,

I agree with Hugo, even if it is important to consider the political impact
of cultural differences, turning a blind eye over social classes is
misleading and dangerous.

Bye.

Maybe this is true for the author of the article and others like him.  However, I am sure there are a lot of other people such as myself who did not discover their true political viewpoint until college.  Some of us need a wider viewpoint outside of our own little worlds.  When we get that wider viewpoint, it is possible for us to become inspired in ways we never imagined before.  I guess it's called growing up (hint, hint).

I found the article amusing.  It may be true in some instances, but not every instance.

In high school, many of us were nerds, jocks, artistic types, drama types, music types all at once.  I have known so many students who worry about college entrance exams, get straight As, play instruments, do the annual school play, letter in foolball/basketball/baseball, and also secretly hit a smoke in the corner. 

Hey, I was a BIG nerd in high school too, but I also lettered in sports and knew half of my graduation class.  I like Bill Clinton too.

Edited by poirot

I would agree with Tobodai.  I'd say most of my political views were probably determined by my mother and my family.  My mother, my uncle, and my paternal grandfather were all big history buffs and specialized in war.  My maternal grandmother and uncle are big gun collectors and so I grew up around guns and weapons of all sorts.  Since the age of three, my mother and I would watch the History Channel or read about wars for fun.  Perhaps the reason for my view of war as natural, unavoidable, and something to be understood and used when necessary.