For all the controversy over University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow’s decision to feature in a pro-life ad aired during the Super Bowl, there was at least one positive outcome.

It made the radically pro-choice left look indisputably silly. The hyperbolic nature of the episode revealed the deep frustration of the pro-choice lobby at the direction of the nation’s abortion debate.

What was noteworthy about the ad, which was made by conservative group Focus on the Family and showed Tebow playfully tackling his mother as she spoke vaguely about the decision to keep her dangerous pregnancy, was how little it actually said about abortion. In fact, the word “abortion” was never stated even once.

By contrast, what was noteworthy about the reaction to the ad, which began before the ad even aired, was its stridency and vitriol. Pro-choice groups practically threw the kitchen sink at Focus on the Family for daring to raise the issue of life, however obliquely, during the Super Bowl.

A few quotes are valuable for perspective:

Before the ad aired, Jehmu Greene, president of the Women’s Media Center said, “An ad that uses sports to divide rather than to unite has no place in the biggest national sports event of the year – an event designed to bring Americans together.”

After it aired, the National Organization for Women alternately declared that the manner in which Tebow tackled his mother reflected an “undercurrent” of “violence against women.”

If only they were joking. The criticism is revelatory, if only of the paranoid psychology of its advocates.

The reaction to the Tebows’ ad from pro-choice groups seems to mask a deep sensitivity among these groups to having any kind of national debate about abortion at all. That the ad, mild as it was, sparked the outrage that it did before and after its airing, reflects the desperate need among pro-choice groups to not let pro-lifers get away with a public relations victory.

Considering the larger trends in the abortion debate and recent poll numbers on the subject, it’s not hard to see why.

A May 2009 Gallup poll send shockwaves through the political world for its revelation that for the first time, more Americans self-identified as “pro-life” than “pro-choice” by a substantial 51 to 42 percent margin.

The data set was not an outlier. Another poll conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in late December and early January 2010 showed that young people (voters aged 18-29) among the most pro-life, with 59 percent calling abortion “morally wrong.” The most pro-choice group seemed to be the Baby Boomers, aged 45 to 64, of which only 51 percent found abortion morally wrong.

The data on young-people has taken the pro-choice lobby particularly by surprise. Where attitudes among older populations are easier to dismiss as white noise from polling, the numbers on youth suggest a true generational shift. Nothing could be more alarming to abortion defenders who have lived the last forty years with a distinctive upper hand in the culture war.

Clearly, the momentum in the abortion debate has shifted towards pro-lifers. According to the popular narrative, the profusion of fetal imaging technologies and increased knowledge about embryonic development has heightened public sensitivity to the humanity of the unborn child. The narrative may well be true. The result is a pro-choice lobby that is bewildered, frustrated, and as we now know, neurotically hyper-sensitive.

One has to wonder what groups like NOW and Planned Parenthood are so afraid of.  That those who defend “choice” recoil at the prospect of a robust public conversation on abortion that could better inform the decisions of women considering the procedure seems contradictory, to say the least.

Resolution may come from the fact the “pro-choice” moniker is more a function of political convenience than ideological accuracy. “Choice,” as NOW, Planned Parenthood, and like-minded groups envision it, conveys entitlement, not deliberation.

Which is precisely why a national abortion debate is so horrifying to them. Pro-lifers might actually win.

There is something about youth that is uniquely susceptible to hubris.

The phenomenon may help to explain why so many young people have an uncanny affinity both for utopian ideology and for the elitist snobbery, sometimes masquerading as self-anointed intellectualism,which accompanies it. Students today seem increasingly elitist in their political views, as they dismiss the reactions and arguments of those who they deem less educated than they are.

Not only is this supreme self-confidence hysterically unwarranted, it hinders a great deal of actual learning. It dovetails with an obnoxious belief in the specialness of Now, captured succinctly in then-Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign line that “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” and seems to all too often preclude introspection among the college-age demographic. With a health care debate and economic crisis reinvigorating American populism, it’s worth considering why students are so in the wrong when it comes to their high opinion of themselves.

When we choose to go to college to further pursue our education, the implicit assumption, one would hope, is that we recognize that we have more to learn. For budding scientists and engineers, perhaps this consists of technical knowledge. But for students of the humanities, the path forward can be less clear. Before this ambiguity, there may be a tendency for some students of the liberal arts to view their education as a rubber stamp—a necessary process that must be undergone to enter the professional world, rather than something of intrinsic value.

Alternately, I would argue that for most students of the humanities, the real purpose of an undergraduate education is to develop our thinking skills and situate ourselves within an intellectual history. To do so, we must necessarily look back on previous thinkers who have explored and reflected on age-old questions and themes relating to the human condition, most of which continue to be the subject of dispute and contestation. This lack of settlement, one would think, should inspire both humility and curiosity.

Yet the do-gooder attitude of these self-appointed “intellectuals,” characterized by a righteous indignation at the moral or intellectual inferiority of other persons or some aspect of society, seems too frequently driven by emotional and egoistic, rather than rational, impulses. This is not to say that the ideological liberalism with which the mentality often conspicuously dovetails lacks an intellectual tradition—far from it. Indeed, students of all political stripes benefit from immersion in arguments from thinkers on the left, as well as from on the right.

But for the lay student, leftist policy positions, with theirutopian self-confidence in the ability of a select few ivory tower academics to lead society towards greater wisdom, are pure hubris. The assumption underlying this attitude, too often, is that because of our Duke education, we are automatically and uniquely qualified to hold these positions without reflection and introspection. Our status as “de facto” intellectuals is reason enough.

The more one reflects on this idea of “student intellectuals,” the more laughable it becomes. If anything, our education should lead us to ponder the extent of our own ignorance.

The idea that we are already “intellectuals” by virtue of where we stand insulates students from the type of deep self-reflection and self-criticism that true education requires. Learning demands the humility to question oneself and one’s most basic assumptions about the world—and accepting that those assumptions exist.

Part of this approach involves the recognition that we are not ahistorical beings, existing independent of a history of ideas. Indeed, we live very much within such an intellectual history and are deeply influenced by arguments originating with intellectual ancestors both dead and alive, whether we recognize it or not. Our education should help us recognize our place within this history and lead us to reflect on the influences we have inherited and selected.

Instead, the attitude of the amateur egoist privileges the young intellectual as if his beliefs are the purely the product of a spontaneous creativity, rather than the absorption of external influences. This generates a sense of certainty unbecoming of a recent teenager. When students—barely twenty years old—think themselves above imperfection and fully prepared to judge the actions and ideas of those much older than them, fully devoid of any context, we may have a problem.

To be sure, this is not yet a rampant phenomenon and a good many students at Duke are genuine and reflective in their temperament. But for all of us, little humility would go a long way.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council, and Kenneth Klukowski of the American Civil Rights Union are out with a great editorial in the Wall Street Journal today on some of the major constitutional questions hanging over the health care legislation that just passed the Senate.  The key take-away is that the legislation breaches traditional balances between state power and individual liberty in ways never seen before:

America’s founders intended the federal government to have limited powers and that the states have an independent sovereign place in our system of government. The Obama/Reid/Pelosi legislation to take control of the American health-care system is the most sweeping and intrusive federal program ever devised. If the federal government can do this, then it can do anything, and the limits on government power that our liberty requires will be more myth than reality.

The Politico has a solid article out today on the political stakes of health care reform. Democrats seek nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of the citizen-state relationship, taking us towards an increasingly expansive role for government, not only in the health care sector, but in the economy as a whole. Americans should be concerned:

The real stakes of health care reform are ideological. They revolve around starkly different bets Democrats and Republicans placed on the success or failure of Barack Obama’s presidency, and the success or failure of a newly expanded role for government in the lives of Americans.

On the left, the bet is that health care reform, even a version most liberals see as flawed, will give the middle class and those clamoring to break into it a greater sense of personal security—enhancing the reputation of and popular support for a dynamic national government.

In this light, health care reform would become a latter-day equivalent of Social Security—a program that quickly evolves into a politically untouchable federal commitment and which fundamentally alters voters’ relationship to Washington in ways that benefit the party of activist government.

By Vikram Srinivasan

Just as tents can collapse from being too small, they can also fall apart from being too big.

That’s a lesson the GOP should remember as it confronts the issue of what role moderates should play in rebuilding a “big tent” party. Answering that question will depend heavilys on what we mean by “moderate.”

As a conservative, I’m of the view that there should be a large role in the party for moderates. But only for one variety: the principled kind.

When a political party has shrunken to the small size the GOP has now in Congress, it can be tempting to rebuild the ranks with whatever candidates can be found. But, by rebuilding on the shoulders of unprincipled “moderates” the party risks diluting its message and undermining its own sell at a time when its core asset is its ability to offer a distinct vision from the Obama administration.

To be sure, the story of the GOP’s decline over the last decade is a tale with many subplots. But prominent among them is a narrative of failed and ineffective candidate recruitment. Oftentimes, it seems like the only criteria national political heavyweights consider in encouraging Congressional candidates are the size of their pocketbook, their name recognition, and their electability.

Certainly, all three are important. But they are not the only criteria that matter. Candidate recruitment at the local level cannot be divorced from a national strategy that controls the party’s image and message.

This failure of a comprehensive approach is very much evident in the tarnishing of the Republican brand. The significant growth in non-discretionary spending under the last Bush administration, unchecked by a supposedly conservative Republican Congress, reflects a complete departure from core conservative philosophy. This story of failed congressional oversight can be explained as a classic case of parochial local interests overriding any core philosophical principles of elected officials.

Perhaps it is too idealistic to hope that the local instinct, the tendency for members of Congress to support initiatives that benefit their own district at the expense of underlying philosophical principles, will ever be diminished. But that does not mean the party would not be able to assert at least some minimal control and provide some structure to otherwise potentially incoherent strands of conservatism within its ranks.

Some might very well have no issue with such ideological divergence. But the problem with being politically “moderate” is that too often it doesn’t mean anything other than a lack of philosophical mooring—a sort of ideological cherry-picking that is all too often wholly inconsistent with itself. For our public officials being “moderate” melds all too comfortably with political opportunism. Ideological inconsistencies and support for pet projects can be too easily be rationalized on the basis of appealing to moderate voters.

The bottom line, however, is that voters seldom support candidates purely on the basis of ideology—in fact, the appearance of being moderate or reasonable may be more important than what the facts say.

President Barack Obama is a prominent case in point. Obama was the most liberal member of the entire U. S. Senate according to the 2007 vote ranking of the non-partisan National Journal.  Yet, Obama ran a campaign that stressed his post-partisan appeal—a sell sharply at odds with his own voting record and complete lack of bipartisan cooperation, either in Illinois or in the U.S. Senate.

In trying to rebuild a party on core conservative principles, Republicans should certainly shun shrill, divisive rhetoric that makes the party seem reactionary and parochial. Nonetheless, electing moderates for moderates’ sake is a deeply flawed strategy. Instead, the operating principle in candidate recruitment should be to elect the most conservative, thoughtful candidate electable for every seat.

This is not to say that the party should not court independent voters. Rather, it is to suggest that the best way to court such voters is to make a persuasive sell on the basis of presenting a clear contrast to the Obama administration and a coherent message and vision of its own.

A big part of the problem for Republicans in this past election was that they did not stand for anything, or at least anything worth voting for among broad sectors of the politically independent public. Republicans had deeply and seriously undercut themselves over the past several years and had no credibility to make a serious case for fiscal responsibility or conservative economic policy. Moreover, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) had so many serious departures from conservative ideology and was utterly unable to articulate a conservative policy worldview, from economic issues to any other area of policy.

The fact that the hyper-liberal Senator from Illinois was able to craft such a broad-based political campaign against a truly centrist candidate should sharply rebuke those who would suggest that only by “returning to the center” can the party reclaim its majorities. In fact, the party already was “in the center” when it lost in 2006 and 2008. Winning again will require reasserting conservative principles as underlying the core of the GOP.

On campus, that means encouraging the truism that being a Republican can mean many things to many people. But at the same time, we must remember that for it to mean anything at all, there really can be little compromising on core philosophy regarding the role of government. At end of the day, liberalism and conservatism are philosophies on the role of government, aligning with the Democratic and Republican parties respectively. For Republicans, that means being fundamentally skeptical of government action in any and every arena where private actors and individuals could suffice.

A strategy for rebuilding the party that emphasizes recruiting moderates to run in races where more conservative candidates could be successful is a failure to learn the lessons of recent history and a recipe for the big tent’s eventual collapse. The GOP must return to core conservative principles and provide a clear alternative to Democratic policies if it is to ever indulge the hope of regaining a lasting majority.