I am sure you have noticed we are armpit deep into the political season. We are so close to the election that attack ads are dominating the media. They’ve always sounded a bit like this to me –
Politician A: “My opponent is a jerk.”
Politician B: “I may be a jerk, but my opponent is a bigger jerk.”
Attack ads seem to be about arousing strong feelings. There is nothing new about that idea. In 1952, Adlai Stevenson was running against Dwight D. Eisenhower for president. 
We had moved again, and I was no longer at the little one room schoolhouse. I remember a fight breaking out between supporters of the two candidates at my new school. I wondered why they were fighting because there was no way they could influence the election. They were far too young to vote. It was one of the mysteries I mentioned earlier in this blog. It left me wondering. How did they know which candidate to support?
Sometime later I remember reading various articles that said young people support or join the party their parents support. I learned more about this idea quite accidentally when I was teaching freshman English at Western Michigan University. The course was basically about teaching writing because writing is a very important tool students will use during college career. There are all kinds of writing. Some of it is simple as making a grocery list and others as complex as writing a PhD thesis. The assignment was designed to teach students how to write a defense of an idea. Of course, there were other goals such as teaching them how to use commas or not create things like run-on sentences – in other words, grammar. The assignment read something like this, “Explain why you are a member of – insert your party of choice here. What fundamentals drew you to this party? How do you see this party advancing the welfare this country…” There were other questions giving the students clues as to what they might want to include in their essay. There was also a list of source materials they might want to use in their essay such as the platforms of the various parties.
This course had an interesting structure. The students were given the assignment and then some time to complete a rough draft. They would bring the rough draft to me and we talk about it and any problems they had. Almost every one of the students found this a very difficult assignment. 
When I would ask why, they would tell me they had never thought much about politics and were just doing what their parents had done. That confirmed what I had read about earlier that we form our political beliefs primarily based on what our parents believe. I cannot fault my students because they had been in high school a mere three months before they found themselves in my class. They had not had a chance to form their own political beliefs. However, the research I read suggested that following their families lead in political choice tended to continue on throughout their lives. Getting back to the assignment, I would show them how to go back to party literature, speeches, and so on to find the basic beliefs of the party. Once they had those firmly in mind they could go on to explain why a belief was good for the country etc. Since the assignment had a limited word count, I suggested they use no more than three beliefs. Looking back, I hope I was successful in teaching them how to defend an idea. I also hope I was successful in getting them to understand why they had a particular political belief and I hope that shows up in the future and every one of the elections they vote in.
I have seen other ways political beliefs are chosen or come about and perhaps in another blog I’ll discuss them.
