I don’t think this is a right / left thing (said the British leftie), the labels “right” and “left” are overused and too often wrongly used.
We in Britain associate the “right” with authoritarianism, the thought police of Orwell’s 1984 and repression of individualism but in America is is the politically correct thinking of the left that is associated with such things.
The real enemy of creativity is conformity. People are coerced into conformity because they are afaid to be different. The root of this problem lies in the education system.
My generation (I’m 60) was the last to benefit broadly from what was known as the “renaissance education” which provided a broad grounding in Grammar, Languages, Mathematics, the natural sciences, music, philosophy and history. The idea of this curriculum was to provide a broad grounding from which the studen could progress to follow several interests in later life. Most of all it taught people to think for themselves.
Now the most promising pupils are steered towards a narrow goal much too early while the less able seem to emerge from the school system with a barely adequate grounding in literacy and numeracy.
Start teching people to think for themselves and they will be equipped to realise the banal, cliche ridden speeches of Barak Obama, and sloganising of his followers are not in any way comparable to the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln or William Gladstone, Winston Churchill or Franklyn D. Roosvelt.
As that great rhetorician Cicero said: “The mind of a man is the whole of the man.”
