Viewpoint: The disease of ‘thinkalike’ polluting politics
Jim Elliott
I like the sound of that word. I came up with it when I read that Montana Senate President Matt Regier had submitted the first bill draft request for the 2027 legislature (nothing like being first out of the gate) to make sure that teachers do not have what Regier calls political agendas when it comes to teaching Montana’s children.
The controversy developed when a person made clandestine recordings of a few meetings at the PIR (pupil-instruction-related) meeting put on by the Montana Federation of Public Employees teachers conference in Missoula last October. He then broadcast them on social media. He focused on discussions in 4 of the 320-plus different seminars offered. Teachers who attend the conference receive pay through their school districts. For the full background you can read the story in the Daily Montanan of October 31st, 2025 at dailymontana.com.
Before discussing “Thinkalike” it’s important to define some terms. First of all, it means think like I do”. When a speaker talks about another person having a political agenda (bad), they mean that the (bad) agenda differs from the speaker’s political agenda (good). And who decides that the political agenda (bad) is bad? Why it’s the speaker who holds the political agenda (good).
Regier said, “We need to make sure that tax dollars aren’t going towards political agendas in our schools.” What he is saying, essentially, is that our tax dollars aren’t going towards political agendas that differ from his political agenda.
It’s important to understand that a “political agenda” is nothing more than a demeaning term for a differing opinion, and as someone once noted, a difference of opinion is why we have horse races. To settle the matter.
It’s important to be the first at labeling an issue. The Republicans are very good at that. No, let me be fair, the Republicans are very, VERY good at that. Take the phrase “family values”. How can Democrats be against that? They simply can’t, they have to think up another label for something that means the same thing as “family values” to support, which they can’t, and even if they could, they wouldn’t all agree on whatever it was.
George Orwell wrote that words have emotional meanings rather than definitions. We kind of know what democracy means, but we definitely know it means something good. Likewise, fascism and authoritarianism, whatever they might actually mean, have connotations of being bad. Because of that, nations do not name themselves “The Fascist Peoples’ Republic of (North) Korea”, but “The Democratic Peoples’ Republic of (North) Korea”.
The key to understanding “Thinkalike” is that it is not based on facts, but opinions. And for the promoter of “Thinkalike” the task is to turn those opinions into facts. The way that is often done is by repetition and naming. If you call someone a “fascist” often enough the term begins to stick and thereby becomes true—a fact. Likewise with any term, “liberal”, “communist”, “dictatorship” you name it. And the key to defining the term is to associate it with bad or good things. I don’t know who it was who said “repetition is truth” (the usual person credited with the idea is Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels) but it works. If you hear something often enough from enough different people, it must be true.
The problem with “Thinkalike” is that it suppresses thinking about anything. Learning comes from considering differing opinions to arrive at a conclusion. Think about a crime. The detectives may take different approaches to the solution and along the way discard some ideas, revive others, or through the process of thinking try a completely new approach. Sometimes they have to consider information that is uncomfortable or controversial, but the entire purpose is to solve a crime. To discover the truth. So, too, with most things in life. Some things are uncomfortable to think about, but if the goal is to find a good solution or process, everything has to be considered and discussed. This does not mean they are endorsed, but scrutinized in the search for the truth.
Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of opinion are the backbone of truth and democracy. As the world’s first and longest lasting democracy, let’s not screw it up with “Thinkalike”.
Montana Viewpoint has appeared in weekly and online newspapers across Montana for over 30 years. Jim Elliott served sixteen years in the Montana Legislature as a state representative and state senator. He lives on his ranch in Trout Creek.