Recent John Locke Foundation speaker Charles Cooke shares with National Review Online readers his thoughts about the latest developments in political correctness on college campuses.
That so-called liberal students are the problem here should come as no great surprise. And yet, for all the unconfined joy that conservatives will take from such clear and unadulterated admissions of this fact, the important part of [professor Edward] Schlosser’s essay in fact lies in the first clause of its headline, not the second. We already knew that our present discontent is the fault of the lunatic Left and its many young acolytes. What we did not know, however, is that their nominal allies within the academic and journalistic establishments would have such an early breaking point. If you want to take something crucial away from this story, notice who is doing the mourning: “I’m a liberal professor . . . ”
… I am not at all convinced that this is a sign that the “most recent wave of political correctness is cresting.” Rather, I suspect that it is merely in the process of mutating into a form in which it is less obviously damaging to progressive interests. That “backlash” that David notes? It’s not really a backlash at all. It’s a rearguard action. And that “concern” that we are supposedly hearing from Jezebel and The Nation? It is not the product of intellectual honesty or of a more general desire to institute academic liberty on campus; it’s a self-serving attempt to fight back against those revolutionaries who are eating their own. Here, Fredrik DeBoer’s horrified observation that “many good, impressionable young people run screaming from left-wing politics because they are excoriated the first second they step mildly out of line” is instructive. Of course Jonathan Chait is turning against political correctness and campus self-indulgence. Of course Vox’s editor, Ezra Klein, is now peddling lefty academics who are willing to stand up to the mob. Of course the good denizens of Jezebel are beginning to wonder aloud whether a feminism that eats the likes of Laura Kipnis is useful. If neo-McCarthyism “becomes a salient part of liberal politics,” Schlosser writes in his conclusion, then “liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.” The American Left has started to rebel at the exact moment that its own interests are being hurt? Naturally. This isn’t about standards; it’s about power.
