G.R. O’Brian writes at the Federalist website that today’s college campuses need more than a return to free speech and diversity of thought.
While conservatives have in the past year or so found common cause with mainstream liberals such as Jonathan Haidt and Jonathan Chait in combating this new status quo, the bar of success should not be set so low as to consider not being silenced as a victory. Conservatives must move beyond seeking to coexist with this insanity to challenging the current higher education system as it currently exists if they truly want to suppress the damage these institutions are causing our society.
An average college student at most state and leading private universities will witness displays targeting Israel for war crimes, warnings of an ominous “rape culture,” and complaints of “white privilege.” Such demonstrations express an ideology that has been growing in the academy but has only recently entered the cultural mainstream.
The terms “New New Left” or “Academic Left” might be appropriate aliases for this ideology. It evolved from the New Left of the 1960s, adding third-wave feminism, the LGBT movement, the consolidation of post-colonialism, and “privilege theory,” which surfaced in the 1990s. Its greatest claims should be familiar to most of us by now: gender is socially constructed rather than based in biology; the West is uniquely despicable for its history of imperialism; racial identity rather than individual action determines guilt and responsibility; and capitalism has increased rather than decreased poverty and exploitation.
The pillars of this “New New Left” naturally merge because each divides the world into oppressors and oppressed: whites versus “persons of color,” Occident versus Orient, men versus women, “cisgender” versus queer, etc. To a large degree, it is a Marxist divide, but with race and gender in the place of class. The oppressor versus oppressed dichotomy leads social justice warriors either to believe they themselves are oppressed, and thus to assume a victim status, or to act as “allies” of their victimized comrades by checking their privilege.
Because of this sense of victimhood, students feel justified in attempting to shut down the free exchange of ideas or retreating to safe spaces, as certain ideas could not only further harm the oppressed, but may potentially strip them of their victim status. Their unfamiliarity with operating in an environment of intellectual disagreement also makes these “social justice warriors” perceive contrary opinions as assaults on their intellectual security. The traditional rules of public discourse therefore do not apply to them. Their cause is too morally important. To allow dissenting opinion is to allow oppression itself.
Conservative’s gradual abandonment of the university has meant many fields of study are not merely tilted to the Left in faculty make-up but inherently leftist in their core ideas: gender studies, ethnic studies, LGBT studies, sociology, and anthropology, just to name a few.
