But who speaks for the American idea?
Madison is rightly remembered and revered as the father of the Constitution. But it's a lesser-known Founding Father, a planter from Fairfax County, Virginia, who brought what Madison wrought to perfection. George Mason (right) is remembered as the father of the Bill of Rights.
It's a document which has amazingly few partisans these days, being under assault from the Left and the Right alike, from scruffy campus radicals to the White House itself.
Ir's passed largely unnoticed- at least few places I've been reading have noticed it- but October of 2017 marks the centennial of the Russian Revolution, the beginning of a bizarre episode in human history marked by a movement seeking to liberate humanity by enslaving the individual and to create social justice by the systematic application of injustice. In Russia and China alone, more innocent individuals were sacrificed on the altar of atheistic Communism than have been martyred by all the other regimes and ideologies and religious movements of history put together- a fact which our current bunch of pop atheists never, to my amusement, seem to notice when decrying the crimes of Christianity and other forms of theism.
In Russia in 1917, in China in the '40's, and throughout the Third World right up to the verge of the new millennium "movements of national liberation" kept striving to liberate the human spirit by enslaving humans. It has been hard to miss the point that in those circles Marxism-Leninism has in every important sense actually been precisely a religion. It even saw itself as representing principles inherent in the nature of the universe, a set of transcendent principles in which devotees put their faith no less than a Christian puts his in the Gospel, the Jew in the Torah, or the Muslim in the Koran.The details have varied from nation to nation and era to era, but it has consistently presented itself in the form of an all-pervasive worldview dominated by what has generally been a ruthlessly imposed orthodoxy. In no corner of Catholic Spain in the Middle Ages or Lutheran Germany in the Age of Orthodoxy or Shite Islam in modern Iran has so much attention been given to doctrinal uniformity, or heresy suppressed with more zeal than in the "people's democracies" of the 20th and 21st Centuries,
The same is true of "Intersectionality" and the identity politics of the modern college campus. J. Oliver Conroy has written a thoughtful- and frightening- piece for Quillette on what happened when a touring group of academics- banned from the campus of American University for promoting the threatening ideology of pluralism and the free interchange of ideas- came to Princeton.
The idea that the presentation of unwelcome ideas represents an actual assault, a crime against members of "oppressed" classes, is the illiberal and frankly rather funny premise of today's identity politics on college campuses. I'm sorry (well, actually I'm not sorry, not even a little), but every time I hear some pampered son or daughter of privilege complain about the savage "microaggressions" represented by the presentation of alternative attitudes and worldviews which violate the orthodoxy of the religion of the contemporary American university campus, the image of Monty Python's mud-spattered peasant spouting Marxist drivel and complaining that King Arthur is "oppressing" him by saying things he doesn't like springs to mind. I despise the term "snowflake" because of the unsavory and equally authoritarian element in the American body politic which is so fond of using it, but it fits the contemporary campus Left like a glove. It's hard not to laugh at and mock people who think that they will melt if confronted with an unwelcome idea!
Not just gallons but tankers of ink have been employed in pointing out that the entire rationale of the university is the free exchange and interplay of ideas, and that the premise which drives the politics of today's university campus represents the negation of the entire reason for its existence. But as absurd and even comic as today's radical Left (and not a little of mainline "progressivism") might be, it's anything but funny. Educators and even employees of private corporations are losing their jobs because of their religious beliefs or simply because they hold perfectly defensible ideas which constitute heresy in the eyes of the contemporary inquisitors of "progressivism." Lives are being ruined. The notion that nobody has a right to disagree with today's radicals isn't merely an attack on the concept of the university. It's an assault on freedom itself.
There was always a kind of comic opera element in the Far Right's paranoia about communism in the '50's and '60's. but it shared the same distinctly unfunny downside. It had a human cost. Ironic that the ideological descendants of Joe McCarthy's victims should today be McCarthy's successors.
In the early 'Eighties, I was a student at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa, at the time an institution of The American Lutheran Church. The campus was dominated by a virtually universal far-Left tinge to almost every aspect of its common life. Conservatives and moderates soon learned to lie low, not for fear of persecution (in fact, Wartburg was commendably unintimidating in its attitude toward dissent) but simply because of the mere fact that to be visibly different was inevitably to become something of an outcast no matter how generous the personal treatment of the minority might be by the majority. "Inclusiveness" and "diversity" were the watchwords of the hour- and, after all, it's difficult to espouse either while stifling dissent.
But today's radicals have no such inhibitions. As Conroy makes clear, they are quite open in their scorn for diversity. Everyone must conform. Ideas which run counter to the university's secular religion represent a threat to justice and fairness and so must be treated with relentless injustice and unfairness. The politics of identity is in many ways the mirror opposite of the ideology of "diversity." I often wonder how my "progressive" professors and classmates reconcile the conflict between the universalism of their worldview and the rabid particularism of the identity politics which dominates today's Left. As Conroy points out, today's campus radicals are quite open in their scorn for the values of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Error has no rights. The liberation of the oppressed demands the subjugation of everybody else. Dangerous ideas must be not merely be refuted but suppressed. All power to the Soviets!
Today's campus is 1917 all over again. The oppressed cannot be set free except at the cost of freedom itself, and justice can be achieved only by sacrificing fairness. War is peace, and ignorance is strength. As Conroy observes, facts are regarded with contempt if they get in the way of the more essential and basic "truth" of The Ideology. Post-modernism has run amuck; truth, as Nietzsche once argued, is now nothing more or less than the will to power. The purpose of education is not to enlighten, but to indoctrinate. And it's not just on campus that the Left has come to be the enemy of everything it stood for as recently as my sojourn at Wartburg Seminary.
Even then, post-modernism was nibbling at the "progressive" concept of truth. Today, the "truth" has become a matter not of factual accuracy but of ideological orthodoxy.
But that's not the scariest thing about the current state of American political ideology. That would be the weakness of any real opposition to the essential failings of that worldview. Donald Trump scored most heavily with Americans sick and tired of the unreason and intolerance of "political correctness," and a great deal of the danger he and his movement pose resides in the degree to which they are motivated by the very same presuppositions! "Political correctness" is attacked by the Trumpistas not because it demands that truth and freedom and fairness and reason should be subordinated to the demands of ideology, but because it gives unwelcome lip-service to "snowflake" ideals like tolerance and diversity!
"Political correctness" is confused among the Trumpistas with the very decency and good manners it fails so conspicuously to promote. As a result, the disciples of Donald Trump simply cannot see how much he- and they themselves- have in common with the very people they scorn. Like fascism and Marxism, AntiFa and the Alt-Right are in practice far more similar than they are different.
On the Trumpist, nationalist, populist Right, it's the "snowflake," not the "oppressor," who has no rights. It's the immigrant and the foreigner rather than the One Percent who must be ground into the dust if true freedom is to be achieved. It's the "cuck" and the Leftist who must be shouted down and silenced. The danger, after all, is not- as Americans have traditionally believed- in the suppression of the free exchange of ideas, but as for the "politically correct" Third Wave Feminist, so for the disciple of Donald Trump: in the expression of dangerous ideas.
I don't want to overstate my case. It's not as if the Republican party has bought completely into the ideology of the Alt-Right any more than the Democratic party has swallowed the ideology of AntiFa and the modern campus totalitarians whole. And neither side seems to have the slightest difficulty in identifying in the other the very failings of which it is itself guilty.
But most Republicans today are, to borrow the jargon of the McCarthy era, "fellow travelers" of the authoritarians of the Right just as most Democrats are "fellow travelers" of those on the Left. Nationalism (as opposed to patriotism), a kind of social Darwinism, and populism color the life of the younger of our two political parties as thoroughly as political correctness, intellectual nihilism, and sentimentality substituting for thought defines the older. The difference is that one can find people like John McCain and Ben Sasse and Jeff Flake and Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham and John Kasich and John Huntsman and Mitt Romney and even the Presidents Bush in the Republican party, while it's hard to find a similar democratic resistance movement among the Democrats. Ironically, in the age of left-wing authoritarianism, just as when "diversity" and "inclusiveness" were all the rage, the Republicans seem in practice to be more ideologically diverse and inclusive than are the Democrats!
Thee Sasses and the McCains and the Flakes are outcasts among Republicans in the Age of Trump, but at least they exist. The Democrats cannot point to a similar group of loyalists to their party's founding principles. That does not mean that the Republican party is any more viable a vehicle for reclaiming the values we all once shared than is the Democratic party; in their embrace of Donald Trump, the Republicans have, in my view, burned their bridges to becoming once again the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower and even of Robert Taft and Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. The repudiation of their heritage is at the same time too sudden and too complete for them to reclaim it anytime soon.
I've made no secret of my conviction that if the American idea is going to be reclaimed from the authoritarians on both sides of the political spectrum which dominate our national parties and our national dialog, a new political party will have to emerge from the Center. The Republicans and the Democrats are too compromised both ideologically and institutionally to be of much use in that regard. But whatever form a return to our founding ideals as a nation- a political Reformation, one might almost say, like the one begun 500 years ago Tuesday by Martin Luther- the truly worrisome thing is that neither political party and neither end of the political spectrum today is conducive to such a movement. We are a nation torn between two opposite parties of authoritarians, of Nietschians for whom the will to power rather than right and freedom and justice as we have traditionally understood them has become the be-all and end-all.
The question which lies at the center of this political era is one which is difficult to answer right now. The authoritarian faux-progressivism which defines the contemporary American Left and the equally authoritarian faux-conservatism which has become the practical ideology of the current American Right leaves nobody to speak for the idea that facts and reality actually matter, and not just the will to power; that as long as all ideas can be freely expressed, no idea can be truly dangerous; that freedom consists of freedom, not of one's preferred form of repression; that fairness means the same treatment for everybody, not in preferential treatment for one class of more deserving people as opposed to another class of less-deserving ones; and that the values embodied in the Bill of Rights are worth preserving.
The major question of the age, whose answer is by no means clear, is that of who, in the midst of the struggle between two authoritarian and profoundly un-American political ideologies, will speak for the American idea.
Applications for the position are solicited.
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