Meanwhile, in the lunatic asylum on the Left...
The alternative to hard-core troglodyte Trumpist seems to be the equally deranged third-wave feminist. The rise of the protectionist, authoritarian "conservative" seems to be matched by the dawn of the illiberal "liberal."
Traditional, pro-freedom conservatives and traditionally inclusivist "progressives" continue to exist, of course. But to an increasing degree, they are not only drowned out but intimidated into complicit silence by the irrationalists who have hijacked the two great tendencies of American
political thought.
I am so bugged by the death of American conservatism and the supine acquiescence of rank-and-file Republicans in the takeover of their party by an ideology which is the mirror image of everything it traditionally stood for that I tend these days to neglect the opposite form of insanity, the rise of the totalitarian Left. And it is indeed totalitarian. Just weeks ago, we were exposed to the bizarre phenomenon of students at Yale being so threatened by a timid memo suggesting that students ought not to be overly paranoid about the political correctness of their Halloween costume that its author was forced to resign. And an even more egregious example of the same phenomenon took place recently in Ontario.
Canada- a land where one can run afoul of the law by hurting someone's feelings- has gone much further down the road to the suppression of free expression than has the United States. So it stands to reason that the campus totalitarianism which is rife in this country would be at least as pronounced in our neighbor to the North. Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo was recently the scene of a controversy which would have left academics of a previous generation aghast.
Lindsay Shepherd, a teaching assistant in Communications at Laurier, committed the sin of showing her students a five-minute segment of a debate between two professors over the use of gendered pronouns. The topic under discussion was the use of 'they' as an inclusive singular. That in itself, it seems, might have been permissible. But unforgivably, she failed to preface it with an explanation to her students as to which side of the debate was morally right!
For that, she was reprimanded by the faculty! Ironically, she recorded the interview at which this took place- and it turned out that she agreed with them that gender-inclusive pronouns should be used! She simply didn't see it as her place to tell her students what to think. She was naive enough to see her role as a neutral presenter of facts to students who, being possessed of minds of their own, were capable of making judgments about them! And this was grounds for reprimand!
Far from being harbors of free expression dedicated to the unbiased search for truth, universities have become centers for indoctrinating students in an ideology which sees everything through a lens of gender and race and class and sexual orientation and, above all, victimhood. They have largely abandoned their role as places where truth is to be sought and have become places where young people are indoctrinated in what they should and should not believe, even to the point where deviating opinions have to be plainly labeled as heresy if the tender minds of those being brainwashed should happen to be inadvertently exposed to them!
I believe that the issue of whether this sort of thing ought to even be tolerated at state institutions, where faculty salaries are paid and the physical plant maintained by taxpayer money, is one which ought to be very closely examined. But the problem goes beyond the campus. It is no accident that in one study 62% of Democrats on college campuses (compared with 39% of Republicans and 45% of Independents) believe that shouting down a speaker one disagrees with is acceptable behavior.
It's troubling when President Trump speaks of changing the laws so that news media can be sued for "purposely false" reporting, or indulges his compulsion to make up convenient "facts" and statistics on the spur of the moment while dismissing any unfavorable information, regardless of the facts, as "fake news." It seems that the one institution in our society- the university- which is supposed to be most concerned with what is true and least concerned with what is orthodox has also given up its search for truth in pursuit of an ideologically congenial fantasy. And when the alternative to an authoritarian administration of the Right is an authoritarian ideology of the Left, freedom and truth alike have fallen on hard times indeed.
And yet that is where we find ourselves in America today. A vast, inchoate mass of people spanning the center of the political spectrum and still concerned about truth and freedom continue to exist. But we have little voice and no real vehicle for advancing the very ideals upon which the Republic was founded and which, until fairly recently, liberals and conservatives alike embraced, differing only as to the means by which truth and freedom should be pursued.
The Centrist Project, as well as Stand Up Republic and other groups dedicated to centrist ideals and the values for which the Founders stood and for which both political parties have stood in the past, are a beginning. But our republic faces a grim reality in which both political parties and both wings of the political spectrum are in the hands of authoritarians. Freedom is threatened in the United States and indeed throughout the Western world by the Left and the Right alike.
If the experiment begun by the Enlightenment and the American Revolution is going to even continue in any meaningful way, much less thrive, it's up to those of us in the Center to make common cause regardless of whether we think of ourselves as conservatives or as progressives and fight for the things we hold most dear. If we don't, "conservatives" who are enemies of freedom and "progressives" who are the enemies of fairness will be the death of them.
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