Some years ago, I was invited to give a university lecture on the importance of free speech. I gave a competent presentation but it lacked passion, not because I didn’t believe but because I didn’t quite see the threat or the pressing need even to address the topic. Free speech had always been in my adult life a non-negotiable principle of civilized life.
Same with the freedom of the press and religion. These are just things we believe. Only deranged psychopaths and dangerous ideological fanatics would dispute them.
What I had not understood was what had become a daily part of life in most major universities at the time: the punishment of dissent, the restriction on ideas, the muzzling of students, the intimidation of the faculty, and the gradual takeover of campus life by politically motivated administrators who were determined to blot out certain views so that others would ascend.
Continue reading “Is Liberalism a Lost Cause?”
Why have liberals become so intolerant? They think nothing of denying someone as prominent as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from speaking on a college campus. They embrace activists who shut down speakers. They publicly shame people for the slightest deviation from liberal orthodoxy.
For them everything from science to the law is “settled” once they get into power. Progress is a one-way street. Their mindset is the very definition of closed-mindedness.
The easy answer would be “they are all bad people.” But frankly that’s a cop-out. Not all liberals are bad people, any more than all conservatives are angels. No doubt among the fevered minions of liberal activists there are people with, shall we say, psychological issues, but that doesn’t explain why so many otherwise reasonable people are so beholden to liberalism as an ideology.