About three years ago, Politico ran a story that piqued my interest, as it anticipated the meaningful comeback of classic liberalism. Conservatives who were disenchanted by the "Trumpifying" of the Republican Party, and who believed that the term conservative had become subsumed in the former president's populist approach, were gravitating towards the label that had long been associated with the country's Founding Fathers.
The same could be said for more liberal-minded citizens who might on the one hand eschew the traditional morality or religious overtones of conservative social policy, but on the other were also disgusted by the emerging woke political correctness of neo-liberals.
The Politico authors went on to define classical liberalism as "spendthrift, hawkish on the social safety net (think Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, etc.), and willing to defend to the death the right to voice an unpopular opinion, whether they agree with it or not."
It's that last point that caught my attention then, and that still holds my interest today – the "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" philosophy of free expression. If that is what we're going to being calling traditional "liberalism," then it is absolutely imperative that it be understood there exist no more illiberal participants in American society today than Gen-Z and millennial activists who so eagerly claim to be liberal.
The Hoover Institute's Niall Ferguson tweeted the depressing trend of American students who boldly and proudly describe themselves to be liberal while holding reactionary tendencies when it comes to any idea they don't like.
"Owning the cons," or perhaps we should call it what it is, "silencing the cons," has become the favored approach of young political operatives on college campuses (and beyond) these days. Gone is the laudable approach of defeating speech you don't like with more speech, better speech; in is the lazy and dangerous approach of defeating speech you don't like by removing the speaker's tongue. I think it's necessary that the young people walking such a path understand that isn't liberalism, it's fascism.
Some of those numbers shared by Ferguson are simply staggering. A full 85% – a near unanimity – of young, self-professed liberal students believe in tattling on their professor if they find his ideas offensive.
I've never been an active supporter of tenure for campus academics given their reputation for abusing the privilege. But statistics like this demonstrate its usefulness. What hope is there for any pursuit of "universals" – the supposed objective of a "university" – if all ideas that challenge the mob are outlawed?
And speaking of the mob, nearly 80% of these "liberal" young people believe their own classmates should be subject to university discipline if other students find what they say to be offensive.
Again, that's textbook fascism, which more than a few commenters recognized:
I certainly don't intend to make a mountain out of a molehill, and I do believe that there is some ambiguity in the way the questions in this survey were formed and posed. For instance, a professor using a provocative, racist term to describe a student in his class is offensive and out of place. It contributes nothing to intellectual exchange or scholarly dialogue. Any reasonable person knows it should be reported.
But being assigned to read Bastiat's "The Law," expected to react to a Jordan Peterson lecture, or evaluate the reasoned critiques of critical theory are not offensive. That's what happens in a free society that thrives on the pursuit of truth, a desire for wisdom, and a commitment to open-mindedness.
For years, growing up as a conservative, I would have to fend off uninformed attacks of those on the left who accused me of belonging to a rigid, dogmatic ideology, of approaching life with a narrow-minded tunnel vision that denied the experiences and value in competing thoughts and ideas. I remember the finger-pointing accusations that politically engaged Christians were "the American Taliban."
Who knew it was just a prophetic projection of their own predilections all along?
