The Closing of the Liberal Mind - a book review
In 2014 students and faculty at Rutgers University protested the planned commencement address from Condoleezza Rice. The protesters claimed that the first black woman to serve as secretary of state, national security adviser and Stanford University provost was an unsuitable speaker because of her association with the administration of George W. Bush. In the collective mind of the campus left, Ms. Rice was, at best, an enabler of a serial warmonger. In the end she bowed out, writing, “commencement should be a time of joyous celebration” and the school’s “invitation to me to speak has become a distraction for the university community at this very special time.”
Two years later not even Democratic female secretaries of state are considered speech-worthy. Students and professors at Scripps College, an all-female liberal-arts school in Claremont, Calif., protested the selection of Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, to deliver this year’s address. The liberal feminist icon is, according to the protesters, a “war criminal” and a “genocide enabler.” Some 28 professors signed a letter saying they wouldn’t attend the ceremony. To her credit, Ms. Albright didn’t bow to the pressure. “People have a right to state their views,” she said. “I also think they have a duty to listen to people that they might disagree with.”
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How did liberals become so hopelessly illiberal? In “The Closing of the Liberal Mind,” Kim R. Holmes suggests that “the loss of historical memory as to what liberalism was is actually a key to understanding what it is today.” Mr. Holmes does an admirable job of reminding readers of that intellectual history, drawing a line from the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill to the original progressive spirit of Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson to the Third Way liberalism of John Rawls and Bill Clinton that synthesized Wilsonian progressivism with Mill’s classical liberalism. This tradition is communitarian, pluralistic, rational and universal. It idealizes freedom of thought and speech, distrusts institutional power, and believes in the goodness of humanity.
Today’s postmodern progressives have only superficial similarities with these liberal forebears. They are more accurately the descendants of radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison; radical egalitarians, like the utopian socialist communities of the 19th century; and egalitarian anarchists like Lysander Spooner and Benjamin R. Tucker. Like those radicals, postmodern progressives “sanction the use of coercive methods, either through legal means or public shaming rituals, to deny certain people their rights and civil liberties . . . in ways that undermine American democracy and the rule of law.”
Perhaps the fundamental difference between yesterday’s liberals and today’s postmodern progressives is each side’s conception of truth. Liberals believe truth is external and can be determined through reason. A good liberal uses his reason to achieve justice and equality for all. But postmodern progressives are moral relativists. For them, truth is internal, discerned by and specific to particular individuals. Today a good progressive defends the individual’s internal truth—particularly if the person is an “oppressed minority”—against all foes, including reason. Small wonder that the postmodern left has turned on its own.
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Look no further than the effort to gain power over language and debate on college campuses, through concepts like microagressions, trigger warnings and safe spaces, which police the expression of ideas. This is done in the name of inclusiveness and diversity, but in reality it’s a demonstration of power over those who think differently.
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Mr. Holmes is a conservative, and while he clearly takes the withering of true liberalism seriously, more effective critiques of the left’s illiberalism will need to come from liberals themselves. There’s some good news on this front. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered a blistering critique of safe spaces in his recent University of Michigan commencement speech. President Barack Obama, who has warned that political correctness is a “recipe for dogmatism,” blasted the Condoleezza Rice protests at Rutgers during his commencement address this month at the school. Ms. Albright in her speech at Scripps challenged the protesters to “use our opinions to start discussions, not to end them.” The door of the liberal mind may reopen again.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/progressivisms-macroaggressions-1463950160
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