Death Squad

University Presidents are not the only idiots in the Democratic Party

I was never much of a lefty. I was “of the left” in my student days—at Penn, of all places, same year as Trump, but not Wharton. I was a vehement supporter of the civil rights movement, vehemently opposed to the war in Vietnam. I was also “of the left” during my early career at Boston’s Real Paper and then Rolling Stone. I marched, but was never violent. I never romanticized the Viet Cong or demonized our troops. I worshiped at the shrine of Dr. King, but thought The Black Panthers were showboats taking advantage of guilty white liberals. There were many people to my left, members of SDS and later, the Weather Underground; I thought they were counter-productive performance artists, children a bit too angry at their parents. There were exceptions: I admired David Dellinger and Tom Hayden, who was a colleague at Rolling Stone and became a friend. (Another important left lesson: For the next 40 years, my immediate editors were almost always women, and they made a convincing case for their particular gender style of integrity, intelligence and, dare I say it, moral superiority.)

As I’ve written here before, my political journey began when I covered the busing crisis in Boston and couldn’t find any black parents who were in favor of sending their kids to be schooled in violent white working-class neighborhoods like Southie. The government’s clumsy, if well-intentioned, attempt at social engineering was a disaster. I could no longer assume left was right. I began to take each issue as it came, taking a side only after extensive reporting; the world did not fit any ideology. I saw how tenuous civilization was, how easily it could be destroyed in Lebanon in 1978, which also pushed me toward the center. By the turn of the 1980s, I was writing pieces for Rolling Stone about how destructive left-thinking was for the Democratic Party.

Which brings us to now. My firm belief is that the Democratic Party is the only plausible bulwark against Trump’s Fascist Populism—and my other firm belief is this: that a major obstacle to success in 2024 is the Democratic Party’s insular, self-righteous, identity-addled academic left. (Yes, Biden’s physical appearance of advanced age is a problem, too, but not as serious as the party’s perpetual indulgence of a menagerie of identity “activists,” who are singularly devoid of perspective and common sense.)

The academic left is not nearly the national problem the populist right is, but lefties fuel the fire. The academic left still doesn’t understand that it lost the fundamental economic battle of the 20th century: free enterprise v. socialism. Capitalism, when carefully regulated, proved to be the greatest anti-poverty program in human history, and also the driving force of individual freedom. This is a far more powerful narrative than the colonists v. oppressed scheme that has come to dominate elite college campuses, although there are obvious elements of truth to the case against the West. The European powers didn’t invent slavery, but they did perfect racism. They were the most brutal conquerors in human history; they killed on an industrial scale; they exploited local resources; they left a mess of straight-line borders and dependent states, especially in the Middle East, as they retreated after World War II.

BUT…

They also left an intellectual tradition, classical liberalism, that provided the path toward human freedom and dignity. No matter what the campus activists pretend, the wisdom of the western canon is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Liberalism, and the ensuing notion of human rights, made it possible for members of the left—and right—to express their most chuckleheaded views without fear of punishment. I’d like to require anyone who’d champion Hamas to spend a few weeks in Iran, where such rights do not exist, and talk to the remarkable women there about who are the oppressors and who the oppressed.

The West championed the scientific method, building on the achievements of the brief efflorescence of Arab mathematicians in and around Baghdad 1400 years ago. The Western discipline of experimentation and devotion to facts, as opposed to superstition, made life safer and healthier in the world’s most impoverished places. I’m all for herbal remedies, but it’s a good thing that doctors replaced witch doctors as our health care delivery system. And yes, the West gave the world capitalism—the smartest, most effective way to create general prosperity in human history. (And the West also created a human rights tradition, within capitalism, that enabled workers to unionize and rebel against exploitation.)

The academic left doesn’t assign proportionate value to these achievements. It exults in anger. There is an Oedipal prejudice to the campus agitators: rebellion of the righteous children against their insensate parents. The Jungian archetype of puer aeternus is a too-accurate description of far too many baby boom faculty members who fled to academia to avoid the real world. They have corrupted academic life. They have created a system where sensitivity is more important than knowledge.

And now we have the spectacle of the Ivy League presidents—including from my alma mater—belatedly coming to the realization that speech censorship is complicated. Let me be clear: I think students have the right to be as stupid as they want. They have the right to espouse evil theories like Jew-hatred. I think it’s almost always a good thing on college campuses when sensibilities are offended; the world is rife with bullying and harassment, a wise person learns to confront and defeat them. I’m glad Jewish students are getting to experience anti-Semitism; it’ll make them tougher, smarter, more able to defend themselves in the real world. The fact that colleges have made a major effort to buffer their students from rude and ugly speakers and ideas—and sometimes from high sophisticated but inconvenient thoughts—contradicts their essential purpose: to teach students how to deal with intellectual and social adversity. They have replaced rigor with triggers, taught their students to turn away from serious discussion of competing ideas…if it makes them uncomfortable, which is a recipe for the collapse of democracy.

To be clear: Campus anti-Semitism is disgusting, but it’s not the problem here. The problem is that those university presidents were supine in the face of left-wing intolerance, until Hamas came along. They—and too many book publishers and news editors—caved when leftists successfully went to war against speakers, and teachers, and op-ed writers, who didn’t quite manage the delicate dance through the minefields of political correctness. And worse, they allowed their institutions to peddle the most disgraceful ideological perversions as fact.

This week, Pamela Paul of the New York Times wrote a powerful column about the intellectual sewage on offer at Columbia University:

During orientation at the Columbia School of Social Work at Columbia University, the country’s oldest graduate program for aspiring social workers, students are given a glossary with “100+ common terms you may see or hear used in class, during discussions and at your field placements.”

Among the A’s: “agent and target of oppression” (“members of the dominant social groups privileged by birth or acquisition, who consciously or unconsciously abuse power against the members or targets of oppressed groups”) and “Ashkenormativity” (“a system of oppression that favors white Jewish folx, based on the assumption that all Jewish folx are Ashkenazi, or from Western Europe”). [Note the use of “folx” rather than “folks,” yet another arrogant derangement of the language, in the same league as “Latinx.”—jk]

The C’s define “capitalism” as “a system of economic oppression based on class, private property, competition and individual profit. See also: carceral system, class, inequality, racism.” “Colonization” is “a system of oppression based on invasion and control that results in institutionalized inequality between the colonizer and the colonized. See also: Eurocentric, genocide, Indigeneity, oppression.”

And:

When a student group, Columbia Social Workers 4 Palestine, announced a teach-in about “the significance of the Palestinian counteroffensive on Oct. 7 and the centrality of revolutionary violence to anti-imperialism,” Mijal Bitton, a Jewish spiritual leader, asked on X, “Imagine receiving services from a Columbia-educated social worker who believes burning families, killing babies, and gang-raping women is a ‘counteroffensive’ and ‘revolutionary violence [central] to anti-imperialism.’”

Social work is essential work, especially in a society where prosperity and permissiveness have fractured social coherence. The job of a social worker is to help pained and damaged people toward health. But Columbia social workers are being indoctrinated to make people crazier, to use therapy methods designed to make their patients more angry and insecure, to further destabilize society.

Much of this, as Bari Weiss argued in an essay in The Free Press, has happened because Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs have overtaken our society. The hapless president of Harvard is a product of the DEI selection process; her stated goal has been to level the academic playing field rather than celebrate the craggy, dangerous peaks of human thought. DEI, Weiss argues, is camouflage: The words diversity, equity and inclusion sound nice. But they mask an ideology that:

does not believe that America is a good country—at least no better than China or Iran. It calls itself progressive, but it does not believe in progress; it is explicitly anti-growth. It claims to promote “equity,” but its answer to the challenge of teaching math or reading to disadvantaged children is to eliminate math and reading tests. It demonizes hard work, merit, family, and the dignity of the individual. 

An ideology that pathologizes these fundamental human virtues is one that seeks to undermine what makes America exceptional.

It is time to end DEI for good. No more standing by as people are encouraged to segregate themselves. No more forced declarations that you will prioritize identity over excellence. No more compelled speech. No more going along with little lies for the sake of being polite.

I sometimes wince at the exaggerated fears of those—mostly freedom-loving academics—who suggest that the DEI left is destroying America. There are a lot of factors to our national decline. But the values of the DEI movement, which Weiss describes accurately above, mirror too great a chunk of the Democratic Party. The notion of “equity,” as opposed to “equality” has slithered into the rhetoric of the Biden Administration: there is a crucial difference between equity, which pursues equal results (which is impossible) and the equality of opportunity (a righteous goal). The DEI sensibility has prevented too many Democrats from uttering this simple sentence: Two parents are usually better than one. Or this one: Sexual fluidity should not be taught to pre-pubescent children. Or this one: Violent criminals belong in jail. The DEI mindset is, I believe, what right-wing populists are angriest about.

And not just Trumpers: The Democrats’ over-emphasis on DEI issues is why the white working-class has fled the Party. It is why significant numbers of Latinos, and now blacks, are countenancing a vote for an American fascist in 2024.

The members of the minuscule left-wing “Squad” in the House of Representatives were an embarrassment even before too many of their members expressed a distasteful tolerance for Hamas terrorism. Several, including my Congressman Jamaal Bowman, became members of Democratic Socialists of America. There are only two reasons why anyone would call themself a “socialist” these days: Either they didn’t read the history of the 20th century or they just want to piss people off. (Bernie Sanders is a great example of the latter.) You talk to these folks and they express admiration for the Scandinavian style of governance—which, essentially, is capitalism with good health care. Real socialism—government control of the means of production—has been an unmitigated disaster everywhere it’s been tried. There is a role for government in economics: regulation, advanced research, progressive taxation. But things get dicey when government tries to do more than that.

Happily, most members of the Squad, including Bowman, are facing primary opposition from moderate Democrats this year; at the very least, it may force some of the smarter ones, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to reassess their sillier and most destructive positions, on issues like immigration, crime and pronouns.

I’ve often written about how important it is for Republicans to take a vocal stand against Trump. It is equally important for Democrats, starting with Joe Biden, to stand against the imperious censorship and implicit authoritarianism of the DEI sensibility. I don’t know if Bari Weiss’s goal can be achieved—DEI has become a major industry, and not just on college campuses—but pushback from moderate liberals needs to start now. It’s not just good politics. It’s essential for democracy.

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