Trump in the looking glass

The New Neo Posted on by

Recommended reading. Here’s how the article begins:

To his legion of obsessed enemies, it is a fortunate thing that Donald Trump owns his own Elba, otherwise known as Mar-A-Lago. Not quite an island, but a place where America’s Bonaparte can be safely exiled, secluded, and sealed-off from the general populace. Carefully watched and heavily guarded, they imagine he too is approaching madness; angrily stalking the grounds, bitterly rehashing his humiliating defeat. In his gilded quarantine, the nation is for the moment safe from that highly contagious and genuinely dangerous virus that threatens to infect more and more of the country: MAGA-1.

The luxuriously incarcerated ex-president presently consults with a small number of carefully screened visitors, so in between rounds of golf (did Napoleon even know his handicap?) he meets with former allies, quietly weighing his options for a possible escape from the confines of the resort and return to active political life. All the while, the guardians of his moral imprisonment keep a wary eye on his goings on; designing new obstacles to any suspected flight from captivity or, alternatively, plotting to make his post-presidency as miserable as his plush surroundings permit.

The author goes on to make some serious suggestions for Trump, who is due to give a speech tomorrow at CPAC:

If this is the guy who shows up at CPAC, merely playing to the resentments of a crowd filled with justifiable anger at how its leader was so shabbily treated, and how its beliefs are constantly mocked and mischaracterized, he’ll be confirming his bitterest opponents’ assessment of him, and will in fact, be doing their work in marginalizing conservatism…

But if he speaks in the voice of the leader of a movement that’s bigger than everyone in the room, including himself, then he’ll ensure that this vital fight will continue in the proper terms and in its legitimate context: on the issues, as a patriotic struggle for the principles upon which this nation should stand. Not as a vindication of one man, however much he’s been genuinely wronged.

The ideological captivity and moral blindness that motivates Biden and his cohorts to damage our nation by their comprehensive, almost suicidal reversal of sensible Trump administration policies, must take center stage

In line with that, I see another relevant article: Trump plans “forward-looking” speech at CPAC:

Former President Donald Trump plans to lay out his vision for America and give his assessment of Biden administration policies during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Trump senior adviser Jason Miller has said…

Trump, who is a featured speaker at the conservative conference, will express his concerns about the direction President Joe Biden has taken since coming into office…

Trump, he said, will talk about the future of the Republican Party, his “America First” agenda, and lessons learned in the 2020 election campaign…

“I think the only way election reform issues are going to come up are in the context of what reforms that we need to go and do in advance of 2022 and 2024,” Miller said. “There are some real concerns Article II violations, things that we need to go and address with state legislatures, certain state legislatures around the country.”

Good.

“Culturally responsive” Illinois teacher training

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the situation in Illinois regarding the education of teachers across the entire state:

…[I]n December, the Illinois State Board of Education, or ISBE, passed a new rule that would require culturally responsive teaching and leading standards to be incorporated in all Illinois teacher preparation programs. Critics of the proposed standards have said they require educators to embrace left-leaning ideology and prioritize political and social activism in classrooms at a time when Illinois students are underperforming on basic skills tests…

Critics have pointed out that the requirements essentially impose an ideological litmus test on educators, making any teacher who does not espouse certain views unwelcome in Illinois schools. In their original form, the provisions were explicitly left-leaning, and educators were required to “embrace and encourage progressive viewpoints and perspectives.” After opponents of the new rule brought public attention to the language, the word “progressive” was replaced with “inclusive,” but this has not alleviated the concern that the standard is aimed at pushing a political agenda on Illinois educators and schools.

Yes, changing the language does not change the intent.

Critics of the new rule have also expressed concern that at a time when so many Illinois students are failing to achieve basic competency in reading and math – exacerbated by pandemic-related learning loss – pushing regulations on “politically-charged topics, including race, gender identity and the role of power, privilege and student activism” is not the proper focus of Illinois’ education establishment. As of 2019, only 38% of Illinois students in grades 3 through 8 met or exceeded Illinois Assessment of Readiness standards for English language arts, according to ISBE, and a mere 32% of students met or exceeded standards in math.

Ah, but first things first, and indoctrination in leftism is more important. In fact, the more ignorant the children are, the easier it will be to indoctrinate them. So the situation is win-win for the left.

Note also the predominance in the regulations of jargon that obfuscates the message, and probably bores most readers to tears. I would wager both things are purposeful:

Similarly, “leveraging student advocacy” is not necessarily a commonly accepted purpose of PreK-12 education among parents of schoolchildren, particularly when basic reading and computational skills are not being uniformly transmitted. The original version used the term “activism” rather than “advocacy” in this section, but “advocacy” is used as a synonym for activism elsewhere – for example, where the rule admonishes educators to be “aware of the effects of power and privilege and the need for social advocacy and social action.”

Nor are most parents likely aware that under the rule, teachers would be called on to “curate the curriculum” and work with students to “co-create content to include a counternarrative to dominant culture.” The standard further directs educators to “implement and integrate the wide spectrum and fluidity of identities in the curriculum” but does not provide specifics to give parents an indication of what this might mean for their children’s instruction.

On February 16, there was a vote in which the Illinois General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules had a chance to reject this program. You may be unsurprised at what happened:

Eight of the committee’s 12 members would have needed to vote to suspend the rule to prevent its implementation, and only the six Republican members voted to do so.

So all the Republicans voted “no” and all the Democrats voted “yes.”

I wonder what the teachers in Illinois who are not onboard with this leftism will do. Will they find another profession? Will they pretend to comply but sneak in a little heresy once they get into the classroom as teachers? And if so, what will happen to them then?

Compare and contrast:

New Hampshire lawmakers are debating a bill that would prevent educators from teaching about systemic racism and sexism in public schools and state-funded programs.

HB 544, titled an act “relative to the propagation of divisive topics,” seeks to limit public schools, organizations or state contractors from discussing topics related to racism and sexism, and would specifically ban teaching that the state of New Hampshire or the U.S. is racist or sexist. Lawmakers discussed the bill in a hearing of the Executive Departments and Administration Committee that began Feb. 11 and continued Thursday.

“This puts guidelines on what are the limits, especially under the auspices of the state apparatus, what are the limits in presuming that someone was born to be an oppressor or someone was born to be oppressed because of their sex,” said Rep. Keith Ammon, a Republican from New Boston, who introduced the bill. “If that’s the assumption we are going to make as a society, then we are never going to get to unity.”

New Hampshire is currently a purple state that votes Democrat on the national level (presidency, House representatives, and senators) and Republican on the state level (governor, state legislators). This sort of split personality means that it’s possible that the state will have voted for Biden, who rescinded Trump’s order banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory in federal agencies, and yet the New Hampshire state legislature may vote to ban it in the state’s public schools. I can’t find anything that indicates the vote has occurred yet, so I don’t know what actually will happen, but there is a GOP majority right now in the NH legislature.

West Virginia is considering a similar bill to that of New Hampshire.

As so often happens, this news regarding education reminds me of a passage from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987 [emphasis mine]:

Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection,; but even the neutral subject, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person…Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime…A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man…

But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

Bloom was in college during the late 1940s. And that passage makes it obvious that, by the 1980s, the current leftist anti-American trends were already firmly in place.

But not so firmly as they are today, and as they will be tomorrow, if the left has anything to say about it.

McConnell tries to undo the damage

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t think it will work, though. Too many people are too angry with him, and it’s not as though he’s ever had much of a following. Here’s his attempt, though:

[Brett] Baier asked McConnell if there was a ‘civil war’ in the GOP. McConnell said no and pointed instead to the issues in the Democratic Party. He said the progressive actions from Joe Biden have made it quite easy for the Republicans to get together.

When asked if he would support Trump if he were the nominee of the party, McConnell responded, “The nominee of the party? Absolutely.”

Is it time for me to add an “Election 2024” category to the blog? Ugh!

The radical “Equality Act”

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democrats are now bent on codifying at the federal level the so-called “Equality Act,” which if passed would do the following:

This bill would require Americans to consider gender identity and even biological sex a personal choice, not an objective fact. This is where this bill completely falls off the rails.

This will turn any recognition of the difference between biological sexes, or any preference for traditional sexual relationships or genders, or even the scientific definition of the two sexes, into potential “hate” crimes. This bill would:

Endanger women’s rights and put millions of women at risk for sexual assault;
Destroy women’s sports and harm men’s sports;
Put gender-confused children at extreme risk, with no alternate paths for them allowed besides cross-sex hormones and genital amputation;
Remove constitutional protections for religious beliefs and freedoms; and
Elevate LBGTQ rights and claims over religious citizens by mandating that an LGBTQ person’s claim wins by default in cases where there is a dispute between the two.

I haven’t read the bill; I’ve only read interpretations of what it would mean. But they tend to agree with the above list. In addition, the author of that article, who is gay, has this to say:

…[I]t would enshrine the gender identity agenda that is counter to gay rights.

For decades, we gays preached to the world that we were “born this way,” and that being gay, lesbian, or bisexual “is not a choice.” Lady Gaga’s famous “Born This Way” has been embraced as a global gay anthem. We did not challenge nature or the science of our biology, nor millennia of human history’s distinctions and separations of the two sexes.

Now, that’s turned on its head. For the gender-identity and trans-obsessed crowd, how you were born can now be “changed,” and everything regarding sex and gender is simply a “choice.”

There’s a long-standing altercation between trans activists and lesbians, in part because a great many biological women who identify as trans men are lesbians (or would be, except for the trans movement). This phenomenon reaches its zenith in Iran, of all places, where being gay is a crime but gender reassignment surgery is considered preferable and is performed on people who in other societies would identify as gay.

The Equality Act has passed the House.

Republican Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York and Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida were two of eight GOP lawmakers who joined House Democrats to vote for the Equality Act during the last session of Congress, when the legislation was first passed in the chamber.
Stefanik on Friday pointed to the June Supreme Court ruling that federal civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender individuals in the workplace, and said the ruling “serves as an important protection against discrimination.”
“I believe discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is unlawful and wrong,” Stefanik said in a statement provided to CNN Friday. “While I voted for previous versions of this legislation before the Supreme Court ruling, I have long been concerned that this bill goes far beyond non-discrimination and eliminates the role of single gendered organizations and activities throughout our society.”

She argued that the Equality Act would effectively eliminate federal civil rights laws meant to ensure women and girls have the same opportunities as men and boys — “eliminating single-sex sports and social groups that are critical for personal development and growth.”…

Diaz-Balart and Stefanik both committed to reintroducing the “Fairness for All Act” with GOP Rep. Chris Stewart, a bill they said would protect both the LGBTQ community and religious groups from discrimination. They also slammed Democratic leaders in the House, accusing them of failing to work across the aisle and amend the legislation in a bipartisan fashion.

Three House Republicans voted for the bill: Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, John Katko of New York, and Tom Reed of New York.

I don’t know what will happen in the Senate, but unless they end the filibuster I don’t think it has a chance of passing. If they decide to jettison the filibuster, it might pass.

I wonder how many Americans who voted for Democrats in Congress were aware that this sort of thing would be the result (or are even aware of it now), and how many approve.

More on Officer Sicknick’s death

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Please see my previous posts on this subject.]

Here’s a recent interview with Officer Sicknick’s mother. Note that it’s in the British paper The Daily Mail. It’s not unusual for British papers to cover events in the US more thoroughly than our own MSM, and to publish things the left wouldn’t be enthusiastic about here:

The mother of the US Capitol police officer who died following the riot on January 6 believes that her son succumbed to a fatal stroke – that he was not bludgeoned to death by a fire extinguisher as reported.

Yet more than one month after Officer Brian Sicknick’s death on January 7, she has admitted that they are still in the dark as to what exactly caused that catastrophic episode.

Speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com Gladys Sicknick, 74, was unequivocal in her assertion that Officer Brian Sicknick was not struck on the head and that as far as the family knows her son had a fatal stroke.

She said, ‘He wasn’t hit on the head no. We think he had a stroke, but we don’t know anything for sure.

‘We’d love to know what happened.’

Please let that sink in: apparently the family has not been told the results of any autopsy. Has there been an autopsy prior to Officer Sicknick’s cremation? I have never read anything that indicates an answer to that question.

More:

But in the six weeks since his death the truth has taken a backseat to the myth of the brutal attack. Democratic Impeachment Managers even brazenly cited the incident – that he was stricken in the head by a fire extinguisher – as fact in pre-trial articles filed February 2 despite already growing doubts.

Now DailyMail.com has unpacked fact from fiction in an attempt to extract Sicknick’s death from the misinformation in which it was mired before it even happened.

Please read the whole thing. You probably know most of it, because it’s been covered on this blog several times since January, but here’s an excerpt:

…January 8, Sicknick’s father, Charles, 81, told Reuters that on January 7, as they rushed from their homes in New Jersey to DC, the family were told that Sicknick had a blood clot on his brain and had suffered a stroke. He was being kept alive on a ventilator but was dead by the time they got there.

Yet these few publicly available facts were bulldozed over by political fervor and it was the unattributed account of a brutal attack, also reported by the Associated Press, that gained traction.

Less than 24 hours after his death, with no autopsy, no confirmation of any sign of blunt trauma, no investigation nor due process, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for the ‘perpetrators’ of Sicknick’s ‘attack’ to be brought to justice and vowed, ‘We will not forget.’

Despite the family’s earnest desire to the contrary, Sicknick’s death was politicized and seized on as an exemplar of all of the savagery of the pro-Trump mob’s assault on the temple of American democracy.

There’s a helpful timeline at the article, too.

The following is true of most press and pundits on both left and right, who for the most part swallowed the fire extinguisher story without checking it out or paying attention to the family’s statements of what medical authorities had told them:

…[T]he narrative continued to run unchecked with not one leader acknowledging the ongoing investigation or the complete absence of any certainty amid the melee of misreporting…

On February 2 CNN reported that investigators were ‘vexed’ by the lack of evidence linking anyone with Sicknick’s death. According to their source medical examiners had found no sign of blunt trauma.

Yet that very day Democratic Impeachment Managers filed their pre-trial articles in which they ignored all doubts and evidence to the contrary and stated as fact, ‘The insurgents killed a Capitol police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher.’

The left is now trying to work the pepper spray angle – the idea that pepper spray wielded by some of the rioters might have caused his death. In very rare cases it can cause a spike in blood pressure – perhaps that’s what happened to Officer Sicknick, although the blood clot story doesn’t seem to support that. At any rate, we’ve not heard anything about Officer Sicknick’s blood pressure when arriving at the hospital.

The Daily Mail article also mentions that pepper spray was used on January by both police and the rioters, so it would be next to impossible to say who wielded the spray that got Sicknick, and of course it was certainly a delayed reaction on his part if he had a reaction to it at all, because there were many hours between the demonstration and his collapse and in the meantime he reported feeling fine. Unless a video is found of someone spraying him directly, it may always remain up in the air, but the left is clinging to it as a possible way to continue to blame the rioters.

Michael Anton has a question: Why Do the Election’s Defenders Require My Agreement?

The New Neo Posted on by

I suggest a full read of MIchael Anton’s essay in American Greatness. It contains a valuable summary of all the reasons to doubt the fairness of the 2020 election. I disagree with his point about changing demographics as a resultant of immigration being part of the unfairness, but that’s really a minor issue of disagreement compared to all the other points he makes with which I agree.

Anton gives some theories about why so many people seen to be insisting on agreement from Anton that the election was won by Biden fair and square. But he doesn’t find his explanations of the phenomenon to be completely satisfying:

At any rate, why [Andrew] Sullivan or anyone else should care what I think of the 2020 election I find difficult to understand. Surely no one can seriously (as distinguished from crocodile fears) fret that my disbelief is a threat to the regime? If my opinion carried any weight at all, then my 406-page book and dozens of articles last year would have had some impact. They manifestly did not.

Or are they concerned for my soul, that I not be plagued (as Plato put it) by a “lie in the soul”? If that’s the case, let me worry about my own soul…

Machiavelli says in chapter six of The Prince that for a founder-prophet to be secure, “things must be ordered in such a mode that when [men] no longer believe, one can make them believe by force.” Does this regime currently possess that power? Is it seeking it? Chait would no doubt like to think so; would Sullivan agree? Is forced “belief” really belief?…

Sullivan repeatedly demanded that I explain how Our Democracy™ can survive as a democracy if something like half the country doesn’t believe in it anymore. The question was rhetorical. Sullivan knows the answer: it can’t. His purpose in asking was to shift blame from those who rig everything, refuse to explain anything but instead gaslight, gaslight, gaslight, onto those who, in response, decline to believe.

Much more at the link.

I’ve experienced much the same phenomenon Anton has, only not so publicly. But quite a few people I know who don’t ordinarily discuss politics with me – or, in the case of one, much of anything with me – have interrogated me (there really is no other word for it) as to whether I believe the election was fraudulent. I have given essentially the same answer as Anton, which in its summary form goes like this: the rules were changed so that we can never know; there was reason to think in advance that the results would be suspect, and then things are reported to have actually happened that do make them suspect, and the courts have never ruled on the merits and almost certainly never will.

Here’s is my own theory as to why my own interrogators and those of Anton are asking – nay, demanding – that we agree with them on the fairness of the 2020 election: they see our answers to the question as a test of our sanity as well as our judgment. The question they’re really asking is: how far gone are you? Have you lost your mind? Do you not see what’s obvious to every thinking and decent person who hasn’t been taken over by QAnon fantasies: that Joe Biden won fair and square and everything else is a baldfaced and pernicious lie?

They’re not looking for reassurance about the fairness of the vote; they feel they know for certain that it was fair. They’re not looking for Anton’s opinion because they plan to respect it, although they obviously respect his intellect. They are asking in order to test his opinion: has this previously intelligent person (whom they used to somewhat respect despite the political differences they have with him) gone stupid as well as mad? Is he that gullible and disordered in his thinking?

They start with the premise that they are correct in their beliefs, and work backwards to see whether he will come up with the right answer. No other answer will do.

More steps toward the defenestration of Andrew Cuomo?

The New Neo Posted on by

Nearly everything coming out lately about Cuomo’s nursing home decision is old news to the right. Only a few details are new.

Until recently the story was only covered on the right. Now we have things like this in Newsweek:

The truth behind the obfuscation and lies is this: The governor snuck a toxic corporate immunity clause in the 2020 budget on behalf of his top campaign donor, the Greater New York Hospital Association. You don’t need a PhD to understand that handing out get-out-of-jail-free cards to for-profit nursing homes in the middle of a pandemic will lead to more deaths

Now there’s also a resurfacing of an allegation of sexual harassment against Cuomo from a former aide. This charge was first leveled back in December, and it’s enjoying a renascence. But the question I have is whether it will die again much like the sexual allegations against Biden – which were immediately quashed, unlike those against Republicans which are always found “credible.”

So far so good for Cuomo on that score. The networks haven’t rushed in yet:

The three major broadcast networks joined CNN and MSNBC Wednesday in avoiding mention of sexual harassment claims against Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo during their evening news programs.

According to Grabien transcripts, ABC’s “World News Tonight,” CBS’ “Evening News,” and NBC’s “Nightly News” made no mention of the embattled Cuomo, who is facing calls for his impeachment and resignation after he was accused of covering up the number of deaths from COVID-19 in state nursing homes following his controversial order that assisted living facilities accept COVID-positive patients.

So I’m a bit confused: is Cuomo on his way out after all, but does the party want it to be for the nursing home decision rather than for anything else? Or will the sexual harassment allegations end up having legs? Or will it all die down? It’s like trying to read the tea leaves in the Kremlin during Cold War days.

For Purim: Hamantaschen meets cancel culture

The New Neo Posted on by

An alert reader sent me this, and I have to say it’s one of the more depressing and yet funny things I’ve read in a long time. It’s not the Babylon Bee, either. It seems that Orwell’s Minitrue has taken on the task of rewriting recipe history.

Yes, food articles about recipes. The particular example given is a recipe for hamantaschen, the Purim cookie (the Jewish holiday starts tomorrow evening) that has symbolic meaning but basically tends to sound better than it is. The original article was entertaining; the expurgated culturally-approved one reads like the boring history textbooks I recall from my youth.

Here’s an excerpt from the original, now apparently disappeared down Winston Smith’s memory hole:

Full disclosure: I am not Jewish. But as someone who attended roughly three Bar or Bat Mitzvahs a weekend during 1992, and as someone who cooks professionally, I thought I could at least weigh in on the Jewish cookie department.

Hamantaschen are a triangular-shaped cookie made to commemorate the Jewish celebration of Purim. The story of Purim involves a bad guy, Haman, a nice Jewish lady, Esther, and her ultimate victory over his plot to destroy the Jewish people. Hamantaschen are shaped to resemble Haman’s 3-cornered hat and traditionally stuffed with sweet fillings made of poppy seeds, dried fruits, or fruit preserves (among others). Sounds tasty, right? But upon reflection, Jews and non-Jews alike on the BA staff could only call up childhood memories of dry and sandy hamantaschen that left your mouth coated with a weird film. “The filling was the thing that you thought might save it, but there was never enough,” says assistant editor Amiel Stanek. “And when you did get to the center, it was jam all the way up to the top,” senior editor Meryl Rothstein chimes in. Point being, it was an imbalanced cookie experience.

So I set out to convert the haters.

The new approved version, whisked away by Winston’s pneumatic tube to be placed in the archives (until displaced in the next purge):

Editor’s note 2/10/2021: The original version of this article included language that was insensitive toward Jewish food traditions and does not align with our brand’s standards. As part of our Archive Repair Project, we have edited the headline, dek, and content to better convey the history of Purim and the goals of this particular recipe. We apologize for the previous version’s flippant tone and stereotypical characterizations of Jewish culture.

Hamantaschen are a triangle-shaped cookie made during the Jewish festival of Purim, a holiday that commemorates Esther’s victory over Haman and his plot to destroy the Jewish people. Hamantaschen are shaped to resemble Haman’s 3-cornered hat and traditionally stuffed with sweet fillings made of poppy seeds, dried fruits, or fruit preserves (among others). Sounds tasty, right? But achieving the right balance is not always easy to pull off.

These literary and cultural revisionists are crazy, and they’re everywhere these days.

Don’t let them know it – but Purim is a holiday that might trigger some Iranians into feeling bad.

[NOTE: By the way, what’s with the constant use of the word “pneumatic” in dystopian novels of the first half of the 20th Century? The Minitrue of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four used a transport system described that way, and Huxley’s Brave New World kept describing well-endowed women and cushiony chairs as “pneumatic.”]

[NOTE II: I actually haven’t had much traditionally Jewish food in my lifetime. But “dry and sandy” actually does describe nearly every Jewish dessert I’ve ever had, with the exception of this yummy stuff – particularly the version made at Rein’s Deli in Vernon, Connecticut.]

Why didn’t more professors oppose the Gramscian march or at least stick up for free speech?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “huxley” asks this question:

I’m trying to understand how academia slid further and further to the left…

I’m interested in Prof. Everybody, the academicians who watched and are still watching as their world was gradually taken over by the left.

Ideally, being a professor is a more serious calling than being a pipefitter or computer programmer. If nothing else it requires a commitment to academic freedom. Given the opportunity, we have heard many high, wise words to that effect. However, we have seen few efforts from the rank-and-file to uphold that commitment against the left over the past fifty years or so.

I’m wondering how that worked.

I don’t have the answer, but I have some guesses.

(1) Most people are afraid to speak up when their livelihood is threatened, and that’s not just people in academia. I’m not sure whether professors are less courageous than most, although they might be. But I don’t think that sort of commitment to liberty no matter what is common anywhere.

(2) That said, professors tend to work in the realm of ideas – except for those in more practical fields such as science, where ideas have more obvious consequences and require (or used to require) more proof. Leftism is an idea with some emotional attractiveness, and my guess is that professors may be more likely than others to be drawn to it, because of their general preference for dealing with ideas.

(3) Not only that, but much of the leftism advanced in the universities has employed race and the threat of calling someone a racist in order to first attract and then intimidate those who might object.

(4) For the most part, professors are people who have done well in school and never left it, staying to take on more power and prestige within that setting. Therefore I don’t think they are selected for courage, or for even necessarily for thinking for themselves (with exceptions, of course). For the most part, they have been very good at taking in information and then giving it back again, perhaps with a small advancement on current knowledge in a very circumscribed field. So there may be more people in academia who are selected for conformity, and they are less likely to buck the prevailing winds.

(5) My guess is that, particularly for professors in the sciences or in business, those who object to the leftward drift of the university have quite a few options in the private sector and may choose to leave the university rather than stay and fight. Professors in the humanities probably are more likely to be with the leftist program in the first place, but if they’re not, they probably have far fewer options outside of academia. And so they stay and keep their mouths shut.

(6) Not everyone did keep his or her mouth shut. I know some professors who stayed and fought. But it’s been a lonely battle over the years, and a frustrating and ultimately a losing one.

(7) The takeover of the academy by the left started a long time ago. I won’t quibble over when, but suffice to say it has been many decades. So there’s been a selection factor over the years as well, a factor that’s only increased over time. At a certain point it became well-nigh impossible for a new hire who didn’t toe the party line to be given a job in the first place. Therefore the number of professors on the other side (or potentially on the other side), has became smaller and smaller over time.

(8) Freedom of speech is one of those concepts that is probably difficult for a lot of people to defend when it involves speech they don’t like. I’m not sure why academicians would be any different in that respect, particularly since they deal in the world of ideas and like to be right.

I keep coming back to Allan Bloom and his 1987 book The Closing of the American Min when dealing with such matters. So I’ll give him the last word; here he is describing events at Cornell University in 1969, where he was a professor [emphasis mine]:

The [Cornell] provost was a former natural scientist, and he greeted me with a mournful countenance…there was nothing he could do to stop such behavior in the black student association. He added that no university in the country could expel radical black students, or dismiss the faculty members who incited them, presumably because the students at large would not permit it.

The provost had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time. He did not want trouble. His president had frequently cited Clark Kerr’s dismissal at the University of California as the great danger. At the same time the provost thought he was engaged in a great moral work, righting the historic injustice done to blacks. He could justify to himself the humiliation he was undergoing as a necessary sacrifice. The case of this particular black student clearly bothered him. But he was both more frightened of the violence-threatening extremists and also more admiring of them. Obvious questions were no longer obvious. Why could not a black student be expelled as a white student would be if he failed his courses or disobeyed the rules that make university community possible? Why could the president not call the police if order was threatened? Any man of weight would have fired the professor who threatened the life of the student. The issue was not complicated. Only the casuistry of weakness and ideology made it so. No one who knew or cared about what a university is would have acquiesced in this travesty. It was no surprise that a few weeks later – immediately after the faculty had voted overwhelmingly under the gun to capitulate to outrageous demands that it had a few days earlier rejected – the leading members of the administration and many well-known faculty members rushed over to congratulate the gathered students and tried to win their approval. I saw exposed before all the world what had long been known, and it was at last possible without impropriety to tell these pseudo-universitarians precisely what one thought of them.

It was also no surprise that many of those professors who had been most eloquent in their sermons about the sanctity of the university, and who had presented themselves as its consciences, were among those who reacted, if not favorably, at least weakly to what was happening. They had made careers out of saying how badly the German professors [during the Nazi era] had reacted to violations of academic freedom. This was all light talk and mock heroics, because they had not measured the potential threats to the university nor assessed the doubtful grounds of academic freedom. Above all, they did not think that it could be assaulted from the Left or from within the university. These American professors were utterly disarmed, as were many German professors, when the constituency they took for granted, of which they honestly believed they were independent, deserted or turned against them. To fulminate against Bible Belt preachers was one thing. In the world that counted for these professors, this could only bring approval. But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were – that they alone manned the walls protecting civilization. Their collapse was merely pitiful, although their feeble attempts at self-justification frequently turned vicious. In Germany the professors who kept quiet had the very good excuse that they could not do otherwise. Speaking up would have meant imprisonment or death. The law not only did not protect them but was their deadly enemy. At Cornell there was no such danger. There was essentially no risk in defending the integrity of the university, because the danger was entirely within it. All that was lacking was a professorial corps aware of the university’s purpose, and dedicated to it. That is what made the surrender so contemptible.

These events occurred over fifty years ago, and those observations were published nearly thirty-five years ago. The only things that have changed are that the vast majority of professors don’t even pay lip service to free speech anymore, the threats against them if they did are more serious, and probably most of them know very little about how professors behaved in the Germany of the 1930s.

Let me doubly emphasize this portion of what Bloom wrote back then:

But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were.