Archives for December 2021

A Universal Aspiration

All the totalitarian movements of modernity have been inspired by the same fantasy of a world made right and finally brought into harmony with itself. This utopian delusion is not restricted to aspiring commissars or religious fanatics. In one form or another, it is the ideal of every believer in a universal progress, including those who would be dismayed to think of themselves in such destructive company.

The desire to make things better is an impulse essential to our humanity. But taken beyond the limits of what is humanly possible, the same hope is transformed into a destructive passion, until it becomes a desire to annihilate whatever stands in the way of the beautiful idea. Nihilism is thus the practical extreme of the radical project. Consequently, the fantasy of a redeemed future has repeatedly led to catastrophic results as progressive radicals pursue their impossible schemes. It is an enduring irony of the human condition that the urgency to make the world “a better place” is also the chief source of the suffering that human beings have inflicted on each other from the beginning of time.

The present volume focuses on individuals who are adherents of the progressive faith, a label that has been embraced by Marxists and anarchists, socialists and liberals alike. “Radical” normally connotes a sharp and violent break with the existing order, which would suggest that the careers described in these pages were confined to the fringes of the political culture. Nothing could be further from the truth. Christopher Hitchens was an internationally celebrated journalist and author; Bettina Aptheker is an acclaimed professor at an elite university; and Cornel West is a celebrity academic who has been friends with two Democratic presidents, and is the author of best-selling books praised by arbiters of the literary culture. Saul Alinsky, a prominent figure in the radical Sixties posthumously became the political guide to an entire generation of American progressives, including an occupant of the Oval Office.

Radicals have often been described as “liberals in a hurry”—sharing similar goals but with expectations that were high and timetables that were short. These are indeed attributes of the terrorists Kathy Boudin and Susan Rosenberg, whose stories are told in this text. But far from being condemned by liberals who would not themselves think of committing their crimes, they have been treated as spiritual comrades, and embraced as victims of a society whose injustices encouraged them to commit their desperate acts. Liberals of this disposition were once referred to as “fellow travelers,” people who failed to muster the courage of their convictions but nonetheless shared the radical dream of a universal progress and a world that would be socially just.

The type of this fellow traveler was dissected in a famous Cold War novel by Lionel Trilling in the character of John Laksell. Men like Laksell, Trilling observed, were not actually for communism, but were convinced that “one was morally compromised, turned toward evil and away from good, if one was against it.” Because Laksell did not oppose the Communists’ vision of a liberated future, he was unable to oppose the war that Communists had declared on the society they actually inhabited. Laksell refused to become an anti-Communist and join the war against totalitarianism, Trilling explained, because “one could not oppose [Communist ideas] with-out being illiberal, even reactionary. One would have to have some-thing better to offer and Laksell had nothing better. He could not even imagine what the better ideas would be.” Laksell therefore became an “anti-anti-Communist,” and took his stand as an opponent of those who opposed the Marxist totalitarian idea.

Sixty years later, Trilling’s observations apply to the fellow travelers of radicalism, who are generally referred to as liberals, and who make up the expansive ranks of the progressive cause. They refuse to oppose the fundamental ideas behind the radicals’ assault on free societies because to do so would make them illiberal and reactionary and put them in the camp of the conservative right. The failure of these fellow travelers to oppose radical ideas explains the success radicals have achieved in pushing their cause beyond the social margins. Over the last several decades, the radical critique of American democracy has become the curriculum of American universities, and the culture of its liberal elites—a fact reflected in the otherwise inexplicable career of Professor Cornel West, which is described in the pages that follow. Once a partisan of the progressive cause, I have devoted myself since leaving its ranks to an effort to comprehend it—first to understand what  prompts people to believe in world-encompassing and world-transforming myths; and second, to explore the tragic consequences of the attempts to act on them. This was the subject of Radical Son, an auto-biography published in 1997, and of a series of essays and books I have written over the last twenty years, including Destructive Generation, The Politics of Bad Faith, Unholy Alliance, and Left Illusions. I have also written two small volumes, The End of Time and A Point in Time, which explore the way the radical passion is a religious response to our common human fate. The present work is perhaps the last I will write about a subject that has occupied me in one way or another over the course of a lifetime.

When all is said and done, what has impressed me most, after all these years, is how little we human beings are able to learn collectively from our experience, how slowly we do learn, and how quickly we forget.

The chapters that follow begin with an inquiry into the life and thought of Christopher Hitchens, a writer who had serious second thoughts about some of his radical commitments but was unable to leave the progressive faith. Hitchens’ life and work offer an opportunity to examine the issues that define a radical outlook, and the moral and intellectual incoherence that overtake an intelligent mind whose second thoughts remain incomplete.

The second chapter follows the life of an icon of radical feminism, and is a study in the totalitarian quest for a unity of the political and the personal. We are all prisoners of what Hegel called an “unhappy consciousness,” reflecting the division between the world and the self. Radicals seek to overcome this division by creating a new world that will resolve this dilemma. The practical result of this effort is the embrace of a totalitarian politics and the inevitable detachment of the individual from her own reality.

The third chapter follows the improbable career of Professor Cornel West, a remarkably shallow intellect whose rise to cultural eminence has been made possible by his personification of progressive clichés. His career is consequently a reflection of a general cultural decline.

The fourth chapter focuses on a group of individuals who are best described as “Nechaevists,” after the nineteenth-century Russian terrorist of that name—privileged youth who jettison the opportunities bestowed on them by a generous society to become criminals in the service of a political idea. It is also a tale of the Laksells, perched comfortably on the heights of society and culture, who work assiduously to create sympathy for the perpetrators of indefensible deeds.

The fifth chapter diverges from the others as the story of an un-political woman whose coming of age in a political decade encouraged her to pursue the idea of self-liberation to the point of personal disaster. Following decades of drug abuse and descent into chaos, she finally rescued herself from ruin by rejecting her identity as a cultural victim to grasp the specific truth of her life.

A final chapter examines the prescriptive advice of Saul Alinsky, mentor to the present generation of post-Communist progressives. It explores the paradox at the heart of the utopian outlook—that its idealism is a nihilism—providing a summary statement of the central theme of this book.

Earlier versions of these chapters have appeared as articles in FrontPageMag.com and NationalReviewOnline.com. They have been edited for this volume and in several instances re-written.

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Preface

During the last twenty years, I have spoken at more than three hundred universities, where I interviewed students and professors about the intellectual climate on their campuses. In the course of these visits I became concerned about the changes that had taken place since I attended college half a century ago. I was particularly troubled by the increasingly intol­erant atmosphere of the schools I visited and by the relentless intrusion of political agendas into an academic environment where they did not belong.

As a result, in the fall of 2002 I began an effort to address these problems by reviving doctrines of academic freedom that were an integral part of university governance but had been increasingly abandoned as a practice in recent decades. I had first encountered these doctrines during my undergraduate years at Columbia College, in the McCarthy period, when they provided a bulwark against the turbulence of those troubled times. Their origins could be traced back yet another half century to the Pro­gressive Era, when professors had been forced to defend them­selves from the meddling of benefactors who were angered by academic critiques of their business practices. The principles of academic freedom were devised at that time to ensure that schol­ars could publish the results of their professional research with­out fear of reprisals from donors and politicians who lacked their academic expertise.

In recent years, by contrast, it is faculty members who have intruded a political agenda into the academic curriculum and have sought to close down intellectual discussion and prevent open-minded inquiries into “sensitive” subjects. Ideas deemed “reactionary” and “politically incorrect” are suppressed through “speech codes” and a collective disapproval that renders them verboten. Unlike previous attempts to interfere with disinterested inquiry, the new political assault comes from faculty insiders who regard their scholarship as a partisan activity and the university as a platform from which they hope to change the world.

The radical attempt to turn schools into agencies for social change is a recent development that coincides with the emer­gence of “political correctness” as the signature feature of a rad­icalized academic culture. “Political correctness” is a term that describes an orthodoxy or party line, in this case reflecting the agendas of the left. Ideas that oppose left-wing orthodoxy— opposition to racial preferences, belief in innate differences between men and women, or, more recently, support for Amer­ica’s war in Iraq—are regarded as morally unacceptable or sim­ply indecent. The proponents of such ideas are regarded as deviants from the academic norm, to be marginalized and shunned.

In defending their position, faculty radicals are quick to deny that an orthodoxy is something new to the academic world. In their view, a conservative orthodoxy has always governed the educational curriculum. The objection, they contend, is not to the establishment of an orthodoxy as such, but to an orthodoxy that is not conservative. In this view, conservatives are merely defending the status quo ante, objecting to change. As evidence, radicals point to the “consensus” view of American history as an orthodoxy that prevailed in the preceding generation, and has now been overthrown.

This argument is misconceived. It is true that there has always been an American consensus, but only as a common heritage of shared national memories and common civic virtues. Contrary to the radical claim, the consensus view of American history was not one that excluded ideas because they were dissenting. On the contrary, it embraced them as expressions of American pluralism. The consensus view was more like a patriotic accord: a shared appreciation of the wisdom of the American founding and the value of the democratic, multi-ethnic republic the Framers cre­ated. The embrace of this legacy represents a unity indispensable to the social cohesion of a nation that is not based on blood and soil, but on a social contract established at its founding—a nation “conceived in liberty” and dedicated to propositions that its con­stituent elements shared.

Within this American consensus there has always been ample room for dissent and for views that are sharply self-critical, even of the American project itself. The American consensus has always embraced a wide-ranging spectrum that includes the disaffected, provided they seek redress of grievances through the democratic process. In other words, this consensus is not an orthodoxy of the political right; it is the social contract of a historically con­structed nation and a community, diverse in its origins and plu­ral in its views. The preservation of this diversity and its democracy is the heart of the consensus. The consensus, in short, is the com­mon cultural bond of the democracy of which all Americans are a part: out of many, one. It is this bond that is now under assault from radicals who have entrenched themselves in the university culture.

Side by side with this American consensus—and reflecting its values—there has been until recently a common understand­ing of the function of education in a democracy. This has included respect for intellectual disagreement as the necessary condition for the development of independent minds. In the modern era it embraces the idea that research and teaching are professional disciplines, which observe the scientific method and require intel­lectual objectivity and restraint; it insists on a perspective that is expert, skeptical and dispassionate; and it respects the uncertainty of human knowledge and the pluralism of views on which a democracy is based. It is consequently a consensus that opposes the imposition of ideological orthodoxies and sectarian agendas in the classroom.

The new political orthodoxies insinuated into our univer­sities by the left are quite different. They do not derive from the traditions of a shared American heritage and culture, but are sec­tarian attempts to subvert both—by deconstructing the nation’s identity and by dividing its communities into warring classes, genders and races—into victims and oppressors. For academic radicals who hope to “change the world,” teaching is not a dis­interested intellectual inquiry but a form of political combat. The banner of this combat is “social justice,” the emblem that signi­fies to the post-Communist left the triumph of the oppressed over the oppressors.

An academic movement for “social justice” has inserted its radical agenda into the very templates of collegiate institutions and academic programs, and into the curricula of secondary schools as well.² Pursuit of this goal both requires and justifies indoctrinating students in the ideas that radicals regard as “trans­formative” and “progressive.” Far from being a consensus that supports the pluralistic community of the American social con­tract, the political correctness of the left is the orthodoxy of one social faction seeking to impose its agenda on all the others—a new and disturbing development in the educational culture.

This book describes an effort to disarm the political assault on our schools and to revive the values—professionalism, polit­ical neutrality and intellectual diversity—that previously consti­tuted their common foundation. The academic freedom campaign was launched in 2003 when I published an “Academic Bill of Rights,” designed to restore intellectual diversity and academic standards. The response is already powerful enough to have acquired a life of its own. In the spring of 2006, the student body at Princeton University passed a “Student Bill of Rights” based on the principles I had proposed, but without any direct inter­vention by myself or the organization I had created, Students for Academic Freedom. The Princeton bill was the creation of the Princeton students themselves. The same self-propelled efforts can be seen in new movements for academic freedom on more than 150 campuses across the nation.

These campaigns reflect a widespread desire among college students and the general public to restore intellectual pluralism and organizational neutrality to academic institutions, and to protect their scholarly mission. They represent a revulsion against the corruption of the classroom by academics who willfully con­fuse education with activism and who seek to suppress opposing viewpoints in the name of progressive agendas.

Because the attacks on the academic freedom campaign have focused to a great extent on me as the individual responsible, the narrative that follows necessarily deals with personal experiences. The political left which has orchestrated these attacks has a long history of conducting its campaigns through ad hominem charges. It is not for nothing that the word “purge,” for example, is a left-wing coinage, or that every purge has featured the slander of its individual targets. The political purge is a purification ritual and its roots can be traced to the fact that radical politics is essentially a religious vocation.

This religious character is determined by the fact that its adherents conceive their projects as “revolutionary” or “trans­formative”—secular terms for what in effect would be a rehgious “redemption,” albeit an earthly one. Looked at from this van­tage, the radical goal is a secular redemption of society from its vale of “oppression.” The redemption is accomplished by creat­ing a world without “racism,” “sexism” or “classism,” the cur­rent term of art for which is “social justice”—a secular version of heaven on earth.

The extravagant goal of redeeming humanity justifies uncompromising means. Social redeemers regard themselves as an “army of the saints,” and their opponents as the party of sin­ners. They do not view their conservative opponents as support­ers of alternative means for improving the lot of women, minorities and the poor, but as enemies of women, minorities and the poor. Progressive agendas cannot be opposed, therefore, on grounds that are principled or practical or compassionate. Opponents of “progressives” are defined as “reactionaries”—advo­cates of racism and sexism, practitioners of “McCarthyism,” and other incarnations of social evil.

Consequently, to be demonized by “progressives,” as in fact I have been as a result of my efforts in behalf of academic free­dom, is not a personal matter, but an ineluctable consequence of opposing their agendas. The anathemas that academic leftists have pronounced on me and the academic freedom campaign have a long and squalid history in the left’s battles with previous oppo­nents. The story of the campaign against academic freedom, therefore, can also be read as a study in the methods of the rad­ical project itself.

Los Angeles, August 2006