RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you have been paying any attention whatsoever, you have to have noticed the recent rapid transformation of the progressive left movement into a crazed Maoist cult. Yes, the phenomenon of “political correctness” — meaning a leftist orthodoxy enforced among willing participants who think themselves sophisticated — has been around for a long time. We even used that term back when I was in college 50 years ago.

But recent events take the phenomenon to a whole new level. Back in the 70s my friends and I could stand aside from the politically correct crowd and laugh at them as second raters lacking the ability for independent thought. Now if you are in the wrong place there is no more standing aside and no more laughing. Whole swaths of major institutions, most notably essentially all of academia and the media, plus many large corporate entities, no longer brook any dissent from progressive orthodoxy. One slip and the wrath of the mob gets called down upon you.

Consider Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School. You would think that there could hardly be a better example of left-center Democratic normalism than this guy. But he does have a tendency to stray from the party line from time to time. It probably started close to twenty years ago, when he came out in favor of due process for males accused of sex-related misconduct. More recently he committed the unpardonable sin of participating the the defense of President Trump in his impeachment trial.

At the Gatestone Institute site on July 23, Dershowitz has a piece with the headline “A Few Thoughts on Law and Justice.” (The piece is apparently an edited version of an oral briefing that Dershowitz gave to Gatestone on June 9.). Despite calling himself a “centrist liberal,” it seems that he has been “canceled” by his erstwhile friends on the left.

I have written dozens of op‑eds for The New York Times. Today, The New York Times is unlikely to publish an op‑ed by me. . . .  I too have been victimized by the cancel culture. The 92nd Street Y where I spoke for 25 years — I am the second-most-frequent speaker after Elie Wiesel — has canceled me even though they have acknowledged that the accusation against me was made by a woman I never met, never heard of. . . .  When I spoke at Berkeley, Antifa came out and tried to prevent my speech from going forward. . . . When I spoke at John Hopkins University, a Hitler mustache was painted on my face and swastikas were put on the program announcing my speech.

Perhaps you have been hanging out with the wrong crowd, professor?

Along similar lines is the recent widely-publicized letter in Harper’s Magazine, signed by some 150 luminaries of the left, decrying the new atmosphere of illiberalism that is sweeping academia, the media, and other major institutions. Excerpt:

We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal.

Well, I’m glad that somebody has started to notice.

But I have a big problem with both the Dershowitz piece and the Harper’s letter. Both of them claim to find an equivalence between efforts at censorship on the right as well as the left. Here is Dershowitz:

For me, the real enemies of America are the extremists on both sides: the hard left that would bring America down, the hard-right white supremacists and neo‑Nazis.

And from the Harper’s letter:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

I certainly am not going to stand up for “white supremacists and new-Nazis.” But the idea that somehow some group of people on the “radical right” is meaningfully “restricting” the “free exchange of information and ideas” in our society is completely preposterous. Can anybody name a single institution of any significance in our country that is controlled by “white supremacists” or “neo-Nazis”? It doesn’t exist. By contrast, hundreds upon hundreds of colleges, universities, media outlets and major corporations are controlled by progressive leftists bent on stamping out dissent from their orthodoxy.

Professor Dershowitz is the tip of the iceberg of the targets of progressive cancelation. Here are just a few other relatively prominent recent targets:

• Professor William Jacobson of Cornell Law School is essentially the only outspoken conservative on the faculty of that school. He has recently been the target of a relentless campaign to get rid of him, particularly over his criticism of the Black Lives Matter organization. Here is a post from today at Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection blog giving the current status of the situation.

• When leftist faculty at Princeton wrote a lengthy list of “demands” on the university to combat its supposed racism, Professor Joshua Katz responded with a July 8 post at Quillette that Katz called his “Declaration of Independence.” Big mistake. The forces of cancelation immediately came for him, seeking to render him an “outcast in his own community,” as a Wall Street Journal editorial of July 14 described it.

• Then there is Professor Mike Adams of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He has been fighting for years a lonely battle for free speech as essentially the only outspoken conservative on the faculty of that school. Recently the efforts to oust him have intensified. Yesterday he was found dead in his home, apparently of a gunshot wound. I have not yet seen whether authorities believe it to be a suicide or a homicide.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in civilized debate, come to any meeting or program of the Federalist Society. We always invite liberals to participate in the discussion.