The Unfortunate Illiberalism of the Left

The institutions of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of inquiry, and the rule of law — the mainstays of Classical Liberalism — are under assault in the United States, but only from the fringes of the right. I take it as obvious that the actions of the Trumps and Arpaios of this country are corrosive to these institutions. But I speak now to the Left, which I identify wholeheartedly as a member of, and ask that the Left cease devouring its own, or at the very least stampeding over this country’s values to oppose the Right. One particularly salient manifestation of this is the number of increasingly prominent cases of university clubs and organizations engaging in racist, undemocratic, anti-freedom behaviors and protests, or condoning them.

• Reed College’s recent protests over a Western Civilization course advocated not even showing — in a critical and academic context — a clip from Saturday Night Live because it was racist and endorsed cultural appropriation, and refused requested by a minority professor with PTSD that they not protest in the classroom, and the leader of the protests accused anyone not joining in the protests of “white supremacy”, leading to an atmosphere that other students — of color — found “suffocating” and “unsafe”.
• At Evergreen State College in Washington, a self-identified Progressive professor had classes interrupted, was accused of racism and white supremacy after he expressed discomfort with the idea that white professors and students were being singularly encouraged to leave the classrooms for a day.
• Hunger strikes culminating in resignation ensued after the Dean of Students used the word “mold” in an email.
• These issues do not only arise among racial lines, but gender lines as well.
• At Middlebury College, liberal protesters forced the cancellation of Conservative speaker Charles Murray, denying that doing so was infringing on freedom of speech.

I do not catalogue these incidents to mock the progressive left, but to warn it. I identify a liberal and member of the Left, but I find these tactics and this rhetoric alienating to the point of inculcating contempt.

A common response to my feelings of alienation, however, is that they are just deserts. The fact that whites and males are now held accountable and negatively stereotyped for the actions of their forebears is comeuppance for the unearned stereotyping and denigration that women or people of color have faced for actions the actions of others. The feelings whites and males may feel of being silenced or sidelined in the face of important sociocultural debates is nothing more than a parallel to the silencing and sidelining that women or people of color have faced for centuries. Resentments at being disadvantaged for scholarships, for jobs, for college admissions, is nothing more than fair recompense for the centuries of suppression of women and people of color from these same positions. Revulsion at the suggestion that the world would be better off without white men is nothing more than a reflection of the revulsions that other felt at long-held notion that women should be bound in perpetual servitude and that people of color were degenerate lower branches on the tree of life, destined for pruning.

These judgements are not wrong. They are not unjustified. They are deeply satisfying in a karmic sense: what has gone around has now come around, and an entire race and sex must reap what it has sown. But I cannot help but to offer the observations that these outlooks are incomplete, for they often do not strive to answer a vital question: “to what end?”

When, hopefully, these legacies of racist and misogynistic privilege have been erased, are we left with a world of liberty and prosperity, free from oppression on the basis of race, gender, nationality, sex, or orientation, as I truly hope? Or will we have only replaced one form of oppression with another, content to repeat a cycle of inequality, resentment and oppression in centuries hence? If the stereotyping, the silencing, the disadvantaging, the genocidal subjugation with which whites and males have crafted their empires for centuries have been truly immoral, both deontologically and consequentially, as they surely have, would the truly moral recourse be to refocus these same institutions on new targets, or rather to strive for their annihilation?

I wish to play a part. I wish to be active in bringing about a world of true justice and equality, one free from silencing, from back-benching, from second class citizenship. I wish to fight against injustices, racism, sexism, and oppression. But if I am to devote that time and energy to the left, I have to know I have a place, that I will not be told to “wait my turn”, not be “told how and when to help” as was recently said at a public presentation by Opal Tometi, co-founder of Black Lives Matter. I will help how and when I think able. I welcome your input, and I respect your position, but we will not end silencing and disenfranchisement by passing it on to others.