The poverty of liberalism

http://newcriterion.com:81/weblog/2007/09/poverty-of-liberalism.html ^ | Roger Kimball

[ventanax5]

The spectacle of these left-wing academics repudiating men like Larry Summers and Donald Rumsfeld even as they abase themselves scrambling to find excuses for welcoming a fanatic like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the halls of a great American University is disgusting. I think again of Bagehot's observation that "History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it." Are we really willing to let ourselves--our ideals, our way of life--be carelessly traduced by a rancid leftism so enfeebled that it can no longer distinguish between free speech and suicide? We are even now in the process of answer that question. How we answer it will determine a lot more than the issue of who gets to speak on American college campuses.

[Old Sarge]

Are we really willing to let ourselves--our ideals, our way of life--be carelessly traduced by a rancid leftism so enfeebled that it can no longer distinguish between free speech and suicide?

Yes.

[magellan]

Charles Krauthammer nailed it on Brit Hume's show when he said the following:

"This is an example of the degradation of American academia. And the reason it has become so irrelevant in American public life--40 years ago in the Kennedy days academia was a source of ideas. It no longer is. All of that now is in think tanks as a result of the incredibly hostile atmosphere in the university against real diversity of opinion."