Bump.
I think it depends on the campus too...we hear so much of the leftist tilt in faculty on campus...but, give the students some credit...MOST, obviously not all, can see extremism...and choose not to participate.
Where we DO get beat on campus is in the passion that the left has in hating this country, and not being afraid to be vocal in their (misguided) hatred. For most people, loving your country is natural...speaking out in a public forum isn't.
In sum, what we HEAR from campuses isn't always what is really going on in the minds of the majority of students...OK, except for Berkeley, UMass Amherst, Dartmouth, UMichigan and the like...
.......what one has to conclude from the present venom is that anti-Americanism is neither logical nor empirical.
Indeed, IT is a fundamentalist secular religion, not a reasoned stance, one entirely inconsistent and unpredictable in its choice of friends and foes except for one constant: Whatever America does, it hates.
"Liberals finally had their war against religious fundamentalism, but it would have put them on the side of the United States."
What makes Gramsci's ideas work is the natural tendency of those with Sowell's "unconstrained vision" to gravitate toward those positions in society -- academia, the media, education, etc. -- where they can "lead" and "influence," and by so doing make the world a better place (in their eyes). It was inevitable that having succeeded so wildly, this cohort of influencers -- who have brought our society to the brink of moral collapse with their 'vision of the anointed'-- would one day run dry of ideas and become what Hanson describes here -- a bunch of tired old leftists trapped in their own rhetoric... a would-be (and one-time) cultural elite now widely despised by the culture they once led. Nothing has changed amongst those of the constrained vision that would now make them seek these positions. We are not going to see a flood of conservative activists moving into the media, into education, etc., to take the place of these fallen, and now discredited, leftists. No, they are far more likely to be replaced -- in due course -- with some different sort of leftists. It is leftists who are drawn to these positions, and while we might have some period during which our Influential Social Institutions appear to have gone apolitical, some new leftist ideology will appear and when it does we will witness another Gramscian March through our institutions by its adherents. This interregnum might be a good time to install some "diversity quotas" in these institutions, to prevent the emergence of another leftist Gramscian monopoly once the new-and-improved leftist ideology arrives. For surely it will. |