Today at the American Mind, the great conservative scholar Daniel J. Mahoney – author of many a National Review piece and the architect of National Review Institute’s acclaimed “Burke to Buckley” program – offers an important essay (with a dead-on subtitle, “Self-Flagellation and the Great Liberal Death Wish”) that calls out the somnolence of many now-shocked liberals, and connects the dots between the heightened outrages on our campuses and those things (including well-heeled alumni) that have underwritten the academy as the Left marched through. From his essay:
The better liberals, humane and decent people, are rightly shocked by professors, students, and activists who celebrate or apologize for the savage nihilism of Hamas or who think that these cruel ideologues and terrorists, heedless to the lives of their own people, whose deaths they relish for the propaganda value, somehow represent the legitimate interests of the Palestinian people. But what reason do we have for being surprised? English departments everywhere have given up teaching literature and humane letters and now specialize in the hate-filled jargon that defines “post-colonial” studies and discourse. “Intersectionality” is the order of the day—everyone who desires to be ideologically correct must unthinkingly parrot demands for CRT, gender ideology, abortion on demand, environmental extremism, sympathy and support for radical regimes and ideologies, contempt for religion and traditional morality, and a hatred of the West—above all for Israel, which is freely compared to apartheid South Africa and, most obscenely of all, Nazi Germany. DEI departments on most campuses enforce this new regime in a totalitarian spirit that is hardly “soft” or benign. For too long, economistic and anti-intellectual conservatives thought this had little to do with the “real world” and still proudly sent their children to utterly corrupt but still prestigious universities and liberal arts colleges.