On Wednesday, I argued that we should take the Left’s sudden interest in academic freedom with a pinch of salt. Why? Well, because it has come at the exact moment that progressive interests are being hurt, and because it is not being couched in universalist language:

It’s not really a backlash at all. It’s a rearguard action. And that “concern” that we are supposedly hearing from Jezebel and The Nation? It is not the product of intellectual honesty or of a more general desire to institute academic liberty on campus; it’s a self-serving attempt to fight back against those revolutionaries who are eating their own. Here, Fredrik DeBoer’s horrified observation that “many good, impressionable young people run screaming from left-wing politics because they are excoriated the first second they step mildly out of line” is instructive. Of course Jonathan Chait is turning against political correctness and campus self-indulgence. Of course Vox’s editor, Ezra Klein, is now peddling lefty academics who are willing to stand up to the mob. Of course the good denizens of Jezebel are beginning to wonder aloud whether a feminism that eats the likes of Laura Kipnis is useful. If neo-McCarthyism “becomes a salient part of liberal politics,” Schlosser writes in his conclusion, then “liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.” The American Left has started to rebel at the exact moment that its own interests are being hurt? Naturally. This isn’t about standards; it’s about power.

I should note in the interest of fairness that this is not true of all on the left. Indeed, USA Today’s Kirsten Powers has written an excellent book on this very topic, and she has cast it in generalized and agendaless terms. She has been pilloried for it, naturally.

There are still some old-fashioned “liberals” out there.