We’ve had recent posts on the difficulties academic traditionalists and conservatives encounter in advancing our cause. Even when campus outrages are exposed and sometimes vanquished, fresh outrages appear. One of our list cleverly referred to the problem of “outrage fatigue,” and another voiced his frustration that some conservatives who do not frequent college campuses don’t appreciate how bad things can be there. This is all part of the battle that we have been fighting for a couple of decades now. Outrage fatigue comes from the conviction not only that we should win but that we should have already won by now.

And we should, and should have, because we have fought a good fight and have kept the faith. But our efforts have been undercut sometimes in that many conservatives have been reluctant to see the importance of the battle and have dismissed academia as only a minor hindrance in the basically healthy direction the country began to take under the great Reagan. They feel that they must uphold Reaganite optimism and perhaps what they see as conservative triumphalism at all costs, and when they encounter the intractable nature of leftwing academia, they turn away and try to convince themselves that it doesn’t matter, or that these academic fads will soon pass, or that in any event, the kids aren’t listening.

But Reagan was not a blind optimist. He knew there was an enemy to fight, he had a strategy for fighting it (we win, they lose), he articulated the importance of the fight, and he never stopped waging the battle in one way or another. He did not sit back complacently pointing to American exceptionalism, as conservatives sometimes do, and acting like the main character in Melville’s Benito Cereno, Captain Delano, whose sunny nature prevents him from seeing danger right in front of his eyes.