New liberalism shuts out voices
Trapier Michael
Staff Writer
Before the first students were up for class all five thousand copies had been stolen. By 11 that morning, hundreds of students were gathered throughout campus in sixties-like fashion. Liberalism was under attack at one of its American citadels and the campus had responded en masse.
Horowitz's ad gave ten reasons why paying African Americans reparations for slavery is wrong. Some felt the ad was racist and stole the BDH's Friday edition in its entirety. They claimed, as Martin Luther King, Jr. had, that they were following in the Gandhian principle of civil disobedience.
Others felt free speech, that holy of holies, was under attack. They were the ones who called The New York Times.
It wasn't just the Times; there were also articles in the Boston Globe and Providence Journal, interviews on Fox News and The O'Reilly Factor.
Questions raised on that New England campus were documented for the world: If free speech hurts, should we limit it? What is the role of a "liberal" university?
I asked my own: Are liberal thinkers actually free anymore?
There was a time when the word liberal, content in being an adjective, described those who were open-minded or tolerant; liberalism, then, was everything pertaining to free thought. Then came the restlessness. People began to free themselves from the fetters of an older school that was still entrenched in its ways of the past. Thus, they were liberals.
In order to carve out a place in society, they took to building a core of beliefs. These beliefs came to define them. Adherence to their core became the prerequisite for admittance to the group. They had forged their own fetters. Liberalism today, in the political sense, has little to do with freedom anymore. Liberal has become a noun: a person with a certain set of beliefs. Liberalism has ceased to be synonymous with freethinking.
Horowitz has attempted to solicit the same ad to other universities. Some, such as The Vanderbilt Hustler and Harvard Crimson refused to print them. Nowhere did students confiscate a medium of speech except at Brown, where they did so in the name of liberalism.
I might be politically quixotic, but I look at the word liberal with a sense of nostalgia. Bob Dylan was a prophet; the times, they have changed, and with them the old definitions have become obsolete.
It isn't odd today to feel estranged from freedom, the most American of ideas and the parent of today's liberalism. For there is a new liberal in the world today who is no friend to his father.
When Horowitz spoke at Vanderbilt on April 8, he made me mad. Like a coward enjoying himself in a bar fight, he took a few sucker punches, didn't make an impact and ran out the back door. He claimed that Edward Said is the thinking man's Pol Pot, that Yasser Arafat is Hitler, that the Left flew those planes in New York City and that America is God's gift to the world; shame on you for not loving it.
He spoke and I got mad. It was his right; it was my right. I'm glad that for once, no one took that away.