Category: liberalism

The Coalition of the Un-Woke

Commentary The metastasis of the “woke” ideology is the most comprehensive threat facing the American republic. It is appallingly totalitarian, insofar as the woke wield the levers of cancel culture to suppress all dissident speech, root out all wrongthink and achieve by sheer force an intellectual homogeneity. It is outright racist, insofar as intersectionality and…


Dancing With the Woke: It’s Time for Liberals to Change Partners

Commentary “Woke” is one of the presently accepted terms employed to celebrate the presumed superiority of the neo-Marxist “social justice warrior.” “Wokeness” is a particularly useful ideological brand for Western Marxists because it allows them to disassociate themselves from inconvenient historical labels such as Bolsheviks, Nazis, Fascists, and Maoists and confuse their opponents by adopting…


The Woke New University

Commentary Historically, universities were institutions devoted to the pursuit of truth. It was a search guided by Socratic humility and Pascal’s dictum that “we know too much to be skeptics and too little to be dogmatists.” Contrary to romantic myths, there was never a time of cozy accord in university life, and academic disputations are…


It’s Not Politics, It’s Groupthink

Commentary I was a liberal for most of my adult life, a liberal in the very liberal habitat of academia. When it came to Republicans and Democrats, progressive attitudes and conservative attitudes, I believed what everyone else believed, and that was one of the best parts of academic life. If I had a choice, I…


The New Rules

Commentary Impartiality, neutrality, objectivity—is there anyone who still believes that those virtues hold steady among judges, reviewers, academics, administrators, and other arbitrators and policy-makers presumed to decide cases, determine hirings and firings, hear appeals and complaints, and otherwise direct policies and practices? Liberalism used to insist upon them, upholding level playing fields and Lady Justice…


Conservative Ethnogenesis

Commentary Ethnogenesis is the process by which numerous individuals who share an ethnic trait come to understand themselves as a distinct group, people whose common attributes mark them as having a separate standing and experience. The term is now commonly applied to any social group with a marked commonality, not just an ethnic one. It’s a…