Today’s college protests represent the culmination of modern liberalism. They start from the premises that people are not individuals, but rather interchangeable units of their demographic groups, and that subjective perceptions (i.e., feelings) are more valid than objective reality. It follows that every grievance claimed by any minority (“minority” meaning anyone whose demographic group is not deemed to have social power – basically everyone but straight, white, Christian males and Israelis) is potentially an affront to every minority and is, by definition, legitimate, simply because a minority says that he or she feels aggrieved, even if others can’t see it. Because every claimed grievance is legitimate, it follows that any opposition to or dissent from the minority group’s position (“All Lives Matter,” instead of “Black Lives Matter”) is illegitimate. Moreover, because feelings take primacy, even mere exposure to opposition or dissent is hurtful, hence the need for trigger warnings and safe spaces.

Liberals also believe that government exists primarily to do good (as they see it, of course), rather than to impartially apply society’s laws, so it follows logically, though frighteningly, that because dissent from any claimed grievance is both illegitimate and hurtful, it should not be allowed, despite the protections of the 1st Amendment (language reflective of white privilege, after all). Speech cannot be tolerated if/when any minority claims, or could claim, that it is hurtful. Hence the demands for university administrations to silence and punish dissenters and to stifle the press—that pesky 1st Amendment again!—as negative coverage is itself hurtful and, therefore, illegitimate.

This dynamic is most advanced on college campuses, because they have been unchecked bastions of liberalism for decades, but the cancer of self-righteous intolerance of dissent is already widespread. Candidates for high office support a Constitutional amendment silencing “corporate speech,” and otherwise-respectable scientists blacklist their peers as climate change “deniers.” In my home state, Wisconsin, people have suffered pre-dawn raids of their homes, in legally-compelled silence, and without any right to representation, for allegedly coordinating political activity. South Park’s parody becomes more lifelike every day.

Things will only get worse as the protesters graduate and take their “we-know-best” totalitarian sensibilities to the country’s legislative chambers and, even more terrifyingly, because less accountably, to the bureaucracies of government.  Free speech has had a nice run, but it cannot survive much longer when fewer and fewer people see any value in standing up for it.

Chris Geary, SU ’95
History/International Relations