Anyone today who undertakes, particularly on many college campuses, to advocate social, scientific, religious or political ideas at odds with the current leftist orthodoxy can expect to be shouted down, physically assaulted, fired and/or smeared. The left today has become a stalwart proponent of closed-mindedness, group-think and willful ignorance.
It's as if those who wield power in the media and on campus sense that their ideas cannot withstand rational examination and must therefore be insulated from challenge.
Two generations ago, at a time when their ideas were still often unpopular, they championed free speech in order to get their views a hearing, but once their worldview became mainstream they sought to deny the same freedoms to their critics and shut down any and all opposition.
Like the old communist commissars of the 20th century, they know that leftist ideology, if ever the masses understood it, would be widely and soundly rejected so anyone who criticizes it must be forcibly shut up so that its manifold flaws will never be exposed.
This was the strategy of both communist and fascist totalitarians around the globe in the 20th century, and it's the strategy of their ideological heirs in the 21st century.
Katherine Timpf at National Review Online mentions just a few examples of how campus administrators and others suppress the free and open exchange of ideas and speech by exerting enormous pressure on students and faculty to conform to the party line. Her examples merely scratch the surface.
Conservative speakers are being deplatformed on social media and disallowed to speak at many universities. Faculty who promote alternatives to Darwinism or who express skepticism about anthropogenic climate change are often punished professionally. Christianity, especially Catholicism, is often mocked in the classroom by professors, and students who seek to speak up for their faith often see their grade suffer for it.
To be overtly pro-life in some spheres of academia is to risk physical assault, and heaven help the student or faculty member who dares to express support for Donald Trump.
Why has this change occurred? Perhaps because aside from a few notable exceptions like the late Nat Hentoff (author of the book Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee) the left's professed devotion to the First Amendment was insincere from the start.
Appeals to First Amendment freedoms were a handy tool for propagating their ideology and arrogating power, but once that power had been achieved the tool was dispensed with. Free and open democratic elections were and are touted and praised by the left until they're voted into office, often under the banner of socialism, and then they use their newly acquired power to make those freedoms disappear.
Philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) set out the blueprint for all this back in the 60s in what he called "repressive tolerance." Here's Ben Shapiro's adumbration of Marcuse's thought in The Right Side of History:
Marcuse suggested that certain forms of speech had to be barred so that they could not emerge victorious, toppling critical (leftist) theory itself. According to Marcuse, "the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to politics, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.""The roots," Shapiro adds, "of sexual liberation, victim politics, and political correctness had been laid." And now, some sixty years later they're bearing their fruit.
Freedom, Marcuse said, was "serving the cause of oppression"; oppression, therefore, could serve the cause of freedom. Speech could be labelled violence....In essence, "Liberating tolerance, then would mean intolerance against movements form the Right and toleration of movements from the Left..."
The marketplace of ideas had to die, since it was "organized and delimited by those who determine the national and individual interest."
Minority groups had to be given special privileges to shut down opposition: "liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters."
It's ironic that in the left's political economy tolerance of contrary opinions has to die, but as the famous physician and counsellor Paul Tournier once wrote, "Tolerance is the natural endowment of true convictions."
The corollary would be that intolerance is a pretty good indication of false convictions.
