The new barbarians

The moral rot on our college campuses is spreading at an alarming pace, with cherished liberal principles upon which our rights depend increasingly denounced.

From just the past few weeks or so:

• The University of California at Berkeley had to go into a state of hysterical, near-lockdown in anticipation of a speech by conservative columnist Ben Shapiro.

Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, “Never Trump” member and a cum laude graduate from Harvard Law

School at age 23, doesn’t easily fit into the “alt-right” or “neo-Nazi” categories, but such terms have now apparently acquired sufficient elasticity to cover anything remotely conservative. As a result, Berkeley had to spend an estimated $600,000 to guarantee

Shapiro’s security in the face of threatened campus protests and possible violence.

Perhaps the dumbest student protesters were those caught on video chanting “Speech is violence, we will not be silenced” — a pairing of clauses suffering from such internal contradiction as to suggest Berkeley’s admission standards have been done away with.

Bernie Sanders was invited to speak and treated with great respect at Liberty University a couple of years ago, but conservatives attempting to express their views at our elite colleges must do so under siege-like conditions, with cordons of police and extensive security precautions.

All too often they are simply disinvited or the speeches canceled due to fears of violence, thereby giving the most illiberal among us an effective veto in the marketplace of ideas.

• The official Constitution Day speech at Princeton University was given by Carolyn Rouse, chairwoman of the University’s Department of Anthropology. The speech’s title, concisely reflecting its illiberal content, was “F%*# Free Speech.”

As with the students chanting “speech is violence, we will not be silenced” at Berkeley, Rouse’s speech, in all its glorious obliviousness, decisively contradicted its purpose — were there no entrenched principle of free speech, she would not have been free to give her toxic speech condemning the principle of free speech.

Like multiculturalists who unwittingly use philosophical ideas derived from Western civilization to bash Western civilization, anti-free speech totalitarians don’t seem to understand that the success of their campaigns require precisely the preservation of that which they oppose.

Adlai Stevenson once said “the first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.”

So why have so many would-be liberals come to reject that position? Might it be because they know that their worldview requires suppression of alternatives and scrutiny for acceptance?

• That the fury over Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ efforts to reform sexual-assault adjudication on our college campuses exposes the extent to which another essential principle of liberal society — the belief in due process, upon which all of our rights depend — has come under attack.

By embracing the idea that those accused of serious crimes should be denied fair hearings, the left thus embraces the logic of the kangaroo courts of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Stalin’s show trials.

Presumptions of innocence and facts influencing assessment of guilt and innocence don’t matter in such proceedings, only the right ideological outcome.

As DeVos succinctly put it, “due process is the foundation of any system of justice that seeks a fair outcome. Due process either protects everyone, or it protects no one.”

There was a time when no good liberal would have rejected such a position, let alone been driven into fury by it. At the root of this abandonment is likely the infection of the liberal democratic tradition by highly illiberal, essentially totalitarian doctrines. And as all too often throughout history, such totalitarianism comes with the kind of ideological fanaticism and self-righteous zeal that ensures the ends justify the means and that all tactics are justified to defeat the oppressors, defined as anyone who sees the world differently.

Rather than respect the rule of law, due process, and free speech, they see such concepts as merely facades for exploitation and impediments to the implementation of their agenda.

To give comfort to the alleged victims of rape on campus, Kafkaesque tribunals are established that deny the accused any semblance of fairness, without, apparently, understanding that presumptions of innocence and due process were originally established not to oppress but to protect the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

To prevent allegedly oppressed minorities from hearing ideas that might discomfort, they suppress such ideas and endorse the use of violence against those expressing them, thereby essentially reversing the long-standing liberal understanding of the relationship between speech and violence — politically incorrect speech now becomes violence and violence suppressing such speech now becomes speech.

Lost altogether is the fact that freedom of speech has been the mightiest weapon in history used by oppressed peoples striving for freedom and justice.

In the end, though, our present-day Jacobins fail to understand that revolutions inevitably devour their own; that there will come a day when, as the party line veers unexpectedly, they too will find themselves in the docket. At which point they might acquire a belated appreciation for “bourgeois” values like presumptions of innocence and due process.