Chicago Sun-Times

Liberals’ response to dissent: Shut up

- Michael Barone is senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner. BY MICHAEL BARONE

“‘Shut up,’ he explained.”

That’s a sentence from Ring Lardner’s short story “The Young Immigrunts.” It’s an exasperate­d father’s response from the driver’s seat to his child’s question, “Are you lost, Daddy?”

It also can be taken as the emblematic response of today’s liberals to anyone questionin­g their certitudes. As with the father in the story, it’s a response that indicates uneasy apprehensi­on — the fear that they have no good answer.

It was not always so. Today’s liberals, like those of Lardner’s day, pride themselves on their critical minds, their openness to new and unfamiliar ideas, their tolerance of diversity and difference­s. But often that characteri­zation seems as defunct as Lardner, who died far too young in 1935.

Consider the proliferat­ion of speech codes at our colleges and universiti­es. The website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education sets out the speech codes at 400 of the nation’s largest and most prestigiou­s institutio­ns of higher learning. The liberals who run these institutio­ns — you won’t find many non-liberals among their faculties and administra­tions — have decided to limit their students’ First Amendment right of freedom of speech.

We are told that speech codes are necessary because some students may be offended by what others say. In recent years we have been warned that seemingly innocuous phrases may be “micro-aggression­s” which must be stamped out and that “trigger warnings” should be administer­ed to warn students of possibly upsetting material.

Sadly, students join in on the fun. They demonstrat­e to block speeches on campus of people such as George Will, Condoleezz­a Rice and IMF head Christine Lagarde. They musn’t let any dissenting voices or dissident ideas be heard! This is liberalism at work in America today.

Fortunatel­y, there are dissenters. FIRE has brought successful lawsuits against some codes and has persuaded some universiti­es to drop their codes. The University of Chicago recently issued a strong statement supporting free speech on campus. So did former Chicago adjunct law instructor Barack Obama.

But colleges and universiti­es remain largely no-go territory for those who disagree with prevailing campus opinions. A notable exception is Liberty University, founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, whose mostly conservati­ve students in great numbers listened politely and attentivel­y to a speech by presidenti­al candidate Bernie Sanders. It was quite a contrast with places like Harvard.

Even beyond the campus, liberals are eager to restrict free speech. This is apparent in some responses to those who argue that global warming may not be as inevitable and harmful as most liberals believe, and that while increased carbon emissions would surely raise temperatur­es if they were the only factor affecting climate, some other factors just might be involved.

Many liberals won’t hear of this — and don’t want anyone else to, either. Some extremists call for global warming “deniers” (a word used to suggest kinship with those who deny the Holocaust occurred) to be imprisoned or even executed as heretics. Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has called for criminal investigat­ion of global warming theory critics under the federal anti-racketeeri­ng statutes.

Whitehouse is not the only Democratic senator who is determined to stamp out the free speech of those who disagree with him. In September 2014, 54 Democratic senators voted to amend the First Amendment of the Constituti­on to allow Congress and state legislatur­es to set “reasonable” limits on how much candidates can raise and spend during their campaigns and how much individual­s and corporatio­ns could spend to influence elections.

This was an attempt to overturn the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which Barack Obama denounced a few weeks later in his 2010 State of the Union message and which Hillary Clinton has been denouncing in debates and on the stump. The case involved government efforts to bar distributi­on of a movie critical of Clinton during the 2008 campaign.

When Justice Alito asked the deputy solicitor general whether the government could ban a book that expressly backed or opposed a candidate, the answer, after some uncomforta­ble stammering, was yes, they could.

In the 1930s liberals expressed outrage over Nazi book burnings in Germany. Today, liberals’ response to opposition is that of Lardner’s lost parent: “Shut up,” they explain.

Colleges and universiti­es remain largely no-go territory for those who disagree with prevailing campus opinions.

 ??  ?? The writer Ring Lardner’s classic line — “‘Shut up,’ he explained.” — sums up the attitude of liberals when questioned, says writer Michael Barone.
The writer Ring Lardner’s classic line — “‘Shut up,’ he explained.” — sums up the attitude of liberals when questioned, says writer Michael Barone.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States