Confident In Its Ultimate Victory

When I first read the words, I knew Lyrissa Lidsky was right. They’ve stuck with me ever since.

Nevertheless, I know that in the war of generations, the younger always wins.  I just wonder what victory looks like.

Ross Douthat has a lengthy and interesting column arguing that the progressive revolution is winding down, and its legacy will be of less consequence in journalism than it will be in academia. In the course of getting there, he makes a point that has long been of concern.

In recent months, there have been several instances of elite universities or their faculty members offering some kind of institutional pushback to a censorious progressivism. Prominent examples include Cornell’s refusal to create a trigger warning requirement demanded by the undergraduate student assembly, the formation of a Harvard faculty group defending academic freedom and Stanford’s official condemnation of the disruptions at a conservative judge’s law school talk.

For some, this has been heartwarming news, that the adults have finally stopped pandering to their unduly passionate charges and are taking back their institutions. In contrast to the flurry of ham-handed radial unconstitutional laws being pushed in red states that will ultimately alienate all but the most extreme right until they’re held unconstitutional and trashed as empty performances by a  party in its death throes, the left has sought to take ownership of the souls of the young. These latest effort at pushback consist mostly of bromides about the worst and dumbest of secular woke religion, that have yet to actually result in any substantive change. Talk is cheap. College is not.

In some situations, the revolution might be rolled back or resisted or collapse of its own accord. But in others, peace might arrive because the revolution feels confident in its path to ultimate victory and no longer feels an urgent need to make examples of its enemies; it can move comfortably to entrenchment, the institutional long march.

Regardless of the trappings academics are donning in their belated effort to restore their appearance of dignity, any battles they may fight or win will be at the fringes of the culture war because they have already lost the hearts and minds of the young to a belief system that has now been so deeply ingrained that its as natural to their world as water is to a fish.

… in the long run, liberalism is giving way to progressivism in elite spaces. The new cultural liberalism in the media reflects the views of senior staff members and is opposed by affinity groups and young employees. That’s important, because surveys consistently find that “woke” values are twice as prevalent among younger leftists than among older leftists. Over eight in 10 undergraduates at 150 leading U.S. colleges say speakers who say B.L.M. is a hate group or transgenderism is a mental disorder should not be permitted to speak on campus. What’s more, seven in 10 think a professor who says something that students find offensive should be reported to their university. Young academics are twice as censorious as those over 50. These are the editorial teams and professoriate of tomorrow.

These are the judges and legislators of tomorrow. These are the parents of tomorrow. These are the cab Uber drivers and waiters, the carpenters and sales clerks of tomorrow. These are the code monkeys who write the algorithms that will give us the AI that will inform and instruct the next generation, raised on the promise that they will neither need hands nor bendable waist to put on their Skechers, and there is pseudo-athletic wear for all occasions, so there’s no reason to be concerned about either the size of one’s thighs or that a putative mate will find your ripples of cellulite sexually undesirable.

But in an atmosphere of ideological entrenchment and growing political uniformity, this protected setup can effectively shrink the intellectual world that the typical academic inhabits: Professional advancement depends on small networks of potential patrons and allies; becoming ideologically uncongenial to even a small number of key decision makers can redirect or torpedo a promising career; and with extremely rare celebrity exceptions, there is no outside force, no nonacademic audience, whose support or favor can rescue your vocation if the inside game goes against you.

The sense is that the professoriate, the nice men and women and others, want to be intellectually honest, and that doing so means they should accommodate the universe in which they exist. Being ideologically congenial isn’t just a matter of professional advancement and dodging landmines, but embracing their sensibilities within a community of like-minded allies, none of whom challenge your beliefs such that they are never subject to any rigorous question. When everyone who surrounds you already agrees with you, even the silliest of arguments will receive heartwarming approval and agreement. That validation assures this group of the “best and the brightest” that they must be correct, as brilliant people agree with them.

Ask a young person about pronouns or genders. Ask a young person how many unarmed black men are murdered by police. Ask a young person whether to believe a rape “survivor,” whether the accuse should be given the opportunity to fully and fairly defend himself before he’s convicted. Ask a young person whether our founding fathers were good and decent men who created a nation that offers the best promise for humankind the world has ever known. Ask a young person whether there is any hope for the planet. Ask a young person whether it’s acceptable to talk to a person they find attractive in the wild without being feared as a likely rapist.

For the most part, these questions are no longer at issue. They’ve been firmly resolved beyond any doubt and subsumed into their world view. They’ve been normalized. Some are fighting battles at the margins which they pretend are life and death struggles, even as the war has already been lost. It was said that we were evolving, even though evolution happens organically and isn’t rammed down the throat of an unwilling society by its most loud and vicious extremists. But the revolution largely succeeded already because they won the young, whether we want to accept that or not.

Perhaps we will have free speech and academic freedom on campus, but it will be tempered by the reality that they can afford to be more generous as it really won’t interest anybody outside of a small circle of friends.