Collectivism on the Campus

Poor old Frank Chodorov, founder of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, must be spinning in his grave at what has become of his baby, ISI. He established ISI as a fifty year project to reverse America’s decent into collectivism and chaos by educating intellectual leaders at university campuses across the nation.

The Old Right anti-war, anti-statist Chodorov, author of such classics as Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist, The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, and One is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist, once proclaimed “As for me, I will punch anyone who calls me a conservative in the nose. I am a radical.”

After Frank died the militant militaristic Buckleyite “conservatives” at the helm of ISI quickly changed its name to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. No individualism for them; conformist collectivism in the guise of “conservatism” became the stentorian order of the day.

Later when absorbed by the cancerous former Trotskyist neocons metastasizing their way through the institutional nexus of “conservative” foundations, public policy institutes, publishing concerns, ISI became even more stridently opposed to the original foundational bedrock upon which it was conceived.

Obstructionists and wreckers such as Paul Gottfried must now be purged in the name of doctrinal “political correctness,” a disingenuous concept first conceived by the Marxist left according to Wikipedia:

Historically, the term was a colloquialism used in the early-to-mid 20th century by Communists and Socialists in political debates, referring pejoratively to the Communist ‘party line’, which provided for “correct” positions on many matters of politics. The term was adopted in the later 20th century by the New Left, applied with a certain humor to condemn sexist or racist conduct as ‘not politically correct’. By the early 1990s, the term was adopted by US conservatives as a pejorative term for all manner of attempts to promote multiculturalism and identity politics, particularly, attempts to introduce new terms that sought to leave behind discriminatory baggage ostensibly attached to older ones, and conversely, to try to make older ones taboo.

In 1955, the distinguished Old Right scholar E. Merrill Root wrote his famous work, Collectivism on the Campus: The Battle for the Mind in American Colleges. That battle against collectivism is still underway but the collectivists are now marching under the scarlet banner of neoconservatism.

Today only the Mises Institute is providing the real principled intellectual opposition to this rampaging decent into collectivism on the nation’s campuses. Support their noble efforts today.

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7:49 pm on August 27, 2014