Lew, the Left’s attack on free speech is a stealth issue like their “culture war” was. By the time Pat Buchanan gave a speech about it many years ago at the GOP National Convention, the “war” was already over. The attack on free speech has permeated the universities, where all totalitarian ideas get their start, for decades already. It was called Political Correctness in the 1990s. The furor over it seems to have died down, but the attacks continue: The malicious libeling of Walter Block by the Loyola College administration for merely giving a very mainstream lecture on the economics of the “wage gap” that we’ve written about on LRC is a good example.
Journalist John Leo has researched and written about the Left’s attack on free speech on campus for years, and has discovered the following: “Much campus censorship rests on philosophical underpinnings that go back to [Marxist] social theorist Herbert Marcuse, a hero to sixties radicals. Marcuse argued that traditional tolerance is repressive — it wards off reform by making the status quo . . . well, tolerable. Marcuse favored intolerance of established conservative views, with tolerance offered only to the opinions of the oppressed, radicals, subversives, and other outsiders. Indoctrination of students and ‘deeply pervasive’ censorship of others would be necessary, starting on the campuses.” (emphasis added).
Notice Marcuse said it starts on the campuses, and then on to the rest of the culture. “Deeply pervasive censorship” of conservative and libertarian ideas has existed on almost all university campuses for at least three decades now, which is why Supreme Court nominees like Kagan feel comfortable bloviating about why there should be a totalitarian crackdown on speech the government does not approve of. People like that have been doing it for years in the universities where they have worked as administrators, and now they want to subject the whole society to it, Soviet style.
