The Victims' Revolution Read online

  The Victims’ Revolution

  The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

  Bruce Bawer

  Dedication

  For Carol

  Contents

  Dedication

  Preface

  The Closing of the Liberal Mind

  Chapter 1

  The Victims’ Revolution

  Chapter 2

  Gilligan’s Island: Women’s Studies

  Chapter 3

  The Ebony Tower: Black Studies

  Chapter 4

  Visit to a Queer Planet: Queer Studies

  Chapter 5

  The Dream of Aztlán: Chicano Studies

  Chapter 6

  Studies, Studies Everywhere

  Chapter 7

  Is There Hope?

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Bruce Bawer

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Footnotes

  Preface

  The Closing of the Liberal Mind

  It is my sense that most Americans today, whether they call themselves conservatives, liberals, or moderates, realize that something exceedingly important in the fabric of American society has been imperiled by the developments of the last few decades. They deplore the degradation of our culture, the polarization of our politics, and the coarsening of public debate. They understand that somewhere along the way, we lost the sensible centrism that, within living memory, defined the American public square. They understand that American history, which until not very long ago was a remarkable account of gradual progress toward the full realization of the nation’s founding values, has taken a wrong turn. But while Americans lament the loss of shared national values, many of them may not recognize the intimate connection between this loss and the changes that have taken place in American higher education over the last generation or so—changes, specifically, in the teaching of the humanities and social sciences, that have eventuated in the rejection, indeed the demonization, of the very ideas that once defined the sensible center.

  “What is it that holds a nation together?” asked Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the celebrated liberal historian, in a new 1998 foreword to his 1991 book, The Disuniting of America. He proceeded to reflect on the “fragility of national cohesion,” serving up a long list of countries that were then (and still are) “in ethnic or religious turmoil.” Even Canada, “long . . . considered the most sensible and placid of nations,” faced the possibility of splitting in two because of tensions between its English- and French-speaking citizens. Schlesinger quoted author Michael Ignatieff on the Canadian question: “If one of the top five developed nations on earth can’t make a federal, multi-ethnic state work, who else can?”

  As Schlesinger observed, “[t]he answer to that increasingly vital question has been, at least until recently, the United States.” For two centuries, America accomplished something that would have previously seemed impossible: the creation, as Schlesinger put it, “of a brand-new national identity by individuals who, in forsaking old loyalties and joining to make new lives, melted away ethnic differences.” Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, author of Letters from an American Farmer (1782), described Americans as “a new race of men”—a race that, paradoxically, had nothing to do with race.

  To point out the miraculous nature of this accomplishment—its utter lack of precedent in all of human history—is not to deny, among other things, the mistreatment of Native Americans and the blight of slavery and racism. It is simply to note that, in a world where violent intergroup enmity and conflict have been the rule rather than the exception, America found a way for increasingly diverse groups of people to live together not only in peace but with a strong sense of shared identity—an identity founded not on ethnicity but on a commitment to the values of individual liberty, dignity, and equality articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. America, as envisioned by its founders and understood by the overwhelming majority of its citizens, was, in an international context, and in a now outdated sense of the word, a supremely liberal conception.

  In 1944 the Swedish writer Gunnar Myrdal marveled at the fact that Americans of every ethnicity, religion, and color shared a more “explicitly expressed system of general ideals” than the people of any other country in the Western world. Although American society had yet to live up to the full meaning of its creed—“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—it was in fact the very thing that made moral progress in America not only possible but inevitable. To quote Schlesinger again: “the Creed held out hope even for those most brutally excluded by the white majority” and “act[ed] as the spur forever goading white Americans to live up to their proclaimed principles. . . . ‘America,’ Myrdal said, ‘is continuously struggling for its soul.’ ”

  One of the most magnificent examples of America’s struggles for its soul was the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. The goal of that movement could not have been more consistent with America’s founding ideals—which was why it ultimately succeeded. But that bright success was not without its downside. The most disastrous by-product of the civil rights movement was multiculturalism, a philosophy that teaches, as Schlesinger put it, “that America is not a nation of individuals at all but a nation of groups.” For two centuries, Americans had been held together by a shared sense of national identity, a belief in individual liberty, and a vision of full equality—even though that vision, as many Americans acknowledged, had yet to be fully realized. Yet just when the complete attainment of that vision seemed to lie within our grasp, the very idea of a shared identity began to be challenged, condemned, dismantled—and replaced by a new conception, founded not on individual rights and liberties but on the claims of group identity and culture. This new ideology, as Schlesinger recognized, represented a betrayal of true liberalism, a rejection of the idea of a sensible center, and a profound danger to the sense of unity that had made America uniquely strong, prosperous, and free.

  Schlesinger was, it should be emphasized, an icon among liberals, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of books that had helped shape social and political thought at the height of the American Century. The great chronicler and defender of Democratic presidents, in particular Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was also the author of an influential 1949 treatise called The Vital Center, in which he argued for a strong and vigorous democratic liberalism as an alternative to the then formidable temptations of communism. The Disuniting of America came as a kind of dismal coda to that book. It was published at a time when American campuses were in an uproar over the rise of multiculturalism and identity studies, and in it he warned his fellow liberals that the looming cult of victimhood, while posing as a liberal crusade, was actually an anti-liberal virus that threatened to destroy the very foundations of American democracy.

  Schlesinger himself might not have put it this way, but what the new academic groupthink really represented was nothing less than the closing of the liberal mind. Armed with a new sense of mission and moral superiority, the new academic elites simultaneously balkanized and politicized the study of society and culture and wrapped their Gramscian Marxist critiques in an impenetrable jargon that only they could understand. They no longer listened to traditional liberals
and held conservatives in utter contempt. Meanwhile, the multicultural dogma spread throughout society, transforming the way people think, speak, and act on a wide range of issues.

  In previous books, I have examined some of the consequences of this phenomenon. While Europe Slept indicted the refusal of liberals in Europe and the U.S. to defend liberal principles in the face of Islamic radicalism. Surrender documented the abandonment of their commitment to free speech in the name of multicultural sensitivity. In this book, I have attempted to go to the root of the problem—the academy, the font of the perfidious multicultural idea and the setting in which it is implanted into the minds of American youth.

  Schlesinger understood the crucial role of education in a democracy, especially one as volatile and changing as ours. He understood the importance of the “sensible center” in maintaining our strength and stability and keeping the country on the right path. And he understood the role of traditional liberal education in communicating, preserving, and building upon the sensible, centrist American values that he cherished. He made a great point of the fact that primary and secondary schools, by instilling civic values in young people, were a critical element in the perpetuation of a shared national identity.

  Higher education is obviously no less important. And the fact is—as many liberals themselves have acknowledged—that over the course of the last few decades, it has become the captive of a kind of thinking that imperils the American idea, and the American contract, as we have known them for more than two centuries. Among those who have most eloquently articulated the nature of this peril was the University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom, who, twenty-five years ago, in a pathbreaking book later described by Camille Paglia as “the first shot in the culture wars,” warned that the intellectual relativism that was taking over the academy—and that claimed to represent greater openness—was, in fact, leading to what he called “the closing of the American mind.” At its best, Bloom argued, liberal education had been founded on a belief in rationality and objective truth, in vigorous and free inquiry, and in the importance of encountering the great ideas and the great books; now, however, the university—and, in turn, the culture as a whole—was increasingly under the sway of relativistic thinking and rigid political ideas that represented, ultimately, a menace to American democracy.

  One result of this relativism is identity studies. The problem, to be sure, is not simply a pathological fixation on group identity, but a preoccupation with the historical grievances of certain groups, combined with a virulent hostility to America, which is consistently cast as the prime villain in the histories of these groups and the world at large. If you or I had set out to invent an ideology capable of utterly destroying the America of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the melting pot, we could scarcely have done better.

  The ideas that have increasingly dominated American universities since the sixties have followed the graduates of those institutions out into the larger society. The results are all around us, from workplaces where an innocuous statement can brand one as a bigot and destroy one’s career to election campaigns in which legitimate criticism of a black or female candidate can be discounted as “racist” or “sexist” instead of being addressed on its merits. Yet those ideas themselves, and the form in which they are presented in thousands of classrooms around the United States, remain an almost complete mystery to a great many otherwise well-informed and responsible citizens.

  This needs to change. Americans who care about the future of their country—especially parents who care what their children are being taught—need to know what is going on within those ivory towers. They need to be aware of the truly toxic changes that the revolution has wrought in the seemingly innocuous classrooms behind those ivied walls.

  A quarter century ago, Bloom’s warning was widely dismissed as a reactionary screed. In fact, it was prescient—prophetic. The sad truth is that the triumph of identity studies—and of the dogmas on which those studies are based—diminishes our sense of human possibility, and threatens to further impoverish our already diminished culture. Attention must be paid.

  Chapter 1

  The Victims’ Revolution

  It’s March 2010, and I’m at the University of California, Berkeley, for the annual Cultural Studies Association Conference. It is, to a large extent, a gathering of youth—of graduate students and very junior faculty.

  At one session a long-haired, fine-featured young man named Stephen, who reminds me a bit of the actor Matthew Gray Gubler on Criminal Minds, gives a talk in which he criticizes homeowners for “participating in global capitalism.” There’s plenty of rhetoric about “the hegemony of absolute space,” “ontological security,” and so on. But his point is clear: “We have no claim to our families’ property.” Though he acknowledges his own fantasy of a two-story house “with a wraparound porch,” he recoils at his own dream. “When we succumb to pity for an old woman losing her house,” he insists, “we abandon social justice,” since we are buying into the idea of an “individual’s monopolistic right” over a space.

  Another young speaker, Mimi, is here to talk about that iconic 1972 photo of a little girl running naked and terrified from a South Vietnamese napalm attack. Mimi notes that the girl, Kim Phúc, has forgiven the United States and is now traveling around the country celebrating American freedom. This angers Mimi, for whom that old photo conveys such a powerful anti-American message. What happens to the message, she asks, when the girl grows up to do such a terrible thing? Phúc’s “loving embrace of America,” charges Mimi, “seems a betrayal of the photo.” What, she asks, are we “as theorists” to make of the fact that Phúc “appears not to feel anger when we think she should”?

  Then there’s a young woman named Michelle, whose paper carries the title “Towards a Green Marxist Cultural Studies: Notes on Value and Human Domination over Nature.” Pretty highfalutin. But when she opens her mouth she sounds like a parody of a Valley girl: “Um, I’m like a grad student at UC Davis?” Michelle says that the “critique of capitalism has faded in significance”; in reaction, she’s “sort of reviving a Gramscian-style Marxism.” She describes global warming as “sort of, like, a crisis, in the human relationship to nature?” and as “a natural result of the human alienation from nature under capitalism.” She cites several authorities who speak of “a sort of, like, physical or spatial alienation?” but adds that she intends to go beyond them.

  It soon becomes obvious that these young people are, for the most part, smart upper-middle-class kids, probably from the suburbs, with little real-world experience and even less in the way of serious education. It’s clear that their familiarity with history, literature, philosophy, or any other traditional field of learning is at best rudimentary. What they have is ideology and the jargon to go with it. And they have the arrogance of innocents who really have no clue how little they know. One after another of them pronounces with an imperial air of authority on things about which they plainly know next to nothing.

  I find my heart going out to them. They’ve been trained to parrot jargon, to regurgitate bullet points about Western imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism—and to think that this is what it means to be educated. After spending a couple of days listening to them, I can see how easy it must have been for these kids—who have never known any other critical language—to pick this one up and mimic it. Indeed, once you’ve gone to a few of these sessions, you discover that you can do the same thing with ease yourself. You don’t need to have actually learned anything, and it certainly has nothing to do with actual social or cultural analysis.

  What makes the whole thing unfortunate is that some of these young people have reasonably worthy topics that they want to explore. But they’re prisoners of a mind-set and jargon that make it all but impossible for them to say anything fresh or insightful about their experiences and observations. They’ve been trained to reduce the rich complexities and ambiguities of human life to simp
le formulas about oppressors and oppressed, capitalists and workers, Western imperialists and their non-Western victims. And when they encounter a reality that doesn’t fit this paradigm, they don’t know how to deal with it, other than to make statements that are demonstrably untrue. Nor do they realize how America-centric they are: despite their rote anti-American rhetoric, most of the things they have to say only make even the remotest kind of sense within an American context.

  Then there’s the disorienting admixture, in many of these kids’ presentations, of ludicrously pretentious postmodern jargon and an informal, semiliterate English, full of “likes” and “you knows” and “kind ofs” and mispronounced words (in the midst of all his fancy academic rhetoric, young Stephen pronounces analogous “an-AL-o-jos”) that seem more appropriate to a high school cafeteria than a professional conference. Indeed, the whole event is suffused by a surprising callowness, a lack of the kind of mature professional discipline that I had assumed all grad students still learned to practice, despite the ideological sea change of the last generation or two. (It is not irrelevant that when I showed up to register on the first day of the Cultural Studies Association Conference, I was the only male wearing a suit jacket; I quickly stuffed it into a bag.)

  Once upon a time there was something called history. And something else called philosophy. And there was also literature, and with it came literary scholarship, literary history, and literary criticism. And there were art and music, and, to complement them, art history and music criticism and so forth. All these fields of inquiry, and others, fell under the umbrella term “humanities,” or “arts and humanities” (the “arts” part included art and music, “humanities” the rest). The word humanities came into common use in the mid-twentieth century and designated a sphere of intellectual inquiry that, strictly speaking, was not to be confused, on the one hand, with the arts, which were about pure creativity, or, on the other hand, with the social sciences, such as sociology, economics, and political science, which, like the natural sciences (among them biology, chemistry, and physics), sought to establish hard facts by means of statistical research and the like.