“American illiberalism is deeply rooted in our past and fed by practices, relationships and sensibilities that have been close to the surface, even when they haven’t exploded into view,” writes Steven Hahn in a NYT column that condenses the arguments from Illiberal America, which I reviewed a couple days ago. America, as William S. Burroughs lectured his readers, is not a young land. Much of it is old and dirty and evil:
Few Progressives of the early 20th century had much trouble with this. Segregation seemed a modern way to choreograph “race relations,” and disfranchisement resonated with their disenchantment with popular politics, whether it was powered by Black voters in the South or European immigrants in the North. Many Progressives were devotees of eugenics and other forms of social engineering, and they generally favored overseas imperialism; some began to envision the scaffolding of a corporate state — all anticipating the dark turns in Europe over the next decades.
The 1920s, in fact, saw fascist pulses coming from a number of directions in the United States and, as in Europe, targeting political radicals. Benito Mussolini won accolades in many American quarters. The lab where Josef Mengele worked received support from the Rockefeller Foundation. White Protestant fundamentalism reigned in towns and the countryside. And the Immigration Act of 1924 set limits on the number of newcomers, especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were thought to be politically and culturally unassimilable.
College students are living through the consequences of illiberalism. Educational institutions with DEI programs and cultural studies majors have no qualms about siccing the police on their students; questioned about their financial ties to Israel, however byzantine, they’re flummoxed, reduced to babbling about “outside agitators” like old dead racist George Wallace. It’s no surprise that university administrators don’t observe the liberal tolerance they espouse in their curricula, but what is less said is how in the last thirty years American colleges and universities exist as training grounds for lawyers, physicians, future Wall Street prestidigitators, and other legs in the stool of elitism; students are supposed to be compliant because these professions encourage it.
Illiberalism comes dressed in respectable clothes. It often looks and talks like Woodrow Wilson.
Humanizing The Vacuum 