Liberalism, a decadent bubble

Liberalism, a decadent bubble

By | 2017-07-27T02:21:52-04:00 July 27th, 2017|Op-Eds|0 Comments

Universities have lost sight of Western culture in their need to be politically correct.

By Giulio Meotti – Arutz Sheva

It is the oldest and most glorious university that America that has produced 75 Nobel Laureates and all the good and/or famous people that count, including Barack Obama. Since 1636, in various forms, Harvard students have paid tribute to the Puritan founders of the University and the Massachusetts Bay Colony hosting it.

But in 2017, the administrators of the Ivy League’s jewel decided that Puritans are not only old-fashioned, but also a little racist. So they changed the formula recited at the graduation’s cerimony.

Harvard is the last major university to perform a politically correct takeover. In February, Yale’s president announced that he would change the name of a residential college named after to John C. Calhoun. Now Harvard attacks the Christians who fled from England to help establish the United States of America. The university requires an innocuous, multicultural formula and, if possible, it should also be gender-respectful.

Four months ago, Harvard’s dean, Drew Gilpin Faust, organized a major conference to shed light on the relationship between slavery and Harvard. On May 23, Harvard then hosted a graduation ceremony exclusively for black students. And a few months earlier, Harvard Law School had cleansed it symbol of the word “Veritas” because it was invented by a slavemaster

The opposition to this ideologically correct wave is led by a great political scientist, Harvey Mansfield, a faculty member since 1962. Universities, Mansfield recently said, have become “bubbles of decadent liberalism”. The result, wrote David Brooks in the New York Times, is that “starting decades ago, many people, especially in the universities, lost faith in the narrative of Western civilization. They stopped teaching it, and the great cultural transmission belt broke. Now many students, if they encounter it, are taught that Western civilization is a history of oppression”.

Mansfield is correct, but we can extend his definition to the entire liberalism spectrum. See what happened after Donald Trump, while in Poland, called to defend “Western civilization”. The entire liberal spectrum of media, intellectuals and journalists labelled Trump’s speech an example of “alt right” thinking.

In this exhausted version of libralism, the goal for liberals seems to be “peace” and “diversity”, at all cost. In other words, surrender. Our Western élites have turned liberalism, as an article by Artnet explained when talking about the artistic exhibition Biennale of Venice, into “an orgy of liberal sex and liberal guilt”. It is not only an uselessl liberalism, but even detrimental in the battle to defend Western civilization, the most important battle of our time.

 Giulio Meotti
The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book “A New Shoah”, that researched the personal stories of Israel’s terror victims, published by Encounter and of “J’Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel” published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary.