"Who thinks that the United States has a responsibility to promote democracy around the world?," the Barnard professor asked. My hand shot up. I looked around at my fellow students. I saw hesitation in some hands and disagreement in most. The professor responded, "Wow. I thought this campus was full of liberals."
That moment confirmed a troubling observation I have about modern campus liberalism. Certainly Barnard, the women's college of infamously liberal Columbia University, is full of self-identified liberals both in the student body and faculty. But, today's liberal students aren't buying the U.S. democracy-promotion role once championed by Democratic Presidents such as Kennedy and Carter.
What changed on this core concept so that today's liberal students stand apart from their predecessors? It's a mix of current politics and postmodernist cultural relativism that has redefined what it means to be a campus liberal.
A professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz, Barbara Epstein, identified this trend ten years ago in an article in New Politics: "There are many academic departments...in which the subculture of postmodernism holds sway...These programs tend to draw bright students who regard themselves as left, progressive, feminist, concerned with racism and homophobia." This postmodern subculture is alive today and profoundly affects campus politics and activism.
It is a combination of the increasingly popular anti-Iraq, anti-Bush, anti-U.S. politics of today and the philosophy of postmodernists like Derrida and Foucault, who became popular in the U.S. in the late 70s and early 80s. The postmodern student says that we all have our own versions of reality, so no one version is any better than any other; no one person (and no one nation) is in a position to judge or force a policy onto another.
The postmodernist concept ‘it's all relative' was a philosophy championed by many activists because it proclaimed that power (especially that of the West) was oppressive.
Now, on prestigious university campuses it has merged with reactionary, anti-interventionist politics to create a new sort of subculture and student leftism. University liberals once protested human rights violations and made the case that the U.S. needs to intervene in non-democratic countries to protect innocent civilians. Today, they are eager to listen to the dictators of the world. After all, from their perspective, who is to say that our system is superior to theirs?
When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, came to speak at Columbia last fall, the student protestors were minimal and were predominately Jewish or conservative. Yet it should not be a partisan or religious issue whether Ahmadinejad's statements are outrageous and Hitler-like. It should be an American issue. This man, and his statements, should have been offensive to all. But the issue quickly became defined by political leaning. The liberal majority of the campus was making it a political statement, saying, "Let him speak" and "We want to hear why he says those things."
Many claimed that they were unwilling to protest the invitation in the name of free speech. But, why were they so eagerly listening instead of yelling blame for human rights abuses against Iranians or in support of Israel's mere existence? Essentially, their response conveyed: "He has an opinion too, and it's all relative, so let's hear what he has to say"-who are we to judge?
Some of Senator Obama's recent statements hint at an affinity with this campus liberal perspective. When speaking to AIPAC, the Israel lobbyist group, a couple weeks ago, Senator Obama called for an Israeli "undivided Jerusalem." Two days later on CNN-after seeing the reaction from Arabs and particularly Palestinians-he took it back. He back peddled saying Jerusalem was still up for negotiation.
The postmodern mindset is a dangerous one to bring to international politics: it creates not just appeasement but the potential for the abandonment of liberalism in the name of being ‘relative' and ‘open-minded.' Immediate withdrawal from Iraq is likely to lead to unimaginable civil and regional wars, experts say. But, that may be perfectly justifiable from the postmodernist perspective: we should let the Iraqis fight it out because who are we to tell them how to run their country?
In his March National Review article, Peter Wehner, former deputy assistant to the president stated, "Postmodernism may sell at Columbia University and Harvard Law School; it doesn't sell nearly as well in the rest of America." Here's to hoping that is still true.
Sarah A. H. Morgan is a junior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum and a senior at Barnard College in New York City.
4 Comments
k | June 19, 2008, 8:53pm | #
Wow, you obviously haven't read Derrida or Foucault, but you still feel you can wrongly summarize their philosophy as "it's all relative." I would suggest learning what postmodernism is before you try "critiquing" it. There are plenty of valid criticisms to be made, but try reading about it first!
M.A. | June 19, 2008, 8:55pm | #
This is the expected result of years of multicultural education in "public" schools. Younger Americans cannot differentiate between good and evil, or free and enslaved. They are left with no measuring rod, and even if they have qualms about a leader's words or actions or a society's character, they can't muster any authority with which to object. The only objection they have is to anyone else who dares question whether or not the emperor is, in fact, wearing any clothes.
God help this country, and the world. When the US won't stand up for the weak in the world, or to the bullies, there is no help anywhere. And these so-called educated elite are supposed to be the future leaders of this country?? They are much too busy entertaining themselves to take notice that their rights are not-so-slowly being eroded, their futures compromised and despite all the rhetoric, their choices whittled to nothing of any importance.
It is human nature to always compete for the best position. If they don't want the US to be the world power, policing the world, whom would these highly miseducated liberals prefer? I dare them to name a country that has done more to promote peace and prosperity for the common man. Who would do a better job? Certainly not the UN, as we've seen.
Without a strong leader, with the will and resources to stand up to the bullies of the world, there will be no help for anyone. What will result is a violent free-for-all for the world's resources, with no regard for the consequences.
Today's young can't see the difference between those who are poor because their leaders insist they be, or those who are poor due to their own actions or inactions. This leaves them incapable of helping either.
in response | June 22, 2008, 11:25pm | #
The criticism of the first comment is an odd one given how much criticism and theoretical analysis has been done on Foucault and Derrida on the subject of how their philosophies can be and are interpreted as relativistic.
Foucault says in his "Selected Interviews and Other Writings": ‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. "“Truth” is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produces and sustains it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it." and Derrida too writes that, "We are lost because of the truth, that horrible fantasy, the same as the fantasy of a child finally. Nothing true, as you know, in our ‘confessions.’ We are still more foreign, more ignorant, more distant from what ‘really’ happened and that we believed we said to each other, more deprived of knowledge than ever."
The their post-modern philosophical writings maintain that truth is both unattainable and socially constructed. These post-modernists say that the previous movements and intellectual breakthroughs (truth-findings such as the Enlightenment) were merely a form of the West claiming that one socially-constructed idea was the right one, therefore imposing it on others and judging those who choose not to accept it.
This argument of Foucault and Derrida on the concepts of truth and knowledge have often been considered and studied as relativistic arguments. Even if it is not what the philosophers meant by their arguments, which it very well may have been, intellectuals and fans of said post-modernists see their philosophical arguments as the founders of cultural relativism and embrace it as such. The author, thus, has made a fair and accurate, though minimalistic, portrayal of some of Foucault's and Derrida's arguments to explain an observation she has made about campus liberalism.
Jessica | June 23, 2008, 11:59pm | #
I think we should declare victory in Iraq. Then we should make a responsible redeployment. If civil war breaks out then we should go back in and help the underdog. If the generals believe that Iraq should become a new duty station then they need to start treating the troops with duty station labor standards. They shouldn't be working the troops 24/7 with no days off and no sleep if its a duty station. There should be labor standards.