How the Democrats Have Abandoned Liberal Values

I came of age politically with the election of George W. Bush, a man whose administration would come to be defined by the September 11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath. In a speech before Congress shortly after the horrific attacks, President Bush outlined the country’s stance toward terrorism, which would come to be known as the Bush doctrine:

Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

In the context of foreign policy, this approach made sense. Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, I supported our military intervention in Afghanistan to take out al Qaeda and the Taliban regime that gave them a home.

However, things changed when our nation’s attention was turned toward Iraq. While our invasion of that country had strong bipartisan support, there was a sizeable minority of Americans who opposed it. I counted myself among that minority. While the immediate aftermath of September 11 and the war in Afghanistan had been a time of national unity against a common enemy, things got much uglier when it came to the war in Iraq. The Bush doctrine was expanded beyond foreign policy and applied to Americans with dissenting views. Those of us who opposed the invasion were smeared as being unpatriotic, as not supporting our troops, even as siding with the terrorists. In reality, these attacks couldn’t have been further from the truth. Those of us who opposed the war did so in large part out of concern for our troops, as we feared that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction might have been used against them, as well as against Iraqi civilians, especially Kurds and Shi’ites. Even as someone who grew up in a blue region of a blue state, I was still in the minority, and many of my high school classmates saw me as the enemy. As such, I came to identify with the far left, as my position on the defining issue of that era was to the left of even most Democrats.

As I made my way through high school, I studied the history of the United States and Western civilization and came to understand the role that liberal values played in creating many of the positive aspects of the world in which we live, replacing oppressive institutions of the past. I did research on the Inquisition and read Inherit the Wind. I studied the Enlightenment and came to appreciate how its values were brought to life in America by our Founding Fathers. I learned about historic Supreme Court cases like Brown, Miranda, and Skokie and appreciated how important it was to protect basic rights like free speech, privacy, due process, and equal protection, even if it might be inconvenient in the moment, as we never knew when we might be the ones facing injustice.

After four years, I graduated from high school and went on to college. I enrolled at a school in New Haven, Connecticut. You might have heard of it. It’s called Yale. I quickly fell in love with the school for a number of reasons, from the engaging courses that I was taking to living in a building that looked like a castle. Among those reasons was that my peers shared my political views and experienced the same joy when the Democrats took back Congress in 2006 and Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. Yet, in time I would come to realize that the political utopia I thought I had found was in fact a dystopia and that I was not as far to the left as I had thought.

The first big red flag came in 2008 when a group of drunk fraternity pledges stood in front of the Yale Women’s Center at midnight holding a sign with a misogynous slogan. I shared in the outrage over this incident, but I was shocked when the Women’s Center proposed a lawsuit against the fraternity. Their actions were offensive and reprehensible, but they were also protected speech under the First Amendment. The fact that Yale feminists seemed to be willing to flush free speech down the drain ought to have sounded alarm bells for any true liberal.

I saw more of this sort of abandonment of liberal values that summer when I worked together on research with a student on the far left. My colleague told me that she saw it as backwards that those accused of discrimination were afforded the presumption of innocence. Instead, they should be presumed to have discriminated unless they could prove otherwise. I wondered whether she had ever studied the Inquisition and learned of the sort of atrocities that can take place when the rights of the accused are not protected.

Another major incident occurred right before I graduated in 2010. Yale held an annual outdoor concert called Spring Fling just before the end of the academic year, and the choice of performers was at times controversial. The school had a tendency to invite rap artists with lyrics that many saw as misogynous. I joined in a feminist-led boycott of one act of Spring Fling my freshman year. Yet in senior year, the tune of Yale feminists was very different. Rather than calling for another boycott, they instead took their problems out on a scapegoat: In their eyes, all men on campus were responsible. No account was taken of the fact that most men had no knowledge of the selection of performers until it was finalized or the fact that at least some of us had taken action in support of their cause in the past. For them to have to miss the concert would be unfair, they claimed. I thought of the generations of courageous Americans who had literally put their lives on the line to achieve the freedom that we have today, from the minutemen at Lexington and Concord to the civil rights protestors who had fire hoses turned on them at Birmingham and Selma. Yet, it was too much to ask for these people to miss one concert if that was the cost of taking a stand for their beliefs.

Over those four years, I encountered a form of left-wing politics that I had not seen in my life up to that point, one that had a single value, diversity, before which everything else must fall. Other traditional liberal values such as free speech, due process, and equal rights were to be abandoned if they were inconvenient for “marginalized” people. I emerged from this encounter with an important question: Was this illiberal ideology confined to Yale or to elite academia, or was it rising in society at around the same time that I went away to college? This question would be answered for me in the years following my graduation.

It first became clear to me that far-left identity politics was going national during the 2012 presidential campaign, when Democrats accused those who disagreed with them on issues of reproductive rights of waging a “war on women.” I now saw the Democrats exhibiting the same sort of problematic behavior that Republicans had engaged in a decade earlier. Under the Bush doctrine of the right, those who disagreed with the Iraq War were branded unpatriotic. Under the Bush doctrine of the left, those who disagree with abortion rights are branded misogynous, while those who disagree with affirmative action or illegal immigration are branded racist. The issues may be different, but both parties are capable of assuming the worst of those who dissent from their orthodoxies.

Soon thereafter, I learned that due process had also gone out the window. In 2011, the Department of Education had issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to the presidents of all colleges and universities directing them on how to adjudicate allegations of rape and sexual assault, and it was eerily similar to the ideas of my research colleague. The right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt was to be eliminated, replaced by a “preponderance of the evidence” standard under which 50.01% certainty of guilt was enough for a student to be expelled and left with the functional equivalent of a criminal record. Other constitutional rights such as the right to an attorney, the right to cross-examination, and protection from double jeopardy were to be abandoned if the school did not wish to risk having its federal funding revoked. Free speech was also implicated in the case of Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University who wrote an article opposing these policies and was placed under a Title IX investigation when students complained that writing the article created a hostile environment for women.

In the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, left-wing extremism reached the point of outright violence. Charles Murray was barred from speaking at Middlebury College by protestors willing to use force to prevent his ideas from being heard. The angry mob descended on the lecture hall of Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College and prevented him from teaching after he authored an email proposing that demands for white students to leave campus for a day weren’t an appropriate way to combat racism. Most recently, Quillette columnist Andy Ngo was hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage after being beaten by Antifa thugs, while The New York Times buried the story in the middle of the paper and attempted to draw a moral equivalence between the peaceful Ngo and the violent attackers who placed his life in danger.

People who behave this way while claiming to be liberal are a perversion of true liberalism. The Bush doctrine of the right was consigned to the dustbin of history with the election of Barack Obama, but the Bush doctrine of the left is alive and well, showing no signs of going anywhere any time soon. I no longer identify with the left and now call myself a centrist and a classical liberal. The world in which we live today is one that my teenage self could not have imagined, where the left has largely abandoned most liberal values while more moderate conservatives have taken up the cause of free speech. I believe that this will be the defining question of my generation: What kind of world do we want to pass down to those who come after us? Will we conserve the liberal values that have made America free and prosperous? Or will we abandon them when they become inconvenient and face the consequences? The choice is up to us.