The Sickness In The Left: Are Student Progressives the Real Authoritarians?

It is often said that as one grows older, one grows more politically conservative. This is often conveyed in a quote generally misattributed to Winston Churchill, paraphrased: “If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; and if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no head.” That liberalism belongs to the young and idealistic, and conservatism to the mature and experienced, remains a regular debate among partisans and ideologues of all ages. But it seems seldom questioned whether ideological change has less to do with the shift in ideals within an individual, and more to do with the world that is changing around them.

Consider the emergence of the new political left. Once the ideological wing of populism, class struggle and egalitarianism, the "new left" in America and the U.K. is largely centered around matters of personal identity, perceptions of privilege and oppression, and in the cases of many younger progressives, personal insulation from views or speech deemed “triggering” or “problematic.”

Not even as long as a decade ago, anti-war and free speech advocates from the political left were fighting tooth and nail to oppose the "free speech zones" into which they were forced – by law enforcement and conservatives more broadly – that curtailed free expression ostensibly in the name of national security. But strangely, today's progressive activist is increasingly becoming one who fights for free speech restrictions, not against.

Take the most visible recent example: university campuses. Whether you focus on the University of Missouri protests of last fall – where Media Studies professor Melissa Click became an icon of the anti-speech regressivist movement when she called for “muscle” to expel a member of the press from the students' “safe space” – or the banning of conservative columnist Milo Yiannopolous and radical feminist Julie Bindel by the University of Manchester Student Union, the modern face of progressive activism is increasingly resembling one of authoritarian design. Notice the twin ironies here: one protest seeks to ban media coverage while attempting to raise public awareness around race issues, while the other bans speakers who are set to debate one another in a forum on the state of free expression.

Both of these cases, of course, contradict the intellectual legacy to which these young protestors otherwise lay claim. The history of progressive student activism – whether fighting for civil rights, opposing foreign wars or drawing attention to gross injustice like apartheid in South Africa – consistently held as a core conviction the belief that free expression and open dialogue were essential to advancing progressive causes. The Free Speech Movement of the 1960s is still seen by many as the high water mark for U.S. progressive student activism.

Yet looking now to students' changing demands – for “safe spaces,” which have come to replace the defense of free expression – it would appear that much of the progressive legacy is being undone with each passing hashtag and protest.

Another insidious, if more banal aspect of modern progressivism is the over-sensitivity and outrage culture overtaking U.S. university campuses. In early 2015, students at Columbia University held forums to discuss how many within their ranks felt “triggered” and “unsafe” in a recent Literature Humanities class in which Ovid’s Metamorphoses was being read and discussed. Deeming the work a “transgression” against “identity,” the student Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board wrote an article in the Columbia Spectator that decried the classic for its “triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom.”

Similar hostilities towards literature, apparently rooted in students' self-absorbed sense of entitlement and political correctness, have been leveled at other great works such as The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and even Shakespeare. Claiming that such works require “trigger warnings,” students on campuses today are becoming increasingly known for their abilities to discover outrage and perceived “trauma” in even the slightest utterance or piece of writing. From “microaggressions” to banning speakers and speech for perceived insensitivity to student identities, so-called progressive student groups are routinely adopting authoritarian positions on matters of free expression and open debate.

So where does this leave liberalism in the broader sense? While many dismissively regard the resurgence of political correctness and outrage culture as a passing fad barely worthy of attention, others consider it a positive progressive effort to advance the ideals of social equality. Still, many more in the political middle are coming to identify this new, repressive progressive agenda not only with intellectual scorn, but as an example of the intellectual failings of liberalism as a whole. Tangential associations between the hyper-sensitive crusades of identity obsession, and the more fundamental causes championed by the left, are causing some to lose faith in political liberalism and even, in some cases, to join its opposition.

As matters of class disparity, labor rights, environmental destruction and corporate corruption of government continue to become pressing crises to greater numbers of people, the left is simultaneously being made more impotent by these distractions of hysterics. It is also becoming a laughing stock of the right and center, as each demand to censor speech or debate by modern fringe progressive activists calls into question the broader legitimacy of serious and established liberal topics. Ironically, the reactionary progressive movements of today in some ways mirror the hardline evangelical conservative right, lending some credibility to the concept of the horseshoe theory: that the extremes of left and right are often more closely related than disparate.

What, if anything, can or should be done to address this growing strong-arm orthodoxy of the left? To begin with, it must be recognized and accepted that free speech is only free when its protections are universally applied and when all speech is defended. While it runs contrary to many activists' notion of the need for “safe space,” the demand for free speech must once again become a central tenet to political and intellectual liberalism if it is to survive.

As free expression becomes more and more a libertarian, even a mainstream conservative issue, it falls as a duty of the left to defend the speech that many on the left may nonetheless disagree with. Those of liberal and progressive persuasion must engage in self-reflection and open debate with anyone – including their own allies – who seeks to stifle that free speech. For while the efforts to carve out safe spaces, police the speech of those around them, and champion causes of identity and emotion over fact and reality may be done with the best of intentions, it's important for progressives to bear in mind just what the road to hell is paved with.