The liberal reaction to Donald Trump’s speech on Western civilization goes to show how much liberals played the fool way back in the 1980s. That’s when the debate over Western Civilization boiled over and traditionalists and multiculturalists vied for control of the humanities curriculum. Liberals didn’t fit easily in either camp. Most of them in the humanities taught a standard course in recognized figures, English from Beowulf to Joyce, art and architecture from the Acropolis to Pollock, U.S. history from the Pilgrims through the Sixties. But while their educational practices were conventional, they stood politically with the progressives and radicals. They had to come up with a compromise–and they did. Donald Trump’s speech proves beyond all doubt that, whether they realized it or not, it was a fake.
At that time, when William Bennett, Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, and other advocates of traditional cultural literacy were filling the public sphere (though Hirsch was a firm political liberal), there were two versions of the “Eurocentrist” critique coming from the Left. First, hard identity politicians in humanities departments and “studies” programs cast Western civilization as a racist, sexist, imperialist enterprise. They retained the anti-Americanism of the anti-War movement of the previous decade and applied it to the college syllabus, treating a course packed with dead white male authors as just that: an ideological formation by race and sex. They didn’t see the legacy of Homer and Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare, Mozart and Manet as a positive lineage of genius. They only registered the exclusions: not enough women and persons of color.
But their presentation was so bitter and anti-intellectual that it didn’t impress many colleagues across the campus, not to mention observers in the public sphere. In fact, it alienated them. Harold Bloom termed these bilious progressives the School of Resentment, and in my view, the Nietzschean tag fit even though I hated Reagan and all the other Republicans as much as anybody. Liberals didn’t view the Western heritage that way, and it wasn’t how they talked about reform, either. The professors I had in the 1980s were solidly Democrat (that is, anti-Reagan) and fully in favor of affirmative action and abortion rights. They wanted to see Geraldine Ferraro Vice President and they acknowledged all the oppressions of the past, but they hadn’t learned to characterize their own teaching of Great Books as another one of them.
Yes, they agreed that Milton and Pope had their sexism and that pre-Civil Rights American writers didn’t recognize the equality of African Americans. But that didn’t make Western civilization something to withhold from historically-disadvantaged individuals. The liberal position was to allow everyone access to it, and that included appreciating the tools of justice that Western civilization provided such as natural and universal rights. If Western civilization bore elements of the bad -isms, the solution wasn’t to banish it or even to disparage it. We should revise it, instead, particularly where it had excluded other voices and other experiences.
And so, we got a positive version of reform, not “Hey hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go!” but happy expressions of diversity, “opening up the canon,” “recovering lost voices,” preserving “herstory” as well as “history.” This was the liberal via media. It didn’t displace Western civilization — it enriched it. We didn’t need to denounce Jonathan Swift because of his misogyny. We could simply place contemporary women’s writings alongside his and produce a fuller, deeper, richer picture of the tradition.
That was the promise of liberalism in the humanities. When conservative critics would charge that Alice Walker is pushing Hemingway off the reading list, liberal professors quickly replied, “No, no, not at all. Hemingway is still there, but now we have broader representation of American literary history.” Who could argue with that?
Well, now we know. We believed that sober moderates would prevail over adversarial leftists, who would sputter out once the (in their eyes) repressive tolerance of liberalism would do its work. But it didn’t work out that way. The identity politicians suffered many public embarrassments because of their political correctness and speech codes and illiberal education and tenured radicalism, but that didn’t slow their advance one bit. On this issue of civilization, they have won off-campus liberals to their side. The enthusiastic or benign appreciation of Western civilization is now a sign of bad politics.
Peter Beinart handily explains what Western civilization now means: “In his speech in Poland on Thursday, Donald Trump referred 10 times to “the West” and five times to “our civilization.” His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means.” Beinart regards “the West” as “a racial and religious term.” The Washington Post‘s Jonathan Capehart, too, linked it to white nationalism, especially Trump’s sentence, “We write symphonies.” In response, Capehart wrote, “In that one line, taken in context with everything else Trump said, what I heard was the loudest of dog whistles. A familiar boast that swells the chests of white nationalists everywhere.”
Commentaries on these remarks have been profuse, but I haven’t seen anyone bring up this 30-year-old background. To recall it is to prove a remarkable and sad transformation in the status of Western civilization. To speak proudly of its achievements, to hail its art and music, to acknowledge its origin in Jerusalem and Athens and Rome was in the past a partial interpretation of human history and culture. Now, it’s racist and imperialist.
All the old liberal talk about diversity and recognition and recognizing the “other” is gone. The fierce multiculturalists of the 1980s are now the mainstream liberal talking heads of the 2010s. It is anti-intellectual and historically-inaccurate, but among the left, it has a bien–pensant moral force. One expects this in academic humanities departments, and now we can find it in the pages of distinguished liberal periodicals, too.
Hope everyone is enjoying the omelet.
It was silly and naive to ever think otherwise.
If some Alice Walker displacing some Hemingway (or Shakespeare!) is good…then more Alice Walker displacing all of Hemingway (or Shakespeare!) is better! If dragging the mediocrity of Maya Angelou into our 20th Century Poetry classes is good (meaning we read less Eliot or Stevens or Auden), then clearly replacing those dead White males with ever more obscure URM’s is glory made manifest. How could it not be?
Especially when the very standards by which the DWMales were elevated are themselves ash-heaped as atrophied symbols of racist, sexist, colonialist, capitalist corruption & oppression.
We see it everywhere (save, perhaps, the hard sciences): Damnatio Memoriae — the condemnation of memory and the embrace of the Great Forgetting. Today become the New Age and the Great Now (in which everything is even, everything is equal, everyone is included (especially the righteously diverse), and social justice is mandated by the State Czar of Social Justicing (the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers).
Tear down the statues. Tear down the libraries. White wash & disinfect everything which remains for all of it reeks.
The Idiots at Pomona put it thusly in their rejection of their President’s paltry defense of Free Speech, quoted as is: “The idea that there is a single truth–’the Truth’–is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples. We, Black students, exist with a myriad of different identities. We are queer, trans, differently-abled, poor/low-income, undocumented, Muslim, first-generation and/or immigrant, and positioned in different spaces across Africa and the African diaspora. The idea that we must subject ourselves routinely to the hate speech of fascists who want for us not to exist plays on the same Eurocentric constructs that believed Black people to be impervious to pain and apathetic to the brutal and violent conditions of white supremacy.”
It speaks for itself.
So Dancers at the end of Time we have become…fiercely thrust there by our New Red Guard. And there, in that fine & private place….we rush headlong to embrace….what is and what will always be…. ultimate, unyielding, inert, unthinking, uniformity. And won’t that just be dandy?
No disrespect, Professor, but did you think it was going to turn out differently? You accepted their premises. You thought it was crucial to still hate Ronald Reagan. Why? You thought it was important to note the inadequacy of free market capitalism and constitutional republican government. Why? You conceded that there was nothing so transcendent about the Western canon that it couldn’t be improved with a little bit of Alice Walker or Susan Faludi. Why?
I know the School of Resentment can answer those questions. They have a clear, consistent, and coherent answer to those whys. It’s not clear to me that you do, at least without taking the tacit position that their argument is fundamentally the correct one.
Something always beats nothing. And logic will always win out. If you tell your students that the premises of the School of Resentment are right, or expect them to accept certain conclusions based on those premises, don’t be too surprised when you find those students willing to follow those premises to their logical finality.
Read The Revolt of the Elites by Christopher Lasch. He discussed this phenomenon back in 1994.
The intellectuals did the same thing in China. Cultural Revolution, anyone?
“But their presentation was so bitter and anti-intellectual that it didn’t impress many colleagues across the campus, not to mention observers in the public sphere. ” Maybe, but they had a genius for getting on the right committees and making sure the “right” people were hired–and more important, that the “wrong” people were excluded. The deconstructionist and gender-ideology academic “superstars” of that era like Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler are forgotten as “names,” yet their radical agenda has entered what is left of the “mainstream”. But how and why that happened is a subject for many books, not just a column.
We believed that sober moderates would prevail over adversarial leftists, who would sputter out once the (in their eyes) repressive tolerance of liberalism would do its work.
Lots of people believed the same thing about Germany in the 1930s. That, too, “didn’t work out that way.”
Lots of intellectual types who like to characterize themselves as Center-Left or Center-Right (synonyms for “sober moderates”) still hold fast to the belief that they (i.e., “sober moderates”) will still prevail.
Moderates do not prevail. To prevail is the antithesis of being moderate.
This sentiment has been wrong from the get-go:” We believed that sober moderates would prevail over adversarial leftists, who would sputter out once the (in their eyes) repressive tolerance of liberalism would do its work. ” Those who believed it were most likely rationalizing their own cowardice, and objectively helping the loony left by doing nothing, imho.
Don’t let “conservatives ” off the hook–they dropped the ball and ceded campuses to the loony left during 2 Bush 43 administrations, Obama just batted cleanup after Bush allowed bases loaded. Epic fail–why you have President Trump, because he’s not afraid of PC bullying.
Roger Scruton identified the problem as a case of arrested development, which he calls oikophobia:
“No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognized: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’ and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours.’ I call the attitude oikophobia [ecophobia] — the aversion to home — by way of emphasizing its deep relation to xenophobia, of which it is the mirror image. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested . . . and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers.
Hello: Thanks for the quote from Roger Scruton. I usually disagree with him, but his notion of oikophobia s provocative. Could you please supply the reference? Thanksn
This was always and forever the project of the left. Destroy western civilization, murder her people, and subjugate her institutions to third-world barbarians, so that we can all be blessedly equal in oppression, poverty and squalor. It’s not even an ideology, it lacks any internal consistency. It’s just hatred of success, most importantly at the civilizational level.
— The fierce multiculturalists of the 1980s are now the mainstream liberal talking heads of the 2010s. —
Perhaps it would be more appropriate to call them anti-culturalists, since what they hate matters more to them than what they claim to promote.
“Historically” is an adverb. No hyphen needed.