Illiberal Liberals and the Postmodern American campus

“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.