A Few Thoughts on SLAM from a Liberal Committed to Social Justice

The following is a response to the Student Labor Action Movement and all the rallying we've recently seen (here, here). As far as I'm aware, the Crimson won't run my response. I don't know why, exactly -- either scheduling issues (?) or substantive ones -- but I am publishing it here.

If you're reading this and are interested, I'd love to discuss this issue further: mnovends@fas.harvard.edu.

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A Few Thoughts on SLAM from a Liberal Committed to Social Justice

“We come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.”
- Barack Obama, Inaugural Address

Let’s assume that you are a liberal (I am) whose support for the American working class is deep – what are you to make of the Student Labor Action Movement?

The group, known by its onomatopoetic acronym SLAM, helped to organize Thursday’s labor rally, in which hundreds of students, workers and union representatives chanted outside of the Holyoke Center, and then marched to President Drew Faust’s office in the yard.

Picket line protesting of this sort is part of an important progressive tradition in America. It is based on a explicit, essential premise: the normal avenues of reform are too clogged or too bigoted for my lone voice to be heard. I must take to the streets.

To this effect, the Crimson quoted one of the leaders of the rally (to be fair, not directly affiliated with SLAM) as saying: “We are fighting for justice. We are making history. We can only rise together."

Protests demand enemies; yet, I am left to wonder, Whom, exactly, is SLAM fighting? The information is sketchy here. Is SLAM really suggesting that President Drew Faust is acting in bad faith or insidious intent to undermine Harvard’s most vulnerable?

If this is their point – insulting as it is to President Faust’s long career of service to the public good – then SLAM ought to say it outright. And then they need to give evidence.

Second, What exactly is SLAM fighting about? In a Crimson editorial, SLAM member Alyssa Aguilera says that there is “nothing responsible about the richest university in the world conducting massive layoffs that will only add to the already hurting economy.” But she only points to Harvard’s announcement to scale back an outsourcing contract to the effect of terminating “13 of 27 jobs contracted through American Cleaning Company at Harvard Medical School.”

The fact is: zero workers directly employed by Harvard have been laid off. And there is no evidence that they will be. President Drew Faust did indeed write that she would be “taking a hard look at hiring, staffing levels and compensation,” but the result seems to already have come to pass: a freeze on wages for most faculty and staff, and a voluntary early retirement option for 1600 workers.


I question the way SLAM has framed the debate – and I do so with all due respect for the organization and the principles that it is pursuing that SLAM has denied Drew Faust and Harvard University. Rhetoric like “massive layoffs” (not to mention the epithets and sloganeering) is more than just misleading – it is openly mendacious. SLAM, like any movement, ought to be wielding truth, not suppressing it. And to the extent that they need to fabricate enemies and conjure up phantoms, I cannot support their work.


I humbly suggest, instead, that SLAM is not a protest group, but a lobbyist. Their case, at its best, is one of costs against benefits: in this time of economic hailstorm – one that threatens hard decisions about practically every aspect of the University, from research to admissions to expansion – workers should be protected as primary.

They might be right. (In fact, I hope they are). But they should not pretend that it's an easy case to make, or that it’s morally unambiguous. Compensation accounts for fifty percent of University expenses, and with limited and drastically reduced resources there are a number of programs liberals might prioritize: What about the University’s mission to research for the public good? What about financial aid, so that no one is discriminated against because of economic standing?

Reasonable people – reasonable liberals – can disagree. And reasonable debate, I posit, should be conducted as such. They ought to get off the street and start typing briefs.


The tactics of SLAM, in the end, seem suited for a place and a time very much different from our own. While my peers are reenacting the civil strife of an older generation, the Obama Administration (a product in many ways of Harvard’s better sensibilities) is proceeding from pragmatism and consensus to win real victories for American liberalism.

Pragmatism. Consensus. Real victories. Such, I believe, are the demands of our age – and ones that we Harvard liberals are uniquely equipped to seize upon.

Protest, a tool of voice, is often wielded by those who do not have one. It seems as if the passionate students in SLAM, a group that exists at the very center of societal influence, want to wish their own considerable talents and access away. Apparently, they would prefer to leave the halls of power – where rational discussion can lead to rational solutions – so that they might bang loudly at their doors.

Crisis at Home and Abroad

The American people face the dilemma of the man whose willful apathy allowed him to be robbed of his wealth and status by those closest to him. The dispirited man could choose, as he likely might, to ignore the theft of his identity. He could elect to deny the character inefficiencies that allowed his cherished possessions to be purloined so effortlessly, from beneath his trusting nose. Otherwise, he could admit that something valuable was lost and that he must, once again, try to regain it.

We the American people must make this choice – to concede that the checks and balances of our little-r republican government are eroding, that bits of our democracy and freedom were taken from us with nary a muted objection, and that we must now fight to regain them. Or, we can blithely ignore the situation, until we arrive finally at the constitutional impasse towards which we have been heading, and the principles that define our nation become completely up for grab by those in power.

Nearly everyone – the American electorate, its representative organ in Washington, our military and diplomatic experts, world opinion and the Iraq government itself – resoundingly opposes our presence in Iraq. If one man can lead a nation to war, despite its citizens and legislature, in order to gratify his own ideological predilections and consolidate his own executive power, then do we have a democracy in any meaningful sense of the word? The rift between public opinion and public policy has expanded tremendously in recent years. However, as the ruckus over Bush’s prime-time “surge” reveals, we have not admitted to this democracy deficit, which accompanies, of course, our budget and trade deficits. Instead, we have buried our heads, like the robbed man in denial, within the minutia of logistics. While we debate troop levels, the political fundamentals of our nation crumble. The question is not, How did we lose the war? It is, Why have we waged the war, and at what costs in American treasure, blood and constitutional integrity?

The American struggle in Iraq is less about oil or democracy or terrorism than it is about power. That Bush wanted to invade Iraq before September 11^th is a fact beyond dispute. Iraq is but the amphitheater of chaos and blood, not the play itself. The war is about the power of the president as he consolidates his unitary control over the American state. The war is the struggle between republic and empire.

History has proven that the two – republic and empire – cannot not be simultaneously sustained. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and destroyed Rome’s republic in order to preserve the empire. Great Britain withdrew forces from around the world in order to renounce its empire and salvage the democracy. Like its predecessors, the United States must make the choice in the tug-of-war between the primacy of its democratic heritage and that of its imperial ambitions.

Empire is defined as a militarized state with a global, hegemonic agenda. The Golden Age of the American Empire thus began, appropriately, with war. World War II taught America the value of a sustained military establishment – importantly, not just as a tool for expansion abroad, but as a means for creating an efficient and obedient society at home. Indeed, the American military establishment did as much to save Europe from the hell of fascism as it did to lift the United States from the hell of poverty. If the New Deal “primed the pump” by providing civil service jobs, then the military economy did the same, with the added bonus of loyalty and national obedience – jobs were supplied to the unemployed from bullet metallurgy to detailing the planes that the government hoped, one day, the workers would die in fighting for their nation. Exiled Polish economist Michal Kalecki described the process of predicating the national economy on the national military establishment as “military Keynesianism,” a tactic which, simultaneously, revitalized both the American and German economies, inaugurating the empire of the former, and collapsing the empire of the later.

The short-term economic gains of a militarized economy are obvious, but the price, paid with our national character of boisterous democracy and grassroots dissent, is insidious. Since its inauguration at the onset of WWII, the behemoth weapons industry – the industry of commercialized violence – has been entrenching itself into the American economy like an octopus, fed by nearly a trillion dollars a year, more than one and a half times all the other countries in the world combined, and smothering our republican virtue. The cephalopodan tentacles reach not just to the thousands of good American families who depend on the manufacturing of weapons for their daily sustenance, but, increasingly, to the capitalists and corporate profiteers, whose businesses depend on the exportation of mechanized carnage. Dwight Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” in the American state, during his 1961 presidential farewell address:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

Eisenhower knew that militarism and democracy do not pair well. The arms race has the momentum of provocative rhetoric and the inertia of national loyalty, so it stifles debate. The race depends on a constant state of emergency, and thus plays out most effectively in a simplified world of allies and enemies, terrorists (or fascists or communist) and freedom-lovers. The establishment sustains itself when national prosperity is intertwined with the specter of war, and no one wants to stop priming the pump.

Arming for prospective war tends helps the economy, but it also tends to lead to real war. America has found out that bombs have a peculiar tendency of being dropped. And it is during times of war, when our nation is most vulnerable to evildoers abroad, that the president can arrogate the rights and power of a free state – unregulated speech, open elections, due process of the law – for himself in the name of national security. Thus there exists a feedback loop between the powers of the executive and the size of the nation’s military: the greater the American war machine, then the stronger the executive and the quieter the masses. James Madison warns us:

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. In war…the discretionary power of the executive is extended…and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people…

In this way, in every way, constitutional crisis at home is inextricably related to military crisis abroad. Take, for example, Richard Nixon whose unlawful expansion of executive might came at a time when the United States was floundering in a likewise debacle of imperial nation-building, Vietnam. His power abuses at home were utterly linked to his power abuses abroad. And so reveals the rift between democracy and empire. Nixon wiretapped Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the pentagon papers; he broke into Watergate to monitor war critics; and he compiled an “enemies list” cataloguing American treason, as troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and bombs were piercing Cambodian skies. Indeed, the overall atmosphere of mistrust and presidential paranoia was borne out of fledgling foreign intervention. The expansion of empire demanded the reduction of democracy.

Nixon's dual crisis abroad and at home is eerily similar to our situation today. In the fall of 2002 the administration announced its National Security Strategy of global dominance: “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.” The Bush Doctrine equates to the declaration of unquestioned supremacy. Implied is that no country can ever confront the unipolar power of the United States and, if it does, we retain the right to invade at any moment. Our intentions are so brazen and disrespectful to the premise of a global order that, surely, imperialism will be one of the profound legacies of the Iraq war.

To enforce the Grand Strategy of preventative imperialism, Bush has used executive power as a birthright. Bush's expansion of our military might thus is intimately connected to his expansion of his executive might. He has pitted our empire against our democracy.The enraging narrative of his affront to American democracy -- aggrandizing the powers of the president in war time at the expense of the powers a free state in peace time -- is both over-repeated and undertold. To the minority that cares about the dire state of our union, it has been heard too many times. But the audible silence of our national media and citizenry suggest that the story, both repetitious and unheard, bares repeating: Bush said there were weapons of mass destruction, but there were not weapons; he said that Al Qeada was implicated in 9/11, but it was not; he officially sanctioned torture at prison cells like Abu Ghraib and Uzbekistan; he has detained “enemy combatants” without habeas corpus; he used the National Security Agency to “data mine” American speech, violating an explicit congressional law banning such an action and fourth amendment restrictions of search and seizure; and he has penned secret memos about the use of torture and indefinite imprisonment of soldiers that, if accepted, would fundamental alter the structure of American government. "We're at war," the president maintains. "We must protect America's secrets." The premise of sustained war has allowed the president, in the name of national security, to appropriate the tools of tyranny.

Republic is not feasible with an empire abroad and a congress, corrupted and complacent, that has forfeited its right to regulate the president, whose unilateral aggression, domestic spying, arbitrary violation of federal law and unregulated torture are hallmarks of dictatorship. However, empire itself is no longer feasible – and self evidently not moral. In a post-imperial world, with heightened sensitivity to local autonomy, the United States cannot hope to absorb other nations into its dominion. Also, in a post-nuclear age, it cannot hope to defeat its rival nation-states on the battlefield. We cannot be Rome, in a world so very different. And by reenacting, or, one might say, re-reenactment, the follies of this delusion of imperial grandeur, we pay too high a price with the fabric of our national republic. We should wake from the soporific of empire and resolve to fight to gain back what we have lost, like the robbed man who has dried his tears, stood up from the curve and stares into the sun.

Start the Dialogue

The story of the three girls who said the word vagina has spiraled beyond the sane minds that originally drafted it. Beginning with the absurdity of a decision and propelled by the booming madness of a mob, the episode has taught me, among other things, the power of spoken words, and the power of the individual to precipitate a storm. I do not believe that the administration was villainous. However, I do now believe that it is only with negative press that justice will be reconsidered.

The pertinent question is, To what extent does John Jay High School retain the obligation to shield its community members from uncomfortable subject matter? According to Hazelwood School District et al. v. Kuhlmeier, "a school must be able to take into account the emotional maturity of the intended audience in determining whether to disseminate student speech on potentially sensitive topics." What does this mean?

Importantly, it is not important (necessarily) that the word is “vagina,” and that the word ought not to be associated with badness and impurity or that believing that it should is degrading and the social expression of thousands of years of female subjugation. I happen to believe these things are true; However, parents in our community can believe otherwise. Indeed, these parents, so long as their children are legally theirs, have the right to inculcate ignorance, and it is illiberal to say otherwise.

The real issue is that as a school, John Jay has the educational imperative for diversity. Importantly, adamantly, is this: just because someone feels uncomfortable by the sexual politics of the Monologue, it does not mean that he is entitled to censor it. Because that would mean the end of education. How would I know what I believe, if I were not exposed to that which I did not believe? How would I know the bounds of my own civility, if I were never made to feel uncomfortable.

As a liberal society, we place the right over the good. Meaning, we establish a sense of justice, what is right, without mandating how that right can be exercised: We say speech should be free, but we do not say what that speech should entail; We say thoughts should be unfettered, but we do not say what those thoughts should entail. Likewise, one of the foundations of our society is the principle that institutions cannot coerce individuals into opinions. In this case, our school cannot force a breed of sexual politics onto a helpless community and – and this, I believe, is of tremendous importance – the community cannot in turn corrupt the educational environ of the night by forcing its breed of sexual politics onto the school.

The nature of words, of an Open Mic Night with minds sentient and free, facilitates this medium, where neither the school nor the community has ultimate domain. Words are non-coercive. Just because someone hears something that they do not like, (say) a monologue about the vagina, does not mean they have been coerced. It does not mean that the school is imposing its sense of good onto the community. However, by censoring that word, the community is imposing, in a very explicitly and coercive way, its sense of good onto the school system, and onto me and those three girls and onto everyone in the room.

And that is the line where censorship is violated. At an open Mic Night, the individuals in the room have tacitly renounced their right as minors to be shielded from the entirely comfortable. They have affirmed that they can discern ideas from each other, from that which they do support from that which they do not, and, resoundingly, that they will take up the challenge of a liberal education: to determine for oneself what one believes.

Censorship at John Jay's "Open Mic Night."

To the students and teachers of John Jay High School:

On Friday, March 2nd, at an "open mic night" sponsored by Reflections, our school's literary magazine, three junior girls were suspended when they ignored the advice of the administration and decided to use the word "vagina" in their reading anyway. They used the word only once. The word, for those you who are unaware, refers to a body part that, I am quite certain, at least half of those in the room had that night, and all in the room, at least in passing, had heard of before.

A democratic society depends on an electorate educated in more than integral calculus. John Jay High School has an obligation, paramount among others, to impress upon its students, the future leaders of our nation, the tenants of a healthy, free society: fairness in deliberation, equality, justice, respect for others and the right to dissent.

By that standard, I believe John Jay High School has failed.

As a school system, we must stand by the clear, unequivocal declaration that sex is neither wicked nor sinful. The suppression of sexual knowledge is not only an intellectually repressive practice, but also the cause of a great deal of human unhappiness. Knowledge based on deception and filtration is not knowledge at all. And I cannot support a decision by the school's administration to sponsor ignorance – especially the breed of ignorance that debases a topic, such as sex, that is so vitally important.

From what I gathered, the intent of the students' reading – an excerpt from the award-winning play "The Vagina Monologues," a play I saw just one week ago – was to celebrate femininity, what for so long has been seen as frail and inferior, or lascivious and sinful. The students uttered the word not as an admission but as a declaration: no longer should a word so natural and important be shrouded in a mist of ignorance and irrationality.

It is the height of irony that by censoring this word, and by punishing those who said it, the administration has compounded the mist of ignorance and irrationality that the word set out to dispel in the first place.

As I listened to the various voices and words of my peers and teachers at the "open mic night," I realized that my purpose in being there, all of our purposes, was to celebrate the individual's voice. Perhaps it is true, as I very much believe it is, that Mr. Cass and Ms. Kor, by making the decision to suspend the girls for their mentioning of an anatomical structure, were attending not to their own personal beliefs, but to those of a vocal minority in the community. However, by capitulating to the simplemindedness and bigotry of a few, and consenting to suppress the free exchange of literary and important ideas, the administration was undermining the most basic principles of the "open mic" that night and of the writers who were willing to share their words.

Even if you are not sympathetic to the girls' use of the word "vagina," or even the purposes of their reading, I hope and trust that you are sympathetic to the premise that human prosperity depends on the expression of a diverse array of ideas, and that in an educational institution we are entitled to hear these ideas.

What is needed now is not less speech, but more. These girls took a great risk in defending their convictions. I urge you to contact the administration saying that you do not support its decision to punish girls who had the integrity to stand up for their beliefs – that in a school system, information ought to be open and diverse, and ignorance combated.

Intelligent Design and the Illusion of Balance

Should John Jay High School teach creationism along with evolution? The call for diversity seems innocuous enough. Should we liberals be warmed by the prospect of a competing conception or a differing opinion? Responding to the question, as to whether intelligent design (ID) – creationism’s slippery new suit, which allows it to escape the United States’ famed separation clause – should be taught in public schools, president George Bush responded: “You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.” The proposal, at first, seems moderate: teach one theory of the world (evolution) along with its counter-theory (creationism).

However, the goal of education is truth, not diversity. Contrasting opinions might lead to answers, but they are not answers themselves. Everything, under the liberal assumption of uncertainly, is questionable in at least some degree. Thus, schools and educators must accept truth as a standard of veracity. Meaning, though theoretically questionable, facts exist when enough evidence has been accumulated.

Evolution is a fact. So much so has it been proven correct, that the dearth of any credible scientific opposition is almost laughable. Creationism deserves to be taught in biology class as much as alchemy deserves to be taught in chemistry, phlogistons in physics, and the stork theory in a sex education course. All these are alternatives; likewise, they are all wrong.

When questioned, the assumptions behind intelligent design fall. First, from a scientific perspective, the theory offers little evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer. Advocates of the dogma bypass the scientific process; rather than publishing journals and peer-reviewed papers, they shrewdly pander to the masses and the politicians they have helped into office. Indeed, all they have to show is negative: the non-existence of certain fossil records in the evolutionary process. However, the existence of a complete, cinematic fossil record is a presumptuous demand on biologists, given that only an infinitesimally small amount of deaths result in fossil formations. Importantly, scientists can claim that no anachronistic fossil has ever been discovered: no dog remains have been detected from the pre-Cambian Era.

Those who preach the gospel of intelligent design make the claim that certain life forms are too complicated for the process of evolution. Not only have scientist proposed plausible intermittents for many of the known complex structures that exist, but, more to the point, is that if (say) the human eye is too complicated to have evolved, and the intelligent designer is more complicated than the eye, how is the designer’s existence accounted for?

The designer’s existence, the creationists insist, however, need not be accounted for. It is a matter of faith.

And herein lies the dangerous fallacy. If a theory is held aloof from the standards of scientific investigation, and makes claims with no basis, assertions without evidence, and implores “faith” when we ought to have skepticism, then it has no place in a science classroom. If John Jay HIgh School teachers were to spend the time – even if, as is likely the case, no more than fifteen minutes – exhausting arguments of the intelligent design theory, then they would be handing the creationists the greatest victory then can realistically hope for. The school would be imparting on its students the pernicious belief that intelligent design is a legitimate scientific perspective to have, and that, more broadly, certain views can be put up as viable alternatives to established theories, despite the fact that they make no valid points in the debate at all. Schools would impress on their students the false-reality that evidence is decoration for dogma. And this would be the end of American education.

In Defense of Max's Speech

May 1966 at a Manchester, England concert venue, Bob Dylan was stoned and angry. He was a rock and roll star, swagger and all, who had recently taken off his acoustic guitar strap as a Woody Guthrie redivivus, troubadour of the leftist revolution to put on a tight jacket and play electric guitar. As the set came to a close at Manchester, as Dylan was to play “Like a Rolling Stone,” a disillusioned, disaffected fan shouts with spite, "Judas!" Dylan screams contemptuously, "I don't believe you," as the echo of the accusation lingers and grows putrid. "You're a liar!" ¹

I ought to say a word or two in defense of my previous post about the blogosphere. It recieved some criticism. I suppose I wasn’t very clear: I’m not giving up protest songs nor putting down my acoustic guitar; I’m not signing off blogger.com nor buying a paid-subscription to Time Magazine; I’m not a traitor nor a liar. The purpose of my previous post was not to renounce the blog medium, but to reclaim the mainstream medium. Here are some of the comments made by my friend whom I greatly respect, Michael Tashman.

Come on, Max. What happened to the marketplace of ideas? You know.. power to the people?

The opening allusion of my previous was to the rise of democracy and to elitist opposition; what’s more empowering to the people? I believe in the power of blogs because I believe in the power of free expression. The inevitable further consolidation of America’s news conglomerations will become less dangerous in direct proportion to the degree that the blogosphere expands. Blogs and wikis excel on a macroscale; they will continue to aggregate the world’s collective voice, its collective intellectual means. In that way, blogs are indeed wonderful . You should know, I have a fundamental, even idealistic belief in the organic beauty of a free marketplace of self-expression. Blogs fill that democratic deficit in a marvelous fashion. Read first my post on the matter.

You said that blogging isn't intellectually self-sufficient, that most of the blogs don't really put forth orignal [sic], intellectual opinions.

This is a linguistic confusion. "Not intellectually self-sufficient" was intended to mean that blogs are an augmentation of the mainstream media rather than a separate entity from it. I didn’t mean to imply blogs are unoriginal; in fact, I believe that the blogosphere has the capacity to be a great deal more original than the mainstream outlets. Most importantly, the intellectual locus in the blogosphere is on the individual not the corporation; so free thought isn’t suffocated at birth. Originality comes at a price, however. No one can doubt that the spectrum of quality is far more pronounced on the blogosphere than on the news magazine shelf. Brilliance and stupidity are empowered by the same fitful stroke of free expression. Blogs are a lot of rough, and few diamonds: "But with 10 million blogs and a great many more soon to come, that’s a risk I’m willing to take."

Whereas today bloggers do mostly depend on the mainstream media, in the future they'll probably become much more self-sufficient.

Here, the linguistic confusion over “self-sufficient” does not occur. A great many web 2.0 enthusiasts, Glenn Reynolds and (presumably) yourself included, believe that by flipping the capitalistic mechanisms to the individual, allowing any David to brew his own beer and write his own Op-Ed piece, the elite mainstream outlets will no longer be relevant. After all, if it happens, the marketplace has spoken. I refuse to subscribe to this optimism. If blogs systematically generated thought, then they would be a corporation not a democracy. Blogs, therefore, as a democratic not corporate entity, are not self-sufficient. When examined, blogging is a terrible way to produce in-depth coverage and analysis of current events; they are too disparate and dogmatic to have the capacity now or ever in the future. But that’s OK. Blogs shouldn’t replace the ancien régime, they should expand it.

I’ve never been a man of precision, of bubbles filled in with a #2 pencil. Blogs might be a little inaccurate, but, like me and like unrestricted free speech, they excel on a macroscale not a on a microscale. They are optimal because they construct a forum for candor in which Truth is distilled to the top, unmonitored and unpurged. They embody the collective enterprise between words and writers and readers. Blogs provide a soapbox to the masses of the world – ill-conceived dogmatism, racist and ignorant ramblings, and sometimes lucid brilliance. My point is that the role of blogs is not to replace the mainstream media, but to check it and expand it.

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1. You can hear the concert here: Live 1966. ↑

Blogs and Democracy: Revolutionary?

During the 1830s, as Jacksonian democracy began its brilliant upsurge in the United States, as the grazing multitude – humanity’s sorry masses – gained a voice, a great many old-guard politicians and intellectuals feared for the future of the country. They hoped to hold onto a polity where the wisest and best among themselves would selflessly rule for the good of the nation; eminent political leader George Cabot wrote that Democracy is “the government of the worst.” They feared the voice of the unruly masses.

Blogs threaten the Old Light media, and when reading The New Republic’s cover article Technobabble on “the idiocies and dangers” of the blogosphere, it’s tough not to think of the mid-1800s gentry squawking with horror as they witnessed the rise of democracy. Christen Rosen, editor of the journal The New Atlantis, remarks in The New Republic that blogs reside, “in a world where technology can be harnessed by any semi-literate with a PC.” And that the blogging hero is “the guy without any expertise who can see through the palaver of elites… [Bloggers have] taken figures who have been historic punch lines--the dilettante, the hack--and turned them into civilizational saviors. It's a brave new world.”

The Old Media has many faults, not least, as Ms. Rosen so nicely shows us, its stuffy elitism and arrogance. So, as the monied pessimists at this nation's democratic beginnings were wrong to prophesize doom with their pens as the voices of the people rose to power, the New Republic is wrong. To fear the voice of the people is wrong. Dare I say, it's unpatriotic?

How is the blogosphere democratic? To begin, blogs function along the rich spectrum of individual experience -- vivid hopes and dreams -- that makes a democratic system function from bottom up. Blogs start with the person. In contrast, the Old Media works from the top down; it must serve two corpulent masters: the conglomerates and politicians and celebrities whom it snacks on cocktail weenies with and the people whom it mesmerizes with fairytales and picture-perfect realities. Old Media thus is a system where free-thought is only collateral damage; thought as a goal doesn’t help ratings or push papers. Diversity of opinion seems to be the only combative force to this myopia. Blogs – like democracy – thrive on diversity. People of various agendas and abilities can voice their opinions; the good ideas are linked to and debated and the bad ideas die ignored. Elitism within a government or within a media system is bad because liberty and freedom and power of the people and truth can be sacrificed for the parochial good of the leader. This cannot happen in a democracy. This cannot happen in the blogosphere.

That being said, an Army of Davids (the amateur blog-based journalists of today) relegating the Old Media to the dustbins of history, as conservative Glenn Reynolds and liberal Markos Moulitsas alike triumphantly predict, is quite simply poppycock, absurd prophesies of a self-congratulatory bunch. A direct democracy ruled completely by the people is patently absurd; a “we-dia” ruled by the inchoate blogosphere too is preposterous.

First, bloggers are a parasitic bunch. Without the The New York Times, the blogosphere is left with nothing but anecdote posts about eating cereal and family vacations. As far as news goes, the Old Media provides the facts and the New Media improvises vantage points.

Second, very importantly, the blogosphere as a concept – as a check against the nation’s elite power institutions – is no doubt important, but the blogosphere as a reality – the vast majority of its constituent soldiers communicating with sentence fragments and lower case Is – is not intellectually self-sufficient nor is it progressive. Just because (as newspaper circulation suggests) the Old Media is dying out, that doesn’t make it right; indeed, it ought to be a truism by now that the free-market is a dangerous judge of intellectualism. America tunes to Fox News for their information, after all.

The vacuous reality of the blogosphere can be summed in a nice aphormism: there are those who link and those who think. Glenn Renolds’ Instapundit, for example, embodies the analysis-free "linking platform," updated about a ten thousand times a day, that dominates the blogosphere. This logorrhea and emptiness is useful as a filtration device for distilling what is valuable within the contours of the web, but it is a rambling, pitiful excuse for political insight. Blogs that do provide sincere thought are too often amateurish and insignificant, and, regardless, recieve far fewer visitors. The fuzzy feeling enjoyed when one conquers a 12 page Harper’s Magazine article, flowing with lapidary prose and delicately founded on well-contemplated analysis, is a warm satisfaction not often replicated in the blogosphere. Instead, you link to links that link to (presumably) more links.

However, the fact that blogs will never replace the Old Media misses the point. Democracy doesn’t necessitate editors or fact-checkers and it doesn’t guarantee quality on a microscale. Instead, it affords the eclectic and perhaps incendiary genius the voice to question the status quo – and his ideas to be scrutinized by the ubiquitous hands of public criticism. The blogger, uncontracted and unremunerated, can freely contribute his unique understandings, and the democractic dynamic thrives. Sure, the voice worth hearing might be quite rare – but with 10 million blogs and a great many more soon to come, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

If you can stomach more blog self-contemplation, check out: In Defense of Internet Speech

On Behalf of Ms. Potter: In Defense of Bias

On the first day of school, as newly christened juniors shuffled into their chairs, my U.S. history teacher remarked, unapologetically: I am liberal. I am opinionated. I have prejudices. This course is going to reflect my biases, and you ought to get used to it. So, as the school year comes to an end, I reflect on Ms. Potter's declaration, on academic freedom, on personal truth and on public dissent -- ideas clearly congruent with the general direction of this site. Dissent, after all, is fundamental to democracy, and all that jazz. What an appropriate end to the school year!

I am very pleased with how this paper turned out. This site, I suppose, does a nice job of chronicling my development as a writer and thinker. If you have ten minutes, consider reading In Defense of Bias:

Archibald MacLeish, American poet and minister of propaganda during World War II, said in 1954, that, "The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself."[1] MacLeish said these words knowing very well the repressive power of the social herd. He said these words knowing very well that more than the size of America’s guns or the tenacity of its Army, the bravery of its dissenters, the men and women willing to cast aside the warm comforts of intellectual conformity, is the most important defense against encroachments on beloved freedoms and ways of life.

Truth, the goal of the dissenter, is a peculiar concept. It is stubborn and uncompromising, yet elusive and unsettled. Bias too is truculent in its certitude, but forever unresolved. The distinction between the two – truth and bias – is no one’s job to determine. That’s the beauty of a marketplace of ideas, of pluralism of thought. Recent legislation, including the “Academic Bill of Rights” pushed by conservative intellectual David Horowitz, intends to broaden the ideal of “academic freedom” to mandate “intellectual diversity” on university campuses. The aim, simply, is to eradicate bias. However, in the process of eradicating bias, the locus of regulatory control is shifted to the student body. The uncomfortable student gains the prerogative to destroy truth labeled as bias, and the dream of higher education, the dream of answers, is subverted, only to be replaced by the dreary acceptance of political correctitude. In the quest for “intellectual diversity,” students gain new weapons to attack the dissenter who – if only momentarily – leaves the herd to think for himself.

The history of academic freedom is the history of liberal thought. It is no coincidence that the rise of academic freedom as a stated initiative paralleled the upsurge of free expression in Europe. The liberal outlook on knowledge states that all truth is questionable in various degrees, and from there, that the most important safeguard against myopia and bigotry is pluralism of thought. The protection of academic free thought thus facilitates the quest for knowledge in the liberal sense. Liberalism makes no judgment about the veracity of dissent; instead, it pits dogma against dogma, prejudice against prejudice, and truth rises to the top of the intellectual free-for-all. The function of academic freedom, broadly, is to protect this clash of ideas and values. Continue reading here.

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[1] Lewis Lapham, Gag Rule (New York, New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 1.

What's your favorite word?

Words are the musicians of the free. I shut my eyes and think of the ponderous Oxford dictionary that sits quietly on the shelf. In a moment, it comes to life as a boisterous concert hall packed with restless musicians tuning their instruments, preparing to play various themes and multifarious interpretations on the age-old sonata, the quest for understanding. The musicians will argue with their notes and chords that when enough is said, when sufficient ideas are shared and hopes and fears are illuminated, when words have been exchanged freely and unfiltered, Truth can be reached by mankind. No, not today before dinner, perhaps not tomorrow before math class, but some day when enough people have access to accurate words, the extent of human imagination can be revealed.

My favorite word, more than my favorite baseball card or Crayola crayon, is my guide as I approach a world undiscovered, full of untapped potential and vivid dreams and fears.

Read the rest (if you dare).

Historical and Contemporary Nativism

America has been asked, from forces within, to supply answers to questions of cultural values. We're at a political juncture that demands, once again, that we define who we are as a people: whether our orchestras of fear will drown out our cries for tolerance, and whether our impulses toward ethnocentrism will bully our collective pysche into submission. This call for affirmation is not new. Nativism has played an important role in shaping American history, and, once again, promises to take center stage in the theater of cultural agitation. My paper on the wave of nativism from 1900 to 1930 is apropos, if you will:

American society esteems itself as a sanctuary for the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses of the world. It adamantly claims to celebrate the principles of rowdy ethnic pluralism and colorful cultural diversity at the core of its identity. However, the proverbial melting pot of American society has not, and perhaps never will, epitomize the egalitarian spirit of the American Dream ‚– the belief that this nation is an unlimited beacon of hope and opportunity. From the 1798 Alien Acts, which required the immediate expulsion of foreigners ‚“dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States,‚” to modern-day Islamophobia, American patriotism and fear during times of change have drummed up anti-foreign stirrings to a shrill pitch. Nativism, in simple terms, is a dogged adherence to the belief that race functions as the most important determinant of cultural identity; this played an important role in the shaping of America at the dawn of the twentieth century. The self-righteous clamoring of reformers during the progressive era coupled with the drastic changes of post-World War I America incited a new sense of nativism during the 1920s and 1930s that aimed to preserve a rose-colored conception of true Americanism.

Read the rest of the essay.

In Defense of Internet Speech

“I don’t trust those blogs,” my English teacher defiantly remarked the other day. Emphasis on the word blog, as if the name itself were something obscene. Did she just say what I think she said? My heart began to pump a little louder. Sweat began to accumulate on my forehead. “They’re just not reputable,” she admonished in a you-crazy-teenager voice of skepticism. Yep, the earth-shattering declaration of unreliability was made. The trump card was played. "It’s simply unsanitary to associate with the plebeian multitude -- to peer into the cacophonous chamber of unfettered free-speech that is the internet 2.0," she seemed to suggest. I practically died right then and there of a coronary thrombosis of the most anxious degree.

Despite the pompous Parthian shot to my fragile ego -- and the ensuing panic attack -- I have to admit that her fear is not altogether irrational. As a species designed to operate on an individual level, we like to believe that an intelligent referee is monitoring the veracity of the media we digest. We like to believe that every piece of information is fact-checked, impartial, and wrapped in a pretty bow. We like to have faith in those above us and in those around us. To the dismay of many, the blogosphere, on the other hand, is not monitored, not refereed, and not fact-checked. Instead, it is what I consider to be the paradigmatic uninhibited marketplace of ideas. It is the ultimate forum for freedom of speech and for the democracy of thought so vital to our survival as a society.

What makes us uncomfortable about Wikipedia, Google, and the blogosphere, is that our brains were not designed to conceptualize the whole at the expense of the part. We are fixated on individual reliability (Is this article accurate? Is this reporter accredited? Is this book on Oprah’s book list?) at the price of large-scale optimization.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, uses the reverse logic: It sacrifices a little bit of accuracy on the microscale for a whole lot of efficiency on the macroscale. This is the concept of probabilistic statistics. In the world of the internet, information is emergent: an invisible hand steers the flow of ideas and information, sifting the good towards the top, and the bad towards the bottom. In the backwards entropy of our democracy, our economy, our evolution, and our internet, chaos on the individual level comes together to form a coherent whole. The whole is stronger than sum of the individual parts.

Therefore, Encyclopedia Encarta’s biggest flaw isn’t accuracy (although we give it more credit than it deserves), it’s omission. Despite sloppiness on the microscale, Wikipedia will excel over time by amassing greater and greater quantities of data, and higher and higher concentrations of the world’s information supply. Encarta will inch forward. Today, Wikipedia’s 1,045,000 articles absolutely eclipse Encarta’s meager 40,000. Tomorrow, the gap will only widen.

A free market place of ideas provides a breadth and depth of information unimaginable to the intellectual plutocracy that edits the mainstream media. Sure, no one blog post or one Wikipedia entry is authoritative, but their function is not as the ultimate ends for accuracy, but as the means for the probabilistic emergence of the world’s collective intelligence.

Essay Excerpt: 9/11 Patriotism and Dissent

On September 11, 2001, the architectural embodiments of American capitalism and culture, The Twin Towers, two symmetrical exclamation points on New York City’s industrial skyline, were destroyed by enemies from abroad. In the weeks and months that followed, America’s guiding spirit of rowdy democracy and individual freedom too was severely damaged, not by the loosely knit group of jihadist who praised Allah and shouted death to America, but by the very government who proclaimed to fight for its protection. After September 11, George Bush, empowered by Christian righteousness and emboldened by American patriotism, began a campaign to extend America’s hegemonic power and redistribute its wealth into the hands of the very wealthiest. Gagging the dissenters with the flag and drowning out their voices with renditions of “America the Beautiful,” the Administration fought not for the protection of American democracy against the nation’s enemies, but for the protection of the nation’s plutocratic elite against the dangerous questions of American democracy.

The strength of American society depends less on the size of its guns, and more on the tenacity of its citizenry to speak up against injustice, to question the status quo, and to challenge the dictations of the government. Prohetic writer Lewis Lapham, in Gag Rule, writes “Tyranny never has much trouble drumming up the smiles of prompt agreement, but a democracy stands in need of as many questions as its citizens can ask of their own stupidity and fear" (1). A healthy democracy is boisterous and loud; an effective dictatorship is quite and subdued.

A remarkable silence washed over post-September 11 America, where dissent became treasonous and momentary lapses into free thought became vices of the unpatriotic. Flag bumper stickers filled store shelves, the President was immediately and unanimously endowed by the Senate the power to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines panned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks,” and Americans were warned that, “they need to watch what they say, watch what they do” by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.

In the months that followed, an obedient chorus of compliance from the Senate greeted attempts by the Administration to promote its political agenda: no substantial debate was engaged when the Administration petitioned for money for wealthy businesses (Dick Armey [Texas-R] pointed out that “This country is in the middle of a war. Now is not the time to provoke spending confrontations with our Commander-in-Chief”), no objections were mounted when the Administration asked to undermine personal freedom and privacy through the PATRIOT Act, and barely a word of disagreement was heard when it violated every moral truism and international precedent available to the civilized and not-so-civilized world by invading a defenseless country based on fabricated pretexts and person aggrandizement. “Told that the truth didn’t matter, that motive was irrelevant, and that the Bush administration was free to do as it pleased, the heirs and assigns of what was once a democratic republic greeted the announcement with an audible and respectful silence” (Lapham 40).

An educated citizenry is a bulwark of liberty and democracy; an ignorant and complacent electorate is easily trampled over and effortlessly misled. The brightly color textbooks of America’s sprawling corridors of educational mediocrity are so completely purged of controversy, scrubbed clean of seditions connotations, expunged of gruesome depictions of war, and free from unsettling concepts of reality, that citizens are allowed to wallow complacently in blissful ignorance. Moreover, the dull political dialogues between the media centers serving their business-class masters and the people provide for an elaborate fairy-tale of a preferred picture of the world. In short: democracy dies in ignorance, and tyranny flourishes within it.

As the smoke rose into the air from the rubble at ground zero, America was presented with a unique and important opportunity to question its role within the world and to engage in a public discourse on the price of freedom and the importance of national security. However, the nation’s collective reason was eclipsed by the nation’s collective patriotism, and the questions, quite simply, weren’t asked.

July’s People and Intellectual Freedom

As many readers probably know, a single-man campaign is being waged against my school to censor the book July’s People from the 10th grade reading curriculum. Here's part of my newspaper article; if you have a little time, it's definitely worth checking out in full. Beginning:

In South Africa, dancing naked in the rain, exposed to the explosive freedom of natural existence, liberated from the cold tethers of suburban sterility, Maureen Smales begins to reflect on intellectual superficiality. In a small hut, during the interregnum between the destruction of the apartheid government and the birth of a new order of thought, Maureen learns to reject narrow-minded assumptions and to question archaic senses of sin. She learns to embrace human diversity. July’s People, by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, teaches us to look critically at our belief systems and our world. White, liberal, and affluent, we’re all a little like Maureen Smales. We’re all a little trapped in this quaint suburbia, sheltered from human suffering.

However, it’s exposure to literature—to other worlds and other people and other ideas—that frees us from the repressive homogeneity of everyday existence. A diverse literature base functions as one of the most potent safeguards against stereotype and narrow-mindedness. And ignorance functions as the strongest bulwark of prejudice.

Indeed, one of the most important goals of education—of John Jay High School—is to teach students to analytically approach a diverse array of facts and opinions, to weigh pieces of evidence, and to make educated conclusions. Any person who wishes to stifle this diversity of thought—in the name of personal values or community standards—is promoting a certain breed of bigotry and simplemindedness, and I refuse to be silent.

Continue reading.

P.S. An abridged version will be in the town's newspaper The Lewisboro Ledger tomorrow, February 9th.

The Rise of Internet Obscenity

According to Harper's Magazine, there's a website, based out of the United States, which features over seventeen hundred erotic stories about the fictional character Harry Potter and his friends. This website receivess almost two hundred thousand hits a day; for perspective, this blog gets about 20-30 hits a day, that's embarrassing.

It is tough to imagine a society constructed in such a way as to prevent any of its citizens from viewing conventionally-obscene materials. The greatest two tangible forces of influence on pornography prevalence are: 1) a society's ease of access and 2) the influence of the community's standards on a person's self image. The rise of the internet, indeed the rise of technology in general, has made great developments towards both connecting the world and isolating it at same time: shielded from the public's eye, all sorts of traditionally defined obscenity can be accessed by the average person with only a few clicks. It's no surprise, therefore, that men and women are more inclined to look at pornography than ever before, it's a matter of access.

It's true that people are more inclined to view pornography now than ever before, but are they more predisposed? I tend to view foul rap lyrics, video game violence, and internet pornography--aspects of society which question community standards--not as the problems themselves, but as reflections of the problems. Perhaps it's not the pornography which is giving rise to psychological illness, but the psychological illness which is giving rise to pornography. In fact, an argument can be made that pornography itself is a safe way to vent urges such as sexual anxiety (re: teenage boys) or much more odious sexual proclivities (re: pedophilic desires to read Harry Potter erotic stories), with much reduced physical harm, however I am not about to debate the virtues of this argument.

Instead, I'll say this: rather than lash out to censor internet pornography (or rap lyrics or video game violence for that matter), perhaps we should examine the psychological undercurrents of its enormous popularity. It's easy to explain the psychological cause of teenage sexual anxiety (coming of age, surges of testosterone, difficult social situations, just to name a few), but beyond that, it's much more difficult to explain the psychological causes of the more incendiary sexual inclinations which lend so much to the popularity of internet pornography. We can remove the raunch from the internet and we can censor it from our music stores, our television screens, and our radios, but we can't, no matter how hard we try, remove the mental impulses which facilitate its existence. We should examine them, not run from them.

There are two causes which I wish to examine: sin and jealousy.

Anthropologists have found that the concept of the obscene as had a place throughout all of human history; almost every society has shunned pornography and exhibitionism in some way. Now, as in the past, community standards are dictated by our religious or moral law. The suppression of sexual knowledge and action--a tenant of this moral law--is a stance I believe to be morbid and unnatural and responsible for great amounts of human misery. Curiosity in sex, like curiosity in dinosaurs and cowboys, is natural and should not be suppressed; ignorance, in my mind, is never justified, and certainly not for something as important as sexuality. Those who are told that drinking is wicked, cursing is wicked, and sex is wicked, despite their conscious rejection of these beliefs when they inevitably fail to adhere to them, are subconsciously tyrannize by this sense of sin and guilt throughout their lives. Perhaps Harry Potter erotic stories exist as a reflection of this sense of sin--by descending into infantile fantasy, by removing oneself from healthy sexual expression, one can reject and escape concepts of guilt and fear brought on by "the sinfulness of sex" so deeply entrenched in our psyche.

Jealousy, like sin, is a concept rooted in human nature, and one which I believe to be partially responsible for the existence of internet pornography. Throughout history, men have had a paternal desire for fatherhood, and in turn, a desire to dominate over their female spouses in order to secure their connection to their children. This urge, in many ways, has triumphed: the rights of women have almost never corresponded to the rights of men within relationships; women, for thousands of years, were property expected to be subservient and proper. It is the desire of women for political and social equality, along with liberating inventions such as birth control and liberating movements such as the working mother, which have significantly decreased the viability of complete female subjugation by men. Even in my high school, I see this phenomenon. The smart, tall, independent, and attractive girls, the ones with certain self-assurance, are not the ones consistently with boyfriends; it's the simple, dependent girls willing to sell sexual charm who get all the guys. Sure, men don't physically take ownership over women, but those psychologically impulses still pervade.

The rise of pornography, paralleling the rise of female independence and equality, is a reflection of this male desire to dominate and objectify women in a world where such practices are less and less smiled upon. Many men (at the very least many boys in high school) are attracted to a certain definition of femininity, a certain type of "lady." As women assert their social, economic, and political power, those types of girls will be less and less prevalent. Porn fills that void. As for ol' Harry Potter, what better way to remove oneself from the consequence of human equality; what better way to objectify, violate, dominate, and subjugate someone, then to strike up a relationship with a person who never even existed in the first place?

Liberalism Explored & Defended

My thesis paper entitled Rousseau and Mill: Differing Concepts of Freedom is now posted on the “essay” section of my site. This paper offers an analysis of the evolution of the concept of freedom and attempts to justify liberalism within the sphere of modern society. Seeing as this site is titled “The Liberal Conviction,” I thought posting this paper would be appropriate: (selected portion)

From the birth of political philosophy, over 2500 years ago, to the present day, the concept of group cohesion has been at a contradistinction with the concept of individual liberty.[i] Group cohesion, defined by allegiance to the state, is rendered legitimate by the consent of the citizenship and enforced by the coercion of the government. Contrastingly, individual liberty is based not on the preservation of the state, but on the freedom to act without constraint in pursuit of individual desires. Too much of the former, and the society collapses under the burden of despotism; too much of the latter, and the society dissolves through a population’s usurped pursuit of individual desires.

From these two philosophical values, group cohesion verses individual liberty, two fundamentally different concepts of freedom have emerged: 1) neo-Romanism, derived from ancient Roman tradition, which conceptually defined freedom merely as the absence of domination by a governmental power not granted legitimacy from the citizenship, and 2) liberalism, defined as freedom from governmental interference on individual action.[ii] Both ideologies, and their interpretations, have manifested themselves within fundamentally different governmental structures—both perceived as free. Governmental structures based on subservience to the will of the community, as is the case with neo-Romanism, or governmental structures based on the preservation of the individual over the community, as with liberalism. Governments whose only responsibility is to attend to the needs of the majority (neo-Romanism), or governments who are additionally obligated to preserve individual freedom within the broad framework of majority consent (liberalism). Each of these concepts of liberty, though based on similar principles of republicanism and democracy, can translate into intrinsically unique political institutions.

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[i] Bertrand Russell, “Introductory,” The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc, 1945), xiii‑xxiii.

[ii] Benjamin Constant, “The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns” The Political Writings of Benjamin Constant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 307-28.

Click here to read more.

Also:

I’ve been away for the past month taking a course in Political Philosophy, a very rewarding experience. Hopefully I can use this new knowledge base as a "hermeneutic lens" towards my critique of current events. The majority of my posts will of course still be the analysis of contemporary politics; however, I hope to intertwine more historical and philosophical contexts, as well as pose and analyze some strictly philosophical questions. I have a number of topics in mind. I will start posting regularly again after Labor Day.

Newsweak: Journalists Need a Defense

No one denies that Newsweek’s error was egregious and awful, and no one denies that its ramifications were even more devastating: riots breaking out, reputations being obliterated, professional lives being destroyed, and the United States' already depleted world image sinking even lower. However, this is not a Jason Blairesque debacle, and this is not an issue of poor journalism; an anonymous source within the Bush administration was employed, two pentagon officials were used to verify, and still they got the story wrong. Sure the mistake was terrible, but as far as I’m concerned no flagrant breech of journalistic ethics occurred here, and certainly nothing deserving of the character assassination Newsweek is receiving.

Make no mistake, Michael Isikoff (the reporter here) is an expert veteran and Editor-in-Chief Mark Whittaker is a highly esteemed journalist who, if anything, is often viewed as being overly cautious, not underly. Congressman Bob Ney, an honorable representative if I’ve ever saw one, has accused the two of no less treason, of “fabricating” the entire story, even calling their actions “criminal”. Radical republicans postulate that Newsweeks’ actions are motivated by some type of debase, unpatriotic, liberal desire to destroy American credibility. Though with less virulence, even the Bush administration has hacked away at Newsweek.

Does anyone else find it ironic that the Bush administration is slandering a news organization for not quadruple checking their anonymous source? This coming from an administration who staged an entire war based on information from one anonymous defector named Curveball, one who was warned by the CIA to be both crazy and a liar. Anonymous sourcing is an industry norm, why can’t journalists stand up for themselves?

One Noam Chomsky Too Many

Anti-intellectualism is a value intrinsically connected with neo-conservatism. Conservatives fear the unbridled exercise of free speech in the same way that those who espouse such academic freedom fear its suppression. Animated by political victory, the right has gone on a witch hunt in order to suffocate the final refuge for progressive thinkers—American Universities. American higher-level education is the last frontier for conservative power; according to an array of questionable polls and dubious statistics, democrats not only dominate the professorate, but infest their students with their radical beliefs.

Hate groups like Campus Watch, Academic Bias, and Students for Academic Freedom, along with new governmental legislature (Senate Bill 24), have formed for the sole purpose of battling leftism within academia. Throughout history, hatred for the radical professorate has faded in and out, reflecting our political landscape. Just like Senator McCarthy before us, we are entering a conservative right crusade against free thought, dissent, and a crusade to quell controversy.

In fact, Larry Mumper, senator of Ohio, introduced a bill, The Academic Bill of Rights, specifically to suppress left wing professors. Mumper claimed that “80 percent” of professors, "are Democrats, liberals or socialists or card-carrying Communists.” I ask you, when is the last time you’ve met a communist? A socialist? Communism, according to Mumper, is merely a euphemism for, “people who try to over-regulate and try to bring in a lot of issues we don’t agree with.” Hmm. When asked how he would enforce his Academic Bill of Rights, Mumper admitted that, “we’re going to put in some ways to monitor classrooms” to enforce this bill. The irony is palpable.

With liberalism wounded, communism dead, and the power of democrats diminished, it’s hard to believe that the leftwing professorate is indoctrinating our youth with anti-Americanism like the conservatives might contend. The conservative desire for dissent within the classroom is propagated through a sense of affirmative actions and victim hood, trademarks of stereotypical liberalism. Should U.S. colleges truly mirror the socioeconomic landscape of the country? Jews, a mere 1.3% of the population, appreciably over represent universities, but that doesn’t mean they marginalize the views of the Christians; just like an overabundance of democrats doesn’t mean the views of republicans are marginalized.

David Horowitz, the leader of Students for Academic Freedom, encourages students to report professors who diverge from mainstream ideology, effectively empowering the students to regulate the professor. Though they claim they’re fighting for academic freedom, in reality, they’re merely restricting it.

Harvard’s Free Speech Vulnerability

“I’ve learned to hold popular opinion of no value”
-Alexander Hamilton

Lawrence Summers of Harvard University, on January 14^th, suggested that congenital attributes may be a factor in explaining statistical disproportions in the workforce: women may be innately less proficient at science. This is a questionable scientific statement, but the political ramifications were unquestionable. The onslaught by students, faculty, media outlets, alumni, and protestors indicates a startling fact: for the first time in Harvard’s almost 350 year tenure, the influence of the outside has eclipsed the influence of the inside. Freedom to say what you believe, though preserved legislatively, is regulated by popular mentality.

As the information age whirls around us, it is important to understand the pervasive influence of national mindset on the fate of unpopular opinion. I do not agree with Mr. Summers’ denigration of women, but I do believe that scientific theories, even those that transcend to political hot-buttons, deserve a place in our great marketplace of ideas, especially in one of the most prestigious academic forums in the world.

The Harvard administration has been functioning self-sufficiently far longer than the government it presides under. If the assailment of Lawrence Summers causes his resignation, this will act as proof to the suppressive powers of public opinion. The free exchange of ideas within an institution rooted in intellect should be celebrated, not stifled.

Alexis de Tocqueville, after exploring America wrote in his book, Democracy in America (1835):

"I know of no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America [...] As long as the majority is still undecided, discussion is carried on; but as soon as its decision is irrevocably pronounced, everyone is silent, and the friends as well as the opponents of the measure unite in assenting to its propriety”

Tocquiville, along with James Madison in Federalist 51, argue the importance of the preservation of the weakest factions of ideas against the tyranny of the majority. Same same holds true even today. I too believe that the true infringement on liberty is not by the elites within Washington, but the omnipotence of the mob. Rock on Harvard free thinkers!