The Daily Northwestern reports,
After a week of abolitionist organizing on campus, University President Morton Schapiro’s email condemning student protests and the hashtag #ResignMorty trending on social media, Schapiro declared in a virtual dialogue Tuesday he “(doesn’t) walk back a single word.”
The letter referred to is quoted by Steven Hayward as reading, in part
We, as a University, recognize the many injustices faced by Black and other marginalized groups. We also acknowledge that the policing and criminal justice system in our country is too often stacked against those same communities. Your concerns are valid and necessary, and we encourage and, in fact, rely on your active engagement with us to make your school and our society equitable and safe for everyone. That said, while the University has every intention to continue improving NUPD, we have absolutely no intention to abolish it.
Northwestern firmly supports vigorous debate and the free expression of ideas — abiding principles that are fundamental for our University. We encourage members of our community to find meaningful ways to get involved and advocate for causes they believe in — and to do so safely and peacefully. The University protects the right to protest, but we do not condone breaking the law.
I view what is going on at Northwestern as a significant test case. The question it raises is whether the future of the left is represented by Maoists, as is feared by Yoram Hazony, or whether it is represented by Schapiro.
When it comes to moderation, Schapiro literally co-wrote with Gary Saul Morson the book, called Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us. A few years ago, those co-authors wrote Cents and Sensibility, arguing for the need to connect economics with the humanities.
I also feel for Tiffany Riley, a Vermont high school principal, who wrote,
I firmly believe that Black Lives Matter, but I DO NOT agree with the coercive measures taken to get to this point across; some of which are falsified in an attempt to prove a point. While I want to get behind BLM, I do not think people should be made to feel they have to choose black race over human race. While I understand the urgency to feel compelled to advocate for black lives, what about our fellow law enforcement? What about all others who advocate for and demand equity for all? Just because I don’t walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I am a racist.
For which she was fired. [UPDATE: a reader sent me a story about Riley’s case.]
Persecution of heretics is the whole point of this awful religion.
Yes, Arnold. There is only one future for radical leftists: absolute power. They are coming for you and all the heretics. Schapiro may keep his position longer than Ms. Riley but not much longer.
In the meantime, Biden and all the old idiots planning to vote for him will find some excuse to rely on the support of radical leftists. Some of your readers have written comments that reflect their complete ignorance of whom they want to sleep with.
Unfortunately, there is only one way to stop them at this moment. It’s too late to negotiate with them (to make things worse, after the election and regardless of the outcome, the Dems’ Old Guard will appease the radical leftists but will not break with them).
“We also acknowledge that the policing and criminal justice system in our country is too often stacked against those same communities.”
He even included this silly slogan and yet he’s still not immune from cancellation. Wow!
Criminal justice isn’t stacked against communities (as if communities are somehow competing against other communities). Rather, it’s the law abiding in certain communities vs. the non-law abiding in those same communities. Most of the time, the race of both groups is identical.
And, when the police are nowhere to be found, I will always side with the “Rooftop Koreans” and those law-abiding citizens like them.
https://youtu.be/nzkBGQx3HAc
Sai-I-Gu was a long time ago. Today they would all be brought up on charges. The police would be ordered not to defend them, and then ordered to arrest them if they tried to defend themselves.
Hopefully, it was at least worth the nostalgic trip back to the early 1990s.
FWIW – the McCloskeys got into trouble because they have some of the worst firearm hygiene that I’ve ever seen, particularly the wife. You can’t willy nilly point a gun at someone without the appropriate provocation, otherwise it’s aggravated assault (a felony). The entire gun community on YouTube was quick to note this, even if they were overly derisive.
My wife’s new firearm finally arrived and she is sighting in her red dot as I type. It is a beautiful gun (albeit overpriced).
https://shop.bravocompanymfg.com/BCM-RECCE-16-KMR-A-Carbine-AR15-Bronze-Cerakote-p/bcm-carbine-750-790-brz.htm
Glenn Greenwald recently left The Intercept, after his articles were PC-censored.
The Intercept was classless enough try to sabotage Greenwald’s reputation on his way out.
You notice something? You can read The New Yorker, The New York Times, WaPo, The Atlantic, Salon, Slate, etc…and The Intercept, and they all read like they were written by the same one guy.
Anyone can be a speed-reader these days. You read the headline, and you know what the rest of the story will say.
The only concerns about “free speech” expressed at Salon, for example, regard Trump’s orders on Section 230, a worthwhile topic, in which Trump is presented as the heavy.
A couple generations ago Ronald Reagan said he did not leave the Democratic Party, it left him.
I now know how he felt.
Thank you for the pointer to Minds Wide Shut which I have pre-ordered and hope to read when it comes out next year if I survive that long under the new regime. Gary Saul Morson is a personal favorite scholar for his essays on Russian literature but his commentary on politics is also lucid and enlightening. I have been thinking frequently of his essay on Russia in the period 1900 to 1917 https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-liberals
while pondering what to make of the likes of Professor Bainbridge, Rod Dreher, Walter Olson, and Ilya Somin who have all publicized their opposition to President Trump and whom I name only because I have deep respect for their work generally.
Trump did not the litigate to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for the contraception and abortions of their students and employees. Biden says that faith-based homeless shelters, adoption agencies, and other charities that refuse to endorse same-sex marriage, transgender identity, and experimental cross-sex drugs and surgeries “discriminate” and must be cut off from federal funding.
Trump signed executive orders in support of free speech in education and against race hate indoctrination by federal grantees and contractors. Biden will compel people to take racist “antiracism” oaths.
I will find it very hard to have sympathy for the Dump-on-Trumpers when they get what they ask for and are persecuted for their heresies. In the future when persecuted heretics come crying about the abuse they are enduring, first we must ask “Where were you when Schapiro was persecuted? Why did you stab a President in the back who actually took concrete steps to protect your rights?”
For every man like Schapiro willing to stand up and face the mob, there are 100,000 squirrelly moral narcissists.
A salute to Schapiro, but I reserve my sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of low income students who will be denied a chance at opportunity when Biden throws them out of charter schools. I will reserve my sympathy for all the working class families who will struggle harder to pay their power bills when they skyrocket due to Biden’s embrace of imbecilic climate cult religion platitudes. And I will reserve sympathy for the thousands of more small business owners whose livelihoods will be threatened by Biden’s violent mobs. Their are many more people who will suffer much more under Biden who survive on much less than a college president’s salary.
FWIW Heather mac Donald has a balanced and nuanced take on Schapiro:
https://www.city-journal.org/northwestern-univ-president-schapiro-stands-up-to-rioters
There was more unruly protesting last evening.
“It started peacefully, but as the march went on, things changed.”
Of course.
As for Riley, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that an eventual termination is legal, and that one doesn’t want things like that to happen. In that case, what is to be done? If taking individual initiative, what is to prevent one from being associated with Riley’s heretical position and treated likewise.
We have come to a point where nothing is likely to be effective except for state intervention or organizing for legal but personalized retaliation again Elizabeth Burrows and company. Solidarity, enemies lists, boycotts, refusals to interact, the works.
A few years back Arend Lijphart wrote an interesting paper, “Constitutional Design for Divided Societies”.
We live in what is effectively a religiously divided society. What happens in such cases is that the facts on the ground drift too far from the previous, official constitution, the adherence to which becomes so strained that it becomes completely untenable in terms of fulfilling its function to contain social conflicts and disputes within civil bounds.
Analogous to “paramilitary” winds of parties which can operate outside of state control, what has happened to us is that the existing state has ceded sovereign terrain to a theocratic para-state, which has the capacity to intimidate and coerce potential heretics into compliance or else get them cancelled.
As a matter of practical reality, once a para-state comes into existence, and the actual state takes a hands-off approach to it, it can only be effectively combated by at least one rival para-state, exploiting the same seams and opportunities the state has opened up, and playing just as dirty, tit-for-tat, or even escalating, punching back twice as hard.
Once the war between para-states start getting too open and too hot to handle – as it inevitably will – eventually the actual state tries to step in, but operating under the old obsolete constitution, cannot broker a new social peace without a reformation in social organization which has to incorporate the positions and take the awful new situation of a balance of terror for granted.
This is all going to end in tears.
I’m actually for abolishing the police in blue cities or at blue universities as long as the majority support it.
It represents an almost perfect natural experiment. Let’s do this and see where it might lead!
In the meantime, I get to be a part of the placebo group where I can sit back, sip a beer and watch the festivities over the television from my red city.
It’s pretty obvious where it will lead: more ruin voters.
Candide is right. The expression of those sentiments is much like the joyous singing of the residents of fortified Jerusalem in World War Z, right before the infected go over the top of the walls and swamp them into annihilation.
I mean we’ve literally seen people fleeing NY and CA slowly turn their destinations into the same places they left.
Thanks for all of your heartfelt concerns, but I’ll be just fine.
The area where I live is deemed uninhabitable by most lefties.
Examples:
The doctor’s office has Fox News and the 700 Club on the televisions in the lobby.
We’ve got these gigantic things called mega churches where people actually wait in traffic to attend Sunday services.
The 2 metro newspapers endorse Republicans.
We love our guns and our gun ranges are out in the open for all to see. We are loyal members at this beautiful range:
https://youtu.be/1jIdJC3ZmAw
Thanks for replying. I concur with your analysis.
And thank you for the Arend Lijphart reference. His status can’t be boosted enough as far as I am concerned. Although I lack access to that article, elsewhere he has written “In the most deeply divided societies, like Northern Ireland, majority rule spells majority dictatorship and civil strife rather than democracy. What such societies need is a democratic regime that emphasizes consensus instead of opposition, that includes rather than excludes, and that tries to maximize the size of the ruling majority instead of being satisfied with a bare majority: consensus democracy.” This seems to sum up the situation in the USA as well.
It is difficult to see a way out of the mess. Roger Scruton ( https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/10/conservative-oppose-socialism-liberalism-timeless-sir-roger-scruton.html )a good job of explaining the dead ends of liberalism and socialism: “nothing is more obvious about these systems than the fact that they are, in their presuppositions, substantially the same. Each of them proposes a description of our condition, and an ideal solution to it, in terms which are secular, abstract, universal, and egalitarian.” Unfortunately his conservative response, “Our ultimate model for a legitimate order is one that is given historically, to people united by their sense of a common destiny, a common culture, and a common source of the values that govern their lives” is merely daydreaming in a country as profoundly divided as the USA.
Even if Trump gets 30% of the Black vote and 50% of the Hispanic, as some polls suggest, establishment elites in love with Biden demagoguery, will do everything in their power to crush democracy and stir civil war. Perhaps a European-style Christian Democrats party might offer a unifying vision but is of course not an option in a two-party presidential system. One might feel a bit of optimism with all the talk of constitutional amendment in the air, but a
nothing short of a complete constitutional overhaul taking Lijphart’s findings in consideration, is going to pull the country out of the quagmire.
Thanks for the link, great article. Somewhat off topic, but I’m a huge fan of Ms. Mac Donald. She introduced me to the concept of “secular conservatism” in a podcast with Dave Rubin. Wait what? It’s ok to be an atheist conservative? I’m in…adios libertarians.
https://youtu.be/BGYrhd3qsSk
you people are not cynical enough
wokeness isn’t a religion
it’s a tool of office politics
the “students” at northwestern are making sure there are available administrative jobs for them when they graduate by removing the top of the current administration
I’ll take a side bet that they are also demanding that academic requirements for graduation be lowered