Time for Our Counterculture

Scarcely a month passes without encountering yet one more new faculty group dedicated to promoting intellectual diversity on campus, yet one more manifesto celebrating campus free speech, and yet one more account of a canceled professor successfully suing those who canceled him. Then, add accounts of red states banning “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) from public universities. All good news, to be sure, but momentary psychological relief aside, they are only minor victories. The left still controls most campuses, particularly the most prestigious, and our victories are more of a nuisance than a serious threat to the left’s hegemony.

The failure results from our unwillingness to confront the enemy directly.

Put bluntly, the left’s capture of the academy is about the triumph of stupidity over brain power, a backward step in Western civilization. This is what the assault on “whiteness” and “decolonization” are about. If this takeover were characterized as a “return to the Dark Ages,” the rejoinder would not be about the decline of knowledge; it would be about the pejorative use of “Dark.”

The evidence of stupidity is indisputable.

While a physicist could, with a few days of training, teach a Gender Studies seminar, the reverse—a Gender Studies professor teaching physics—is unimaginable. Why must universities spend millions on remedial classes targeting black and Hispanic students when no such classes are necessary for Asian students who often come from impoverished non-English speaking immigrant families? Why have so many professors now inflated their grades and dumbed down reading assignments once the campuses opened their doors to “under-represented” minorities? These are among the countless realities acknowledged in hushed private conversations but never voiced openly.

The culprit for this silence is an ironic one: champions of free speech mistakenly believe that the path to victory lies with mobilizing the most prestigious advocates as the “tip of the spear.” Adjuncts at community colleges need not apply. As in a medieval battle, the highest nobility will lead the charge, bedecked in expensive armor. Peasant pikers will bring up the rear.

This “elite first” guarantees defeat for the simple reason that these eminent academics have the most to lose in battling the dominant left, and, as a result, will not be forthright in speaking truth to power. Worse, they flee to their institutional safe spaces at the first sign of trouble. Why risk the decades spent building a stellar reputation when confronting a heckler if that clash results in publicized and almost irrefutable accusations of “racist,” “sexist,” and “transphobic?”

The accuracy of such slander is irrelevant.

These are Tar-Baby encounters, and even the best reputation will suffer once you engage in the dirt-flinging. The slightest off-hand aside can be deadly. Recall when Nobel Prize winner James Watson averred that it just might be possible that low IQs explain today’s tribulations in Africa. Instantly, the co-discoverer of DNA became a “racist crank” due to a single utterance, and no amount of backtracking could reverse this damnation. Most academics know Watson’s tale, and nobody wants to be the next James Watson. Just avoid controversy.

Here’s better to defeat the politically correct (PC) mob with a “The Emperor has no clothes” approach. Here, the taboo violator, being just an unindoctrinated young boy, failed to understand the risks of speaking the truth, unlike the adults who grasped the costly consequences of truth-telling. The moral: the greater the academic prestige, the more one loses by violating a taboo, so don’t expect an assembly of luminaries to bell the cat.

This strategy is hardly hypothetical.

The destructive counterculture of the 1960s that upended society’s norms and humbled the mighty—including President Lyndon B. Johnson—was organized, funded, and led by a motley crew of hippies, college drop-outs, drug addicts, and other “rabble” who had little to lose in the way of reputation or position. The likes of Abbie Hoffman and Gery Rubin exercised more power than a conclave of Nobel Prize winners; when Harvard’s Timothy Leary joined “the movement,” he and other intellectuals’ enlistees never owed their success to scholarly resumes. They were free to act with total abandon.

The successful push for campus intellectual freedom will likely come from young, disorderly males allergic to the Kool-Aid. These “fringe” combatants do not fear being ostracized by professional organizations. For them, inviting Charles Murray to campus, selling his books on the quad, and telling everybody about Facing Reality is hardly career-ending. More important, it might be fun, no small matter to youngsters.

The left’s domination of the campus may, as Christoper Rufo demonstrates, have its origins in arcane Marxist and post-modern philosophy, but its current incarnation rests far more on a permissive culture than abstract doctrine. That reality is acknowledged, and the lessons of the 1960s counterculture era are instructive: subvert the culture and alter the politics.

The good news is that the entire leftwing campus edifice, with its almost comic infatuation with diversity, homosexuality, the social construction of biological reality, the obsession with impenetrable jargon (heteronormality), its penchant for hypocrisy and mendacity, its fixation on preventing trivial psychological harm, the twisting of the English language (“silence is violence”) and multiple other insanities is a house of cards waiting to be toppled, and, as Saul Alinksy said in his Rules for Radicals: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.”

As the 1960s demonstrated, comedians and musicians will do a better job than professors, especially with the millions of youngsters disinclined to follow serious academic debates. Modern-day versions of George Carlin or Lenny Bruce will do more to undermine leftist dogma like “intersectionality” and “queer theory” than an army of world-class academics speaking at a well-funded, invitation-only conference. I can picture thousands of students laughing hysterically when the new Lenny Bruce regals them with his failed efforts to seduce a non-binary social justice warrior who angrily demands assurances that having sex is eco-friendly and bio-sustainable.

Ditto for the power of music to undermine shibboleths.

The messages will be different from Creedence Clearwater’s 60’s era “Fortunate Son,” which told of how the government was sending the poor to fight in Vietnam, but the message, whatever it is, will reach millions. The rise of “conservative” Country Western music may be the most powerful weapon in today’s anti-PC arsenal. Jason Aldeans’s overtly political Try That in Small Town received some 11,7 million radio and streaming plays. Country music may nurture a campus counterculture just as “acid rock” fueled the radical counterculture of the 60s.

Entertainment can also build solidarity. Current heretics typically feel isolated, and this breeds passivity. There may be like-minded thinkers in one’s classes, but they, too, prudently remain silent. But, imagine if dissenters attended an event and saw thousands of other classmates cheering on Brad Stine, an evangelical conservative comedian? The reaction may be transformative and, like gays of yesterday, may now summon the courage to “come out.”

This is not a call for de-mobilizing the faculty wing battling the campus left. Professors are needed, but at the current rate of progress, decades will pass before the enemy is vanquished, all the while thousands of careers will be destroyed, and ideology-mongering will continue to pass as “truth.” Meanwhile, an army of youngsters are sick of brainwashing and being demonized due to the color of their skin and patriotic beliefs. Time for a new counterculture. Arise, you have nothing to lose but your mandatory diversity training.

Photo by Jared Gould — Adobe — Text to Image