The liberal rebellion against liberty and freedom

 Peter Berkowitz:

“The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so,” wrote Andrew Sullivan earlier this month in “What Happened to You: The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism.” Sullivan is correct that the left has turned sharply against freedom in recent years. And he vivisects the illiberal ideology about race and justice espoused by many schools, private corporations, and government agencies. However, in dating the origins of the larger tempest, Sullivan is off — depending on how you count — by about 50 years, 100 years, or perhaps 250 years.

Many Americans associate the recent round of the culture wars to the Yale University Halloween costume imbroglio of 2015. That autumn, a university official sparked outrage among undergraduates by suggesting that they should manage their own Halloween parties. Erika Christakis — at the time a lecturer in Yale’s Child Study Center and associate master at Silliman College — advised students that they were capable, without the aid of university authorities, of using their own good judgment when choosing a Halloween costume and letting classmates know if they crossed the line of good taste or failed to respect the feelings of others.

Some students vehemently disagreed. A vocal group demanded that the university oversee their parties and punish those whose holiday garb offended other students’ sensibilities.

Yale’s faculty said little. But university President Peter Salovey concluded that the controversy somehow confirmed — despite many years of effort and the expenditure of considerable sums of money to increase minority representation on campus —the persistence of deep-seated racism at the university. He announced the allocation of tens of millions of additional dollars to support racial-sensitivity training for administration, faculty, and staff, and the hiring of a decidedly more diverse — that is, racially diverse — faculty.

Student authoritarians — the same should be said of faculty and administration authoritarians — of this generation are the spiritual descendants of the student rebels of the 1960s. Students’ importuning universities to curb campus freedom today may seem like the opposite of students a half-century earlier who rebelled against university-imposed restrictions on freedom of expression, not least student attire. But the former carry forward the work of the latter. In the 1960s, students fought for free speech but as a means to give voice to their cutting-edge progressive sensibility, which included contempt for the logic and achievements of existing institutions and for the wisdom contained in old books and ideas. Today’s students, sustained by a campus culture in which that progressive sensibility prevails, wish to impose it on everybody — in part, by stifling free speech.
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The left in this country has become totalitarian in character.  It is intolerant and the exercise of freedom from their dictates or other points of view.  One of the tells with CRT is how persistently they cling to the racist garbage while falsely claiming to be "anti-racist."