Left Out by the Left

I never dreamed I would borrow the words of Ronald Reagan, but recently his comment about switching from Democrat to Republican, “I didn’t leave the party, the party left me,” keeps running through my head.  What’s even scarier, is that I too feel left by the left.  Let me explain.

            I remember declaring myself as a liberal somewhere early in high school, when Barry Goldwater conservatism was briefly flourishing.  While I didn’t march in Selma or burn my draft card,  my left credentials are pretty good: writing in the college paper against the Vietnam War and offering the resolution that the school I was working at should close in protest of Kent State; hiring a majority staff of color at the agency I worked at, founding board member of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, and so on. 

            But now I found myself almost as astonished and distressed at the left’s cultural and political screeds as at the right’s.  A few cases in point:’

            The Boston Museum of Fine Arts cancels a show in which women can dress in a replica kimono next to Monet’s portrait of his wife in the kimono.  Protesters had called the exhibit “racist,” “cultural appropriation,” and of course “orientalism.” 

            The Wesleyan student newspaper publishes an article concerned that the Black Lives Matter movement could also incite extremists to take violent action, citing examples of anti-police chants and other specifics.  (The article is here if you want to read it for yourself:  http://wesleyanargus.com/2015/09/14/of-race-and-sex/.)  The student government responds by unanimously (!) voting to consider shifting $17,000 in funding away from the paper.

            Yale makes headlines when one affinity group says that certain costumes, including turbans, headdresses, and the like, are to be avoided at Halloween because they are culturally insensitive, and a white early childhood educator responds negatively.  According to the NY Times, students confront the professor’s husband demanding that he apologize for her and saying he should lose his job. 

            This is besides many other examples of extreme sensitivity, like the law students who object to discussion of rape law because it may trigger sensitivities in people who have been sexually assaulted.  “Trigger warnings” now seem even to include such literary works as Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” which, for those of you who didn’t have to wade through masses of eighteenth century literature, is about the snipping of a lock of (head) hair.

            There are so many things wrong with these incidents that it’s hard to know where to begin.  Let’s start with the other end of the censorship spectrum.

            For decades -- no centuries,-- the left has fought against, and still fights against censorship from the right of “offensive material," particularly in schools and other institutions,  This included everything from the portrayal of nudity by Michelangelo and in movies, to banning hundreds of books like Of Mice and Men and The Color Purple.  Hitler burned books that portrayed Jews positively.  Stalin banned biology that offended him.  Students used to protest when colleges and universities censored or defunded publications for political or sexual content.

            But what rational position can maintain that we shouldn’t ban works that upset some groups, for example, Christians, but not others that upset others, for example Muslims?  Furthermore, the very notion of banning the upsetting seems linked with antagonism to free speech and free thought.  The Charlie Hebdo assassinations, the fatwah against Salman Rushdie, the Danish cartoon murder, were all extremes of “cultural sensitivity.”  During his years in hiding, Rushdie wrote an essay entitled “Is Nothing Sacred,” in which he hoped the answer was “No,” since sacredness only allows some ideas to be buried, and others to go unchallenged.

            Let me be clear.  I am not a free speech advocate even to the extent that this notion is espoused in America.  I agree with Germany that Holocaust denial, especially there, should be illegal, and that hate speech should be more strictly defined and controlled.  But none of the examples above comes close to a deliberate or even, I would argue, a plausible, attack on one culture by another. 

            For years, America has drifted toward the right, so that moderate positions of the past are now seen as liberal, and liberal positions as radical.  Remember, Reagan was for a path to legalized status for many immigrants, and Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits proposed universal Medicare in 1970.

            But now the Young Left, particularly at schools, is making itself a mirror image of the worst of the right, and the sensitivities of any individual, right or left, apparently take precedence over what we used go call common sense.