The Mess on Campus Helps Explain the Mess With RussiaIt stands to reason that our apparent contempt for freedom at home would signal to Putin that we would be unlikely to fight and sacrifice for its protection abroad.
By Paul S. Levy
March 23, 2022
What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens at our universities spills over into society at large . . . and quickly. Our friends across the pond at The Economist have finally noticed that collegiate cancel mobs have infected business, politics, media and education with their poison.
While one may argue that the link between our current wokeism and the harm it has inflicted on America has an attenuated link to Vladimir Putin, the breakdown of the rule of law manifest at our colleges and in our cities has emboldened the Russian president in his irredentist ambitions in Ukraine and in Eastern Europe. We are now reaping what we have allowed progressive ideologues to sow for us.
Why shouldn’t Putin dismiss the West, and America in particular, as pathetically dysfunctional? Weakness is writ large in our daily failure to defend our core values. Putin understood Joe Biden’s cowardly, politically motivated, and hasty retreat from Afghanistan as a reason to think his aggression in Ukraine would stand. But that moment of shame was disastrously intensified by the backdrop of the deterioration of civil society and the abandonment of moral conviction.
The Russian autocrat has miscalculated the West’s reaction to his invasion of Ukraine, but why shouldn’t he have expected a feckless American response, when we turn our backs on thieving and looting—mayhem and murder—in our cities; when our universities, which are supposed to stand for free thought, inquiry, and expression—the very values brave Ukrainians are presently fighting and dying for—stifle speech, thought, and free expression?
It stands to reason that our apparent contempt for freedom at home would signal to Putin that we would be unlikely to fight and sacrifice for its protection abroad. Putin himself said in October 2021 that the West has lost its way and no longer stands by its defining values.
What message do we send abroad when dozens of students at Yale’s elite law school threaten physical violence against speakers with whom they disagree, stomping to drown out their words at an event whose very purpose was to discuss free speech? This incident occurred only last week, but it is one in a stream of hundreds of such incidents in the past several years and it is a sign to the world that we have abandoned our most cherished values. And it signals to the world that our leaders lack the will to enforce their own rules and deepest values.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/23/the-mess-on-campus-helps-explain-the-mess-with-russia/
