my relative has been listening to too much Rush Limbaugh and subscribed to 'heterodoxy' a newspaper put out by David Horowitz, written in about size 14 type. I admit I'm a bit prejudiced against this guy because he was giving a talk promoting his 'tell all' book on the 60s left, and was blaming each and every progressive or leftist person, no matter how moderate, for the crimes of STalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc., and then when my friend quite politely mentioned some right wing atrocities, he accused us of being virtual Stalin supporters were we to be in the right time and place and said we would be the type to put him in a camp. He has a real persecution complex. When a real communist who had shown up shouted something, he started going off that all the PC people were here to silence him and that this happens at every appearance and his brave followers must fight on or whatever.
anyway, he makes these statements in his article this month: "progressives have a false consciousness of their own. Being so noble in their own eyes, how could they not be blind? But this blindness also springs from an insularity created by their contempt for those not gifted with progressive sight. As a result, radicals are largely innocent of the ideas and perspectives that oppose their agendas. The works of von Mises, Hayek, Aron, Popper, Oakeshott, Sowell, Strauss, Bloom, Kirk, Kristol and other anti-socialist thinkers are virtually unknown on the Left, excluded from the canons of the institutions they dominate and absent from the texts they write. This silencing of ideological opponents in the areas of the culture the Left controls has led to a situation one philosopher lamented as "the collapse of serious argument throughout the lower reaches of the humanities".............The average college graduate is acquainted with whole libraries of radical blather - the repackaging by third rate intellects of discredited Marxist formulas in the works of bell hooks, Frederic Jameson, Derrick Bell, Andrew Ross, Richard Delgado and Catharine MacKinnon but has never opened a text by the most important figures of 20th Century social thought. An ideological omerta is the left's response to its vindicated critics, especially those who emerged from its own ranks. it is an intellectual version of Stalin's efforts to transform his political opponents into "unpersons"".
now, is it just my experience, or is this guy completely out of touch with what is going on at universities. Do you think that the average undergraduate has even heard of the middle four of the last list of names? In my experience, freshman and sophomore english classes usually are dealing with Poe and Kafka; the economics class I took was remedial algebra etc.