Elitism, campus politics and the ghost of Allan Bloom.
Where conservatives were saying this is the remnants of the 60s left propagating all these dangerous ideas, today you have centrist liberals saying that some combination of third wave feminism and Black Lives Matter are the propagators of these dangerous ideas that are taking liberalism out of control, basically. The reason all these different people have found Bloom's argument so compelling is that it creates a narrative where some version of the left has gone out of control and is a danger to liberal democracy, and needs to be countered.
Journalist Jacob Hamburger re-examines Allan Bloom's writing 30 years after The Closing of the American Mind - as campus politics and elitism are re-contested in American culture, conservatives and centrists alike are returning to Bloom's reactionary arguments in their attacks on today's left.
Jacob wrote the artile The Closing of the American Mind for The Point magazine.
Guest
Jacob Hamburger
Jacob Hamburger is a writer based in Paris. He is the editor of Tocqueville 21, a bilingual blog that focuses on contemporary democracy.
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