Robert Tracinski identifies for Federalist readers a disturbing trend among major stories from 2015.
But the big new development in 2015 is that the left’s culture war came back to attack the very institutions that hatched it.
Early in the year, I remarked on the irony of leftist writer Jonathan Chait whining about political orrectness. He is absolutely right about the stultifying, totalitarian nature of the demands for conformity and the injustice of accusing people of racism merely for saying something you don’t like. But the system he’s complaining about is one he helped bring into existence and which he has used to smear his opponents as racists. …
… This new round of political correctness has also turned on the Democratic Party. In July, they began to expunge two key founders of the party: Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. But as I pointed out, by the same reasoning hardly any Democratic Party icon would be safe, counting down everyone from Woodrow Wilson to Jimmy Carter. And one part was prophetic: students at Princeton University are now demanding that the school expunge its revered former leader Woodrow Wilson.
That’s where the chickens have really come home to roost this year: on college campuses.
In the middle of the year, I ticked down a list of old-fashioned “liberal” pieties that have long since been abandoned by the left. This includes the value of a liberal education. …
… It is on campus that the left has created a quasi-totalitarian system of social conformity — as the base from which they have tried to impose those rules on everyone.
