The newlo isolationism in the coming global disorder. [applause] good morning. I should just mention in the beginning that im told there will be time for q a but thatt depends on your asking distinct questions that ended question marks and which i can then repeat for the benefit of filming of this production. Can someone close the door . Thank you. The title of my remarks this morning is notes on the passing of liberal culture. There is a story that might be apocryphal but is too good not to share which is told about mahatma gandhi. Hello, jamie. [laughter] all right. I will begin again for jamies benefit. Theres a story possibly apocryphal but too good not to share which is told about mahatma gandhi. The Indian Independence leader was asked by journalist what do you think of western civilization. Gandhi thought for a moment and replied i think it would be a good idea. [laughter] i have been pondering that line the better part of the year as i consider the state of liberal culture both in the United States and throughout the world. What i think of liberalism. I think it would be a good idea and in fact it could be our erlvation as a country and as an civilization if only we could remember what it is also has to be about. Lets review some recent incidents. First event President Trump seeks to suppress the publication of the book he finds personally insulting and politicallyem embarrassing and then proposes telling us libel laws to make it more to build to publish criticism and make it easier for people in power to sue. Second event laura a feminist professor of film studies at Northwestern University writes an article in the chronicle of Higher Education 40 about sexual paranoia on campus made worse by new enforcement standards for title ix plates. For using her First Amendment right to complain about title ix she is repeatedly sued underep title ix by students who argued that her opinions created a chilling environment on campus from which they are entitled to protection. Third item. At an alabama rally donald trump offers the following view off Football Players taken the during the singing of the National Income in a quote wouldnt you love to see one of these nfl owners when someone disrespects our flag to say get that son of a [bleep] off our field right now. Hes fired. Item. Roger pokey junior and respected expert in disaster trends at the university of california investigated by democratic member of congress because some of his research contradicts the more dire scenarios painted by Climate Change activists. As you probably noticed i have drawn these examples from both political left and the political right. You can probably tell that this is just a sample of what could have been a very long list and they are all instances of an assault on liberalism that has been coming for a long time in which is slowly but surely moved from the fringe of our politics to the center of it. Just to be clear i am not talking about liberalism in the contemporary american sense of the term as an Barbara Boxer and Elizabeth Warren are liberals and ted cruz and nikki haley are conservative and Arnold Schwarzenegger is a hermaphrodite. [laughter] what i mean by liberal, the latin root meaning free to be a liberal very simply is to believe in freedom. Liberalism, the ism is the belief that the aim of politics is to maximize personal freedom, constrained only byec the respet to the freedom of others and the safety of society as a whole. The transcendent phrase of the pursuit of happiness expresses the central liberal ideas best. It holds that the course content of the good life cannot be imposed from above, from parents, priests, teachers, gorillas, village elders, king or supreme leaders. It is fully universal and yet deeply personal. It requires a sense of social tolerance as well is the concept of personal responsibility. It involves trial and error. It implies the possibility of free will and above all it is something that every individual must choose for himself orse herself alone no matter whether the choice leads to success and happiness or to failure increase. We have 2 had 242 years to get used to the words pursuit of happiness. It is worth pausing to reflect on what an extraordinary idea it really is. The fundamental conviction of agent philosophers was the primary purpose of politics was not to make men free. It was to habituate them to hurt you. Freedom the stoics taught is a dogg more than being change to a court. We cannot choose for the cart, that is compulsion, circumstance or fate, will take us but we can choose whether to be dragged by the chain or walk willingly behind it. Modern lost her beginning as Great Britain john locke and the mortal scott, adam smith and searching for contemporary philosophers like thosear wonderfulaw austrian karel poppr and bridget hayek, believe that the good society cannot be based on the concept of virtue is enticing is amazing. The contrary they knew that virtue Centric Society from sparta inn ancient greece to the medieval monasteries in europe the 20th century communism and fascism were almost invariably despotic society which crushed humanity in an oppressive and forgiving concept of quote the good. Societies based on freedom might aim for less lofty aims and allow for a great deal of senseless but increasing space for what memorably called experiments in living they allowed the humans. Two. It parish. I cannot emphasize enough that freedom is to be at all fmeaningful and must allow forn extraordinary amount of failure, utility, stupidity and ugliness. We start businesses that more often than not fail. We enter marriages that half the time and into force. The experiment drugs in indulgent drink and some of us end up as attics and rex. Floor money on slot machines. We traffic and crazy conspiracies and express shocking bigotry and tell the shameless lies. And that is just the present. [laughter] adam smith said there is a lot of ruin o in a nation and theres ase lot of ruin in our personal lives as well. All because we have dedicated ourselves to this proposition about the pursuit of happiness. It is normal in most liberal societies to make compromises with our own freedom. Uthe United States we criminale drug use, most of the time, and sex work, exceptop for the bott, and we have largely banned smoking in public spaces. In europe and in canada there are laws against socalled hate speech, welfare states the interest of redistribution ahead of those profitmaking or quality ahead of individual merit excellence and achievement. There isnt a a right answer aso what the right amount of social protection versus individual autonomy ought to be. What matters is what kind of accommodations and tradeoffs different societies are prepared to make at different points in theirr evolution. Nevertheless, there ism a point in which liberal democracy can transform themselves to the slow and steady secretion of protective measures into Something Like a padded cell. That is they can so cushion themselves from the possibility of harm and error and insult and offense that theyy become form f prison. Societies based on the t ideal f the pursuit of happiness we can quietly slip into systems based on the prevention of unhappiness of ugliness and hurt. I fear this is where we may be headed toward a soft tyranny of the night, the wellmeaning and the politically correct. Followed some of the news from academia in recent years you will have noticed that that is where the academy is leading us. This is a world of visiting conservative speakers being shouted down and assaulted by professors living in feary of accidentally appending their students socalled agro aggressions, a theory of something called cultural appropriation, an example of which the was the wearing of ponchos in sombreros and mexican themed Halloween Party and of a process of solving the feelings of students but the price of their permanent input colonization. Let me give you an example. In the fall 2014 a student at Brown University got wind that her school is going to host a debate between two women, one feminist and the other a libertarian, which also makes her a feminist [laughter] on the subject of campus Sexual Assault. The student feared that exposure to such debate could be damaging to people ine, the audience, soe of you might find their experiences of Sexual Assault in the quote invalidated by what the debaters might say. Student organized a safe space. As described by judith in the New York Times an excellent newspaper by the way the space was a room equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, y plato, this is in college, mind you, call me music,bl pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies as well as students and Staff Members trained to deal with trauma. That sounds from us enough but the story of safe spaces doesnt end there. As she noted in her essay, once see you designate some spaces a safe you imply that the rest is unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer. Thats an important insight. It shows how easily an impulse to shield to protect vulnerable quickly become a desire and then a demand to o impose a particulr concept of safety on others whether they want it or not. After all, a college or university should accept the principle of the safe space in a single designated why should that they will not extend to the classroom, the lecture hall, toward parties, college newspapers, chat rooms, social media and so on. If one wants to accommodate some subsidiaries of subsidence consumption and that accommodation extend not only what one says but to what one says anywhere or what one allows to be said anywhere and it is not okay to say certain things anywhere should we even think them and wouldnt we be better off if the ideas that could hurt peoples feelings or trigger their anxieties never popped into our heads in the first place. Not long ago i heard the english novelist Salman Rushdie knows a thing or two about what real safe spaces are about and what real micro or macro aggressions to call the six spaces to mark that instead of making colleges safe spaces for thought we are moving toward a world in which campuses are becoming spaces from thought. In short, we are witnessing the slowmotion disintegration of what used to be called liberal education and that is an education in openmindedness of intellectual challenge, a freedom to express unpopular thought and in a recent survey conducted by scholar at the Brookings Institution a plurality of College Students today, that is fully 44 to not believe the First Amendment of the United States constitution protects socalled hate speech. Of course, it absolutely does. More shockingly a narrow majorityty of students, 51 thik it is quote acceptable for a Student Group show down the speaker with whom they disagree and an astonishing 19 that is almost one in five also agree that it is acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking. All of this is happening among students who, if you asked them, if youse asked him to describe himself politically, would overwhelmingly call themselves liberals or progressives. That tells us something about how c far removed contemporary ideological liberalism has become permits etymological forebear. More description of the students attitudes might in my opinion be called the shift stick. In all events it represents the addition of inquiry with an ideology, a method conclusion, of education with indoctrination and of inquiry with identity. It would be bad enough that these trends were combined to mainly to a the college quad but im afraid they are not. Thanks for letting this stress on the politics of identity to the world in which what seems to matter most in Many Political debates isnt the logic or force of ones argument but the racial, ethnic or sexual standing of the persons making the argument. This is the broke way in which you speak these days. As a woman, i think ask. As a gay man i believe why. As a privileged person i apologize for izzy. [laughter] this is dangerous. Lincoln warned in a young mans life when he was nine years old and i quote reason, cold calculating, unabashed reason must furnish all the materials for our future support and since. Identity politics is the politics of anti reason, o of passion and selfassertion over thoughtfulness in common humanity. It adds another layer of affection and an element of division in our already hyperpolarized sideload and splintered civic, and i might add, digital life. It create an artificial barrier to Mutual Understanding and makes the distance making an argument causing personal offense terrifyingly short. Now we turn to the political right. One of the worst aspects of identity politics is that it is a game in which to play. For many years i thought identity politics was mainly a position of the left of academia. The rise of the socalled ultra right in the election of donald trump has taught me perhaps taught many of us that white identity politics remains a npowerful driving force in american politics and we saw it in the widespread trump so improperly championed a few years ago and we saw it in charlottesville and in the president s unforgivable occasions when it came to condemning neonazis. We saw it again in the president s comments about people from as whole countries as opposed to those from those pale faced norwegians like my friend, karl rove. And this guy in the front row was very delightful but a little red in the face. [laughter] weve seen in the nonstop demagoguery by the administration and its supporters about crimes and murders committed by Illegal Immigrants when in actual fact Illegal Immigrants areom incarcerated at about halfro the rate of nativeborn americans. Not surprisingly the adoption of white identity politics by the president with the broader pattern of a liberal thinking coming from the white house and thought. Donald trump has no american president in living memory painted a political target on the news media called them, i should say called us, an enemy of the people. A sentiment that o seems to be shared by the likes of vladimir putin, president erdogan and our good friend in venezuela and those we consider ourselves. Two. Hes devalued the coin of truthr comes to president ial statements replacing straightforward factual honesty with what one might call narrative truth, a term that once belonged to the from of psychoanalysis, if not, in fact, psychosis. Consider this exchange that the president had about a year ago just after he came to office with bill oreilly when oreilly was still at fox news. Oreilly asked in a quote, is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you cant backup factually and is the president you say there are 3 million illegal aliens whong voted and u dont have the data to back that up some people are going to say its irresponsible the president to say that . I think oreillys violence tool the [inaudible] [laughter] to which the present replied many people have come out and said that i am right. Many people say the moon landing were a hoax. Many people say that jim morrison fixed his own death. Many people say ishtar was the greatest film of the 20th century. [laughter] many people say that what is known of the argument of [inaudible], the logical fallacy that holds that if many people believe i so, it is so. The president is responding to a claim of facts not by denying the facts by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have an argument. He isnt telling oreilly that he has his facts wrong, he is saying that as h far as he is concerned facts, as most people understand them, dont matter, that they are indistinguishable from and interchangeablele with opinion and that statements of fact needed have any purchase against the man who is either either sufficient to powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them. Or in his case, both. This is another example of our new liberalism. Some people on the left think they can assert truth claims based on their status as systems trump is assertings his own claims based on the status of being powerful. Truth is what he thanks he can get away with. It needs to say that 90 of the departments in one of his towers are sold when in fact only 20 are that is true. Needs to say the size of his inaugural crowd was larger than obama, that is true, as well. It would be bad enough for speaking of the president of the united alone but his political rise of cement the rise of his many helpers from alternative facts Kellyanne Conway 20 fax sean hannity. The conservative movement is used too rail against the pernicious idea that the truth is relative and is a pernicious idea seems to find a comfort withpr the president from the relative disapproval is as important to him as his hair. [laughter] when the truth and it is then i might add, when the truth becomes relative to those in power liberalism is in danger. Free societies to push their need to be able to rely on the common notion of truth, a common basis of fact a in a commonly agreed set of rules about how we distinguish truth from lies, facts from falsehood. The alternative is true as a function of power, a world in which those who w wield power gt to decide what is true and those who lack power have no basis on which to challenge them. You need a sense of where politics can lead i suggest you pick up a copy of George Orwells 1984. Let me sum up. Liberalism is a political concept value is individual freedom. Within family of liberalism canv havece legitimate differences or whether to prioritize Economic Freedom or moral freedom or how the balance of Civil Liberties or how to balance Civil Liberties against collective security. That is what liberals and conservatives have been arguing about time immemorial without doing fundamental damages to the overall fabric of our liberties. Now, however, liberalism is under attack from at least two quarters. On the left by the cobblers, on the right by the troopers. The cobblers want to protect people from the consequences of freedom everything from secondhandmo smoke to politicaly incorrect speech. They want to exalt the concept ofit identity to serve as a barrier to intellectual challenge away a loaded castle is a defense from slings and arrows. They want to post a concept of virtue that much as we may sympathize with its attention opposition to racism or sexism for instance mustxi inevitably have the results of supporting free speech and smothering independent thought. With the word skepticism becomes a dirty one on the political left as it has so current environmental orthodoxies you know that something is amiss. As for the travelers they have their own version of identity politics the same way the identity the way the white majority put their less interested in the freedoms the most need protecting in a democratic society. Rights of political minority and the liberties of the individual citizens and america has previously thrived as a nation because we have a cultural disposition in favor of the [inaudible], the contrarian, the upstart, the were, the late plumber, the disruptor, the activists, the social nuisance in the New York Times columnist. [laughter] that is risk when personal dissent is treated as an affront toat patriotism. I personally do not have too much sympathy for some of the political views of colin kaepernick, the quarterback was the first to take any during the singing of the national anthem. I would never do anything but stand for theta market flag with my hand on my heart. [applause] but when the president of the United States called him a son of a [bleep] and urges that he be fired then i will take a stand with colin kaepernick. I will stands for the claims of individual conviction and conscience however much i might disagree with those convictions against the threats of the powerful. That is what america is about. To think otherwise [applause] to think otherwise is very simply unamerican. There it is. How do we defend liberalism against the toddlers and the travelers . Thats another speech but it begins by reminding ourselves in teaching others what liberalism is. How extraordinary it is, how vulnerable it is and why it is so worth preserving. When are we going to start teaching the mix seriously again in high school . [cheering and applause] when will we again require College Students to take classes in western and american political thought . When will we again understand our founders is something more than slaveholders and sexists and hypocrites which some of them, of course, surely were but more importantly as people of their time nonetheless transcended their time with ideas that have gradually emancipated us all . When are we going to insist that an american president should set an example of personal property and illness and deep respect for the institution that sustain our liberalism, beginning with a free and vigorous and sometimes rude and temperance biased press . When will w we drop in when we drop a cop out in the crotch of identity politics and tell ourselves white or black, gay or straight, male or female, above all we are americans and when will we understand again that we will make america is it geography or nationality much less ancestry. It is a universal greed that holds whether we were born in haiti or in norway and defended the mayflower or as in my case from [inaudible] that we are all created equal and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. This [applause] this is the challenge of our time and i hope that we are equal to it. Thank you very much. [applause] okay. So, helene, [inaudible] she makes the point that among the american [inaudible] there is overwhelmingly on the political left and somewhere from the left to the sanders left to the colonies to last and then we get to the center of academia over to the venezuelan left and finally we end with stalinism. That is exactly it. Universities have allowed themselves to be captured ideologically in a way that is deeply damaging to the fundamental interest of a liberal education. It is astonishing that someone like ben shapiro who is a never trump would need tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of security to speak at what is allegedly but not actually the premier Public Institution in the state of california. That is a stunning comment on what berkeley hasha allowed itsf to become that someone like shapiro of all people would be considered practically persona non grata and it is an astonishing fact that when Charles Murray visited Middleberry College he and the very nice democrat centrist democrat who sponsored and invited him and moderated stock were physically assaulted, a femalele professor had a concussion and spent a week in a dark room by being physically assaulted by students, government, should have to count his presence of Charles Murray on their campuses. No scholar has made a more interesting case for why donald trump anticipated why donald trump one and hes listening to. By the way, i should add it is also worth listening to the pickets and ideologues, not because we agree with them but because we cannot intelligently disagree until we have thoroughly understood so to disagree you must first understand the last. [applause] and the best thing College Campus like Janet Napolitano runs the system and number one provide a stalwart defense free speech on campus and number two dont treat conservative professors the way anthropologist my treat certain tribes in the amazon as an interesting curiosity but rather as part of the mainstream American Life which is probably important things to say about every single field of scholarship and thank you for the question. [applause] maam. For every action there is a reaction and i think that is [inaudible] [inaudible] ive never been a marxist excuse. The question the lady makes a point that let me see event pairs a list correctly that what we are dealing with is action and reaction, thesis and antithesis that extremism on the one side to get or has begun extremism on the other. I dont think is i can relate an answer im not a marxist and i dont in fact think that history moves through a series of contradictions the result. I think we are capable or we ought to bepa capable of being intelligent critics of a particular position. I dont think anyone if you followed my career at the wall street journal you know that i had plenty of less than terrible things about the administration of barack obama so those of you who are upset that im giving it to donald trump, i give it to everyone. That doesnt mean that intelligent peoplean cant simpy get beyond the desire to do the opposite. There is a wonderful scene in seinfeld which is my guide to depicting. [laughter] in which george the stanza, the schlepping character, and jerry are eating or having breakfast at toms restaurant and he says every decision i make is wrong and every time i order a turkey and swiss i wish id gotten the ham and cheese and jerrys answer is well, if you do the opposite of what you thank you willll do the opposite must necessarily be right and as it plays out in that episode he says you are right and thats what i will do. He spots this beautiful woman at the counter and walks up to and says hello. Im george. Im unemployed and i live with my mother. [laughter] she looks at him and says hello. [laughter] in real life you can modulate,s okay . By the way, i would say this and i said this yesterday and i would say this to all of you in this report democrats or aghast by this administration this country does not need a resistance. This country needs an opposition. This country doesnt need insanity [applause] on ath bipartisan basis. The answer to make America Great again is make t america sane again. That is what if democrats want to they will have to find some way of responding to donald trump that is modulated and that Something Like edward primal scream going full blast 24 hours a day. Sir, in the middle. [inaudible] where do i draw the line the perfect right to, demonstrate against racism and the ownership right of an owner to want to set the tone and industries and thats a very legitimate question. Thats a genuine dilemma that we have that people players are at the end of the day not just free and public persons but employees in an organization that often owns these stadiums and your free speech right will always be limited in certain public settings but to the extent that it is possible, for instance, private universities toot not he to observe constitutional niceties when it comes to campus tribunals. For instance, those dealing with sexual abuse and assault. You dont have a right if youre accused of a Sexual Assault as a student to face your accuser for instance. You dont have those constitutional amendment rights. But large institutions Like National football and like american universities should do they can to model themselves because they are modeled on our common sense of what we have right to do in public places. I think because it is an education and because football isnt simply a close shop in which only those for pain get to watch. So, does an owner have right to fire colin cabinet or take action for taking 80 . Yes. Is it wise to do so . No. I think we have elided this distinction between what we have right to do and what we ought to dohe from a sense of wisdom and respect for the overall ideals of country. [applause]ud sir. [inaudible] free country. Sorry, the question is where do i take issue with ben shapiro and where do i not . We are different people. In some respects i agree with him on some things and in many respects i dont. Ive always been very much a social libertarian or liberal in my thinking but that is neither here nor there. Ben shapiro iss a guy with this and that political view with a fairly broad following who is interesting and certainly a dynamic speakerng who is interesting for College Republicans or college audiences. It is insane that someone like him who is by no means an eaextremist should be treated as one. All it does is demonstrate that the real extremist are the people who find ben shapiro extreme. [inaudible] to be clear we have to be clear that there are two homonyms shtetl, not to be confused with us whole although the shtetls were asked holes and the shtetls were the communities on the socalled real settlement in what used to be called [inaudible] or ukraine, poland, all of these gone places andla so on that are now belarus and lithuania and ldopa in romania and so on that were the indigenous desperately indigent places where jews have been forced to live by the russian empire. When my greatgrandfather arrived with his eight children and his wife from [inaudible] he had no skills, no english and probably not the best hygiene and if you looked at the literature of the early 20th century talking about henry adams talks about that weird you dish, right . You would beot hearing a commentary that is not so some of the comments that are today made about the haitians in the nigerians and the latin americans. We were poor, broken and i say this as a jew, poor, broken, filthy and let me leave you some of the sons who arrived from the shtetl. Mike bloomberg, his father arrived from the shtetl. Jonas spoke, his parents arrived shtetl. You can go for a list of some of the greatest american benefactors the entropic businessman, scientist and so on, and they all came from those s whole shtetls and make their American Dream their own. This is so fundamental to what we are as americans. We dont arrive with phds. We are not [applause] with a handful of honorable exceptions we are not dashing norwegians. [laughter] yes, maam. [inaudible] [inaudible] there is no question that the question was similar to one asked earlier wasnt donald trump and his election not so much a vote for me trumps values personality but a reaction to the suffocating liberalism and Political Correctness media bias in someone that had prevailed in the eight preceding years and theres a great deal of truth to that. But just because you have complaints about the past eight years doesnt mean you ought to be there to accept just about anything as a response to it. Look, it is very important and i sayy this i agree with many things that the Trump Administration was done. Im happy the embassy is moving to jerusalem where it belongs. I think its a traffic thing and its a thing that apple is repatriating hundreds of billions of dollars that it had kept in cash overseas because we had an insane corporate taxation system. And when those things happen i say it. Okay . I acknowledge it because i am trying, as a columnist, to be to look at the world with an open i and to accept the facts as they come to me. John maynard keynes, who i dont entirely love as an economist, said when the facts change, so do my opinions. What doo you do, sir . And that is what we ought to do. We also need to keep sight of the fact that deeper than the matter of policy or the location of our embassies or funding for military or any number of issues there is a question of the moral political and philosophical culture of the United States and we are a liberal society and we are a freedom loving people. We need two parties democrats and republicans who honor and exalt that tradition and what i am trying to do is make sure thatus i remain honest with yourself and do my best to keep both parties honest, as well. Thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] next up the Rancho Mirage fred as possible author and satirized, dave barry, remarks on his very books including best day ever a florida man defends his