The very important point that is inevitably missed when actual discussion is shut down, is that shutting down the discussion does not help the people who are the supposed beneficiaries of that suppression of our Liberal tradition. Are blacks helped, in their ghettos? Where racism is actually present, does it disappear because the ability to be honest is suppressed?
I once asked, before being banned the second or third time by what I call the Auto-Lynch feature [edit: at the Daily Cause], how anyone could feel they were working for the best policy, when it was not allowed to discuss or critique the policy. I was told, and this is close to verbatim: “We are not here to discuss policy; we are here to implement it”. I was not able to respond, because my IP was blocked. They don’t value free speech. They are not Liberal in any meaningful way. It is just a word, like racism, that has been denuded of content.
But this point is important. The whole point of freedom, of democracy, is that–by allowing many, many viewpoints to emerge–through a somewhat chaotic unattractive process useful truths emerge, and pernicious lies die the natural deaths they deserve. A sort of teleological energy is summoned which seeks out the best paths, and corrects them as new information emerges.
And the precise defect both of authoritarianism–and, in the Academy, what we might call One-Idea-ism–is that discussion is not possible. This teleological process cannot be summoned into being. Creative energy is not brought to bear on the solving of actual problems. It is rather brought to bear in the service of deception, cheating, and trickery so that the political process can be manipulated in the service of an ideology no one is allowed to question, and which DOES NOT WORK.
I have been arguing for some years now that the supposed heyday of “liberalism”, the Civil Rights Movement, and the War on Poverty, are abject failures. By any rational standard of measurement, blacks particularly are far worse off than they were in 1960. Yes, they can eat and drink and swim anywhere they want, but they live in hopeless places, where children give birth to children, where crime is rampant, drugs are the only easy answer, and high school graduation rates are abysmal.
Culture is everything, not economics. It is the ideas which inhabit our minds which causes us to rise or fall, both as individuals and as societies. And the ideas on the Left are absolutely damaging to decency and human flourishing. It is for that precise reason that they cannot be discussed.