Re: POTUS 45.2 - Same arguments, different sides
A source that you disagree with is still a source.
You might want to read "The Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom. It's 30 years old now, but it is still relevant today.
I like Bloom, but that book is
silly. Everything he says that had merit was already being said by everyone. Everything else was just a man with a great knowledge and instinct in one sphere (the classics, philosophy) bloviating his opinions about another sphere in which he knew nothing (political science).
Fun fact: Bloom took his intellectual integrity marbles and went home after some black students occupied a building at Cornell and the administration settled with them. The irony is I and pretty much every liberal in America not fooled by post-structuralism
agree with Bloom that this was both a bad precedent and introduced a moral hazard into liberal activism that when offenses are committed against norms by oppressed groups we will blame the norms, not the offenders. This is wrong, and it's wrong because of the tenets of liberalism, not despite them.
Bloom never figured that out because he was a bitter and petty man. Frank Rhodes at Cornell, like Bloom a classicist and philosopher, took positive action and kept the liberal candle burning in stark contrast to Bloom even though the latter was within his discipline a far more subtle thinker. Tis a puzzlement.
I recommend you read
History of Political Philosophy edited by Bloom's mentor and quasi-god, Leo Strauss. (Warning: it's longer than
War and Peace, no joke). Strauss is considered the father of neoconservatism, and all its strengths and weaknesses are on display there: the erudition and the dedication to the text, the pure intellectual honesty of the endeavor of analysis is academia at its best. And yet the men who were trained by Strauss, like Bloom and Wolfowitz and Kagan, were also selected and encouraged in a completely anti-intellectual reflexive reactionariness bordering on authoritarianism. In celebrating the birth of democracy, they lit their votive candles slavishly to an autocrat. And Strauss played the part, right down to encouraging them to spread "noble lies" in order to achieve furtive but salutary ends.
You're a funny cat, joecct. On the one hand I can see the longing for the fresh air of truth, and yet you so easily fall under the spell of all types of ultramontanism.
You've got the ability to weigh and doubt, but you don't use it on your mentors, and that runs the risk of self-delusion.
