"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Bumper Sticker Liberalism

From an interview at NRO with Mark Goldblatt, author of the new book Bumper Sticker Liberalism:

If there was ever a time when “academic” and “intellectual” were synonymous, that time is long gone . . . at least in the humanities. Some of the least serious, and most gullible, people I’ve ever known have been humanities professors. They’re able to maintain their gullibility precisely because they’re cocooned in academia. Only there can you build a career on the self-contradictory premise that objective truth cannot be had, or that “reality” must be set in scare-quotes because it doesn’t exist independently of what’s thought or said about it. There’s a direct if-then line from such thinking to Holocaust denial, but most humanities professors are too dense to realize it. On the other hand, these same humanities professors will insist that man-made global warming is a reality — without scare quotes — because, well, that’s different.

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