The Id Of Every Prog
By Mitch Berg
Mark Moyar reviews the new memoir by former Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust.
Faust was an unabashed radical during her time running the university – a once-great institution that recently graduated David Hogg.
And her memoir highlights a tendency that I’ve identified in a depressing pluraity of “progressives”, including a dismal mass of American ones; an understanding of “freedom” that is utterly perverse (I’ve added emphasis):
Faust doesn’t delve into the how, but she does address the why in her third objection. When she was 15 years old, she recounts, her outlook on American anti-communism changed during a trip to Eastern Europe. The police-state tactics of the communist regimes, she acknowledges, seemed to violate their professions of freedom. Nevertheless, “I began to understand that when East German communists used — as they often did — ‘freedom,’ they meant something quite different from what I had come to understand. ‘Freedom’ in my mind had meant exclusively ‘freedom from’: freedom from censorship, from restrictions of movement, from governmental dictates or oppression. It was a revelation for me to hear East Germans speaking of a ‘freedom to’: freedom to be educated, to get health care, to work.”
The success of communists in providing universal health care and eliminating unemployment was so persuasive, Faust recounts, that she decided American anti-communism to be unjustified and immoral. Hence, the war to stop communism in Vietnam was “cruel and illegitimate.”
It’s not a revelation that Communists saw “freedom” in the same way a herd of anthropomorphic livestock might.
And, sad to say, it’s no longer a revelation that one of academia’s most prestigious executives might, anymore, either.
September 12th, 2023 at 11:57 am
SITD readers should also study “America’s Cultural Revolution,” by Christopher Rufo, particularly the chapter called “The Long March Through the Institutions.” Pretty much says the same thing as Faust (love her name) does when she lets the mask slip.
September 12th, 2023 at 1:03 pm
Freedom at the end of the business end of the barrel. Freedom to do what we tell you to do. Nothing more, nothing less, or else. Perversion and depravity indeed.
September 12th, 2023 at 1:51 pm
What part of “most lethal political system ever devised by man” are these so-called “elites” not cluing into? I’m sorry, but 90 years after reports of the Holodomor started coming out and 60 years after Solzhenitsyn started writing, no educated person ought to be defending Communism.
September 12th, 2023 at 2:50 pm
I completely agree with her definition of “freedom.” I always apply it to freedom of speech
You are free to agree with me in any way you like. You can agree with me in song or interpretive dance, by sonnet or limerick, in sculpture, painting or prose.
What you cannot do is disagree with me. I hate that and hate speech is not covered by freedom of speech, it must be censored ruthlessly.
See? You have perfect freedom. What’s wrong with that?
September 13th, 2023 at 5:43 am
Faust.
Hmmmm….
Q: What is the biggest problem with selling your soul to the devil?
A: The long, long lines.
September 13th, 2023 at 8:04 am
Greg;
You are correct.
If there’s a highway to hell, but only a stairway to heaven, it illustrates the expected traffic on each one.
September 13th, 2023 at 6:03 pm
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