[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Classical liberals believe people should not be discriminated against. Classical liberals believe identity should play no role in how people are treated by the law or by our institutions.

Classical liberalism says a lot of things that are great in theory, but fail miserably in application. Here in lies the problem when trying to apply political philosophy to a complex system. Those who ascribe to a particular philosophy are locked into that belief system and see problems that don’t comply with that particular ontology. I hate it when people try to apply philosophical positions to complex issues and problems, because solutions to these problems affect and contradict all those positions in some way. Stick your philosophy back in the book and get into the real world where the vast majority of people don’t understand the difference between grades of gas let alone the contrast between classical and social liberalism.

It's the color-blind approach to society, the one championed by Martin Luther King. It was the foundation of the Rights Revolution in the 60s and 70s, when Western legislatures and courts greatly expanded civil rights and civil liberties.

The reality is that the color-blind society never developed. For that to have happened you would have had to burn the whole thing down and cull the herd of several generations. The reality is that you work with what you have, and what we have is not a color-blind society. Find solutions that can work in a culture where biases exist, because we all have them and will only move forward when we find solutions that address the flaws in our personal biases.

This approach was rejected by academics in the 80s, who wanted to use the Marxist approach to class struggle and apply it to race, gender, and sexual identity. They rejected color-blindness, and the core liberal principles of individual freedom and tolerance. It's an authoritarian credo, which hopes to use the power of the state to impose radical egalitarianism on society, in contrast to the classical liberal approach of leaving people alone to live as they please.

I once thought this, but after greater exposure I disagree with this. Academics didn’t reject anything. In the United States most institutions completely embrace classical liberalism, but the reality is that we live in a multi-cultural world where your customers (nee students) come in with very different expectations. These students have biases passed onto them by their parents or social environment and those academics are forced to try and open their eyes to that color-blind society. When you attempt to expose people to information that does not comply with their preconceptions you get major pushback. You also see it at institutional level when bodies like the College Republicans, write complaints against you as being an activist faculty member, putting your career at risk. Colleges and universities are caught in the culture war the conservatives started and are trying to put an end to liberalism all together. Try existing in a system where you have interests like David Horowitz publishing the illiberal Academic Bill of Rights, political bias publications aimed at academics just doing their jobs, and then identifying some of those very academics as the “most dangerous” academics in the country, like common criminals. Since when is getting students to apply critical thinking skills is a crime?

Classical liberalism covers all those things: Leave people alone to do as they please. Do not treat people differently because of their race or gender.

Except our systems aren’t set up that way. Unless you are prepared to burn down the whole system and start all over again, this philosophical belief is not possible. One of the things that is not identified in this whole ideal, nor your comments, is the concept of the dollar and its impact on the classical liberal view. Like it or not, money plays a big part in our world, including on college campuses, completely turning the classical liberal philosophical position on its ear. It changes the dynamic and is inline with the philosophy, per se. Frankly, all students are one color: GREEN. But those with more green have greater latitude, which is also reflective of our society as well. I guess your ideal of a colorless society has been achieved to one extent, in a very twisted sort of way, but the illiberal aspects you observe in our culture are a result of this single color perspective.

What's going on at college campuses is inspired by a anti-capitalism and anti-western ideology. Individual rights and individual freedoms are subordinated to the group struggle, where class has been replaced with race and gender. Freedom of expression is suppressed. All political and social struggles are seen through lens of race and gender, and the moral and political high-ground are inversions of the existing patriarchal power struggle formulated by radical leftists. In recent years that has spread out of campuses and into mainstream media and politics.

This may be the way it is in Canada, but not in the United States. Colleges and Universities have gone just the opposite way – being turned into profit centers. You seem to have this belief that universities and colleges are getting an endless supply of cash from the government to operate. You are so far from the truth. In our state we survive on what funds we can raise through tuition and user fees. State funding was cut years ago, so we are sink or swim. This is capitalism at its finest, and everyone is involved in the process. A customer is our lifeblood. Their enrollment means we can continue to operate and keep instructors employed. Students are green and they are all treated as being special. It has got so bad in education that you can’t afford to hold students to the same rigor they once were held. You can’t fail someone. You can’t expel someone for just cause, because the student is the revenue stream. This is the viciousness of the market economy in action.

Some states are different, but the funding strings are tighter than they have ever been. Even in ultra-liberal California you are forced to see students as green, not white, black, yellow brown or pink. My experience across multiple institutions, and hearing the same issues at gatherings like Educause, tells me this is the world academics now live in. It sucks, and it wasn’t what most of us signed on for, but it is the system we have to accept and try to make work.

All driven by classical liberalism, not identity politics. Again, if you think people should not be treated differently owing to their race or gender or sexuality, then you're defending classical liberal principles.

As I mentioned, those ideals don’t work in our society because of the complex nature of it.

Identity politics have been around for about 30 years. Before that, all those causes were championed on the basis of classical liberalism.

I’m not sure this is accurate in any form. You need to read “Why We Can’t Wait” to see that identity politics has been in play for a lot longer than you suggest, and employed by Dr. King himself.

Now THAT'S identity politics. It says the validity of someone's opinions derives from their race or gender. It's the same arguments that were once used by conservatives to keep women out of professions like law. It's poisoning the well - a way to delegitimize someone else's opinion.

You mean like when someone champions one particular flawed political philosophy, claiming it, and its followers, superior to others?

When you go from the classically liberal position that nobody should be discriminated against, and that we should treat everyone as unique individuals - principals on which there is broad agreement if not consensus in Western society today - to the identity politics credo that all politics are a struggle between groups and we should regard people first and foremost as members of their group, then yeah, you're going to cause division. And not just the kind of division you want to imagine, between righteous people and evil oppressors. You're going to get - you are getting - a division among liberals between the classical liberals who believe in treating everyone as individuals and putting the highest premium on freedom of expression and open debate, and the regressive political left, who believe in using group identity to impose a new political model on society, and in silencing any speech that questions or challengers that new model.

And I will repeat, that our society is not set up this way. We are a clash of cultures, ideologies and philosophies. The expectation that all are to ascribe to one philosophy, or its behaviors, is unrealistic. That to me sounds more Marxist than anything in the social liberal philosophy. We need to find the philosophical commonalities and build systems from that than try and have people comply with any one particular philosophy.

The upshot is that if women and minorities and people of non-CIS orientation mobilize as political groups fighting for their collective interests*, you're going to get males, whites, and straights mobilizing as political groups to fight for their collective interests. Which is fundamentally illiberal, and a very bad thing - especially for minorities.

* We should recognize that most of the people who belong to the gender and minority groups do not subscribe to the credos of identity politics. Most want to be treated as individuals like everybody else. There's a reason only a quarter of Canadian women self-identity as feminists.

I might be missing your point here. So fighting for a collective belief, is a bad thing? Conflict can lead to quicker and better resolution. When two sides are fighting for their beliefs, and can effectively articulate those beliefs, I think it is much easier to find commonalities and identify things that everyone can agree upon, regardless of ideology or philosophy. When they don’t participate then we end up in what we just experienced. We can’t break down walls until we know there is a wall in place, no?

Probably late the party with this, but oh well.