More Cultural Rot to the Right
Tuesday, September 09, 2025
At Reason, J.D. Tuccille reports that on college campuses, right-wing students are increasingly aping leftists by shouting down and threatening their political opponents:
"Until recently, these vices primarily belonged to Democratic students, with a staggering 79% of students who identify as strong Democrats agreeing that shouting down a speaker is at least rarely acceptable," Chapin Lenthall-Cleary wrote last week for [The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)]. "Republicans have finally, perhaps belatedly, arrived at the party, with over half of strong Republicans now saying it's acceptable to shout down a speaker."I have contended in the past that the left and the right look more and more like each other by the day, but this data point is one of the most disturbing examples I can think of.
Lenthall-Cleary works from the latest College Free Speech Rankings Survey. The survey asked respondents how acceptable they think it is for students to shout down a speaker, block other students from attending a speech, or use violence to prevent a campus speech. As of 2020, just over 80 percent of students who identified themselves as strong Democrats said these tactics are at least rarely acceptable. Fewer than 40 percent of strong Republican students agreed. But over the years since then, the number of Democratic students holding that opinion has inched down just a bit while Republican support has climbed close to 60 percent.
The way for a free society to course-correct is for it to foster the open exchange of facts, arguments, and opinions.
The adoption of the left's tactics by the right is understandable to a point. But it's wrong, and shows a lack of self-confidence in one's own opinions. Even worse, it indicates that the right is losing whatever appreciation it might have had for the value of rational debate, which emphatically includes letting your opponent make his case, if for no other reason that to be able to understand it, refute it, and contrast it with one's own better alternative.
-- CAV
1 comment:
Not only is it unjust and unfair, but it doesn't work as a way of having your views win: If you have good ideas which make sense but aren't being taken in, you need the general attitude that people get a hearing and are not canceled or shouted down.
Even worse if you're a minority viewpoint like the advocates of freedom or smaller government, you are already having difficulty Being heard or understood. So you want a world where people give unpopular or different views a fair hearing, are willing to listen and have the patience and thoughtfulness to calmly assimilate. You don't want to contribute to the coarsening or suppressing of dialogue or the bypassing of careful rational consideration in any way.
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