Three years ago, after I had completed my first visiting fellowship in Budapest, the American academic Peter Boghossian reached out to me with a question. Boghossian had become famous for his anti-woke activism. Though an ardent leftist and atheist, the philosopher despised the absurdity of wokeness, and its illiberal stifling of free expression, especially on campus. He said he had been invited to MCC in Budapest for a visiting fellowship, and was curious, but feared that MCC would be too right-wing, and would curtail his free speech.
To the contrary, I told him. You will be far more free to say what you think at MCC, here in Orbán’s Hungary, than at your own university, the extremely woke Portland State University, in Oregon. Come see for yourself, I said. Peter later resigned from Portland State under pressure, denouncing it as a “social justice factory.”
The next year, when I returned to Budapest, I met Peter in person. He had been at MCC for a month by then, and told me that he loved it. He had not felt so free to say what he really thought on campus in many years. Though his time in Budapest did not turn Boghossian into a conservative, it did enlighten him about the way anti-Hungary propaganda works in America.
I thought about Peter this week when news broke about what Antifa and student activists have done lately to Portland State. Protesters forced campus to close for a time. Pro-Hamas extremists occupied the campus library, and trashed it thoroughly—all in the name of ‘liberating Palestine.’
University president Ann Cudd sheepishly agreed to protester demands, offering them no expulsion, no suspension, and a promise not to file criminal charges for their vandalism and trespass. She also offered to keep funding “anti-racism” programs, and to add Palestinian studies to the university’s required courses. It wasn’t good enough for the militants, however. As of this writing, they are still holed up in the library they have destroyed.
Boghossian tweeted on Wednesday, to the university:
You were warned. Not only did you not listen, you doubled down. Consequently, the thugs you have helped create are devouring what you have built.
There is a certain satisfaction in seeing the physical destruction of civilization—what is more symbolic of civilization than a library?—by the same barbarians who were coddled and cultivated for so long by progressive authorities like Ann Cudd. Some strategists on the Right have cautioned conservative leaders not to be quick to come to the rescue of besieged campus liberal leaders. The thinking is, let them reap the chaotic harvest of what they have sown for so long.
After all, these same progressive professors and academicians have for decades been destroying Western civilization by what they teach in the classrooms. It seems only fair that they should be compelled to endure concrete physical manifestations of what they have done abstractly, in their coursework. What’s more, in the wake of the Summer of George Floyd in 2020, the City of Portland reduced its police force, bowing to leftist anti-cop demands. Now there is doubt that there are enough officers left there to deal with the radicals who have taken campus hostage.
Some Boomers in power cannot shake their compulsive nostalgia. The New York Times columnist Serge Schmemann, a student at Columbia in 1968, surveyed the recent chaos at his alma mater, overrun by students and agitators asserting loyalty to Hamas, which slaughtered over 1,000 innocent Jews on October 7, and warbled witlessly in the Times that he “is heartened to see that college kids will still get angry over injustice and suffering and will try to do something about it.”
Schmemann also fretted that Republicans might benefit from exploiting anger over the protests. Gee, you think? This season of radical left protest is almost certainly going to turn disillusioned liberals into conservatives, and compel previously standoffish conservatives to engage more fully in the battle for our civilization. Jewish friends tell me that the open embrace of Jew-hatred on the American Left has shattered the illusions of many Jewish liberals, and compelled them to face the unimaginable: that the Right was, well, right. It is too early to say for sure, but seeing footage on television of pro-Hamas encampments, some of them flying Communist flags, is almost certain to radicalize ordinary Americans.
To be sure, the U.S. news media will be the last to notice this. There’s a presidential election coming this fall, and Donald Trump is on the ballot. The media will go out of its way to ignore or suppress right-wing reaction, or to frame it as illegitimate. But they will not be able to erase the images that have gone viral—images that have not been seen in America since the campus unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
That era was the making of one of the greatest contemporary thinkers of the Right: Sir Roger Scruton, who told of how bearing witness in Paris to the 1968 student riots turned him into a lifelong conservative. In a 2003 essay in New Criterion, Scruton recalled those tumultuous events. He confronted a French friend who had been among the brick-throwing protesters demonstrating against “the old fascist”—Gen. de Gaulle, a liberator of France from Nazi occupation.
What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at risk in order to display them? I was obnoxiously pompous: but for the first time in my life I had felt a surge of political anger, finding myself on the other side of the barricades from all the people I knew.
She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue—by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the “episteme,” imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds.
In the decades since, Foucault’s disciples marched through the institutions of American academic life. On the campus quads, teeming with anti-Semitic radicals, and in the occupied libraries of once-great universities, is the translation of that message into deeds.
The trauma of 1968 sent young Scruton deep into the conservative philosophical tradition, which was even then taboo among British academics. He drew heavily on what Edmund Burke taught about politics and society, lessons Burke discerned from observing the French Revolution. He absorbed Burke’s critique of revolutionary idealism, his defense of tradition and authority, and his devastating attack on Rousseau’s social contract theory. In Burke, young Scruton found concrete articulation of political lessons he had intuited on the streets of 1968 Paris, but lacked the conceptual basis to understand.
Later, he traveled to the communist Eastern Bloc to befriend and aid anti-communist dissidents, and saw firsthand the totalitarian bleakness to which the utopian ideals celebrated on the streets of Paris led. Scruton became a conservative, and destroyed his academic career in so doing. The leftist British establishment despised him. But to this day, Scruton’s memory is cherished with love and honor by Central Europeans who remember that he had the vision and the courage to stand with them when so many Western academics did not.
At the time of his death in 2020, Scruton left a philosophical legacy from which conservative thinkers will draw for decades to come. This too is a fruit—a life-giving one—of the poisonous seeds sown by the radicals of the soixante-huitard generation. In that 2003 essay, Scruton said that he came understand conservatism “not as a political credo only, but as a lasting vision of human society, one whose truth would always be hard to perceive, harder still to communicate, and hardest of all to act upon.”
He then called bringing Burke’s wisdom to the world of modern politics “perhaps the greatest task that we now confront.” Two decades on, it still is. This is a task made more difficult by the fact that older thinkers of the Right are too tightly bound to the Reagan-Thatcher reaction to the Sixties that they cannot perceive the ways in which the world has changed since then, requiring different responses.
We can hope that somewhere—perhaps on a campus tormented by hate-filled radicals and surrendered by gutless administrators, or perhaps in a coffee shop somewhere far away, watching it all unfold on the Internet—another, doubtless very different, Roger Scruton is watching, learning, and preparing himself to be a prophet of his own time.
Roger Scruton’s 1968 Lessons for Our Time
Scott Olson/Getty Images/AFP
Three years ago, after I had completed my first visiting fellowship in Budapest, the American academic Peter Boghossian reached out to me with a question. Boghossian had become famous for his anti-woke activism. Though an ardent leftist and atheist, the philosopher despised the absurdity of wokeness, and its illiberal stifling of free expression, especially on campus. He said he had been invited to MCC in Budapest for a visiting fellowship, and was curious, but feared that MCC would be too right-wing, and would curtail his free speech.
To the contrary, I told him. You will be far more free to say what you think at MCC, here in Orbán’s Hungary, than at your own university, the extremely woke Portland State University, in Oregon. Come see for yourself, I said. Peter later resigned from Portland State under pressure, denouncing it as a “social justice factory.”
The next year, when I returned to Budapest, I met Peter in person. He had been at MCC for a month by then, and told me that he loved it. He had not felt so free to say what he really thought on campus in many years. Though his time in Budapest did not turn Boghossian into a conservative, it did enlighten him about the way anti-Hungary propaganda works in America.
I thought about Peter this week when news broke about what Antifa and student activists have done lately to Portland State. Protesters forced campus to close for a time. Pro-Hamas extremists occupied the campus library, and trashed it thoroughly—all in the name of ‘liberating Palestine.’
University president Ann Cudd sheepishly agreed to protester demands, offering them no expulsion, no suspension, and a promise not to file criminal charges for their vandalism and trespass. She also offered to keep funding “anti-racism” programs, and to add Palestinian studies to the university’s required courses. It wasn’t good enough for the militants, however. As of this writing, they are still holed up in the library they have destroyed.
Boghossian tweeted on Wednesday, to the university:
There is a certain satisfaction in seeing the physical destruction of civilization—what is more symbolic of civilization than a library?—by the same barbarians who were coddled and cultivated for so long by progressive authorities like Ann Cudd. Some strategists on the Right have cautioned conservative leaders not to be quick to come to the rescue of besieged campus liberal leaders. The thinking is, let them reap the chaotic harvest of what they have sown for so long.
After all, these same progressive professors and academicians have for decades been destroying Western civilization by what they teach in the classrooms. It seems only fair that they should be compelled to endure concrete physical manifestations of what they have done abstractly, in their coursework. What’s more, in the wake of the Summer of George Floyd in 2020, the City of Portland reduced its police force, bowing to leftist anti-cop demands. Now there is doubt that there are enough officers left there to deal with the radicals who have taken campus hostage.
Some Boomers in power cannot shake their compulsive nostalgia. The New York Times columnist Serge Schmemann, a student at Columbia in 1968, surveyed the recent chaos at his alma mater, overrun by students and agitators asserting loyalty to Hamas, which slaughtered over 1,000 innocent Jews on October 7, and warbled witlessly in the Times that he “is heartened to see that college kids will still get angry over injustice and suffering and will try to do something about it.”
Schmemann also fretted that Republicans might benefit from exploiting anger over the protests. Gee, you think? This season of radical left protest is almost certainly going to turn disillusioned liberals into conservatives, and compel previously standoffish conservatives to engage more fully in the battle for our civilization. Jewish friends tell me that the open embrace of Jew-hatred on the American Left has shattered the illusions of many Jewish liberals, and compelled them to face the unimaginable: that the Right was, well, right. It is too early to say for sure, but seeing footage on television of pro-Hamas encampments, some of them flying Communist flags, is almost certain to radicalize ordinary Americans.
To be sure, the U.S. news media will be the last to notice this. There’s a presidential election coming this fall, and Donald Trump is on the ballot. The media will go out of its way to ignore or suppress right-wing reaction, or to frame it as illegitimate. But they will not be able to erase the images that have gone viral—images that have not been seen in America since the campus unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
That era was the making of one of the greatest contemporary thinkers of the Right: Sir Roger Scruton, who told of how bearing witness in Paris to the 1968 student riots turned him into a lifelong conservative. In a 2003 essay in New Criterion, Scruton recalled those tumultuous events. He confronted a French friend who had been among the brick-throwing protesters demonstrating against “the old fascist”—Gen. de Gaulle, a liberator of France from Nazi occupation.
In the decades since, Foucault’s disciples marched through the institutions of American academic life. On the campus quads, teeming with anti-Semitic radicals, and in the occupied libraries of once-great universities, is the translation of that message into deeds.
The trauma of 1968 sent young Scruton deep into the conservative philosophical tradition, which was even then taboo among British academics. He drew heavily on what Edmund Burke taught about politics and society, lessons Burke discerned from observing the French Revolution. He absorbed Burke’s critique of revolutionary idealism, his defense of tradition and authority, and his devastating attack on Rousseau’s social contract theory. In Burke, young Scruton found concrete articulation of political lessons he had intuited on the streets of 1968 Paris, but lacked the conceptual basis to understand.
Later, he traveled to the communist Eastern Bloc to befriend and aid anti-communist dissidents, and saw firsthand the totalitarian bleakness to which the utopian ideals celebrated on the streets of Paris led. Scruton became a conservative, and destroyed his academic career in so doing. The leftist British establishment despised him. But to this day, Scruton’s memory is cherished with love and honor by Central Europeans who remember that he had the vision and the courage to stand with them when so many Western academics did not.
At the time of his death in 2020, Scruton left a philosophical legacy from which conservative thinkers will draw for decades to come. This too is a fruit—a life-giving one—of the poisonous seeds sown by the radicals of the soixante-huitard generation. In that 2003 essay, Scruton said that he came understand conservatism “not as a political credo only, but as a lasting vision of human society, one whose truth would always be hard to perceive, harder still to communicate, and hardest of all to act upon.”
He then called bringing Burke’s wisdom to the world of modern politics “perhaps the greatest task that we now confront.” Two decades on, it still is. This is a task made more difficult by the fact that older thinkers of the Right are too tightly bound to the Reagan-Thatcher reaction to the Sixties that they cannot perceive the ways in which the world has changed since then, requiring different responses.
We can hope that somewhere—perhaps on a campus tormented by hate-filled radicals and surrendered by gutless administrators, or perhaps in a coffee shop somewhere far away, watching it all unfold on the Internet—another, doubtless very different, Roger Scruton is watching, learning, and preparing himself to be a prophet of his own time.
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