From an essay in the current Claremont Review of Books by John Marini:
[Today's] intellectuals have pronounced their historical judgment on America's past, finding it to be morally indefensible. Every great human achievement of the past--whether in philosophy, religion, literature, or the humanities--came to be understood as a kind of exploitation of the powerless. Rather than allowing the past to be viewed in terms of its aspirations and accomplishments, it has been judged by its failures. The living part of the past is understood in terms slavery, racism, and identity politics. Political correctness arose as the practical and necessary means of enforcing this historical judgment. No public defense of past greatness could be allowed to live in the present. Public morality and public policy would come to be understood in terms of the formerly oppressed.
The entire essay (not short) is here.
I bring this up because, ultimately, the problem we are having with fidelity to law -- what with, among many other things, the surge in violent crime and the denial and cluelessness we see in response -- reminds me of what we saw in the Seventies. It was another time of cultural rot impersonating advanced thinking.
In academia, then as now, the professoriate was an accomplice when it wasn't a ringleader. From my minor post at Georgetown Law, I respectfully dissent.
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