I could write a paean to the vital importance of dialogue, both on campus and in a democracy, but I have done that before, sometimes at considerable length. Nowadays, his best-known work is the essay “Repressive Tolerance.” There he sets out the argument that the downshouters are putting into practice. The only way to build a “subversive majority,” he writes, is to refuse to give ear to those on the wrong side. My own old-fashioned view is that a “truth” that will not debate is a truth that deserves to lose. The downshouters will go on behaving deplorably, and reminding the rest of us that the true harbinger of an authoritarian future lives not in the White House but in the groves of academe.

Source: National Post March 07, 2017 19:18 UTC