Time To Wake Up, Wokes

India too has had a long history of Left-liberal intellectualism’s cancel culture

- R Jagannathan

Last month, some Conservative intellectuals and academics in the US decided that enough was enough and announced the setting up of a new University – the University of Austin, Texas (UATX) – to fight the stifling atmosphere in traditional mainstream institutions now characterised by LeftLiberal intolerance and cancel culture.

As historian Niall Ferguson, who works in the US and backs UATX, noted in a Bloomberg article, there is an “erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy of an illiberal ‘successor ideology’ known to its critics as wokeism, which manifests itself as career-ending ‘cancellations’ and speaker disinvitations, but less visibly generates a pervasive climate of anxiety and self-censorship.”

The first sign of a decline in the quality of intellectualism comes when one kind cannot stand the other. It’s a pity that Left and Right, Conservative and Liberal, cannot share intellectual debating space even in academia when they regularly indulge in breast-beating over “rising intolerance” elsewhere. Nowhere is this decline in intellectualism more manifest than in what we call the Left-Liberal sphere.

One wonders who hyphenated Left and Liberal. Perhaps, the intolerant Left sought democratic legitimacy by being clubbed with the word Liberal, and the Liberal sought wider political acceptance by espousing Leftist egalitarianism. But the net result is the worst of both worlds: We have a Left-Liberal elite that is neither egalitarian nor liberal.