Allan Bloom Was On Our Side Claims Liberal - Road to the Middle Class

WHO WOULD HAVE thought that the man that liberals sneered at for his best-selling The Closing of the American Mind would some day come to be celebrated at the back of The New York Times Book Review as a writer who would probably be on the side of liberals today?

You see, even while they were publicly excoriating Allan Bloom for his reactionary views, some liberals actually appreciated what he was doing. According to Jim Sleeper:

some thoughtful liberals found themselves reading “The Closing” under their bedcovers with flashlights, unable either to endorse or repudiate it but sensing that some reckoning was due.

So what is Sleeper’s game? What is he doing praising the Allan Bloom that criticized the liberal academy so roundly twenty years ago?

He is using Bloom as a club to beat today’s generation of conservative activists, first of all Roger Kimball in The New Criterion. Kimball has written Retaking the University: A Battle Plan and Sleeper wants to blunt his attack.

What exactly is Kimball’s plan, you wonder? It amounts to little more than to “say that the job of criticism is never finished” and call for a serious look at tenure in the university. Some battle plan!

And then there are other conservative activists like David Horowitz and his campaign for an “Academic Bill of Rights” that must be stopped.

You see, Bloom was never a conservative ideologue. Oh no. Instead the University of Chicago professor was “an eccentric intrepreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay life [and]... mistrusted modernity, capitalism and even democracy so deeply that he believed the university’s culture must be adversarial.”

So that means that Bloom would side with liberal professors in their intellectual citadel against the conservative hordes at the gates? Well yes. You see, it’s all very well for David Horowitz to say that “I don’t want the universities to be conservative.” But we know how far to believe that! Did you know that Horowitz’s “small board of directors included John O’Neill of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth[?]”

Well. Need I say more? Allan Bloom, the Epicurean gay professor, would never had sided with the public face of the evil Swift Boat Veterans for Truth!

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.