[eli_gottlieb]

Also, if the Left always gets more left-wing over time, while the mainstream always moves leftward, leaving nobody but a lone batch of online hyper-reactionaries defending decency and normality, where's my Communism? Worker-owned cooperatives? Commons trusts? Basic income? Only the last of those is even under the remotest mainstream consideration!

And how is it that we've got the most hegemonically capitalist system the world has ever seen, with self-professed right-wing nationalists or cultural conservatives running most of the planet's governments, and I hear that what we really need to worry about is college students being dirty hippies? After all, college students have always been dirty hippies, and the world has yet to die of it -- unlike, say, global warming.

Tempest in a teapot </crotchety>!

[guscost]

The World: 8000 BC - 2014 AD. Died of Global Warming.

But seriously, I don't agree with the choice to label our recent history a "leftward" movement. I would call it a gradual, and thus far successful evolution. It often includes progressive ideas spreading through society, but as the author correctly points out, many progressive ideas are never accepted (see eugenics).

I think the best way to explain it is to say that while the "conservative" side of our culture tends to favor stagnation, the "liberal" side of our culture tends to favor unchecked growth. On the one hand, it would be very unfortunate if our society stagnated for centuries like some have, but on the other hand unchecked growth is what cancer does, and that's not healthy either.

[kedean]

The problem is that these particular college students are too far left, its that the ones who are being extremely leftist are also trying to silence everyone else and remove the intellectual environments from universities. It's not about which side their on, it's about the end result they're trying to achieve. Leftist college students in the past weren't trying to silence and terminate professors for expressing a viewpoint contrary to theirs, unless there was some kind of legitimate attack with it.

[eli_gottlieb]

>Leftist college students in the past weren't trying to silence and terminate professors for expressing a viewpoint contrary to theirs

As a matter of fact, in the '60s and '70s they were trying to blow things up, burn things, and kill people.

[kedean]

That's terrorism, and thats dealt with by law enforcement. This is a group trying to manipulate the existing system to their whim, and that's a more insidious problem to deal with.