It's All About 'Muscle'

In this, the millennials who inhabit America's campuses have learned a great deal from the left. If The Closing of the American Mind anticipated political correctness, it was Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism that prefigured what we now find on college campuses. Goldberg saw that liberalism had come unmoored from specific policy goals and was finally interested in just one thing: power.

Writing in the wake of his own school's capitulation, Claremont McKenna professor Charles Kesler observed, "When the leftists lacked power, they embraced free speech. Now that they have power, they don't need it." There are a great many other niceties of which the leftists no longer have any need.

Unless it is checked, in the coming decades the movement seen now on America's campuses will take control of every institution it can and burn to the ground every institution it cannot. Because however ridiculous the student protesters may seem, they have an intense, unshakable belief in the legitimacy of their cause. And they understand, keenly, that power is everything.