THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
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Since The Weekly Standard and Hugh Hewitt are deeply committed to invigorating public discourse (Tough Guy), perhaps you will share with your readers my brief reply, from the April 17 Yale Daily News, to one of the responses my column received. This might help some people who tend to read things ideologically understand better what I was actually arguing in the column itself.
"In 1965, [Yale President] Kingman Brewster, Jr. told my class, 'To a remarkable extent this place has detected and rejected the very few who have worn the colors of high purpose falsely. This is done not by administrative edit or official regulation [but] by a pervasive ethic of student and faculty loyalty and responsibility and mutual regard which lies deep in our origins and traditions.'"
Writing to support that ethic, I drew a distinction not between right and left but between those who use violence or intimidation (which do require "edicts") and those who do what Brewster cautioned against: They claim to champion dialogue while serving narrower, often unacknowledged ideological or tribal agendas against perceived enemies whose reputations and words they often distort, sometimes smoothly, sometimes hideously. Campus Stalinists refined this to a high art years ago, deftly invoking liberal pieties and principles to justify one-dimensional politics; so now do some conservative networker-warriors.
A strong Yale will detect and reject them, quietly but firmly placing
the burden on progressive and conservative activists to clean their houses. They'll have to, if the rest of us are brave enough to make it clear that we're not buying what's pernicious or nonsensical in their claims and that we won't be intimidated or guilt-tripped into pretending otherwise.
--Jim Sleeper
Hugh Hewitt responds: There is an old Irish saying: When everyone says you're drunk, you'd better sit down. Professor Sleeper had better sit down.
Sleeper is quite energetically attempting to persuade readers of both The Weekly Standard and the Yale Daily News that he didn't write what they thought he wrote. He is attempting to do so at the same time he refuses to apologize to the freshmen for the use of the terms "neo-Stalinist" and "Fedayeen Uncle Sams" in his first article in the Yale Daily News.
One of the great benefits of the Internet is that observers of arguments like this one can instantly read the originals. Sleeper's first column was linked in my Daily Standard piece, as was the students' report to Frontpage magazine. Sleeper may want to plead guilty to lousy writing rather than abusive invective, but even the former won't erase the terms "neo-Stalinist" or "Fedayeen Uncle Sams." Those are serious charges, far beyond any ordinary charge of incivility. To remind Professor Sleeper: Stalin murdered millions and imprisoned millions more. The Fedayeen have been violating the rules of war in recent weeks, murdering American soldiers and Iraqi citizens. Sleeper was writing about civility in his first article. "Yeah, right," as the younger people say.
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