By David French
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
I’ve split my professional life between two American
cultures: half spent in the bluest-of-blue cities and the other half in the
reddest-of-red rural South. I’ve split my jobs between universities and law
firms that are almost uniformly Left and conservative nonprofits that are
steadfastly Right. I attended a conservative, Christian college and then one of
the nation’s most liberal law schools. My family has bounced between Cambridge,
Massachusetts, Manhattan, rural Tennessee, small-town Kentucky, and Center
City, Philadelphia (where we lived right at the edge of the so-called
gayborhood). And after all those travels, I’ve come to at least two important
conclusions: The sushi is better in Manhattan, and the freedom is better in
Tennessee.
My conservative undergraduate institution — Lipscomb
University in Nashville, Tenn. — was far more open to dissent, including from
angry atheist classmates (yes, I had a few) than was Harvard Law School. No one
was jeered, shouted down, or threatened at Lipscomb. No one called future
employers of atheist or liberal students to try to get job offers canceled.
Professors didn’t scream at dissenting students, and activists didn’t plaster
photo-shopped, pornographic pictures of liberals all over campus walls. At
Harvard, all those things happened — to conservative students.
My relatively conservative Kentucky law firm employed
people of every ideological stripe, and we engaged in robust (and almost always
friendly) discussions of virtually every kind of cultural and political topic.
The firm’s pro bono work veered both liberal and conservative, depending on the
views of the individual lawyer. When an LGBT activist complained to the
managing partner of the firm about my conservative advocacy, she was shut down
by a simple statement: “I’m running a law firm here, not the speech police.”
My Manhattan law firm, by contrast, performed only one
kind of pro bono service: liberal. Political debates were virtually nonexistent
in the workplace, but political conversations happened all the time. The
overwhelming liberal majority expressed themselves freely, while the very few
conservatives remained silent. Dissent was decidedly not welcome.
Even the conservative churches I’ve attended have been
more ideologically diverse than the two major liberal campuses where I either
attended (Harvard Law School) or taught (Cornell Law School). Indeed, the
numbers demonstrate the truth of my anecdotal experience, with self-professed
Evangelicals more politically diverse than not only Ivy League faculties but
entire, allegedly “diverse” Northeastern cities. In other words, you’re more
likely to hear a meaningful debate between people of fundamentally different political
opinions in a church pew than in New York City.
This reality exerts a powerful influence on the residents
of the two regions. While enjoying the undeniable organizational (and psychic)
benefits of near-unanimity, urban liberals consistently think debates are
“over” when they’ve scarcely begun, fail to understand (much less consider)
opposing points of view, and consistently overestimate their cultural strength.
An urban liberal can go his entire life without exposure to serious
conservative ideas. This leads to an atmosphere rife with bullying but also
prone to the occasional embarrassing overreach — such that brave conservatives
can, for example, defeat even the largest universities in court as the
universities’ ideological zeal outpaces their respect for the Constitution.
I’ve been privileged to be a part of many such cases, in courtrooms across the
nation.
In the South, I’ve found that rank-and-file conservatives
are often amused rather than alarmed by most cultural debates. And while they
have a much more difficult time escaping the Left (after all, everyone still
has a TV and goes to the movies), they have a hard time taking, say, the Bruce
Jenner story seriously. He’s more of a sad curiosity than a harbinger of
cultural disaster. Unless they work for politically correct corporations (often
those headquartered in Blue America), conservatives in the South usually find
that radical social trends don’t affect their jobs, rarely affect their schools
(which tend to retain a robust Christian and conservative presence at every
level), and are barely a topic of conversation at church.
These two cultures create a reality that is exactly the
opposite of that portrayed in Hollywood, according to which people always
escape smaller towns and cities for the “broader horizons” of New York, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles. Yet it’s not small-town America that’s
narrow-minded. Our great cities embrace a curious and constricted kind of
diversity, in which people of all races, sexual orientations, and personal
proclivities are celebrated and embraced — so long as their minds belong to the
collective.
We have yet to see whether these cultural approaches can
coexist indefinitely. While your average Tennessean doesn’t much care what
someone in New York City thinks or does, the urban Left isn’t willing to
embrace legal or cultural federalism and allow states to go their own way.
Instead, it demands that all social trends conform to its agenda, demands that
public schools teach social leftism exclusively, and, most recently, refuses to
allow even Indiana to chart its own course on religious freedom and tolerance.
Americans tend — over the long run — to reject censorship
and intolerance, but past performance is no guarantee of future results. For
those of us who live in Free America, our mission is clear: Resist legal and
ideological aggression, and model the respect for free speech and individual
liberty that we demand from our ideological foes. May the best culture win.
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