IGF author and Yalie James Kirchick passed along an interesting (if long) analysis by Yale junior Daniel Koffler in the leftwing publication Dissent, titled "On the New Student Politics."
Koffler wants to save the left from its excesses (campus speech
codes, for example, and "The transformation of the left into a
mouthpiece for every sort of cultural grievance, whether legitimate
or not"). But it's worth noting that he finds among today's
students (or perhaps it's mainly Ivy Leaguers) that:
Though there are important differences, the struggle for gay rights is something like my generation's version of the civil rights struggle. Left, center, and yes, right as well, the prevailing consensus among college students, if vague and only half-articulated, is the idea that powerful people older than we have perpetuated a gross injustice, and that of the two major political parties, one is contemptible in its cowardice while the other endorses a constitutional validation of second-class citizenship.
And he sees something of a new "alternative politics"
emerging:
This politics assumes as its foundation the inherent worth of individual rights and strives toward the maximization of individual freedom. The beliefs that define it and cluster around it - recognition of gay rights, abolition of arbitrary discrimination, the end of the drug war and the legalization of soft drugs, the curtailment of content regulation in the media..., the belief in the inherent worth of classical liberal values, and the willingness to defend them by force against real external threats — are thus analytically connected to each other as expressions of the principle of liberty-maximization.
Of course, students always think they're hatching a "new
politics," but let's at least celebrate the possibility that a sort
of new "liberty-maximizing" alignment might be afoot.