Kallicles was Right

In Plato's Gorgias, Socrates, after vanquishing the famous sophist Gorgias and his student Polus, engages in discussion with Kallicles. Unlike almost every other Socratic interlocutor, Kallicles refuses to be drawn into Socrates' word games, and provides this refreshing opinion of over-educated nincompoops who focus exclusively on words and the ability to manipulate them:

I feel exactly the same too about students of philosophy. When I see a youth engaged in it, I admire it and it seems to me natural and I consider such a man ingenuous, and the man who does not pursue it I regard as illiberal and one who will never aspire to any fine or noble deed, but when I see an older man still studying philosophy and not deserting it, that man, Socrates, is actually asking for a whipping. For as I said just now, such a man, even if exceptionally gifted, is doomed to prove less than a man, shunning the city center and market place, in which the poet said that men win distinction, and living the rest of his life sunk in a corner muttering with three or four boys, and incapable of any utterance that is free and lofty and brilliant.

Kallicles recognized that the central charge against Socrates, that led to his death, was accurate. Socrates was accused of demoralizing the youth of Athens. And in a very literal way, that's precisely what Socrates had been doing. By constantly questioning and undermining Athenian traditions and values, and teaching the Athenian youth to do the same, he was stripping them of their morals. Not to mention their confidence and pride in their society and culture, thereby weakening Athens.

The same paradigm of moral relativism has been present in America since the 1960's. But in recent years, the Left has moved to the next stage in their jihad against traditional American values. They initially championed a free speech paradigm, so as to have the space in which to challenge and destroy traditional values. Now, having successfully inculcated a culture of anything goes relativism, and holding the vast majority of teaching positions, they are now boldly and shamelessly instilling their own left-wing orthodoxies into unsuspecting students, and ruthlessly punishing those on the Right who seek to exercise their free speech rights to disagree with the Left. (Town Hall columnist Mike Adams is the foremost chronicler of the suppression of conservatives on college campuses.)

In this as in many other things, Whittaker Chambers saw most deeply into the true nature of Leftists:

But as the struggle was really for revolutionary power, which in our age is always a struggle for control of the masses, that was the point at which they always betrayed their real character, for they reacted not like liberals, but with the fierceness of revolutionists whenever that power was at issue.

The Liberal Psychosis

If you are a conservative, you have almost certainly had the following experience: against your better judgment, you got dragged into a political discussion with a liberal. You tried to have a calm, rational discussion in which you mentioned established facts, and you refrained from making accusations. As you thought you were making some progress, with virtually no warning, your liberal friend began to have a tantrum, accused you of being (take your pick) a fascist, a right-winger, a racist/sexist/homophobe, etc., accused you of being unable to have a discussion without making personal attacks, and walked out of the conversation extremely upset. Sound familiar? It used to happen to me all the time. The only reason it doesn't continue to happen all the time is because I have largely given up having any kind of serious discussion with liberals. It's a waste of time because their psychoses get in the way of their ability to hear truth and deal with reality.

The most concise description of this phenomenon I have seen is in Witness. In the course of describing those (liberals) who most viciously tried to destroy him when he began to testify against Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers wrote:

They were people who believed a number of things. Foremost among them was the belief that peace could be preserved, World War III could be averted only by conciliating the Soviet Union. For this no price was too high to pay, including the price of wilful historical self-delusion. Yet they had just fiercely supported a war in which one of their ululant outcries had been against appeasement; and they were much too intelligent really to believe that Russia was a democracy or most of the other upside-down things they said in defense of it. Hence like most people who have substituted the habit of delusion for reality, they became hysterical whenever the root of their delusion was touched, and reacted with a violence that completely belied the openness of mind which they prescribed for others.

(emphasis added). Nowadays, merely voicing disagreement with the liberal dogma of the day will generate the knee-jerk accusations of fascism, etc. But it's the recitation of facts that refute the liberal dogma that will unfailingly unhinge the liberal with whom you have the misfortune to be speaking.

If you have had this experience, and derived some entertainment out of it, please feel free to comment.