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.