Of the half dozen readers in the domestic U.S. edition of the New York Times reacting to “Yes, Woke 1.0 Was Crazy. Now Where’s the Accountability?,” by Bret Stephens (column, Aug. 19), almost all defended woke progressives while trashing Stephens and going berserk over Donald Trump's MAGA movement.
The lone exception — albeit the only letter that was printed in the international edition of the newspaper — was the one that mentioned the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Whoever edited the letters page online was kind enough to link both Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's Atlantic pages, plus their 2015 article (unless they simply copied the html in the Canadian letter-writer's email).
To the Editor:
Whatever term we wish to apply to this decade of insanity, I share Bret Stephens’s shock and disappointment with the lack of accountability or self-reflection from those who participated in this broad cultural movement.
In their widely read article in The Atlantic in 2015, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt put a spotlight on a key turning point in higher education toward safetyism, which then spread much more widely in society and led to many of the abuses that Mr. Stephens pointed out in his column.
The period was marked by an assault on traditional liberal values from the progressive left. Merit was redefined as privilege. Dedication to universal values was patriarchal. Respect for the dignity of the individual was getting in the way of the revolution.
Traditional liberalism values self-reflection, and this has been largely absent when assessing what happened during this period and its costs.
Mark Wolfgram
Ottawa
