ITS FORMAL title is Young America’s Foundation and its roster of sponsors, alumni, supporters and cheerleaders reads like a Who’s Who of the American right, so it’s only natural that it would drive the American left to distraction and beyond.
YAF counts among its patrons and/ or stars game-show host Pat Sajak, the billionaire Koch Brothers, and Amway founders Richard and Helen DeVosin-laws of Betsy DeVos, who’s now U.S. secretary of education. The object of all this talent and energy is not to shut down the opposition but engage it in debate—wide open, full throttle and unlimited by either manners or polite pretenses in general. They’re looking for a fight, all right, but one of words. The last thing they may favor is any kind of gag rule, such is their confidence in their own ideas. That is, they’re the opposite of the student mobs that have tried to shout them down over the years.
If you’re looking for the mirror image of the Young America’s Foundation, you can find it in Alexandra Prince, a graduate student at the University of Buffalo who apparently seems to consider this invitation to debate ideas just an act of provocation that needs to be banished from American campuses. Which is why she circulated a petition to keep a conservative author named Robert Spencer from speaking on campus. It’s part of an old pattern in American anti- intellectualism: Blame the victim.
What may rile the American left most about the Young America’s Foundation are all those chapters of Young Americans for Freedom it has planted in American high schools and collegessome 250 of them. Naturally one of the founding fathers of YAF would be the late great William F. Buckley, who delighted in the left’s discomfiture and believed, like Young Americans for Freedom, in letting freedom ring. Its critics may have a point: Every controversial idea is a provocation. But instead of muffling it, the left would do better to imitate it by organizing its own youth groups. (Young Americans for Statism?) Then the American people would have a real choice.