Sleeper On Bloom

Wasn't too impressed with Jim Sleeper's essay on Allan Bloom in this week's New York Times Sunday Book Review. He seems to think it novel to note that Bloom was not a conservative, but doesn't everyone know that? Bloom said it quite a few times himself.

Bloom was, if nothing else, an elitist. Universities existed to select the creme de la creme and protect them from the great unwashed. Bloom was useful to the conservative camp because, as an old-fashioned liberal, he disagreed with how modern liberals were running things. But back to Sleeper.

For some reason, Sleeper uses Bloom to attack David Horowitz. (Later, Sleeper is so sure he's writing in an echo chamber that he figures merely raising the specter of John O'Neill and the Swift Boat Veterans is enough to make us shiver.) He seems to think Horowitz's Academic Bill Of Rights would force professors to teach ideas they don't believe. I don't personally support this Bill Of Rights, but this seems like a misreading of their effect. Worse, Sleeper shows how removed he is from the conservative world when he claims:

it's hard to imagine that Horowitz, or his conservative allies, want Milton Friedmanite free-marketeers to be required to tell their packed economics classes about Daniel Bell's claim, anticipating Bloom, that our economy had led to ''corporate oligopoly, and, in the pursuit of private wants, a hedonism that is destructive of social needs.''

In fact, I assume Horowitiz and his ilk, not to mention "free-marketeers," would give time in class to explain opposing theories. It's Marxists who doubt such bourgeois folly as hearing opposing sides.