Surveys now show that up to two-thirds of students approve of shouting down campus speakers, while almost a quarter believe that violence can be used to cancel a speech. These are the views of the generation that grew up without required courses in Western civilization, a course the core theme of which was the long, bloody, and difficult path by which our freedoms were conceived and established. Those courses nurtured a sense of reverence around our liberties, and a sense of shame in those violating the liberties of others. We have lost both the reverence and the shame.

The upshot is that globalization has made us more vulnerable to foreign threats, while our misguided response to globalization has damaged our greatest weapon against those very threats: our regard for our own tradition of liberty, and the principles that lay behind it. Our horror at the assault on Rushdie is a sign that there is life in our tradition still. The culturally alien nature of the attack reminds us that our tradition of freedom is real, distinctive, and worth preserving. Yet our continuing reluctance to affirm our own history and principles — especially in our schools — means that time is running short. Freedom, so to speak, is on a ventilator. We cannot remain a “safe haven for exiled writers” if we are not a safe haven for ourselves.