Here's an interesting interview with Travis Rowley, a recent graduate of Brown University who has written a book, Out of Ivy: How a Liberal Ivy Created a Committed Conservative. To those who don't realize just how politically radicalized many of our universities have become, this interview will prove fascinating and not a little dismaying. The following excerpt from the interview summarizes leftist thought well.
I truly believe that the underlying driving force behind leftist philosophy is a disdain for America. In fact, the entire book leads up to this one conclusion. The book is peppered with entertaining stores about my clashes with various components of the campus left, but that's merely the setting I have used to deliver the more important message concerning the intentions of hard-core liberalism. Brown's campus left wasn't made up of mild American liberals. This is the Far Left we're talking about. They are much more devious than the person who simply believes in taxing the wealthy a little more than we tax the poor. I didn't know it at the time, but I was arguing with Communists, Marxists, anti-Christians, and anti-Americans. Hatred for America was a very difficult scheme to decipher for a politically ignorant student, but I eventually found the campus to be operating off of the intellectual premise that American liberty, Christianity, capitalism, and the United States were the root causes of all world tragedies.
To prove this, the campus left made a tireless and incessant effort to undermine America by constantly reminding everyone of certain people's claim to victim-hood, oppression caused by the American system. Homosexuals were victims. Minorities were victims. Women were victims. Muslims were victims. Indians were victims. Anyone who dared to question this premise-that certain people were injured by America's past and present-was doomed for what liberals saw as the appropriate social consequences. Their problem was, that once they marked particular people as victims, they were forced to point out the perpetrators who had inflicted such harm. If you listened closely, you would hear them saying that it was the straight, white, and patriotic Christians who were to blame--the American mainstream. 9/11 couldn't have more perfectly demonstrated the reason why liberals fought so hard to maintain an image of victim-hood for certain types of people.