The National Review Online has launched a blog called Phi Beta Cons "dedicated to keeping an eye on the politics of campus life."
As an analytic philosopher, I find the Sokal hoax to be absolutely hysterical, so I sympathize with some of what Mark Bauerlein is saying here. On the other hand, I find it highly misleading. The reason that so many academics are on the left can hardly be traced to postmodernism alone. Indeed,Chomsky himself is a critic of the lack of clarity and precision in postmodernist tought and in particular of Foucault.
Keep reading below the fold or at the crosspost.
Morover, Sokal himself is a self avowed leftist and feminist:
"After all, I'm a leftist too (under the Sandinista government I taught mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua). On nearly all practical political issues -- including many concerning science and technology -- I'm on the same side as the Social Text editors. But I'm a leftist (and feminist) because of evidence and logic, not in spite of it." A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies
It's hard to imagine Sokal the Sandinista sympathizer siding with Phi Beta Cons that government harassment of left leaninghistory profs is a good thing.
The academic left is hardly united behind a "gospel of anti-Enlilghtenment power politics." To say so is a gross and intellectually irresponsible misrepresentation. I agree with many critiques of Foucaldian rhetoricians, but they hardly make up a majority of humanities departments outside English and some history departments. To call their views "gospel" is a joke.
Bauerlein's post asks the question: "Where are the scientists?" I would suggest to you that there are two trends in conservative politics that cause scientists to be more wary of conservative politics than they are of anything going on in any English department. Furthermore, these trends have far more popular sway than Foucault or Derrida.
First, there is the dominionist right: as "anti-Enlightenment" as they come. Scientists can hardly be expected to rally around conservatism when ID-creationists launch politically motivated attacks on science and fundamentalists insist on blastocyst's rights. Second, there is the anti-environmentalism of the corporate right. As long as working climatologists are attacked as having a hidden socialist agenda, the right can hardly complain about the left inserting "politics and power into the conduct of inquiry."
In my experiance in the academy, opposition to conservative agendas comes from more than the postmodernists in English departments. I have had discussions with scientists, mathematicians, analytic philosophers, historians and even some non-postmodernist folks in English departments, all of whom are liberals without being Foucaldians. If the National Review wants to have a debate on why so many of America's most intelligent and accomplished people are liberal, let's have it, but the suggestion that it has anything to do with the nonsense that Sokal parodied is demagoguery. Not surprisingly, National Review seems more interested in further marginalizing academia with cheap-shot anti-intellectualism than in opening up a real discourse on politics in the academy.