The boy’s mother said she let him dye his hair as a reward for getting good grades. So the boy is combining the two principles that are most valued by today’s conservative and that they see as most representative of America: individual achievement and individual choice. Instead of siding with the school that wants to suppress the boy’s freedom, we should see this as a chance to celebrate the ideas of opportunity, freedom and tolerance that have made America a great country.

In my last comment I wasn’t just being ironic. What principles do today’s conservatives have with which they could say that a high school student should not be allowed to have blue hair? What position do they have distinct from that of the liberals? For some years now, and as reflected in the news story that Mr. Kalb linked, the liberal position is that clothing or hair styles can only be forbidden by schools if they are “disruptive” to the school environment. I first learned this from then NYC Schools Chancellor Richard Green when I wrote him in the mid ’80s suggesting that a simple dress code—i.e. regular shirts with collars, no clothing with pictures and slogans and so on—would instantly raise the whole atmosphere of the schools. Green wrote back to me saying that under present judicial rulings, the only basis for controlling clothing was that the clothing was “disruptive” of the learning process.

This is, at best, a utilitarian standard. Only something so GROSS that it causes fights or noticeably distracts people in the middle of class can be barred. There is no common social standard, a standard embodying a morality and a culture—let alone embodying even a minimal concept of what a school is—that can be enforced in today’s schools.

All this is a logical working out of the premises of liberalism. And, once again, what articulated alternative do today’s conservatives have to offer against it?

Under the ACLU standard I don’t think disruptiveness would be grounds enough. In the prom/school protest case I cited they clearly take the view that disruption is OK is it’s free speech.

In (somewhat) defense of conservatives, their basic problem is that the things they defend are harder to articulate. That’s just the nature of the knowledge we get through tradition - if it could be articulated and proven we wouldn’t need to rely on tradition. So the question right now is how to defend the unsayable. It’s not that easy a problem.

Agreed that articulating the principles of social order is difficult, especially in a society that has lost traditional understandings. But we’re not even at that stage yet. We’re at the stage of trying to get conservatives to see that the problem exists. At present, they are not even aware of the fact that they—the supposed adversaries of liberalism—have no principle of social order apart from liberalism itself. And that is why liberalism keeps advancing.

Oh, agreed. Americans including conservatives are mostly comfortable and like it that way, and if they recognized there really was a basic problem they might have to do something or even think, and that would wreck their comfort.