Liberals and the Illiberal Left

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Liberals and the Illiberal Left - The Atlantic

[…]Chait is a liberal’s liberal: a warm and consistent supporter of the Obama administration, and a fierce and relentless critic of conservative policies and personalities. This time, however, Chait directed his sharp wit against a leftward target:

Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate … Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach.

Chait condemned the goals of this new political correctness as verging on the totalitarian:

The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents — you know, the old line often misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — as hopelessly naïve. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to. The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones.

That set off a stinkbomb!

It’s difficult even to tally, much less read, all the ripostes and rebuttals, many of which confirmed Chait’s original point by reprising even more noisily exactly the category-think he warned against. “So, here is sad white man Jonathan Chait’s essay about the difficulty of being a white man in the second age of ‘political correctness,’” wrote Alex Pareene at Gawker. Variants of this theme have rocketed around the left wing of the Internet and Twittersphere over the past 24 hours.

Yet even as Chait’s critics pooh-pooh the reality of political correctness he decried, real world examples pile up—some absurd, others ominous. In the absurd column comes this from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York: Professors and other employees at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center have been forbidden from addressing students and prospective students with the title “Mr.” and “Ms.” because, campus leaders say, the terms may be offensive.

America’s most effective liberals—from Harry Truman to Rahm Emanuel—have known how and when to defy the illiberal left, whether that illiberal left was communist or Third Worldist or, as it is today, infatuated with the jargon of “intersectionality.” The liberals who couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t have been dragged toward the same marginality that has always befallen the hard left in America—and always will.

Republicans have suffered greatly over the past six years from their visible terror of their more extreme associates. The evolution toward a more responsible Republicanism remains incomplete, but is visibly under way. Now it seems to be the turn of liberals and Democrats to veer off into their own ideological fever-swamps. Exactly how and exactly why they are taking this novel turn is detailed in Jonathan Chait’s essay. There will be nothing novel about the result.

This is something I've been noticing more and more, about how other liberals (or "neo-Marxist"?) are increasingly intolerant of any idea, thought, or action that is not identical to their own, and make marginalizing these "dissenters" a full-time job. If you disagree, and not even if you disagree but instead have a different take on something, you must be a troll, "delusional" (because why wouldn't you be as progressive as myself), a white man masquerading as [insert whatever you are here], or really a, what must be the most vile swear word of all, "conservative". *gasp, shock, horror, guns & ammo*

I see this online mostly, in FB groups or forums or simliar where people who tend to fall down the same left-thinking line congregate (veg*n, glbt, whatever), but I've seen it once or twice in the real world (though not as extreme). And then it almost always, always, evolves to the "extremest" shutting down and bailing out of the conversation with an insult if the "dissenter" defends themselves/their point or if someone else defends the "dissenter". Why is being illiberal a thing? Why **** on people who have the same goals as you but different ideas on how to get there? Why is it praised by other illiberals to be intolerant under the guise of tolerance?
 
I guess in some circles tolerance isn't as thoroughly understood or held in as high esteem as they like to portray it.