...The legions of moderate liberals troubled by all this tend to offer two arguments to downplay the threat. Echoing their favorite “conservative” columnist, David Brooks, they say the right is ginning up hysteria over the isolated actions of a tiny fringe, “a few extremists in Portland” and “the leftist illiberals on campus.”
Other moderates, who admit that position is hard to reconcile with the mountains of contrary evidence, cast the rise of the illiberal left as a temporary response to Trumpism that will dissipate once the pestilential orange boil has been lanced.
Both views are naive. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay detail in their indispensable new book, “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity,” this radical movement has been percolating for decades, metastasizing from academia to the broader corridors of power. Critical race theory, $#@! theory and related social justice ideologies fueling Black Lives Matter, the New York Times’ 1619 Project, anti-whiteness programs in the workplace and the broader Great Awokening comprise a puritanical worldview that is being embraced by the nation’s elites. This secular Calvinism, denouncing capitalism’s winners in the hands of an angry mob, is not going away.
The issue is not just whether that morally absolutist world view represents a rejection or a fulfillment of our nation’s Enlightenment ideals. It is the unwillingness of the illiberal left to engage in meaningful debate, its impulse to censor rather than solicit opposing views.