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When Democrats don't stand up to political correctness, they surrender control of their party to its most extreme elements.

A liberal, Robert Frost once said, is someone who cant take his own side in an argument. If conservatives are often caricatured by their detractors as unfeeling, liberals are painted as uncertain, weak, and easily bullied. Back in the 1980s, the centrist British politician David Owen joined the two accusations in a jibe against Britains Prime Minister Thatcher and her then Labor opponent: She doesnt care, and he doesnt dare.

These stereotypes exert real-world political effects. In the 1970s, a Yale sociologist went to live for two years among an exotic tribe: not in the South Seas or up the Amazon, but in the working-class neighborhood of Canarsie, next door to New Yorks Kennedy Airport. For a political generation, the Jews and Italians of Canarsie had voted overwhelmingly for New Deal Democrats. Since 1970, their preference had shifted to Richard Nixons Republicans. The sociologist, Jonathan Rieder, wanted to understand why. Heres what he found:

Since 1960 the Jews and Italians of Canarsie have embellished and modified the meaning of liberalism, associating it with profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility and sanctimoniousness. The term 'conservative' acquired connotations of pragmatism, character, reciprocity, truthfulness, stoicism, manliness, realism, hardness, vengeance, strictness, and responsibility.

All of this is background to understand yesterdays Internet dust-up over Jonathan Chaits powerful new article in New York magazine. Chait is a liberals 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 Todays 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 liberalisms 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 Ill defend to the death your right to say it as hopelessly nave. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place societys unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power youre 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!

Its difficult even to tally, much less read, all the ripostes and rebuttals, many of which confirmed Chaits original point by reprising even more noisily exactly the category-think he warned against. So, here is sad white man Jonathan Chaits 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.

Continue reading here:
Liberals and the Illiberal Left