Liberals and the Illiberal Left
When Democrats don’t stand up to the policing of speech, they surrender control of their party to its most extreme elements.
political correctness is fundamentally and often radically illiberal.
.. political correctness is a weapon deployed by leftists against liberals. Its political effect in the larger political context is to make liberals look hesitant and weak. The inability to say “no” to transgender activists at a graduate school may not matter much in the scheme of things.
.. Politically correct leftism is more than a challenge to liberalism. It is a test of liberalism.
.. One way—perhaps the best way—to demonstrate someone’s lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves—thus the rough slang I used above. … Someone who can’t or won’t defend themselves certainly isn’t someone you can depend upon to defend you.
.. 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.”