Andrew Sullivan writes:

When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large….

If voicing an “incorrect” opinion can end your career, or mark you for instant social ostracism, you tend to keep quiet. This silence on any controversial social issue is endemic on college campuses, but it’s now everywhere…. This is compounded by the idea that only a member of a minority group can speak about racism or homophobia, or that only women can discuss sexual harassment. The only reason this should be the case is if we think someone’s identity is more important than the argument they might want to make. And that campus orthodoxy is now the culture’s as a whole….

Microaggressions? How else do you explain how the glorious defenestration of horrific perpetrators of sexual abuse and harassment so quickly turned into a focus on an unwanted hug or an off-color remark?…

Privacy? Forget about it. Traditionally, liberals have wanted to see politics debated without regard for the private lives of those in the fray — because personal details can distract from the cogency of the argument. But cultural Marxists see no such distinction. In the struggle against patriarchy, a distinction between the public and private makes no sense. In fact, policing private life — the personal is political, remember — is integral to advancing social justice….

Due process? Real life is beginning to mimic college tribunals. When the perpetrator of an anonymous list accusing dozens of men of a whole range of sexual misdeeds is actually celebrated by much of mainstream media (see this fawning NYT profile), you realize that we are living in another age of the Scarlet Letter….

Treating people as individuals rather than representatives of designated groups? Almost every corporation now has affirmative action for every victim-group in hiring and promotion. Workplace codes today read like campus speech codes of a few years ago. Voice dissent from this worldview and you’ll be designated a bigot and fired (see James Damore at Google). The media is out front on this too. Just as campuses have diversity tsars, roaming through every department to make sure they are in line, we now have a “gender editor” at the New York Times, Jessica Bennett….

Objective truth? Ha! The culture is now saturated with the concept of “your own truth” — based usually on your experience of race and gender. In the culture, it is now highly controversial for individuals in one racial/gender group to write about or portray anyone outside it — because there is no art that isn’t rooted in identity….

Look: I don’t doubt the good intentions of the new identity politics — to expand the opportunities for people previously excluded. I favor a politics that never discriminates against someone for immutable characteristics — and tries to make sure that as many people as possible feel they have access to our liberal democracy. But what we have now is far more than the liberal project of integrating minorities. It comes close to an attack on the liberal project itself. Marxism with a patina of liberalism on top is still Marxism — and it’s as hostile to the idea of a free society as white nationalism is. So if you wonder why our discourse is now so freighted with fear, why so many choose silence as the path of least resistance, or why the core concepts of a liberal society — the individual’s uniqueness, the primacy of reason, the protection of due process, an objective truth — are so besieged, this is one of the reasons.

Sullivan stumbles twice in that otherwise laudable indictment of today’s virulent brand of leftism.

First, he “doesn’t doubt the good intentions of … identity politics”. I most certainly do. There’s a lot of humbug, preening, tribalism (of the wrong kind), and virtue-signaling in identity politics. Above all, the main intention of identity politics is to seize power and wield it like a club against one’s perceived enemies — those who are different. Talk about discrimination.

Which lead to Sullivan’s second stumble. There ought to be discrimination (of a kind) with respect to certain “immutable characteristics”. Intelligence and strength are immutable characteristics. Learning and practice matter, but there are at bottom wide disparities in the distribution of intelligence and strength among races and sexes.

But it has become “wrong” for the more intelligent to enjoy greater success than the less intelligent (leftists excluded, of course) because intelligence isn’t equally distributed across races and socioeconomic classes. Thus blacks and Hispanics are given university admissions, jobs, and promotions that wold belong to whites, with the result that (a) those favored are set up for failure and (b) the needs of consumers (including blacks and Hispanics) aren’t fulfilled by those best-qualified to fulfill them. Do you want to be operated on by an affirmative-action surgeon?

Another immutable characteristic is gender — which is a real thing, not something assigned at birth. There are demonstrably large differences between the sexes with respect to the distribution of strength and the aptitude for abstract thinking. But, again, it is “wrong” to admit such things and to discriminate on the basis of actual differences. There must be “fair shares” of women in STEM fields, occupations requiring analytical skills, and occupations that (traditionally) have required superior strength (e.g., soldiering, policing, and firefighting). Who suffers? The women who fail on merit — though that is increasingly barred by  “political correctness” — and the consumers and taxpayers who get less value for their money.