Illiberalism

Jonathan Chait comments on the University of Missouri failure:

The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy‐​kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement.

Chait deserves praise. I had thought the time was past – long past – when a committed Social Democrat could hold liberal views on the freedom of speech. Time to jettison my prior beliefs about Jonathan Chait. But he is pretty much alone, no?


I see political correctness in this instance as an outgrowth of egalitarianism, a worldview that sees everywhere only oppressors and the oppressed. The former can have no rights that the latter are bound to respect, and thus it makes perfect sense, as the law professor Owen Fiss once proposed, to “restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others.”


Free speech needs support from the political left. It is hard to see how such support might be revived.