Liberalism’s Crack Up, by Rod Dreher.

Mark Lilla, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, …, who is a professor of the humanities at Columbia, and who identifies himself as a “frustrated liberal,” says he is struck by the difference between his liberal students and his conservative students. The conservative ones formulate opinions and make arguments based on ideas and principles. The liberal ones, though, base their arguments (such as they are) on an assertion of identity (e.g., “Speaking as a lesbian of color, I believe that…”). Lilla goes on:

“Conservatives complain loudest about today’s campus follies, but it is really liberals who should be angry. The big story is not that leftist professors successfully turn millions of young people into dangerous political radicals every year. It is that they have gotten students so obsessed with their personal identities that, by the time they graduate, they have much less interest in, and even less engagement with, the wider political world outside their heads.” …

“Black Lives Matter is a textbook example of how not to build solidarity.” …

On Damore’s firing by Google:

Why? Because of the left’s identity politics, which keeps expanding the boundaries of things you cannot say, even if you can demonstrate that they’re true, or might well be true. So, when Lilla says that “the politics of identity has done nothing but strengthen the grip of the American right on our institutions,” the Damore debacle provides him with a great example.

hat-tip Stephen Neil