Never thought I'd be sharing National Review articles but this one really gets down the core of what we're constantly sparring against. I think we should all tweet at Fred Bauer (https://twitter.com/fredbauerblog) to let him know this one really hits it out of the park.

Link to relevant article

Some selected quotables from the linked piece:

Marcuse’s work is much more sophisticated and rigorous than the tweets of many of today’s outrage activists, but that only makes it more important to engage with his ideas in order to comprehend the foundations of the Newer Left’s cultural crusade — and to see why this crusade fundamentally fails. (In his 1955 Eros and Civilization, he considered the breaking of all sexual norms to be a key component of toppling the Western status quo.)

Marcuse argued that, because of the radical repressiveness of Western society, a tolerance for all viewpoints actually contributed to social oppression.

The fact that society is so radically unequal means that we should be intolerant and repressive in the name of tolerance and liberty. He rejected what he termed “indiscriminate tolerance” — a tolerance that accepts all viewpoints — in favor of “liberating tolerance” or “discriminating tolerance.”

Following Marcuse’s lead, our current PC politics is simultaneously collectivist and personal. It is collectivist insofar as belonging to certain collective identity groups grants one ethical privileges denied to others. But PC politics is also personal in that the new intolerance exacts a tremendous personal price from dissenters. It is not enough to argue with ideas: Those who espouse heretical ideas must be destroyed; they must lose their jobs, their reputations, and their places in the public square. The notion of “shaming” to the point of personal destruction seems a principal modus operandi of PC politics.

As a corollary to its collectivist emphases, PC politics also attempts to eliminate the space for ethical debate through fetishizing the idea of identity. One of the major innovations of current advocates of “discriminating tolerance” is the attempt to classify alternative ethical approaches as exercises in animus rather than good-faith attempts to find the truth and to live well.

The PC culture war applies to cultural affairs the technocratic will to power: Cultural mandarins in universities, think tanks, and the legacy media will decide how we should speak and how we should conceive of ethics, and the benighted citizenry should follow their enlightened commands.

Postmodern “discriminating tolerance” makes our public affairs more acrimonious because it suggests that an authentic debate is illegitimate. This kind of politics asserts that history has only one direction (ever to the left) and that the only valid kind of conversation is one that goes in that direction.

Rather than the authoritarian imposition of self-righteous assumptions, inclusive tolerance would pave the way for a more integrated and enriched public square. Because it is based on the inherent legitimacy of the individual, this mode of tolerance would not lose its way in the fray of collectivist identity politics. Inclusive tolerance supports a person’s freedom of conscience not because that person belongs to a given group — but because he or she breathes.