Never trust anyone whose political convictions are unaccompanied by doubts. Without the willingness to entertain doubt, the signal virtue of true liberalism, a person takes his or her principles to be unconditionally correct and absolutely binding. The person becomes a dogmatist, and dogmatists are dangerous. They tend toward a totalitarian mentality made up of equal parts arrogance, utopian fantasy, and, when given a chance, a penchant for inflicting their own biases on others.
Like all people, dogmatists have different things on their minds, but a good part of the time they think about whom to destroy and how. All dogmas divide people into believers and heretics. During the Middle Ages there were only two ways to deal with heretics: Let them alone or torture them to death. Today’s dogmatists recoil from either course, and so they have devised a compromise: Torture heretics, not to death, but to some extent.
And so we arrive at the mindset of contemporary Western identity politics. The practitioners of identity politics do not wish to physically destroy those who question the #MeToo movement (think actress Catherine Deneuve) or casually misspeak (think Roseanne Barr). They wish only to torture them to some extent, by making their lives a living hell. Thus thousands of people have been smeared with charges of sexism or racism, charges that ruin their peace of mind, their reputations, and occasionally their livelihoods. All this has happened in the name of some higher good.
Many people feel something to be wrong in all this. Not everyone’s conscience sits well with dragging people into the public square to humiliate them, people who had whispered a bad joke or perhaps tried to think through a complex subject out loud. But they usually keep quiet about it out of fear of being attacked themselves.
(Ronald W. Dworkin, "America's Permanent Mobs," The American Interest [22 October 2018])
