People often forget that free speech includes the critics, boycotters, and those that simply don’t want to listen.
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“Nice solidarity” is interesting phrasing to describe the fight for what limited degrees of equality the disenfranchised have managed to achieve. It suggests, in its dismissive condescension, a fair bit about the privileged position from which you likely write.
I’m not familiar with Dean’s book, but Lilla’s white male liberal kvetching has crossed my screen before. I do think he and you are right that marginalized identities can be focused on to the exclusion of say, class solidarity. But I don’t see him focusing much on the latter either, and again, as with a lot of leftist white male intellectuals, I do see him blithely dismissing the misery and struggle of people who arent like him. There’s much more to say, but I’ll just add this quote, in which Charles Kaiser makes an especially good point about Lilla’s recent book, and his overall approach:
Lilla does mention the main cause for our current predicament – the investment of billions of dollars in thinktanks, radio talkshows and TV networks to move the center of political thinking sharply to the right. But for some reason he thinks all of this has been much less important in alienating voters from liberalism than a noble effort to extend the basic protections of the constitution to women, African Americans and gay, lesbian and transgender people.
Yes, that is a problem, a huge one, when white men respond to claims for equality with claims that they’re the real victims these days.
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Right? So many on the right seem not to realize that disagreement is not censorship. And I suppose the smarter and/or more cynical ones do realize that, but also recognize the utility of unwarranted claims of victimhood.
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You are directly and explicitly operating in the identity framework I was criticizing.
It’s one of those things that if you buy into, it’s uncriticizable, because any criticism is perceived as validation. You even acknowledge the utility of victimhood, but imagine there is some kind of arbiter of legitimacy that can control it being weaponized.
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It seems to be supporting my point.
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they’ve been using since Atwater’s Southern Strategy?
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Nope. That defeats the purpose. Tolerance is for people willing to play nice with others. Intolerance is the opposite of such sentiments.
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Yes. And they were recognized as repugnant. But then we decided they were legitimate for some players and dove back in after we knew better.
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You clearly didn’t read the entire thread, aside from the fact that it’s unlikely you could have done so in that short span of time since I posted the first comment.
Everything you assert here was already countered there, and then some.
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Of course it has utility. That’s not the same thing as legitimacy. White men are not “the real victims here” in the ways that they often claim they are. OTOH, various people oppressed by white supremacist patriarchy (a thing which clearly holds little interest for you, Lilla, and the like) really are victims of it, and so obviously, pointing that out has utility in fighting against oppression.
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Get ready for that inevitable semantic ‘hamster wheel…’
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You should hear moose complain sometime. Is enough to make one moosoginist.
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Until there is a slur for white people on the same level of offensiveness as slurs they use for everyone else, they can’t even start to be considered victims. 
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Yeah, we’re arguing past each other, and it’s not going to produce anything to have another performance of ‘every social issues thread.’
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You either support costly free speech - or you don’t. There is no middle ground. There is way to reconcile limits to the concept.
And yet, when I have advocated here for starting leftist/progressive/radical thinktanks and talkshows to counter those, the general consensus was “but only the right does that, I’m not going to use their tactics…”
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Welcome to boing boing.
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Not sure where you’re going with this, but the right (and right Dems, where expedient) have exploited identity politics ruthlessly for five decades or so. As @milliefink pointed out, conflating that with arguments for equality that derive from intersectional critique is, well, absurd. Of course rich white people don’t want to share their shit- they’ve built an entire cult around it; pointing that out as a legitimate political issue isn’t wading in the muck with white supremacists, it’s not even the same game. It’s a call for justice.
The problem for mainstream Dems is that their calls ring hollow, or fall on deaf ears, because they aren’t interested in rebuilding the systems upon which white supremacy is founded. That has more to do with their electoral failings than anything else IMO.
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Just to be fair, I think that’s true of rich people in general, regardless to color; it just so happens that in our current society, White people tend to be the ones with all the power and influence.
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