The erosion of shared political consensus

What does it mean to be woke? Roger Kimball writes in part in American Greatness,

There are two central tenets of the woke philosophy. The first is feigned fragility. The second is angry intolerance. The union of fragility and intolerance has given us that curious and malevolent hybrid, the crybully, a delicate yet venomous species that thrives chiefly in lush, pampered environments.

...when the free speech movement started at Berkeley’s Sproul Hall in 1964, it was a left-wing movement that demanded tolerance and challenged conventional behavior and mores. Today the Left espouses the opposite—not tolerance and free speech but conformity, censorship, and intolerance.

...The truth is that American universities are among the safest and most coddled environments ever devised by human ingenuity. The idea that one should attend college to be protected from ideas one might find controversial or offensive could only occur to someone who had jettisoned any hope of acquiring an education. Many commentators have been warning about a “higher education bubble.” They have focused mostly on the unsustainable costs of college, but the spectacle of timid moral self-indulgence also deserves a place on the bill of indictment.

...The suppression of free speech by the wardens of wokeness has prompted many conservatives to champion free speech as an all-purpose antidote. I sympathize with that endeavor, and have written probably dozens of articles defending a robust idea of free speech. In my view, if you say “I am for free speech, but not ‘hate speech’ or speech that offends Mohammed or speech that insults Greens or speech that mocks, satirizes, ridicules, and laughs at some P.C. icon,” etc. then you are not for free speech at all. Your “but” is merely a species of capitulation pretending to be redemptive conceptual nuance. Free speech is by nature offensive speech, at least potentially. If it couldn’t offend, if it couldn’t insult, it also couldn’t enlighte...The Bill of Rights, Justice Jackson said, is not “a suicide pact.” In other words, when it comes to free speech the choice “is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either.”

The Bill of Rights, Justice Jackson said, is not “a suicide pact.” In other words, when it comes to free speech the choice “is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either.”

Conservatives have rightly lamented the assault on free speech that is such a conspicuous and disfiguring reality of life in America today. But that loss only achieves its true significance in the context of a more fundamental erosion: the erosion of that shared political consensus, that community of sentiment, which gives life to the first-person plural, that “We, the People,” which made us who we are. Should we lose that, we shall have lost everything.

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