It is time to be clear about the difference between the Democratic Party and the campus left

There’s no overlap.

One is liberal, one is a form of Marxism. And Marxism never cared about equality, about civil rights, about the dignity and privacy of the single person, about the right to the pursuit of happiness.

On NPR a few months ago, Linda Wertheimer responded to a study in which women came off better than men by saying, “Perhaps women are just better people.” Would it have been okay to say, “Perhaps men are just better people?”

We may be used to this sort of implicit sexist, inegalitarian, prejudicial language, but we shouldn’t be.

In “We All Live on Campus Now,” Andrew Sullivan wrote, “In the world beyond campus, few people use the term microaggressions without irony or an eye roll; claims of “white supremacy,” “rape culture,” or “white privilege” can seem like mere rhetorical flourishes.” He identifies these as effects of “neo-Marxism.”

Democrats hold that such implicit race and gender prejudice is morally wrong, since it is about attacking people because of immutable characteristics, race and gender, which they can’t change, rather than harmful attitudes, habits, and social conventions, which they can.

Sullivan adds, “When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.

And, sure enough, the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping from the discourse. The idea of individual merit — as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege” — is increasingly suspect. The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites.”

The Constitution is a representative Enlightenment document; and the Democratic Party honors “the Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment.” By contrast, the no-platforming of the campus left violates the free speech principle of the First Amendment by engaging in viewpoint censorship of prospective campus speakers, sometimes specifically because they endorse liberal values such as the central intellectual concept that competing ideas should be freely debated in the University.(1)

Finally, campus left politics of identity is about approved identity. As Linda Wertheimer inadvertently revealed, this is inseparable from its counterpart, the unacceptable resurrection of such politics of disapproved identity as sexism. The campus left meets a definition which once appeared in the OED: “Not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, and liberties of others: narrow-minded.”

(1) “Academic freedom is the freedom to profess a discipline according to its recognized content and procedures, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to that discipline.” — Mary Lefkowitz