NO ONE EVER MEANS NEVER AGAIN:

The New York Times is, of course, within its legal and institutional rights to issue craven apologies for the crime of having irritated its readers' sensibilities, just as the paper's staff is within its rights to pretend that a given column has meaningfully put them in "danger." But it matters when it happens. Behavior breeds behavior, and every time the employees of Politico revolt because Ben Shapiro edited Playbook for a day, or the crew at New York magazine decides that it "can't even" with Andrew Sullivan, or the team at The Atlantic insists that the appearance of Kevin Williamson's byline represents a mortal threat, or CNN's Oliver Darcy proposes that the competitors to the cable network for which he works should be shut down, our hard-won customs are damaged a little more. Read a piece about a contretemps at a major American press outlet and you will invariably learn of a split between the "old guard," which is committed to free speech and pluralism, and the "woke young," which is not. That old guard was a young guard once, though. And, one day, the woke young will be the woke old.

Our political antennae are trained to look for individuals with too much power, which, given the history of the 20th century, is no bad thing. And yet our current predicament is the product of a somewhat different phenomenon: the inward-facing mob. Why did the New York Times become an unbearable workplace for someone as moderate and open-minded as Bari Weiss? Because its staff, complaining and haranguing and egging each other on in Slack, put pressure on their bosses and all but took over the joint. Why did Twitter choose to delete President Trump's account, and Amazon Web Services choose to delete Parler? Because the lower-downs pushed and pushed and pushed until the companies did "the right thing." Why are due process and open debate recast as "apologism" on college campuses when the defendant or the speaker is disliked? Because administrators who should know better fear that their offices will be filled with protesters or that they themselves will be targeted. Much of the criticism of our new American illiberalism focuses in on the ideologies that inform it. Not enough of that criticism, however, is engaged in analyzing the motive. It is undoubtedly the case that a good number of Americans have swallowed whole the idea that classical liberalism is a smokescreen for all sorts of insidious isms. But an even bigger number, one suspects, are simply using the weapons they've been handed. One need not be an incisive student of history to understand that when a man is told that he can silence his critics by merely claiming to feel "unsafe," he will quickly claim to feel unsafe. 

As for those of us who have no interest in silencing anyone? Well, we face the age-old liberal problem of being obliged to advance our arguments in defense of someone -- or something -- that is unpopular. When, in 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union defended the right of Holocaust-denying neo-Nazis to march through a Chicago suburb with a sizeable Jewish population, its leadership was asked why it was spending its time and resources in the service of such a repugnant endeavor. 

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