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I disagree. As a European "leftist", which I guess counts as the "far left" people like to blame things on, I think almost all these issues being discussed are right wing issues. To the point were you have to explain to people in Europe, that have been reading US articles, that the things they are opposing doesn't exist here. Overall European leftist doesn't want company policies, affirmative action or even large immigration. They want powerful unions, fair admissions to university, daycare, protection of employment and other concrete things that the US consider socialism. This entire "social justice" situation is because liberals in the US doesn't want to give up their privileges of private social insurance, good schools districts, rising housing markets, lobbying etc. So the result is the predictably a shallow shouting match, which people are uncomfortable with after the fact.

Political labels are fuzzy, and highly subject to drift. I use the term "liberal" and "leftist" because in current US politics, there are two clusters of political thought and, in current US politics, "liberal" and "leftist" are the names that we seem to be assigning them.

A European leftist is not the same thing as an American leftist. In fact, if we were to look at a different issue, the division between liberal and leftist would be different, even withing American politics.

For some issues, there is so little corralation with the general notion of liberal and leftist, that we would not even think to frame the problem in terms of those lines.

My point being, political identities are not a fundamental unit. They are an abstraction that is only meaningful in a particular contexts. There are real clusters of thought in politics; and we are currently discussing the relationship between two particular clusters of American politics. For the sake of communication, we are forced to give these clusters names, and we choose liberal and leftist because they are the best names we have available.

There are many people who identify as liberal while basking in their rising home value and exclusive school districts, but they typically do so quietly, not under the banner of liberalism. The closest example of people doing this openly and proudly under a left-wing banner is San Francisco's Progressivism, which is more closely aligned with what we're calling leftism here than what we're calling liberalism. Overall, the various shades of the left are still pretty aligned on concrete policy at the national level. Liberals are pretty reliably in favor of single payer, education funding, minimum wage, family leave, etc.

Where you start to see the fissure is around how universities should handle controversial material in the classroom and accusations of sexual misconduct in their student populations. The Christakis incident at Yale [0] is one of the best test cases. In particular,

>...if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.

is one of those flash-point statements that separates liberals from leftists. This incident has been picked up as a rallying cry by the far-right so there's a lot of FUD flying around, but just to prove I'm not the only Democrat who would agree wholeheartedly, here's Obama [1]:

> I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, "You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say." That’s not the way we learn either.

I would call Obama and has allies "liberals" here, and the protesters and their allies "leftists." Happy to be convinced otherwise on terminology, but it shows that there are at least two very distinct value systems going on here, which may be aligned on policy only by accident.

[0]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-per...

[1]https://www.vox.com/2015/9/14/9326965/obama-political-correc...

I just think it is inaccurate to call that leftism. There are certainly leftist in the US and there are also similarities between socialism and social liberalism, but the game being played in the US isn't a leftist one. It isn't about state intervention, union power or even legislation. That private individuals, institutions or companies should be able to do and say whatever they want is even a right wing positions in the first place. Just that it originally was about teaching about god, excluding gay people and firing union organizers. So if anything, people that want precedence for their opinions are right of liberal and not left. The left position is that important institution shouldn't be private (or at least not privately funded) in the first place and/or primarily be accountable to the state rather than individuals.

See, I really don't think it's about liberalism vs leftism. I agree with the article. It's about those who think critically, and those who chose not to. Unfortunately, the Internet gives voice to both groups equally, and idiots tend to have a lot of time on their hands to be exceptionally vocal on Twitter or other forms of social media. Since journalism has suffered so severely in the past decade, social media has just taken off as a source for every tiny criticism which just gets amplified. And there's no attempt to see how deep this outrage goes because depth doesn't make money in journalism anymore. Manufactured outrage is driving the conversation because it's sexy and gets views.

Culturally, the underlying problem is that certain people have spent too long in echo chambers that have atrophied their ability to interpret criticism rationally or thoughtfully. It's to the point that it's gone beyond oppression olympics to outright witch hunting. Liberals are terrified of being accused of not being liberal because apparently not being a complete extremist in your beliefs means you're not dedicated or passionate about them or have no credibility. This is so unbelievable as to be absurd.

Journalism and discussion have completely broken down into whichever side can throw the most hate at the other. It's just complete nonsense.

I don't disagree with you. I personally see this problem as stemming from the Two Cultures problem (sciences vs humanities), with the humanities culture leaking out of academia, into the mainstream where it can do real harm.

But, the current leftist movement, as far as I can tell, is a product of the humanities culture. In the current iteration of this fight, there seems to be, at a minimum, a liberal/science coalition, but I am not sure how fundamental that is.

I actually avoid talking about this, because people tend to get far more offended when I attack the humanities culture relative to the leftist culture (probably because humanities students take an attack on the humanities much more personally; while most non-activists would not have such a personal attachment to "the left").

Maybe people are unhappy because "humanities culture" is an extremely broad term which is terrible at describing your target? I mean, I'm a scientist, but I have a lot of artsy hobbies, and my initial impression when I hear "humanities culture" is "oh great, this is the next SJW or feminism label, used to dismiss things." Probably not what you intended.

Oh, I definitely agree that a lot of this is an outgrowth of humanities in academia. I think it's clearly originating from gender and minority studies academic programs, and the translation from social sciences and cultural anthropology to general culture loses all the nuance and technical detail as well as the historic and academic background that informs all these terms. I took a few humanities courses in the late 90s, and all these ideas were clearly already present in those student's thinking. I shouldn't have difficulty passing a physical anthropology class just because I don't believe that all humans should be hunter-gatherers like the Bushmen (San) in Namibia. That was my first exposure to some very odd groupthink.

I won't deny that women and minorities still face actual discrimination, but as some minority groups are being normalized in general culture, there seems to be a drive from the same people to normalize every potential minority no matter how small or unusual. Simply put, there's a limited amount of accommodation that's reasonable to make. We're at the stage where some of the minorities that are left are well below 0.1% of the population and they don't face significant discrimination due to appearance like races and women do. Maybe someday there will be an "Other" on a form for gender, but it's not ever going to be there on a medical form where genetic sex has a real and meaningful impact on your healthcare treatment.

However, I still don't think it's necessarily a good idea to separate leftists from liberals. First of all because I'm not entirely sure how large this "leftist" group actually is. I suspect that it's actually radically smaller than the group of liberals, and it's only the Internet and social media and shitty journalism that reads individual Tweets from regular citizens on the national news that amplifies their voices. Furthermore, I don't see why they wouldn't be better classified simply as radical liberals. Just because they have extreme views doesn't make them less liberal, just less centrist. In a time when being centrist and favoring compromise is apparently a sign of weak morals, I can understand the desire to instead excise that group entirely, but I really don't believe that's correct.

I think it's also useful to note that in most European countries, they always seem to have four or five political parties: far left/liberal, left/liberal, central, right/conservative, and far right/conservative. Sometimes you'll see multiple parties in each area or an occasional party that breaks these -- some parties might be left/conservative or right/liberal -- but by and large most can still be pegged to one of those five, and the parties clustered around the middle always tend to get the most seats. It's possible that the geography and politics of the US has simply allowed the far left to stay hidden within the normal left, largely because our election process tends to favor rural communities slightly, and they tend toward conservative and right.

See, you're subscribing to the model where there is an objective truth that we access through rational methods, empiricism, and debate, where the outputs of the process you call "critical thinking" are to be privileged over other statements. The new leftism rejects your premise. According to my college classmates, the notion of objective reality is a social construct popularized by white men to reinforce their power.

I don't know how much credence that particular claim gets, but the broader context is apparently a whole academic movement [0]. Guess I took the wrong philosophy sequence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

No, I'm subscribing to the idea that relabeling things and being sectarian isn't particularly useful, especially because sectarianism is exactly the problem. Just because there are idiots who are liberals doesn't mean we need a new category for them so they aren't called liberals because they might make liberals look bad.

Please excuse my brevity, I'm on a phone.

I think you are right about the "coalition" between liberals and leftists. I've noticed it falling apart for a while but not really been able to describe it. Talking with friends I previously considered liberal and being shushed for questioning or simply not knowing the current vogue in social justice discourse has been a really horrible experience.

Worse, I've seen that experience turn others into frothing radicals who then do the same thing to other people. It's a forward feedback loop of people entrenching their existing preconceptions.

It's a mess.

us liberals are having to come to terms with our leftist allies not actually being liberals

In fact, it's so hard to reconcile that I sometimes wonder if leftists are a straw man invented by the right, but I'm starting to realize that may not be true.

>In fact, it's so hard to reconcile that I sometimes wonder if leftists are a straw man invented by the right, but I'm starting to realize that may not be true.

Leftists are not, but "leftists" as described by the right often are, as are "feminists" and "SJWs."

And because it will probably come up, yes, the same phenomenon exists on the other side as well.

Thank you for succinctly describing what I've been struggling to put into words for a long time. It was confusing and disorienting to learn that my left-wing peers in college had so little in common with the values and principles of the liberalism I grew up in, even if we arrived at the same policy prescriptions on most of the issues surfacing in the news. Being able to conceptualize these things as separate political alignments is helpful.

Could you describe what you perceive to be the difference between leftism and liberalism?

A leftist violates general democratic principles in the fight against a particular injustice.

And do the people you apply this label to agree that they're "violating general democratic principles"? Seems unlikely, and also seems unlikely to generate a good discussion.

They're openly hostile to both free speech and the presumption of innocence as values and general practices (less opposed to the technical Constitutional restraints on the state, for now).

I don't know about "general democratic principles" but I would include these as ideas valued by liberalism and not by leftism.

Just starting with the first part of what you said, I see a big disagreement about what "free speech" is. If you say something offensive, and a billion people speak back that you're being offensive, that's also free speech.

Sure. The fissure is over whether a disagreeable idea or speaker should be engaged and defeated on rational grounds, or excluded from the premises by whatever means necessary. Last generation's liberal professors value the exercise for its own sake. Today's leftist students think it's an abomination that they're allowed into the institution at all.

That's not what I see happening, but sure, you can accuse other people of that if you like.

> The fissure is over whether a disagreeable idea or speaker should be engaged and defeated on rational grounds, or excluded from the premises by whatever means necessary. Last generation's liberal professors value the exercise for its own sake. Today's leftist students think it's an abomination that they're allowed into the institution at all.

> That's not what I see happening, but sure, you can accuse other people of that if you like.

I've seen videos of it happening. Basically a speaker is invited to give a talk, but people who disagree with her crowd the auditorium and scream to prevent the talk from being given. The intention is not to "engage [or] defeat on rational grounds," but to shut down and exclude.

A lot of the people who have this done to them are in fact disagreeable, but that doesn't make the reaction less illiberal.

Didn't that exact scenario happen at like Berkeley? I thought Ann Coulter or someone what prevented from speaking...maybe it was someone else

Well, there were 2 things that happened at Berkeley. One was a huge, peaceful counter-demonstration (free speech), another was a small number of violent people. I find it hard to believe that closeparen intended to only label the second group "leftist". But I could be wrong about that.

Fortunately, Ann Coulter or someone has plenty of outlets for her speech. And we've come a long way from Governor Ronald Reagan ordering UC Berkeley to cancel speakers because he didn't like what they had to say.

It’s not even remotely a departure from liberal values to protest outside. It is to work towards disrupting/overpowering the event so that it can’t continue, or to be totally unconcerned that others are doing so because “it’s a small group” or “they have plenty of other outlets” as long as the speaker is from the wrong side.

How have we “come a long way” from Reagan doing it? No-platforming actions don’t require the backing of a democratic majority. A few self-righteous people get going and no one wants to burn political capital objecting. Making the disinvitation button available to a wider population isn’t progress.