Andrew Sullivan

The Liberal Point by Jon Lovett: Atlantic: The Shut-up Culture

The Progressive Point by J. Brian Lowder (couldn’t you find a more ironic name?!) “No, It’s not too soon to condemn public figures for being anti-gay” (which BTW confirms Douthat’s idea about Pluralism and Power, which is you only allow power to diverse opinions that are non-threatening)

This is not a minor disagreement. It’s a profound one. One side wants to continue engaging the debate. The other wants one side to shut up. I think you also see this difference in the responses to Jon Chait’s new piece on race in the age of Obama. Progressives see the scale of the historically-loaded injustice that African-Americans face every day and cavil at any attempts to minimize or qualify the iniquity of those on the right who still deploy its rhetorical codes. Liberals still insist on some fairness, on not jumping to conclusions about an entire party’s or a single person’s racism, on seeing that human beings are not so simple as to be reduced to such ideas as “hate”, on maintaining some kind of civil discourse which right and left can engage in, which eschews too-easy charges of bigotry.

• Douthat’s Response