"More Than a Challenge"

"It's difficult even to tally, much less read, all the ripostes and rebuttals, many of which confirmed Chait's original point by reprising even more noisily exactly the category-think he warned against. 'So, here is sad white man Jonathan Chait's essay about the difficulty of being a white man in the second age of "political correctness,"' wrote Alex Pareene at Gawker. Variants of this theme have rocketed around the left wing of the Internet and Twittersphere over the past 24 hours."


David Frum at The Atlantic reacts to Jonathan Chait's New York article on leftists versus liberals.


As does Andrew Sullivan, and Michelle Goldberg, and Ross Douthat, and Samuel Goldman.


Chait himself in The Daily Beast assesses the reaction (as he does in New York, and Henry Farrell reacts.)


"My essay describes p.c. ideology as a form of Marxist thought, substituting race and gender identities for economic ones, and assigning political rights on the basis of class identity rather than individuality.
"I'd argue that the historical record of Marxist regimes is an unambiguous disaster. Marxist regimes have failed everywhere they have been tried—not because of external pressure or the idiosyncratic personal failures of their leaders but flaws inherent in its ideological structure. Marxists are very good at crushing critics of their policies, but rather bad at devising the policies themselves. Those two facts are not unrelated. The construction of effective policy requires internal reasoning, not the automatic identification of all criticism as the representation of a privileged class. That is to say, the liberal ideal of free government is still the right one."


Chait again in New York addresses critics.