Yes, it is hard to like Sean Wilentz these days. Little there but two-minute hates against "pwogwessives", who believe in the moment, in Sean's imagination, whatever bad thing he momentarily wants them to believe: Dan Nexon: I wanted to like this essay:
Dan Nexon @dhnexon: I wanted to like this essay, but it's really weird. https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/48/fighting-words/. Terminology evolves. US political labels don't neatly align w/ how same labels used in Europe. "Liberals" in US don't believe in the self-regulating market, and thus—in some ways—are closer to modern European social democrats. Yes. Obviously. Do a lot of people on the left throw around "liberal" and "neoliberal" in ways that don't take seriously how modern social democrats are different from DLC Democrats? Sure. That's fair. But that doesn't warrant this kind of incoherence. The "progressives" who focus on racial justice are generally loathed by the "progressives" who are genuine old-school socialists, who see the world in terms of class:
And for all that is holy, there is nothing illiberal, per se, about recognizing the relationship between durable inequality and categorical identities, let alone the dynamics that terms like "intersectionality" were designed to describe...
Brad DeLong @de1ong: In fact, there is something very illiberal about not recognizing it...
#shouldread
