Old Lefties, Scared of the Kids, News at 11
By 
Them damn kids, they don’t hold the same set of principles as we true leftists of the 60s!
Nope — not in the topsy-turvy universe of identity politics. The festival immediately disavowed the address, though the organizers had approved the thrust of the talk in advance. A “Right of Reply” session was hastily organized. When, days later, The Guardian ran the speech, social media went ballistic. Mainstream articles followed suit. I plan on printing out The New Republic’s “Lionel Shriver Shouldn’t Write About Minorities” and taping it above my desk as a chiding reminder.
Viewing the world and the self through the prism of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the identity-politics movement — in which behavior like huffing out of speeches and stirring up online mobs is par for the course — is an assertion of generational power. Among millennials and those coming of age behind them, the race is on to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved — who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.
When I was growing up in the ’60s and early ’70s, conservatives were the enforcers of conformity. It was the right that was suspicious, sniffing out Communists and scrutinizing public figures for signs of sedition.
Now the role of oppressor has passed to the left. In Australia, where I spoke, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to do or say anything likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate,” providing alarming latitude in the restriction of free speech. It is Australia’s conservatives arguing for the amendment of this law.
As a lifelong Democratic voter, I’m dismayed by the radical left’s ever-growing list of dos and don’ts — by its impulse to control, to instill self-censorship as well as to promote real censorship, and to deploy sensitivity as an excuse to be brutally insensitive to any perceived enemy. There are many people who see these frenzies about cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and safe spaces as overtly crazy. The shrill tyranny of the left helps to push them toward Donald Trump.
If I knew how to embed emoji, it would all the eyeroll emoji.
I mean, sure, one might argue if the left survived the narcissism of the 60s generation that so many of that generation seem to forget when they whine about millennials, but asking those who said they hoped they die before they got old to now understand now that they are old that, like themselves back in the day when THE LEFT WAS THE LEFT UNLIKE TODAY WHAT WITH THE IDENTITY POLITICS AND THE HIPPITY HOP AND THE LIKE, young people might not think in the same way as those 40 years older than they is evidently impossible. Unlike the GOOD OLD DAYS WHEN WE DROPPED ACID AND PLOTTED TO BLOW UP BUILDINGS AND FETISHIZED INCREASINGLY RADICAL REVOLUTIONARY GROUPS WHILE SHOWING HIPSTER DISDAIN FOR SELLOUT LIBERALS, the kids these days just don’t understand free speech and a real debate, right?