Jonah, I enjoyed your back-and-forth today on Republicans and Democrats, the ideational vs transactional et al. It mirrors very closely my present kerfuffle up north. In seeking to roll back the Canadian thought police, my defenders on the right have argued on the basis of the principle of free speech. By contrast, my critics on the left have argued on the basis of the identity groups caught in the “human rights” crosshairs – that’s to say, white supremacists, “homophobes”, a man who believes Her Majesty The Queen is really a shape-shifting blood-drinking space lizard from the star system Alpha Draconis, plus a couple of right-wing blowhards (me and Ezra Levant).

Granted this is perhaps not the rainbow coalition one would choose to build without first running it past a focus group or two, it was still striking the way Canadian liberals were unable to address the issue in anything other than a look-who’s-on-your-team sense. At first, I took it as read that that was because I’m a pretty repellent fellow, and if you get the chance to link me to some neo-Nazi nut, who wouldn’t grab it? But then an affable and principled Liberal Member of Parliament introduced a freedom-of-speech motion essentially supporting the Steyn line and he too got jumped on as a neo-Nazi-by-association even though he is a “visible minority” – or, in his words, a “brown guy”. As one Liberal spinmeister put it to any other party figures thinking of wandering off the reservation:

Do you agree with this stunt? Not surprisingly, the Nazis do.

So what? These particular Nazis also oppose George W Bush and the Iraq war. Does that make Bush hatred and the end-the-war movement unrespectable, too? Modern liberalism is so rooted in identity politics – approved tribes and unapproved tribes – that even its ideas (“tolerance”, ”diversity”) extend only to favored groups.