"There is a sort of orthodoxy required among liberals.
Do you believe in climate change?
What about the gender pay gap?
Those who do not toe the line often find themselves exiled — not just from the fold, but from the conversation.
To some extent, these views are merely what we mean when we say the word “liberal” — they describe a political program roughly supported by one major party.
But at some point, these views have become prescriptive; they have morphed into a moral structure to provide meaning and guidance in place of religion.
The practice of attacking views as incorrect, or even as manifestations of evil, can be found in many religious denominations.
Early Christianity — not to mention the Reformation — is rife with examples of vitriolic debates that ended with consensus, and one side becoming villainized as heretical.
The Sunnis and Shi’ites in Islam have been fighting it out for centuries, and they still hate one another.
Today, some benighted hicks and malicious liars still doubt the doctrine of climate change as a deadly threat.
When Real Clear Politics writer David Harsanyi tweeted “Celebrate climate change, an externality of the greatest poverty destroying program in the history of mankind,” he was called a psychopath and a sociopath.
“When a group confuses politics with moral doctrine, it may have trouble comprehending how a decent human could disagree with its positions,” Harsanyi explained.
This, he suspected, “is probably why so many liberals can bore into the deepest nooks of my soul to ferret out all those motivations but can’t waste any time arguing about the issue itself.”
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