You can imagine my dismay when I read in the New York Times March 6, 2025: “People say they are intimidated by online attacks from the president, concerned about harm to their businesses or worried about the safety of their families.”
Sad! Apparently liberals now experience what American conservatives have suffered for decades.
People say they are intimidated by online attacks from the president, concerned about harm to their businesses or worried about the safety of their families.
The silence grows louder every day.
Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.
Even longtime Republican hawks on Capitol Hill, stunned by President Trump’s revisionist history that Ukraine is to blame for its invasion by Russia, and his Oval Office blowup at President Volodymyr Zelensky, have either muzzled themselves, tiptoed up to criticism without naming Mr. Trump or completely reversed their positions.
More than six weeks into the second Trump administration, there is a chill spreading over political debate in Washington and beyond.
People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Mr. Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Mr. Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man.
“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die.”
The best book on the topic of conservative claims of cultural oppression is a work-in-progress by attorney and philosopher Rony Guldmann. It’s called Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia.
Here are some excerpts:
* Liberals have successfully pegged conservatism as authoritarian in the public mind, conservatives insist that the authoritarian tendencies of so-called liberals run much deeper than theirs. Diagnosing the roots of liberal hostility to home-schooling, Kevin Williamson observes: “The Left’s organizing principle is control, and the possibility that children might commonly be raised outside of its control matrix is an existential threat from the progressive point of view. Institutions such as free markets and free speech terrify progressives, because they are the result of arrangements in which nobody is in control… Home-schooling isn’t for everybody, but every home-school student, like every firearm in private hands, is a quiet little declaration of independence. It’s no accident that the people who want to seize your guns are also the ones who want to seize your children.”
* Conservatives confront what they believe is an iniquitous social hierarchy that always credits liberals with reflectiveness, discernment, and empathy while branding them as smug, mean-spirited, and authoritarian.
* a conservative politics of recognition, demanding that conservatives be understood on their own terms, rather than dismissed as authoritarian, bigoted, benighted, or misogynistic.
* the modus operandi is now the slander and intimidation of conservatives.
* Liberals ask us to put ourselves in the shoes of the less fortunate, so [Alan Charles] Kors proposes the following thought-experiment: “Imagine secular, skeptical, or leftist faculty and students confronted by a religious harassment code that prohibited “denigration” of evangelical or Catholic beliefs, or that made the classroom or campus a space where evangelical or Catholic students must be protected against feeling “intimidated,” offended,” or, by their own subjective experience, victims of a “hostile environment. Imagine a university of patriotic “loyalty oaths” where leftists were deemed responsible for the tens of millions of victims of communism, and where free minds were prohibited from creating a hostile environment for patriots, or from offending that “minority” of individuals who are descended from Korean or Vietnam War veterans. Imagine, as well, that for every “case” that became public, there were scores or hundreds of cases in which the “offender” or “victimizer,” desperate to preserve a job or gain a degree, accepted a confidential plea bargain that included a semester’s or a year’s reeducation in “religious sensitivity” or “patriotic sensitivity” seminars run by the university’s “Evangelical Center, “Patriotic Center,” or “Office of Religious and Patriotic Compliance.”
* Where conservatives seek the truth, liberals cultivate “rhetorical firepower,” a hollow verbal dexterousness that aims, not to persuade, but to bewilder, intimidate, and humiliate. …Using their empty verbal acrobatics, liberals have bewildered the superior intuitive wisdom of the ordinary American, which is effective in the real world but ill-suited to the artificial rules through which liberals maintain their dominion.
* Since the vision of the anointed can at most enjoy the passive acquiescence, and never the lucid assent, of the great majority, it must be promoted and defended by an unaccountable intellectual class. Having captured America’s most influential institutions, including the media, Hollywood, the universities, public education, foundations, government bureaucracies, and, perhaps most importantly, the courts, the liberal elites employ their privileged position to foist their parochial values upon a silent and largely powerless majority of ordinary Americans. Even where democracy has not been legally disabled by the courts and the administrative state, this residue of freedom comes too late when informal coercion can achieve unofficially whatever cannot be achieved officially.
* Laura Ingraham observes: “They think we’re stupid. They think our patriotism is stupid. They think our churchgoing is stupid. They think our flag-waving is stupid. They think having big families is stupid. They think where we live—anywhere but near or in a few major cities—is stupid. They think our SUVs are stupid. They think owning a gun is stupid. They think our abiding belief in the goodness of America and its founding principles is stupid. They think the choices we make at the ballot box are stupid. They think George W. Bush is stupid. And without a doubt, they will think this book is stupid.”
Where liberals see stupidity, conservative claimants of cultural oppression see the silent heroism of a beleaguered and colonized people, who resist the encroachments of a coterie of cloistered elites, uprooted rationalists and cosmopolitans with nothing but contempt for the indigenous culture of the less eloquent but more wholesome ordinary American.
* Robert Bork warns: “Persons capable of high achievement in one field or another may find meaning in work, may find community among colleagues, and may not particularly mind social and moral separation otherwise. Such people are unlikely to need the more sordid distractions that popular culture now offers. But very large segments of the population do not fall into that category. For them, the drives of liberalism are catastrophic.”
It is no coincidence that the liberal vision is advanced by those whose professional stature provides their lives with a meaning and coherence that the assault on traditional values undermines for the silent majority—which is consequently left susceptible to debilitating social ills that the elites are privileged to avoid.
* Even as it subverts old inequalities, the New Class “silently inaugurates a new hierarchy of the knowing, the knowledgeable, the reflexive and insightful.”
* The “cognitive elites,” argues Harris, cannot entertain opposing arguments because “they do not see them as arguments in the first place.” Instead, they dismiss the fears and grievances of conservatives as “prejudices that have been programmed into them, requiring not logical rebuttal but open derision.” Angelo Codevilla observes that “the notion that the common people’s words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our Ruling Class.”
* When a progressive tells a conservative “You can’t possibly mean that,” the point, charges Kahane, “is to stop the argument in its tracks,” to assert the progressive’s “higher reality.” “Everyone knows that” is likewise “[a]nother all-purpose put-down,” intended to broadcast that the conservative is a “complete idiot,” just as “You’re not really…” is meant to suggest that the conservative interlocutor “is little better than a cave-dweller, a superstitious moron whose walnut-size brain is probably stuffed with religious ‘dogma.’” Here is the censorship of fashion in all its insidiousness. A liberal asking a conservative “You can’t possibly mean…” is like a man admonishing a woman to “calm down”—something which may not be terribly offensive in the abstract but assumes a more nefarious meaning in the context of a long history of negative stereotypes functioning to reinforce the position of the dominant class… Though feigning that he is engaged in a thoughtful exchange between inquiring minds, the liberal quietly invokes a presumed social consensus before which the conservative is expected to cower in fear.
* when a conservative looks in the mirror, he sees only “a coward, a weakling, a quivering mass of protoplasm, a spineless jellyfish, a neutered creature stripped of dignity and cowering in fear.” Not content to simply present their side of the argument, liberals have moreover de-centered conservatives’ very sense of themselves, undermining their basic agency powers.
* In fearing for our physical safety, we are responding to a situation that can be described scientifically in terms of causal forces with the potential to impinge on us in specified ways. Fear remains “subjective” inasmuch as it is an element of human experience.
* Being fearful and anxious before the unknown and untried, conservatives exhibit a higher need for order, closure, and structure…
* Feminism is just another form of liberal elitism, one more arena on which the anointed mock, scold, and intimidate the benighted under the deceptive veneer of enlightenment, progress, and liberation.
* Whether or not the liberal in question has personally slandered any given conservative, he benefits from the general practice of slandering conservatives, because the social hierarchy which these slanders have engendered has now been built into the liberal identity and the broader social space it inhabits. Even if the liberal has not have personally slandered a non-racist conservative as racist, he has almost certainly participated in the general discourse of Social Darwinism in some fashion or other, thereby contributing to a cultural environment in which it becomes possible to associate free markets with slavery or genocide. This rhetorical environment harms conservatives even if it does not do so in a “one-at-a-time” sense, to borrow again from MacKinnon. Even where liberals do not directly accuse conservatives of racism, the latter know they are socially vulnerable to the charge, which gives liberals a power-advantage that they wield irrespective of their conscious designs. And this is enough to implicate them in conservatives’ cultural oppression, and hence liberal privilege. If the grievances of conservatives seem downright hallucinatory to liberals, this is for the same reason the grievances of feminists seem hallucinatory to many men (and some women), because a standard of atomistic causality is deployed to obscure the essentially collective, totalistic, and contextual nature of the injury. In permitting liberals to insinuate without stating, this background simply immunizes liberals to confrontation and argument, making their conservaphobia invisible to their rationalist epistemology.
* Much of the legislation that liberals would veto under the harm-principle as unduly coercive can be defended as a response to the “psychic harm” and “communal harm” which the targeted conduct obviously causes. After all, “psychic distress is a kind of mental pain” and “is plainly something that people prefer to avoid.” There is thus an obvious sense in which conduct that causes it—like the consumption or dissemination of pornography—is “harmful” and falls within the ambit of the harm-principle, irrespective of secondary effects. The same holds true of communal harm: “If people get satisfaction or happiness from living in a particular kind of community, then conduct that subverts that kind of community and thus reduces such happiness inflicts a kind of ‘harm.’”
Yet liberals will greet such claims with “peremptory dismissal” and “dismissive indignation.”
