1/Let me riff a little bit on this post by my esteemed colleague @tylercowen: bloomberg.com/view/articles/…
2/I strongly agree with this. Rightist and conservative discourse is indeed being driven offline. Not just off of Twitter, but off of anywhere where it could be screenshotted and posted on Twitter to create outrage. 
3/I disagree with this. Intellectuals on the right, I find, complain constantly about the left (albeit increasingly offline), just like intellectuals on the left complain constantly about the right. This has not changed, I think.
4/Tyler doesn't go into the actual content of the discussions on the right and left very much, but here is what I see.
Economic issues have almost entirely disappeared. Intellectual discourse on both sides is now almost exclusively about racial and gender issues.
Economic issues have almost entirely disappeared. Intellectual discourse on both sides is now almost exclusively about racial and gender issues.
5/On the left, the drive to purge racism, sexism, etc. from American society is very strong, and most discourse concerns this drive - either decrying examples of racism/sexism, discussing institutions that maintain these -isms, or discussing how to effect change.
6/On the right, the consensus position seems to be that differences in racial outcomes are due to (probably innate) "group differences", and that innate differences also explain the persistence of (and justify) traditional gender roles.
7/But because people on the right are, generally, afraid to express this idea in public, they instead talk about the idea of free speech. Basically, to the right, "free speech" is a proxy for "the right to say races and sexes are inherently different without fear of censure."
8/As far as I can tell, this is 100% of what the "free speech" debate is about - the idea of "group differences". Every idea that people on the right seem to feel they can't express in public boils down, eventually, to this.
9/The debate over racism and sexism, and the meta-debate over "free speech", is so intense that economic debates usually get shoved to the side, or relegated to a niche. Discussions of UBI or Job Guarantee are a refreshing break!
10/The age of Trump is one of racial and gender animus. Trump's divisiveness and hate have infected every corner of our intellectual landscape, poisoned every discussion.
American intellectual life is just one more thing that won't be healthy again until Trump is gone.
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American intellectual life is just one more thing that won't be healthy again until Trump is gone.
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