Is left-wing illiberalism dead?

After living through the Dan Feller-SHEAR controversy and the James Sweet-AHA affair, the latter of which had a lot to do with my resignation as president of the Conference on Faith and History, I hope the illiberal fever that spread through American culture in the past decade has finally reached a breaking point.

Here is Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic:

Much of blue America is now experiencing a determined reaction against the excesses of that bygone period. Many important organizations that had cooperated with mob-driven cancellations came to experience regret, installing new leaders or standards in an explicit attempt to avoid a recurrence. The New York Times, perhaps liberal America’s most influential institution, has made a series of moves reflecting implicit regret at its treatment of figures like Bennet and the science writer Donald McNeil, including publishing a pro-free-speech editorial and defying demands by activists and writers that it stop skeptically covering youth gender treatment.

Corporations have pulled back on the surge in spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that began in 2020, and some universities may follow. Many elite universities have stopped requiring job applicants to submit DEI statements, which have been widely criticized as a de facto ideological screening device. The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has found that the upsurge in attention by scholars and journalists to race and gender bias peaked a few years ago, as did reports of cancellations…

I believe that the illiberal-left movement has not merely declined. It is dead, or at least barely breathing. When was the last time you saw a social-media mob have any effect outside social media? Who is the last person to be publicly shamed and unjustly driven out of their high-status job over some misunderstood joke or stray comment? Indeed, the roster of cancellation victims has not only stopped growing, but begun ticking downward. Five years ago, Saturday Night Live fired the comedian Shane Gillis before his first appearance on the show in response to outrage over offensive jokes he had made on a podcast. This past February, he was brought back as a guest host. David Shor, who lost his job in 2020 for suggesting that violence is politically counterproductive, helped direct advertising by the Democratic Party’s most powerful super PAC this year.

Read the entire piece here.