I remember when endless, pointless war was a bad thing. But these people want a war against -isms just as the Bush administration did. And just as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld wanted to tap your phones in case you made a joke about a bomb, they want to monitor your every interaction to make sure you’re not doing anything problematic. They want to tell you what songs you’re allowed to sing along with in your own car, by yourself. They want to institute an elaborate “sex bureaucracy” to manage and control the clumsy hookups of college students. I remember that being a liberal meant believing in privacy — the privacy of consenting adults in their own homes, for instance. But now anyone is at risk of exposure for an off-color social media post or a wrong move on a date. If privacy were a liberal value, why did liberal journalists gleefully dig into the Reddit posts of mild-mannered Ken Bone after his red sweater was a hit at a town hall debate in the fall of 2016? Why is it so easy to know so much about romantic encounters between celebrities and their fans, between senior and junior journalists, between pairs of people I haven’t even heard of before? If liberals still value privacy, then why is it considered politically necessary to publish so much of this stuff?

I remember when due process was a liberal refrain, too. Graduating from college ten years ago I applied for (but didn’t get) a job at the American Civil Liberties Union, where I would have been a paralegal working to support lawyers representing Guantanamo Bay detainees. There was a moment when I thought to myself: Can you really help out terrorists, murderers, killers? Some might be innocent, but what of the others? But I felt two things very strongly: first, that it was only through a fair and principled process that innocence or guilt could be determined to begin with; and second, that even the clearly guilty had a right to representation, as a matter of basic dignity and humanity. These days, the anti-due process rumblings are coming from liberals, too. In my discipline, philosophy, there is a fairly large and active group of professors who believe that there’s a pervasive sexual harassment problem amongst philosophers; in this group there has been talk for years of the idea that “due process culture” is “outdated.” These accusations are of things so heinous, so horrible, that we should alter our sense of fundamental norms and rights in response. What should the takeaway be, for an aspiring liberal? That mass murder and terror aren’t so heinous or horrible?