Today, of course, the contention that some ideas are better than others—let alone that some deserve to be called “the best”—is rejected as an elitist crime against “diversity.”

The cult, the ideology of diversity—what we have baptized as “identity politics,” which represents the systematic rejection of everything connected with impartiality and objective, impersonal standards—is the enabling presupposition of the destructive cauldron of racialist obsession in which our society is now marinating.

The irony, as Allan Bloom understood, is that our current intolerance is the perverted progeny of the primary liberal value of openness. It used to be, Bloom noted in “The Closing of the American Mind,” that openness was “the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness … has rendered openness meaningless.”

Roger Kimball, “Franklin’s Admonition” (July 4, 2020)