DO TELL: How Stigma Sows Seeds of Its Own Defeat: Defending the liberal project is a Sisyphean task in part because successfully inculcating liberal norms leads to habits that weaken the ability to sustain them. Plus: “Stigmatization of an idea, by design, intends to convert, not persuade, by bypassing reason and going right for our tribal desire to fit in. But I think the rarely noted effect of this conversion happening is that it robs the converted of the tools to persuade others going forward. In other words, if you haven’t been persuaded by the merits of a political idea, how do you persuade others? You can’t without resorting to the same sort of stigmatizing argument. This, I think, at least partially explains the left’s staleness over the past two years, and the cultural center-left elite’s utter shock at the inadequacy of its invincible ascendant coalition.”

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. And voting is by secret ballot. . . .