A Nature editorial urges us to do the impossible – ” fight discrimination in all its forms” while not “excluding conservative voices from debate.”

How possible or impossible that is of course depends on what is meant by “excluding from debate.” That activity tends to be used in different senses depending on where the user is in the paragraph. It tends to mean one thing in its first appearance and another thing in the next sentence and a third in the one after that. Or, in other words, it tends to be deployed as a nice respectable goal in airy generalizations, without much effort to explain how it actually works.

Nature was prompted by a couple of Times think pieces, one by Nicholas Kristof in May and the other by Mark Lilla days after the election.

The article by Mark Lilla, a researcher at Columbia University in New York City who specializes in the history of Western intellectual, political and religious thought, called for an end to what he described as an overemphasis by liberals on racial, gender and sexual identity politics. He believes that this focus distracts from core fundamental concepts of democracy and so weakens social cohesion and civic responsibility.

That’s an article or book I’ve read many many times over the past twenty years or more. There’s usually something to it; it’s true that identity politics can get obsessive and narrow and unproductively hostile. On the other hand it’s so difficult not to notice that these things are so often written by people who are not in need of “racial, gender and sexual identity politics.” It’s so difficult not to notice that Mark Lilla and Nicholas Kristof are not subject to misogyny or racism or homophobia.

In short, [Lilla] asserted that many progressives live in bubbles; that they are educationally programmed to be attuned to diversity issues, yet have “shockingly little to say” about political and democratic fundamentals such as class, economics, war and policy issues affecting the common good. Of direct relevance to the US election, he argued that the excessive focus on identity politics by urban and academic elites has left many white, religious and rural groups feeling alienated, threatened and ignored in an unwelcoming environment where the issues that matter to them are given little or no attention.

Wait. How is it that class affects the common good but sex and race do not? How could that be the case? Class is about hierarchy, just as sex and race are. Some people benefit from class and others don’t; some people benefit from class by exploiting the people who don’t benefit from class. That’s what “class” is. Talking about it is “divisive” in exactly the same way talking about sex and race is. Economics also works differently for different classes, sexes, and races.

Also, white people and religious people are not the persecuted or neglected minority here. Rural people are to some extent, but that’s also what rural means to more than some extent. Rural means far fewer people around, and that means services much less densely provided. It’s not possible to provide the amenities of a city without the population density of a city. That fact is not the fault of the bubble-dwelling elites with their identity politics. It’s economics – that which Lilla wants the bubble-dwellers to pay more attention to.

Lilla argues, perhaps unconvincingly, that fixating on the concerns of particular groups has been divisive, and he calls instead for a focus on unifying issues that affect the majority of people in the United States, with highly charged narrower issues such as sexuality and race tackled with a more-measured sense of scale. But it need not be a trade-off.

Ah yes, good idea – let’s stop paying attention to the ways the majority can shit on minorities, and go back to treating the majority as all there is. Let’s go back to ignoring sex and race, and letting white men run everything unopposed.

The article comes at a time when many in science and academia are rightly worried that Trump’s odious racist, sexist and anti-intellectual remarks during his campaign risk unacceptably broadening the limits of acceptable discourse — and freeing and normalizing people’s worst base instincts and a rhetoric of hate. Not surprisingly, the column has been controversial and has sparked vigorous debate.

But the discussion echoes points made earlier this year by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, directed at academics. Kristof, who has long championed diversity issues and so can hardly be accused of conservative bias, argued in a column entitled ‘A confession of liberal intolerance’ that academics are often selectively tolerant, but are intolerant when it comes to considering conservative or religious viewpoints.

It’s shocking, isn’t it. All conservative and religious viewpoints have is everything, while the pesky lefty intellectuals have…each other.

Kristof also argued that the low and plunging representation of conservatives and evangelicals on US faculties, and bias against these groups, is itself impoverishing intellectual diversity and discourse. He pointed to an effort to change this state of affairs: the Heterodox Academy, a website set up by centrist social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University to advocate tangible remedies. His column did not go down well with liberals. “You don’t diversify with idiots,” stated one of the most highly recommended comments.

Again, it depends how you define things. But it seems fatuous to me to lament a lack of evangelicals on university faculties. Evangelicals are by definition opposed to the fundamental approach to inquiry that universities are there to teach. People who are wedded to the literal truth of one “holy” book are disqualified from being competent academics. There’s no need for affirmative action to make sure biblical literalists are well represented on university faculties.

Academics must be vigilant and resist normalization of Trump’s crude vision of society, but must also look in the mirror. A significant chunk of the US population voted for Trump. Are some bigots and racists? Yes; but most aren’t, and progressive academic liberals can’t simply dismiss them as retrograde.

Yes they can, and so can we. It may be true that some Trump voters are not bigots and racists, but Trump’s open and insistent sexism and racism did not prevent them from voting for him. So yes, we damn well can dismiss people who voted for him as retrograde, because they are.