Tucker Carlson's interview with Shelby Steele deepened my understanding of liberals. I gained insight into the modern American liberal's profound sense of moral superiority and identity which renders ideological conversation and debate impossible. An opponent is evil and his or her speech must be shut down.
Shelby Steele's Wall Street Journal article which occasioned the interview is titled, The Exhaustion of American Liberalism.
Partial transcript beginning at the 3:15 minute mark:
Liberalism is not an ideology. It is an identity. People who think of themselves as liberals really are adhering to an identity, to the idea of "my personal self." I am the kind of person who is above racism, who is above sexism. And if you take that position that I don't like, then you are challenging not just my ideas, but you are challenging me as a human being with a particular identity and that is why the passions, the ferocity of the Left that we see today in the streets and elsewhere.
There's a complete shutdown of any honest intellectual exchange because you are not threatening my ideas, you are threatening me, and I don't have the patience to be reasonable and argue with you on the basis of reason. I need to literally extinguish or annihilate you in your position. You see the anti-Trump sentiment in many ways. Annihilate him! There is nothing redeeming in this man! And so forth, because... liberalism is an identity