“‘Shut up,’ he explained.” That’s a sentence from Ring Lardner’s short story “The Young Immigrunts.” It’s an exasperated father’s response from the driver’s seat to his child’s question, “Are you lost, Daddy?” It also can be taken as the emblematic response of today’s liberals to anyone questioning their certitudes. As with the father in the story, it’s a response that indicates uneasy apprehension — the fear that they have no good answer. OPINION It was not always so. Today’s liberals, like those of Lardner’s day, pride themselves on their critical minds, their openness to new and unfamiliar ideas, their tolerance of diversity and differences. But often that characterization...
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