If it is the representatives of a democracy, you have the tyranny of the majority to discriminate against “offensive” homosexuals, for instance. If it is a dictatorship, you have the whims of the ruling tyrant or party—which will inevitably find challenges to its rule and ideology offensive. If it is public or private institutions, they will decide that whistleblowers must be fired for damaging the bureaucracy, regardless of whether they told the truth in the public interest. If it is the military, they will suppress pictures of torture for fear of providing aid to the enemy. If it is the intelligence services they will say that leaks about illegal surveillance must be stopped because they might harm national security, just as pornography might harm women. Why should they have to prove it, when liberals have assured them that there is no need to demonstrate actual damage?

In Britain the state is showing that real power does not and has never been in the hands of over-confident intellectuals. It is telling academics to report on campus Islamists, even when they are not engaged in violence. “Thank you very much,” the politicians seem to be saying to the illiberal philosophers, the organisers of blacklists, and the intellectuals who dismissed free speech as an illusion. “If you say you can ban speakers even though they are not provoking violence, we can demand that you spy on Islamist students, even though they are not violent either.”

All of a sudden and with a blackly comic haste, British academics are scrambling to rediscover the virtue of freedom of speech, a liberty they spent a generation denigrating. All of a sudden. And much too late.

No, no, no, the liberals protest. We never wanted to spy and censor on behalf of the powerful, but on behalf of the powerless. But again how are they to judge the loss of dignity that can justify criminal penalties? Perhaps the vehemence of the offence taken is the decisive factor. Maybe if the offended can prove that they are shocked beyond measure, they would provide legitimate grounds to censor. If so, we must give in to Islamists, who feel the hurt of blasphemy so keenly they will murder anyone they deem to have blasphemed. Many have given in and bowed to a blasphemy code enforced at gunpoint. If they were being consistent, they would have to back down if Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Scientologists, Satanists and atheists followed suit and started murdering the authors of unpleasant depictions of their beliefs. If conservatives could prove that the discussion of left-wing ideas incited pain, or left-wingers could say the same about right-wing ideas, they would presumably have to take the logical step of deciding that political argument was offensive too.

Identity politics and the demands for freedom from offence it breeds create a Hobbesian world where everyone can demand the censorship of everyone else. There is no better proof of this than the fate of the politically correct themselves.

Strip away the appearance of a solid ideology, and you see the contradications. The tendency of the modern liberal-left to excuse radical Islam is supported by the politically correct belief that liberals should support a religion of the disadvantaged. In the name of liberalism, they fail to fight a creed that is sexist, racist, homophobic and, in its extreme forms, genocidal and totalitarian. Their political correctness has turned their principles inside out, and led them to abandon their beliefs in female and homosexual equality.

But the difficulties in pretending there are no conflicts between groups are as nothing compared to the pretence that there are no conflicts within them. Michael Ezra, a friend who is researching the growth of the illiberal intelligentsia, says that he is constantly reminded of Trotsky’s warning about the Bolshevik party’s claim that it represented the working class. A rapid descent follows, Trotsky said: “The organisation of the party substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally the ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee.” Or in the case of feminist identity politics the people with the loudest voices substitute themselves for an entire gender.