One of the best-selling books in America right now, Ibram Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist,” calls for some astonishingly autocratic policies. It would establish a federal Department of Anti-racism with veto power over any local, state, or federal policies considered racially inequitable by its bureaucrats. (No one in the agency would be appointed by or accountable to the president or Congress.) It would also “investigate private racist policies” and “monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas … empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”

This proposal to tear up both the checks and balances on executive fiat in Washington and the protections for individual rights embedded in our Constitution is one indicator among many that woke activists have fallen headlong for authoritarianism.

Their very language of group conflict and oppression is of course taken directly from Marxism. And there is a harsh intemperance and lack of proportionality in the behavior of today’s social-justice warriors. They say white supremacism is universal in America, not an aberration. Their favored graffiti spray tag is “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards). They want to defund and shut down police departments, not fix them. They call for lawmakers to “abolish ICE” and fling our southern border wide open. There is a growing fanaticism in which gray arguments and toleration for opposing points of view disappear.

If politics is the methodical organization of resentments, identity politics runs on the methodical organization of rage. Rage is an awful fuel for the gradual give-and-take needed to produce social progress in a non-authoritarian democracy. Alas, the Americans under age 30 who are manning the barricades of identity socialism loathe messy give-and-take. They prefer, as columnist Bari Weiss has noted, to squash resisters. Revolution rather than reform is increasingly the goal.

There is a soaring tendency to personalize disagreements. Protesters now regularly descend on the homes of people they disagree with. They hound them in restaurants. They harass family members. They release phone numbers and personal information online (“doxing”). They get opponents disinvited from public events, and dismissed from public posts (“deplatforming”).

Character assassination and purges — also hallmarks of a totalitarian temptation — are on the rise. A University of Chicago economist was forced to resign as editor of the Journal of Political Economy after he argued, “We need more police, we need to pay them more, we need to train them better.” (The day he wrote that, June 8, was the most murderous ever recorded in his home city; Chicago’s homicide rate is currently up 51% from the previous year.) When he said poor people benefit from positive role models, Pete Buttigieg was denounced as racist. The art and museum world was swept by severe ideological purges this summer.