>http://nationalpost.com/opinion/barbara-kay-wlus-contemptible-conduct-proof-of-intellectual-assault-underway-on-campuses
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>"... as John M. Ellis, emeritus professor at the University of California Santa Cruz and chairman of the California Association of Scholars, observes in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Higher Education’s Deeper Sickness,” “[I]ntellectual dominance promotes stupidity. As one side becomes numerically stronger, its discipline weakens. The greater the imbalance between the two sides, the more incoherent and irrational the majority will become…. With almost no intellectual opponents remaining, campus radicals have lost the ability to engage with arguments and resort instead to the lazy alternative of name-calling: opponents are all ‘fascists,’ ‘racists’ or ‘white supremacists’.”"
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>"This contemptible episode has proven, if proof were needed, that, as one WSJ letter-writer put it: “The left is no longer able to recognize opposing political thought as thought.”"
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The writer takes for granted that there are "the two sides."

That assumption, not the dominance of one or the other, is the fundamental issue facing intellectual dialogue here in the US.
Way back when I was in academe, the debate subjects were empiricism vs idealism, religious belief vs atheism, censorship vs freedom of expression, Hemingway vs Faulkner, Yankees vs Dodgers, Wordsworth vs Coleridge etc. , etc.

This Left vs Right thing seems to have come along since the sixties.
It's almost a throwback to the days when people defined themselves exclusively in terms of their religious beliefs
Some people have attributed it the collapse of other institutions, like religion and marriage and that makes some sense.