The oddest thing about this essay - is that the people he's kind of lamenting - the 'banners' particularly in academia and the press - are by far not classically conventional or authoritative types.

That's where this analysis goes way wrong.

'Ban culture' is driven by 'aggressive antagonists' who generally have power through the mob, or some kind of 'new' authority, they are 'anti classical power' in their very identity.

I would characterise them as the 'least conventional' people.

The logic I think goes off the rails there.

Banners are 'people angry at the system'. Not 'people adamantly supporting the system'.

Mr. Graham may not realize that those pushing ban culture are in his camp - 'SJW' has more in common with Entrepreneur/CEO and Artist than it does 'Police' or 'Justice System'.

Also the author's choice of words to describe the groups says far more about the author than his musings on personality types.

Most tellingly 'tattletales' and 'quasi-fascists' as those who support the rules and 'Galileo' as those who break them.

It also speaks to class a little bit, because for common people, in reality, the rule breakers are more likely to be actual criminals. Like the 'bad' kind.

The closest 'common science' we can get at would be the 'Big 5' personality types of which 'conscientiousness' is somewhat correlated with following rules. Prisons are full of 'unconscientious people'. And most succesfull people are highly conscientious.

That said, it's not an exact correlation and his 'sheep' type 'vs' aggressive type are probably very differently: conventional people in the burbs, aspirational conventional in business. (I literally read that yesterday, I'm sorry I cannot find the reference, but 'Big 5 conscientiousness' does break down into sub-types).

The underlying problem with the analysis, is that there is often an inherent morality in 'convention', which the author's choice of words seems to kind of deny.

'Look both ways before crossing a street' or 'wear a mask' - these are very important rules to follow, and we need these conventions. None of us are smart enough to really understand the nature of all the rules, so we end up having to follow a lot of them.

Dr. Fauci says 'wear a mask' - and since he's the expert, I trust him on the whole, even though I could point at a myriad issues, I know it's a complicated thing.

Also:

"The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligent wants to undertake that kind of work, so it ends up being done by the stupid. "

So here's the thing - when CNN is deciding 'who to ban' - this is very bad.

But when Facebook is deciding how to moderate - this is not bad, and Graham is wrong to suggest only dummies would want to do this. This is an astonishingly difficult problem to solve, it's not bounded by the norms we normally understand, so it should be very attractive to real thinkers.

People say horrible, horrible things all the time. Tons of harassment, abuse, doxing, bullying, point-blank racism - and I'm not talking 'intellectuals being called out' - I'm talking 'neighbours don't want the n-word on their street' and 'my boss is a faot', people making death threats. Graham is speaking a little bit from the bubble - 'most' of censorship is simply just getting people to stop saying they're going to kill each other - not 'banning ideas'.

So I think this thought-piece has a big hole: most people shutting down freedom of expression (in the free world) in the more intellectual sense - are not 'conventional' by his own description. Not at all.