I am old enough to remember times where at least some individual rights - speech, association, honest elections, equality in the eyes of the law for all people regardless of their identity, due process - were the causes that most of the left would support. There were people on the left that genuinely supported Civil Rights movement because they believed all people should have equal rights. Now equality is offensive for them, and so are due process, free speech and other values their previous generation wrote on their banners.
There is a big difference however between the traditional old American left largely coming out of an academic, fairly elite milieu, and the much more diverse left today.
For people like Chomsky who used to defend the right to Holocaust denial say, it's a very abstract, intellectual debate. For a lot of Asian working class people, proliferation of hate-speech is a very real threat today. I don't think this tension is new either. Even during the civil rights era, there were marked differences between black activists (or even militant groups) and the public left-wing intellectuals.
Equality is not offensive and a left-wing value but today it is more obvious that there is a tension between formal equality in front of the law and genuine equality in the real world. And because there is now more voices in politics, the left is changing.And so is the right by the way, whose elite values are very, very far removed from the ordinary voter.
> For a lot of Asian working class people, proliferation of hate-speech is a very real threat today.
Anti-Asian hate speech has the history over a century long, at least, in America - sad, but true. It's not a new thing. And for all those years, Asian community managed to achieve huge success and become very prosperous, in fact so much that now the woke higher education institutions discriminate against this community (as they did against Jewish community years ago) - because they are too successful and make their formalistic "diversity" goals harder to achieve! Clearly, abandoning the ideals of the free speech is not necessary for the community to succeed, even in the presence of haters.
> there is a tension between formal equality in front of the law and genuine equality in the real world
No, there's no tension. Of course, the former does not guarantee the latter - it's only a necessary condition, but never a sufficient one. There's much more that a society needs to achieve equality of opportunity - if it's at all possible, and it will never achieve the equality of outcomes, of course. But the paradoxical conclusion the new left is making from this - completely common in human affairs - difference between the ideal and the worldly practice falling short of it - that the ideal has to be abandoned completely, since our inability to achieve it - even witnessing the huge progress that has been achieved - means it's a false ideal.
Even worse is that to replace this ideal, the old and tired ideas of racial division, segregation, racial hate and unequal treatment depending on skin color and ethnic identity, are unearthed, dusted off, and paraded as some kind of solution for inequality. Not only it could never work - forced inequality can't lead to equality - it is morally repugnant, and will cost us as a society a lot to drive those ghosts of the past back underground where they belong.
Some of the group's members might actually be pluralist civil libertarians at heart.
But this news demonstrates that the vast majority are not. They were authoritarians in libertarians' clothing, and today's political environment is woke enough for them to swap out their duds.
It seems like you're complaining about the fact that the left is not conservative at heart, which is odd. It's not exactly some sort of hidden agenda that the point of the left is to win elections and wield executive power rather than obstructing the government and focusing solely on individual rights.