Should the left abandon conflict for consensus? What neoliberal commentator David Brooks doesn't get

Comment published in New York Times online in response to “Understanding student mobbists,” by David Brooks, March 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/opinion/student-mobs.html?comments#commentsContainer:

"The concession of politeness is always a political concession," said French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Brooks's Hobbesian rejection of "conflict theory" entails denying one side of republican social and political life, affirming a depoliticized politics that is sanitized against conflict or expressions of it that threaten to become unruly. It is to affirm a notion of politics as essentially consensual and so permitting expression of conflict only as polite disagreement. Yet, republican social life always involves social conflicts; democracy is contestation. 

What is most wrong with so many of the college student radicals is not the embrace of conflict nor the wrong idea of its (properly polite, patient, and parliamentary) pursuit, but the wrong understanding of who the parties are and what the stakes. They should be opposing the neoliberal state with its apparatuses of policing, and management through psychology.

Identity politics and social justice warriors are part of a liberal (not left-wing) paradigm, with roots in Affirmative Action, that over-valorizes demographically defined social differences within the framework of meritocratic and neoliberal policies that express the material interests of the ruling class of professionals, "leaders," and managers. The complaints these students make are only about inclusion and complaints directed at protection by authorities enforcing a morality. 

We have enough "beautiful" law enforcement and need a new politics.