1) You ever wonder how many people on the opposite side of your political opinions have actually read books -from- your side?

Statistically (and in my experience over the last 3 years), if you’re progressive , the answer to the question “have you read the sharpest minds that disagree with you” is essentially, “what’s reading”, “why would I read racists” or a laugh react on Facebook with no elaboration; a less-than-ideal response to what is basically asking whether or not you live in a bubble. ^[1]

And, as BlueSky indicates, “bubble” is not an insult, but rather, to hear the left say it, it’s a pejorative used by conservatives who are jealous of not being let into this college-educated, and yet very poorly-read and easily-offended club. ^[2]

Conversely, the conservatives can be guilty of over-reading, if they read much at all. It is often books from popular authors on their side while letting Fox or Daily Wire handle what the other side believes. Which is a mistake. The primary texts of Critical Race Theory, for example, are far worse than any caricature the Fox News Channel is capable of. FNC’s view of DEI is relatively accurate, but it’s just enough to give viewers a superiority complex without being able to articulate why CRT/DEI is truly evil. There is enough horror in the Communist Manifesto, Stamped, CRT: Key Writings that Formed the Movement, and a particularly awful book from 2019 called “The Case Against Free Speech” to work with, that Fox does progressivism a service by not articulating what it really is all about.

2)  I’ve noticed a profound intellectual arrogance lately among progressives. For example, when the left loses, it’s a common refrain among leftist media that “college educated people voted Democrat”, as if that means people who are smarter voted “the right way”. And yet, these same institutions, like the Atlantic and the New Yorker, struggle to come to grips with the fact that a college degree is, if you look one level deeper, neither a sign of wisdom nor competence. Considering how anti-philosophical colleges are these days, a degree indicates nothing more than your ability to regurgitate information, most of which you will never use. A Master’s does not justify the arrogance of using one’s background as a substitute for an argument. The “Appeal from authority” is a considered a logical fallacy for a reason. “Trust the experts” died in 2020, and if “I have a degree” or “I am an X” is the beginning, middle and end of your argument, then you have absolutely nothing of substance. It is one step above “Google it, bro”, which is the lowest, most online form of rejoinder.

One either has a strong argument or doesn’t. To cling like shrink-wrap to a degree or a background does not absolve you of that responsibility.  If anything, claiming to be an expert completely above reproach is an extraordinary claim that thus demands extraordinary evidence.

In other words, you can either articulate a position, or you can’t.  Everything else, including time and fancy paper, is meaningless. 

“Trust the experts” gave us the lockdowns, DEI, “if you can’t afford a tank of gas, buy an EV”, and calling ¾ of the country “non-essential”. One can be forgiven for thinking “the experts” are at best myopic and at worst cruel.

3) Turning my attention to the MAGAs for a second, we’ve reached the point in the election cycle where the MAGAMan’s most ardent supporters, and the MAGAMan himself are starting to tamper expectations from the messianic heights of the election. Lowering prices isn’t going to be as easy as first declared. Meanwhile, the threat of tariffs are a game of chicken, a favorite of Trump’s but he’s the only one who enjoys it, and withdrawing Ukraine is going to be an interesting gambit as well. I agree that we need to stop picking every battle and making it ours, up to and including that doomed stalemate over there, but politically it’s going to be a difficult minefield to traverse.

In the same way that some have put their identity into an openly misanthropic ideology like progressivism, the truly dedicated and/or online MAGAs have put a lot of their capital into a boisterous and chaotic sequel to a movie that was not as perfect as they might recall. It is true, for example, that the lockdown cult and every evil thing about it eventually became part of the left’s core. The Left has internalized the cold yet effective view of people as soulless numbers on a spreadsheet with which they can tinker. Despite, it is still Donald Trump who platformed Anthony Fauci, the cult’s patron saint. The lesson here is that if you give evil an inch and it will take everything from you if it can.

As another example, It is better that someone play hardball with China than someone who doesn’t seem to know how to play ball in any form (Biden or Harris). However, considering that person is Trump, we should remember while his Sec of State Rex Tillerson was in China during episode one, Trump was tweeting away about how China was not to be trusted at all, essentially indicating that Tillerson was wasting his time with President Jinping.

While the Left has already created multiple scenarios in which they can say “things would’ve so much been better under Harris”, we’ve already gone over the difficulties with her (lack of) leadership style. She’s a California progressive who has never known true resistance. Even outside the identity politics the media and its allies played, she is not a proven leader and, if the word about her campaign debt is accurate, she’s probably not great fiscally either. The idea that things would’ve been better under Harris is unfalsifiable because it did not happen. Considering that there isn’t anything she would change about how Biden was running the country, it’s not a given, either.

This is why you don’t pin your identity to politics or politicians, it’s an endless race to the bottom. You spend the time before the election going “this candidate will save America” and/or “They’re not perfect but they’re so much better than the other candidate that it’s still an obvious choice, and if you don’t think it’s clear, you’re obviously a racist/sexist/bigot/libtard/pejoratives I can’t type here

4)Another part of the problem for the right is not only that the conspiratorial inmates run the asylum, but the more rational on the right have no ability to articulate WHY the good is worth defending. Gun control and progressive causes like DEI and the worst of the environmentalist world are fundamentally anti-human and have made everything it claims to fight for worse, and it’s finally becoming culturally safe to say so regarding DEI. However, in a world where everyone has an opinion (and it’s usually a critical one), one can only point that out so much without offering a positive alternative that isn’t “it’ll be better than those fools over there”. 

Modern progressives are deconstructionist and thus are pathologically incapable of building anything good by themselves. Therefore, they need to take over things more capable minds have built, progressives are ideologically incapable of defining, let alone articulating a constant “good”. Secular conservatives have only a slightly better starting point. They’re not incapable of explaining why what has worked is worth defending, but they seem unable to do so beyond “look at the alternative”. 

The philosopher Edmund Burke described the difference between the change progressives seek, and the reform conservatives are capable of:

“There is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding,—that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves, and gets rid of all their essential good as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be known beforehand. Reform is not change in substance or in the primary modification of the object, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.” ^[3]

In other words, when a progressive applies their solution to a problem, such as inequality, we get CRT and it’s ugly offspring DEI; a divisive, spiteful witch hunt that overuses the already overused term “racism”, ascribes virtue and vice to skin color (which is racist, by the way), and there is nothing it can point to apart from some vague notion of “raising awareness” as a net positive for the several years it was morally untouchable. As the Atlantic^[4] and later National Review^[5] have noticed, wherever DEI has shown itself in academia or business, it has created many “DEI consultants”, but has not cultivated anything but a culture of pettiness, fear and endless seminars that tell certain people they are irrevocably racist, even and especially if they say they’re not. This is Kafkatrap best described in the beginning of White Fragility, which states that even an attempt at defense is an admission of guilt. The more spirited the attempt, the guiltier you are.^[6]

A conservative, meaning not MAGA approach would be to eliminate arbitrary barriers to equal opportunity, while not setting up those who did not merit a given position to fail. Bernard Williams has a much more nuanced view of equality than any race-baiter is capable of or would dare attempt.^[7]

Conservatives and anyone who holds the “constrained vision”^[8] of humanity, the one that knows mankind is not perfectible and is incurably self-interested, know that inequality is a natural aspect of life. However, saying inequality is something that can’t be eradicated is not the same as saying it is good. The person who claims to have a plan to eliminate a negative, but inherent aspect of life is a danger to everyone around him. 

And no, inequality is not polio. Just because you can get rid of a disease does NOT mean you can get rid of an inherent flaw in society. To achieve perfect equality, you need to eliminate liberty, which has failed everywhere it’s been tried. Further, the attempt to infringe on some people’s liberty is more likely to engender division and spite. So the one who claims to desire equality above all things is trying to force a magical society, based on a utopian idea, from a stated position of benevolence, which can only be achieved through malevolence, which the speaker is aware of and has justified.

And then we get to watch what happens when the self-appointed savior of society gains power, just how much they concern themselves with making sure other people are equal to him. As with the lockdown cult, the EV craze, the “anti-racist” destruction and the rest of progressivism’s long reign of terror, the rest of us who knew these things would end poorly will be able to once again point out that “I told you so” doesn’t even begin to say it.

Bibliography

Adorney, Julian. “White Fragility: Unpacking the Kafka Traps of Robin DiAngelo’s NYT Bestseller.” Foundation for Economic Education. Accessed December 21, 2024. https://fee.org/articles/white-fragility-unpacking-the-kafka-traps-of-robin-diangelos-nyt-bestseller/.

American Enterprise Institute – AEI. “Liberals or Conservatives: Who’s Really Close-Minded?” Accessed December 21, 2024. https://www.aei.org/articles/liberals-or-conservatives-whos-really-close-minded/.

Bluesky Is Going Great, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7839-sOfUFE.

Confessore, Nicholas. “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?” The New York Times, October 16, 2024, sec. Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/magazine/dei-university-michigan.html.

Diangelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2017.

Klein, Eds Daniel B, and Dominic Pino, eds. “Edmund Burke and the Perennial Battle,.” CL Press, 2022, 6. https://clpress.net/site/assets/files/1026/burke_perennial_complete.pdf.

“The Intellectual Collapse of DEI | National Review.” Accessed December 23, 2024. https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/11/the-intellectual-collapse-of-dei/.

Williams, Bernard. “The Idea of Equality, Conflicts of Liberty and Equality.” In In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, edited by Geoffry Hawthorn, 97, 115. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005.

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^[1] “But Haidt’s research went one step further, asking self-indentified conservatives to answer those questionnaires as if they were liberals and for liberals to do the opposite. What Haidt found is that conservatives understand liberals’ moral values better than liberals understand where conservatives are coming from. Worse yet, liberals don’t know what they don’t know; they don’t understand how limited their knowledge of conservative values is. If anyone is close-minded here, it’s not conservatives.” “Liberals or Conservatives.”

^[2] Bluesky Is Going Great.

^[3] Klein and Pino, “Edmund Burke and the Perennial Battle,.”

^[4] Confessore, “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?”

^[5] “The Intellectual Collapse of DEI | National Review.”

^[6] DiAngelo sees resistance to her ideas as evidence that other people have yet to accept the primacy of race in their lives. She writes “The final challenge we need to address is our definition of “racist”. In the post-civil rights era, we have been taught that racists are mean people who intentionally dislike others because of their race”,  This is the dictionary definition of racism that was used before the civil rights era. Indeed, this definition of racism is the foundation of that struggle. In shoving aside the proper definition of racism, she does not give the reader a definition in its place until later, describing it as not individual, but systemic. This is absurd. A system is a product of individuals, it reflects those individuals. A system cannot be racist unless the people are racist and it’s the individual you need to contend with. She does not make a strong case for doing away with the traditional definition but hopes the reader will do so because it’s racist if he doesn’t. Further, she tells the reader that nothing unique about themselves is enough to vindicate them from the racism at their core (Diangelo, White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.) See also: Adorney, “White Fragility: Unpacking the Kafka Traps of Robin DiAngelo’s NYT Bestseller.”

^[7] Williams observes that “equality” as the left would define it is too vague, and the pursuit of that definition of equality over all things denies human nature, requires an overbearing and impossible government system, intolerable infringements on a person’s freedom. Further, the statement “all men are equal as men”, while not untrue, is not helpful beyond one significant point. The racist needs to overlook the fact that we are all image-bearers of God, and ascribe some kind of evil behavior to that skin color in order to justify overlooking it. Williams, Bernard, “The Idea of Equality, Conflicts of Liberty and Equality.”

^[8] Thomas Sowell best articulated this in his “Conflict of Visions”. Those with the “unconstrained” or “anointed” vision believe that man is perfectible. They believe not only that utopia is possible, but that there are a select view, usually themselves, who are able to achieve it and are willing to do and justify horrible things to that end because they have fancy degrees that impart unique wisdom. So while it’s true that the lockdown made every form of abuse worse, took people from their support networks and livelihoods and called ¾ of the country non-essential, it’s important to remember that it was all for what your self-appointed intellectual and moral superiors would call “a good cause”. To those with the “constrained”, “tragic” or “correct” vision of the world. Plato’s philosopher-kings, which we see today in the progressive’s academic cabal, are a threat to freedom, the value of the individual, and ultimately a functioning society.