There are three quotes, with a section relating to each quote. I have a very special section at the end for those of you that like to read what you need to be there as opposed to what is written. It’s probably wasted effort, but so is most online discourse, this is stretching a bit further into the realm of being understood and respected. When I was part of a facebook group that was actually really good pre-pandemic, I often had to respond to things I was TOLD I was saying, instead of what was on the page. Over the last year or two, I’ve had to resurrect those segments.

But, as an appetizer: there is a distinction between saying “protesting in the modern era is either unproductive or damaging to the cause because it’s -largely- Twitter/BlueSky politics made flesh” and “protesting should be illegal”. In this essay, I observe the former. They are in fact two independent thoughts. A good-faith, serious reader should be able to make that distinction, but I expect disappointment and am rarely surprised. With the disclaimer out of the way, here we go.

“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury”  H.L. Mencken

“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.” Edmund Burke

“A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion: to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind – if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else – then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease” C.S. Lewis.

-Relating to Mencken-

Spending a week in the center of a city that saw the worst of both Hitler AND Stalin makes the unserious discourse in the States look even less serious.

What I mean is there is a line between “dramatic” and “serious”. Serious, according to Webster, implies “thoughtful or subdued”, “requiring much thought or work”, “relating to a matter of importance”. Now, some politicos will jump to the fact that the issues they spend their lives “raising awareness for online” are serious. That could be true. But that does not mean that they THEMSELVES are serious people.

The left, for example, has been calling people racists and Nazis for a long time, I can remember the only reason to not vote Obama was overt or secret racism. It could never be an ideological disagreement, that was just a smokescreen. Of course, blessing Mitt Romney with the same pejoratives that are now ascribed to Donald Trump, one could assume we use serious words in an extremely flippant manner

On the right, everyone to the left of a right-wing politico is a socialist or a Marxist. And that’s been a thing for as long as I can remember as well. We’re always “one generation away” from losing freedom of speech and such and slipping into a socialist dystopia. It is so serious that we must “Make America Great Again” and anyone who stands in the way of that, so says MAGA orthodoxy, is leading the nation into collapse.

And on a personal level, some of you, especially if we haven’t talked in a while, speak before you’ve read the whole thing, and still respond like you take the topic super sereeuhsslee. My standards are not that high. Read the whole thing, respond in a tone that acts like we’re both human. That’s not a high bar. That’s playing limbo in hell.

I’ve been toying with an idea in my head lately that the last 15 years of discourse have actually taken America farther away from the ideals that either side claims to be pursuing. The left has made as much about equality as the New Atheists did of “reason” and MAGA makes of “individualism”. In reality, the left has a oppressor/opressed hierarchy that ascribes good and evil to skin color or gender, the New Atheists where more rhetoric than reason, and MAGA pushes the kind of  “bootstrap individualism” that existed back when the Boomers were kids. They’re so serious that it the basic idea that economy they grew up in, and the economy 50 years later are different

-Relating to Burke-

On the left, this could be said of the MeToo movement which never got out of what TIME Magazine called the “bomb throwing” phase before petering out, and can also be said of BLM, started -a- conversation of police violence, but never set a standard for what justified use of force -could- be. My main example of that was the Antwon Rose shooting. The part of the state code that got the killer off was Title 18, Sec. 508 of the PA state code. If we’re going to have a serious discussion about police violence, that would’ve been -the- place to start here in Pittsburgh. It’s been nearly 8 years since that moment faded, and the issue does not appear primed to be on the cultural docket anytime soon.

The right, meanwhile, has an entirely different set of unserious claims. At the moment, it’s virtually everything coming out of the Trump administration daily. From the Daily Sperg-Out (trademark pending on my end) from the President on Truth Social, to the insecure alpha-bro in charge of the world’s most powerful military, to the latest conspiracy/hot take from Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Candace Owens or some of the Daily Wire crew, the right-wing in this country has instead taken institutions and done everything they can to discredit them. They’ve switched out the CDC for “doing your own research” on alternative medicines. Every major political event is staged, every loss is because of the amorphous and shadowy Deep State. Where the left takes ideals and language (like the various ists and phobics that have become a meme), the right attacks institutions like the CDC, NIH etc as “woke”.

But even in this, there is a common trait among both the left and the right. Both are so intent on destruction of the other that they will take whatever good comes from a system with it. And when that’s done, they’ll realize they have long since forgotten how to build something that can withstand any serious attack. They confuse ditch either Burke’s idea of change or reform and instead choose ruin.

-Relating to Lewis and then concluding-

All of this is compounded by the fact that the dilution of language, the shallowness of online politics, the fracturing of communities along these unserious lines and the toxicity and destruction the whole sordid affair brings about has also turned the act of assembly into just another thing baked into the equation. Whereas there was power in protest and deep, powerful thoughts in the old days of protest, it seems now it is just what people who have nothing else to do will gather for. They are told to protest the Current Thing, and they turn out in droves. 

The end of modern politics therefore is as follows: the dilution of language has made the actual evil those words are supposed to point to harder to spot, since the definition of Nazi can be Mitt Romney, Donald Trump or your neighbor, racism can stretch from the KKK to “not voting for Obama”. The easy availability of worthless, rage-based stories and the desire to have one’s political prejudices justified has made the discourse anti-useful, and people are still going to war over parties that have a combined 12% approval rating in Congress, while the endless protests about Current Thing, which can see people turn out by the hundreds of thousands, makes the entire thing look like a show. The last 20 years of presidential elections have bounced between the battle cry of “anyone but” the incumbent (as if it can’t get worse), or “the lesser of two evils”. Politics is drain-circling sideshow of people who have no remote idea how bad it could get, have lost the language to convey true weight and the ability to discern what is actually evil and what they have been told is evil (a neighbor, family member, or Facebook friend you haven’t talked to in years posting something that disagrees with you).

The problems are serious. The people are not.

-Clarification for those who read what needed to be there “inbetween the lines”. As opposed to what I actually said.- 

I am not saying and have never said that protesting should be forbidden, that racism and other forms of evil do not exist, that people who have experienced evil and find themselves among the cacophony of voices are as ridiculous as the cacophony itself. What has been said is that the terms that used to point to real evil have been used so frequently, FOR NEARLY TWENTY YEARS applies to everything from real, felt evil, to simple disagreement. You may not mean them that way, but these discussions, especially of the online variety, do not exist in a vacuum. All of us on the right, even the well-read, thoughtful ones, have heard the same stuff for, once again, going on two decades now. The minute we realize “actually, no, we’re not racist Nazis” (and if you actually respect the history of those terms, you’ll realize we’re not even fucking close), is the moment the discussion dies because the accusation is all the speaker has in their programming.

The terms used to falsely say “this person is so evil that he isn’t worth debating” now -demonstrate- that the speaker is so unserious and dogmatic that -he- isn’t worth debating.

Perhaps you are well-read and can articulate your view in a way that is not personal, violently bitter and condemnatory or 85% propagandistic rhetoric. Perhaps you are also in the 5% of us (and I am including myself in that sad, autistic minority) who read the opposing view or at least tried to steel-man it.  Welp, guess what, you’re circling the same drain the rest of us are. The serious people, have always been in the minority. Us thoughtful, well-read folk are more aware of the inexorable mess politics is than the rest of the world, with just as much impact on the country as the psychos have.

The only difference is that we are more likely to have found something edifying to do instead.