The left has always had two emotions. Anger and Outrage. It was hard enough to listen to their arguments when they were just angry. When they are outraged, Katey bar the door. We are witness lately to the seething outrage. A gay right wing provocateur scheduled to give a lecture at Berkeley incites a full blown riot to stop the event. The new Secretary of Education is barred by protestors from entering a public school. Cinematic and music award shows are blown apart by long screeds of anti-right hatred. Businesses broadcast they want only “correct thinking” customers purchasing their goods.
The President has been President three weeks.
Victim status has been the calling card for the left since time immemorial. The aggrieved and the oppressed, however ill defined in today’s world, at one time had legitimacy as a political expression. There has always been a ruling elite, and there has always been an underclass that served them, from ancient days, through feudal times, to the unconstrained capitalism of the industrial revolution. The American experiment was something altogether different. The codified rights and freedoms offered every citizen provided an alternative promise unrestrained by that citizen’s current circumstance. The one dark blot on that promise, the preservation of slavery after a declaration that all men are created equal, was expunged by a righteous, brutal conflict of one class of men fighting and dying for the promise of restoring rights to another, denied class of men. A million deaths in four brutal years, and the greater truth that no man would have victim status imposed in a free society was painfully restored. The progressives recognized importantly however that their work was not done. Positive societal gains creating suffrage, safety in the workplace, access to hygiene and healthcare, and eventually removal of overt discrimination immeasurably improved society.
Such principled successes have led unfortunately to principle devolution and ever greater anger over ever smaller classes of victims, and obtuse oppressors. A potential mother is oppressed by her unborn fetus. A person confused by gender is oppressed by bathroom confusion. A student is oppressed by an alternative argument or philosophy of life. A carbon molecule or an animal protein obstructs a person’s security that they are living a cleansed existence from harmful influence.
When anger is insufficient for discourse, it must be replaced by outrage. Politics, or what passes for politics, must infest every interaction. Political correctness has become the tool of liberal fascism. Believe what I believe, or face a punch in the mouth. See the world my way, or face obstruction, boycott, and chaos.
Whatever valuable concepts are left remaining in progressive thought, they are swallowed up by inane demands and petty outrage that prevents any structured logic that might advance their aims. The left is most offended that the President comes from their world, and occasionally retorts with similar heat inflected rhetoric — they recognize a mirror when they see it. They are offended that they are no longer able to have the exclusive privilege of having everybody have to react to them, and that now they must react and adjust.
The modern left lives in a world where their value set of individual infinite victimhood is absurdly comfortable with a world where a muslim woman can be punished for publicly humiliating her rapist, or where an entire country like Venezuela must starve to preserve a left elite that promotes socialist equality of suffering for all, except themselves. The constant hypocrisy is a comfort, because the left owns its own facts,is comfortable with only those facts, and doesn’t let reality get in the way of a meme.
President Trump wont be going anywhere anytime soon. We are all getting used to his impulsive personality and thought process. But he seems to hire good people, who are measured in their approaches, and he clearly listens and absorbs their comments — something the last guy found impossible to do. The fire on the left is likely to burn as bright as their outrage, but like all superheated conflagrations, the fuel eventually is subsumed, and all that is left is the smoking embers.
The job of the rest of the world is to build an appropriate fire wall, and get on with the task of living life. Our efforts should be pointed toward a better world for those who want it, and keeping the left from doing what their outrage drives them to do — burn it all down.
My sentiments exactly! And so eloquently expressed. Most on the Left have lost the ability to reason and debate, partly because they were the dominant paradigm for so long and so had no need to defend their stance, but also because they keep their social media contacts as an echo chamber, openly declaring intolerance and resorting to ad hominem attacks when others’ views conflict with their own. Many provoking violence at Trump rallies, the Inauguration, the Women’s March, and the riot in Berkeley may have been professional, paid agitators. The celebrities of pop and news media calling for Trump’s assassination may also be spokesmen for some kind of shadow government. But that still doesn’t explain the “anger and outrage” of people smashing a Trump’s-head piñata at a friend’s recent party.
I enjoyed reading your thoughtful and articulate take on our current charged political climate. Your writing in this and other posts (I particularly enjoyed your your Canyonland post) comes from a place of astute observation and deep knowledge. Knowing this, your characterization of the current American left surprised me in it’s oversimplification. As you noted, progressive movements have resulted in social and societal achievements that are near universally regarded as positive. If some progress is good, like suffrage, racial equality, workplace safety, etc, then who decides where the line is? When do we cross into “infinite victimhood”? Who gets to decide where progress stops? It’s easy to claim that those being oppressed in “ever smaller groups” are whiny angry victims when you have the luck of not being in one of those groups. Most folks on the left don’t feel like victims at all, they are simply continuing to fight for equality as they always have. The reason progressives and moderates are currently outraged, post election, actually has less to do with right vs. left than you might realize. In our lifetimes, the stakes of elections and politics in the United Sates have always been consequential, but limited to the bounds of what could be called normal perimeters. The pendulum has swung to the right and left, but mostly has stayed within the scope of the constitution and of the institutions of our democracy. The majority of Americans believe that electing DT crossed a dangerous threshold where the most basic questions about the future are now uncertain. DT is a man whose words and actions have undeniably demonstrated that he is a compulsive liar with sociopathic and authoritarian tendencies, a racist, a misogynist, a demagogue, and a megalomanic. This man is not a Republican at all. What you see as leftist outrage is largely not coming from a place of political ideology, it is a reaction to a man who’s disturbing actions, personal history and divisive rhetoric represent a clear danger to the democratic institutions of United States. Frankly, it bewilders folks that millions of Americans do not also see this about the president. I would also argue that his cabinet is not comprised of good people at all but I’ve run out of time to get into the details for now. Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful posts. I hope this country can get to a place of less polarization and more constructive communication in the future.