"...but right now we're gonna party like there's no tomorrow, cuz there's no feelin' in the world half as good as winnin', but the sun will come up, and the knives will come out, and all these smilin' faces will be watchin' me, watin' for that one first moment o' weakness, and then they will gut me like a deer.'
It's from 'All the Way', this is the second half one of my favorite speeches in any movie or play, a work about LBJ (Lyndon Johnson) and the steep price of politics in the raw.
It's not just how politics interacts, it's how humans interact. What we call 'cancel culture' doesn't just exist, it began before the internet, it began when humans began existing, it never began, it was always there as a technique by which societies enforced their norms. Usually they were bad norms enforced in bad conscience, a way of seeing in other people those ugly notions about humanity we repressed in ourselves, and if you've never seen the problem with it, you've never been cancelled. But anybody who lived even a few months of their life as a non-person recognizes the phenomenon, even if it was friends turning on you in high school to avoid getting cancelled themselves.
I lived this sort of cancellation multiple times in a cult-like high school where the possibility of cancellation was present in every interaction, and so did many I knew. Occasionally I was one of the cancellers: friends were practically ordered to turn on each other by the administration and faculty. I'm even sure that many students who didn't endure cancellation lived in fear of the place's heavy, blunt apparatus.
I moved nearly as far left as one could move when I was there, seeing in that place human's full capacity for authoritarianism, but I had the bad luck of starting college in Washington right as 9/11 happened. It moved me to the center prematurely, and then I began the slow crawl back to some kind of left. I'm no leftist today, but I'm a 'left conservative.'
It's not because I think the 'right' and Trumpers are trustworthy that I occasionally sympathize with them, it's precisely because however much I fear the woke world, I fear the Trump world more.
You may think you understand how much the right resents you. You don't. It's so much worse. I won't get into the details, but they think we have destroyed this country, that all of us not on their side represent an existential threat to them and everything they hold dear. They don't see us as the enemy worthy of death, but they do see us as the enemy's helpers, and therefore a threat worthy of imprisonment. People on the left want to avoid and shun those who disagree with them, people on the right want to end and break those they disagree with.
Even in an era that does not put ill on so many people, this shunning is one of life's many seasons; but in an era when every interaction is politicized, interactions become far more dangerous.
It's the nature of partisan extremes to have a kind of borderline personality disorder, a schism in the mass psyches by which the same people who 'love bomb' you to win you over are the people who mistrust you once you're welcomed in. The very fact that you once believed otherwise from what they did means they will look for signs of unpleasantness, dissent, even misbehavior, because keeping the commitment of the values of the group is more important than individual relationships.
We obviously live in fraught times when people behave irrationally, but the most irrational are not the far leftists or even the far rightists, it's the no less than millions who've recently moved left to right. It's not just the pundits and entertainers, it's the laymen who depend on them for what to think.
I'm not going to wade into the details of the irrationalities the left believes, it's much too controversial for now and I don't want to alienate more people than I suspect I already have, but once you stipulate so many dogmas to be thought a decent human, it follows that more and more people will dissent, and once they disbelieve the orthodoxies of the left, all notions the left disbelieves come into question, including notions on which the left is very much correct.
At the end of this post I'm linking to an article which perfectly describes one of the great irrational phenomena of our times, and like the perfect progressive thinkpiece, ascribes it to a complex cocktail of reasons. Good on them for identifying the trend, but as for their diagnosis: bullshit.
Politics is not determined by the head, it's a phenomenon of heart and nerves: a visceral reaction to what most inspires you and most offends you. Conservatism, as Galbraith said, is the eternal search of a justification for selfishness. What moves our generation right is the fear of cancellation, pure and simple.
You'd think this is the moment when ostensible progressives understand how high the stakes are and circle their wagons all too happily, but quite the opposite's happened. The tighter the wagons circle, the more leftists leave the circle to go right with full knowledge of the current right might be anti-democracy. Why? Because they think the left is anti-democracy too. Why do they think that? Because of how they were treated themselves.
Most of them claim they're anti-Trump, but whom do they support? Well, 16% of polls claim they would vote for RFK Jr. RFK Jr. is known as the antivaxxer conspiracy theorist, but his insanity goes so far beyond what you might think it does, and so does his influence. Every month, his website with all his conspiracies gets 4.7 million unique visits! Again, I won' go into detail, there's just too much to write and it's too depressing: rather, go here to this Slate article for details of what he believes about COVID and vaccines, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, AIDS, and, of course, the Kennedy assasinations: https://slate.com/.../rfk-jr-conspiracy-theories-vaccines...
THIS is our center alternative. Not even traditional conservative Republicans like Lynn Cheney or Ben Sasse, but rather: 16% of the country would sooner vote for a man who promotes these conspiracies than a President with 36 years of a voting record in the Senate that bespeaks far too sensible moderation because he welcomed an unwelcoming left into his tent.
There is only one possible explanation for this, not political but personal: the fear of isolation from those dozens of friends who brook no disagreement, the fear of rejection, the fear of a life without love and support.
That fear is what provoked many people far left to begin with. A quote from this thinkpiece below, dealing with the 'horseshoe theory' that the two sides begin to resemble each other, doesn't quite describe what happens. "...a political spectrum bending to met at its extremes, doesn't describe this drift. It goes in one direction."
It doesn't go in one direction, it goes in both, but the ones who go right to left usually happen in high school. It's those kids who grew up in the Christian right, among jocks who beat them up and families who only read the Bible and only listen to worship music: these are the ones who end up rebelling in punk rock and metal, b-horror movies and science fiction, who make up the extremity of the left's bulwark. It's only when they get thirty years older that we get the opposite phenomenon of people moving right once they have teenagers of their own.
Why? I would think it would be obvious but I'm clearly the only one: it's just that hard to keep up with the impossible standards you set.
It's this far below the fold, where nobody is reading, that I'll put the impetus for this post, and the dynamics that made me realize just how deep this pathology goes.
...actually, I can't, I'm just not that brave. Maybe another time.
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