Sometimes we’re blind to the applicability of things we write about others to ourselves. Consider Erick Erickson’s latest:
As progressivism secularizes, politics becomes religion. Virtue signaling replaces a Christian ichthus fish on the back of a car. Outrage becomes a signal for identifying heretics. If one is not outraged, one just might be a heretic to secular progressive religious zealots.
So what does Erickson think an ichthus fish might be? A signal of evil? No, it’s a virtue signal. It says I belong to the cult of Jehovah.
That said, Erickson’s not wrong in his larger point. There’s a fierce need to belong at the core of the modern human being, and to prove that one belongs. We see it every day stitched into our clothing, in our bumper stickers, on our walls – those emblems by which we identify ourselves to ourselves and, almost as importantly, to others.
I suspect – I’m no evolutionary anthropologist – that this is a result of social evolution. Prominent display of identifying alliances functions, mostly, to advertise membership to other members, to advance one’s fortunes, even to keep one alive in existential crises, although certainly a mistaken display can also get one killed.
And it has its dark side. It is not allied with rational thought, as it demands a loyalty that is often unreasoning – and that’s not from other members, but from one’s self. Because its background is existential in nature, even appearing to think about one’s loyalties may appear to be disloyalty in the perceptions of fellow members.
Who may then eject one out into the barren wastelands of not-membership. Better to hug the emblem without regard to the toxic sludge dripping off of it.
This can lead to terrible broken thinking, as Erickson himself, a leading member of the far-right conservative movement known as the Evangelicals, demonstrates:
Undeterred, instead of blaming the plaintiffs for their collective screw up, progressives assailed the Court, Texas, Donald Trump, conservatives, and babies. They fixated on the worst case scenario — rape. According to progressives, women who are victims of rape will have to carry their babies to term and face untold psychological trauma. They patently ignored that Texas cannot stop a woman from traveling to another state to terminate her child. Nor did they care to point out that rape accounts for, at most, one percent of abortions. To listen to the commentary on television, one would think rape and pregnancies therefrom happen constantly. Meanwhile, one doctor admitted to killing dozens of children in the run up to the law taking effect, none because of rape, but because of the mother’s convenience.
Between ignoring the fact that some pregnant women live far from Texas borders, cannot afford to go, cannot dare to go, may find the next door state has replicated the Texas law, and the misleading use of the faux-synonym of children for fetuses, Erickson’s fealty to the far-right forces his reasoning down paths that are obviously wrong – and fosters mistrust in his other arguments.
Which is a pity. His is the second conservative voice (here’s the other) – I’ve also read a liberal’s concurring opinion – suggesting SCOTUS is correct in rejecting the initial appeal concerning the Texas abortion law:
The Supreme Court let a Texas law stay in place because the plaintiffs in the case sued the wrong people. The Supreme Court refused to halt the law because the Court does not stop laws. The Court only stops people from enforcing the laws. When the wrong people are sued, the Court has no power to stop them. Progressives insisted, despite the dereliction of duty by the plaintiffs, that the Court should stop the law anyway. While four justices would have done so, they would have deviated from legal precedent.
And Erickson was a lawyer at one time, so he may be right. But with his long exhibited stream of broken logic, it’s difficult to take him seriously. This is not a matter of opposing views; it’s a matter of shaking one’s head over a lack of serious thought.
