A great many of my friends have decided to give up classical liberalism in large part because they believe it lacks any teeth or fight to stop a progressive cultural onslaught. Frankly, much of both the left and right now live in fear and loathing of the other side.
Combined with all of that, we are now in post-modernity. In post-modernity, doubts outweigh truth; there is no objective truth; reality is shaped by words; and devotion to a belief necessitates performance. Post-modernity is arguably incompatible with an American experiment that holds to self-evident, objective truths.
Thus we get boisterous performance on the left and the right. The left engages in protest, cancel culture, and demands for censorship. The right engages in protest, cancel culture, and demands for censorship. The left claims the nation is systemically racist and fundamentally flaws with unfalsifiable statements. The right, from conservative thinktanks funded by the free market successes of what conservatism conserved, demands to know what conservatism has conserved.
Everyone wants to move on, largely devoid of ideas or truth, driven by contempt for the other side.
For all that I laugh – literally, sometimes – at Erickson, here he’s nailed it, in particular the final sentence. While Erickson continues onward to see this through the prism of his particular variety of Christianity, I see us as being in the age of intolerance and hubris.
By the plural, I mean much of the leadership of the left and right, and the tendency of swaths of each side to tromp along in their wake, tediously spouting similar slogans. I do not mean everyone.
But, regarding tolerance, those who understand the importance of recognizing the concept of fallibility and the credibility of compromise are largely segregated from the levers of power, particularly on the right – and it takes two to tango. So long as the right’s culture leads to right-wing extremists becoming leaders, such as Greene, Boebert, Gohmert, Gaetz, Jordan, McConnell, all the primary challengers to Cheney and the pro-impeachment Republicans, and all the primary challengers to sitting Republican governors, so long as the toxic team politics mixes with the Christian Nationalism portion of the party – see my favorite Senator Goldwater (R-AZ) quote – the power of that portion of the left leadership that acknowledges the difficulties of governing, and the importance of compromise, is vitiated.
And that leads to hubris, the divinity-level certainty that You Are Right And My Opponents Are Wrong And Evil. The right, in its embrace of the religions supposedly devoted to the Divine, bears a terrible burden in this regard, a burden so heavy that it’s breaking the Republican Party; the left, though, has displayed its own self-righteousness and rigidity, with some observers, such as Andrew Sullivan, pushing wokeness as emblematic of this failure.
Are we doomed? No.
On the right, far right extremist influence on the electorate continues to shrink. Moderate and Customary Republicans who can no longer stomach their former brethren in the wake of the January 6 Insurrection and the incompetence and frank insanity on exhibit are leaving the Party and/or the movement. Among Evangelicals, membership is shrinking and young people are not replacing those lost to age. And independents continue to shudder in revulsion.
But the left, too, has suffered setbacks. As an example, remember Defund the police!? In Minneapolis, right down the road from me, that effort collapsed. And it was not entirely a surprise – “Man on the street” interviews presaged it, as Minneapolis residents of all colors expressed unease, if not outright disagreement, with the slogan, as ill-defined as it has always been. Between that unease, a drop in manpower at MPD, and a discouraging jump in violent crime, the idea of defunding the police has become far less popular, until I suspect it’s the favorite slogan of only a few dedicated groups and power-seekers who don’t yet understand that defund is no longer popular. I remain in favor of reformation and removal of those responsibilities that do not normally require an armed response, as has been demonstrated with the CAHOOTS program of Eugene, OR.
So the rigid left, too, does not have a convincing message for the electorate.
The problems of left and right are disparate: the left may push recognition of problems difficult to deny, but their proposed solutions are unconvincing, even haughty; the right, populated as it is with third and fourth raters who benefit from a status quo that is unsustainable, are reduced to dishonest tactics, such spreading lies, gerrymandering, glibly discounting the prime importance of democracy, and shamelessly pushing voters to embrace the single-issue poisons of which they are so proud.
The question is: what can a skeptical public do about this? In the absence of wide spread ranked choice voting, in which moderates can harvest the secondary votes of zealots who – reluctantly – list the moderates as second choices, I’m not sure. Speak out, keep voting, vote against the zealots, demand demonstrated competency, distrust the slogans, be sensitive to manipulation (read The Persuaders, perhaps), ask yourself what’s missing from an argument, remember that common sense solutions is a big red flag when it comes to national problems, and, well, your most valuable political possession is that ballot. If you’re selling it to the candidate who says You should vote for me because of white shame! or I can do the anti-abortion jig better than anyone else! then you just might be screwing yourself and your fellow citizens.
And not doing the right thing.
