I was struck by something Erick Erickson wrote this morning:
Now, here is the problem — that sounds good for the right. Except the right actually needs a sane competitor. The right will get intellectually lazy if the left goes crazy. And the right will further elevate its own crazy voices when it has no competition for the hearts and minds of voters.
Which is more or less what I’ve been saying for years – except the other way around. And, of course, we can point at his complete lack of reference to the January 6th insurrection, perpetrated by the right-wing, his denial of climate change “… The progressive left really does believe that climate change is dooming us. They really do think we are all going to die and they are doing their lord’s work to save us from ourselves,” and a few other factors in order to sow doubt.
But his trips off into delusion do not negate his citations of simple fact. For example, here’s a deeply unsettling nugget:
According to the far left Southern Poverty Law Center, already forty-four percent of male Democrats under fifty think assassinations of political opponents is acceptable. Those men come from a party that also thinks a human is not a human until it leaves the womb.
Only, it’s worse, because he left out more important facts from the same source:
- Younger Democratic women are 32% approving of political assassinations
- Younger Republican women are 40% …
- Younger Democratic men are 54% against political assassinations
- Younger Republican men are 57% …
The SPLC data chart.
Sure, these negate his gratuitous claim at the end of the quote. And, yes, these additional data can be spun a number of ways. But that would be ignoring the forest for the trees, and that forest is that the politically aware younger generation, regardless of attachment, has a disquieting tolerance for political assassination.
Let me repeat, regardless of attachment.
That has a dizzying variety of implications for the future. A future in which the NRA has arranged for everyone to be armed with their choice of military-grade gun, and, in a moment of truly grim humor, the CEO of the NRA, responsible for this disastrous situation, was hiding in terror on a yacht, thinking he’s a prime target.
As a side note, while I considered George Will’s recent column on youth and social media to be, maybe, doubtful, these poll results tend to reinforce Will’s points. Here’s my post on Will’s column. And then add in this WaPo article from yesterday, which covers a small collection of angry young Democrats who are convinced they’ve been betrayed by their elders, but come across as a bunch of ignorant, arrogant, lazy dweebs, convinced they have all the answers while having none of the sense that comes from a dedication to knowledge and history.
Back to Erickson, then he goes on to note the left’s autocratic streak coming out in relationship to transgenderism and a few other undeniably relevant items concerning the left.
In the end, Erickson’s post is his usual mishmash of facts, religious fantasies, propaganda, and missing facts, but it’s enough to remind me that the left, as much as it’ll scream otherwise, while playing CYA, is full of its own fantasies, blunders and denials.
A rather obvious visual allegory. The reader may fill in their favorite labels for what’s eating who.
It’s enough to make me wish for a viable third party, a party based on tolerance, not arrogance; requiring debate and discussion, and not bullying; a party with a strong plank of rationality and strong, strong support for the Establishment Clause; a party that recognizes compromise is not a weakness, but a strength, and ideological zealousness is a mark of brittleness and weakness; that science matters and should be taken seriously; that experts matter, but need to be carefully vetted and based in science; and that religious sects whose sensibilities would result in the suffering and deaths of other people, outside the sect, do not get to set law congruent with those sensibilities.
It won’t happen. Just one critique is that arrogance is considered a personal failing, not an institutional existential flaw. At least, not yet.
