The deepest despair here is how the rapid reversal on civil liberties suggests that they were always an opportunistic weak-side argument all along, incapable of putting down roots. Most of the people writing this stuff -- Franken was born in 1951, he's a Boomer! -- lived through decades of the ACLU defending free speech for the KKK.
The expectation of sufficient pedagogy for the cultural Left should be pretty high here, but *none* of it is surviving after less than a decade under their institutional hegemony. ("Less than a decade" for things like Wall Street and the military, I mean, obviously academia has been dealing with this shocking reveal of illiberalism since at least the 90s!)
Oh yeah. My regular example is that people chanted MY BODY MY CHOICE for 40 YEARS, and then immediately became advocates for mandatory vaccination like none of that every happened. A very, very few people on the Left said "wait a minute", and half those people now wonder if they are conservatives.
I feel sorry for them. Theirs is a pitiable existence, and their rages speak of terrible suffering—a malady of the soul.
A "sickness unto death" as a clever Danish philosopher put it a couple of centuries ago.
The fury of nihilism instead of the peace of meaning. There is no trust in reality, and it makes them so sad, and then so angry.
The deepest despair here is how the rapid reversal on civil liberties suggests that they were always an opportunistic weak-side argument all along, incapable of putting down roots. Most of the people writing this stuff -- Franken was born in 1951, he's a Boomer! -- lived through decades of the ACLU defending free speech for the KKK.
The expectation of sufficient pedagogy for the cultural Left should be pretty high here, but *none* of it is surviving after less than a decade under their institutional hegemony. ("Less than a decade" for things like Wall Street and the military, I mean, obviously academia has been dealing with this shocking reveal of illiberalism since at least the 90s!)
Oh yeah. My regular example is that people chanted MY BODY MY CHOICE for 40 YEARS, and then immediately became advocates for mandatory vaccination like none of that every happened. A very, very few people on the Left said "wait a minute", and half those people now wonder if they are conservatives.