Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Is This the Source of the Problem?
I really think Jim Geraghty of National Review has an accurate description of what we are up against as Conservatives attempt to deal with the Leftists’ current behavior. We are trying with civilized political means and discussion to deal with what is at its roots a psychological problem.
To quote from Jim’s column:
Published in GeneralThe more time I spend covering politics, the more I’m convinced that a significant chunk of grassroots political activists aren’t really arguing about politics at all. These folks are actually grappling with personal psychological issues and projecting it onto the world of politics. Every problem they had with a parent is projected onto authority figures. Every religious person who ever scolded them or made them feel guilty becomes the embodiment of organized religion and demonstrates its menace. Because they’ve had a bad experience with a member of a minority group, that experience reveals something sinister about every member of that minority group. The cop who wrote them a ticket instead of giving them a warning demonstrates the danger and corruption of law enforcement, the boss who fired them for shoddy work exemplifies the inherent cruelty of the capitalist system, and every frustrating experience they had with an ex-girlfriend demonstrates some defect in all women.
This is why things get so personal with them so quickly. They cannot distinguish their worldview from themselves, and so if you contradict that worldview, they believe that you have attacked them personally. In their minds, expressing doubt about an accusation of sexual assault means you support rape; scoffing at the need for higher taxes means you’re greedy and want them to endure more financial difficulties; and as a Yale freshman puts it in The Atlantic article linked above, “You can’t devalue a woman’s right to choose and respect women.” Only 31 percent of women believe abortion should be legal in all circumstances — meaning, in the mindset of the student, 69 percent of women do not respect women.
I think this is what happens when you put politics in the place of religion. Anyone you disagree with on a political issue is not an opponent but an apostate.
I also think it’s deliberate. Hate is a tool that is being used against us. We had a discussion on this at a recent meeting of a Second Amendment group, about how gun ownership is the new smoking. They can’t pass laws against it, but they can teach that people who own guns are ugly, scary and stupid.
I think there’s a lot of truth here.
KEALCSEO
So, my antipathy towards bureaucracy is merely a pathology deriving from trauma sustained over thirteen years under the thumbs of totalitarian public school teachers?
“These folks are actually grappling with personal psychological issues and projecting it onto the world of politics.’
There’s a very interesting related observation in the memoirs of Sebastian Haffner, who grew up in Germany between the wars. He noted that when the political situation stabilized and the economy improved substantially (under the Stresemann chancellorship), most people were happy…but not everybody.
A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions…Now that these deliveries suddently ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk.
I’m afraid that in America today, we have a quite considerable number of people who get their sense of meaning in life from their political views and activism, in the same way as those interwar Germans that Haffner described.
So the personal is political, well I’ll give Geraghty credit for catching up to the 1960s. Five or so more decades to go and he’ll be completely up to speed.
?? (for those of us who aren’t into cryptography, please decipher.)
@jimmcconnell, thanks for this cite; as I’m sure you know, Rush talked at length this morning about this article and another, a piece by the brilliant Shelby Steele in yesterday’s WSJ. While I have not read the piece you cite, I have read the Steele piece and cannot recommend it too highly. It is entitled Why the left is consumed with hate.
Thanks again, Jim
They can teach this all they want as long as they can’t pass laws against them.
PS Jim– welcome to the 80’s! I’ve been there for a while and find it…..well, interesting! Especially after a move to a lovely place in Florida after living in one city in one home for many, many decades. All the best from a simpatico colleague, Jim
OK, Jim, now do “Never Trumpers.”
It’s also an example of narcissism coming from never growing out of the childhood mindset that the world revolves around you and your needs. The normal cycle is mom and dad cater to your needs as a child and start drawing lines as you get older on what you can and can’t have, and as you mature you do the same thing with your own kids. And lots of kids go through the tantrum-throwing stage before they mature, but the angry activists are locked in there — if they don’t get what the want when they’re in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, they act out in the same way they did in their 2s, 3s and 4s. The difference is they’re not just limited to crying and kicking their feet now, and can take lots of hurtful actions, mentally and even physically against the people they’re angry at (which, when those angry types gain positions of power, can lead to authoritarian legislation and worse actions in a hurry, because if everybody else won’t do what they tell them to do, everybody else must be punished.
Amen, brother. It’s not hard to see why. When, according to the neo-Marxists, the sense of meaning you get from building your business perpetuates “greedy capitalism”; and the sense of meaning you get from serving in the military perpetuates “oppressive militarism”; and the sense of meaning you get from serving your church perpetuates “intolerance”; and the sense of meaning you get from providing for your family perpetuates “the patriarchy “; and the sense of meaning you get from being with your friends perpetuates “toxic masculinity”; what’s left but political activism as the only legitimate, guilt-free source of meaning?
And you know they laughed at the “Buy N Large” people in Wall-E, never realizing it’s them.
Arahant, I told you not to do this a couple of posts ago. I think you do this to make yourself feel superior to the rest of us. Of course, you are superior, but you don’t have to shove it in our faces.
With Arahant, WYSIWYG, AFAIK.
Covfefe.
Dennis Miller used to have a phrase to describe Al Gore: “A Mariana Trench of Daddy Issues”.
Hmm, I wonder how one might describe Ronan Farrow, the son and brother-in-law of Woody Allen who looks like Frank Sinatra whose family has accused his father/brother-in-law of sexually assaulted his other sister (one of 13 siblings) at age 7 or younger.
Ronan the Accuser, a fictional character Marvel Comics character created in 1967.
Stated simply, these are people whose identity and self-worth are completely tied up in holding the right (that is, Left) positions. Which is why they’re so radically unprincipled. Leftist positions are incoherent and change with the wind, depending on whatever makes them feel superior at the moment, and accumulates power on the Left.
I’m pretty sure that this character in Allen’s “Wonder Wheel” from last year is based on Ronan Farrow: a neglected momma’s boy who sets fire to everything. It’s even less generous to the Mia-Farrow stand-in.
One big problem is that a lot of these kids are single kids without any siblings. So they got all of mom and dads attentions and affections. They never learned what it was like to share.
We are the most perfect of political beings superior to all in both humility and intelligence. Next question please.
And how!
Hear, hear!
Jim, thank you for your kind comments. Do you find 80 as “freeing” as I do? When you get to be officially an old man, people don’t expect very much of you. I’m enjoying life in a retirement community in the Evergreen City of Eugene, Oregon. Best wishes.
And since their worldview is not based on time-tested principles it changes rapidly causing chaos. It sort of makes them all sociopaths. They judge everything by their own worldview and disregard the principles of others.
Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch has ongoing problems with Discover and MasterCard, instigated by the SPLC. He’s been dropped from Patreon and Discover and MC are no longer processing donations. He writes:
Had Harvey Weinstein and Miramax not bailed out Woody Allen a quarter-century ago by giving him a film contract when other studios shied away after the Soon Yi scandal, we likely wouldn’t have the current #MeToo movement birthed by Farrow’s story. The revenge angle wouldn’t have been there for Ronan….
….which isn’t to say we wouldn’t have had the same thing going on as we do now, just that the cast of characters would be different Woody’s scandal came after the Clarence Thomas hearings and just before Bob Packwood was hounded out of the Senate for his actions, while Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd (and of course, Bill Clinton) were given free passes by the non-digital SJWs of that era. Without Farrow we might not have the same movement that’s laid waste to a glut of movie and TV people, but we’d likely still have something similar and the same type of howling by today’s SJWs around Brett Kavanaugh.
As well they should. The past is full of oppression and injustice, so there is nothing to be learned from “time-tested principles.” A worldview must adapt to accommodate new information, which means they are open to new ideas, not bound to old prejudices and false thinking. They must disregard the principles of others if they impede the advancement of society to a more equitable state.
The best thing about this worldview is its certainties (opposition to the worldview is prima facie evidence that you oppose progress) and its infinite capabilities to discover perfidy in every object or person that impedes your conception of the Just World to come. It’s the sort of mindset that makes people feel unsafe when they overhear someone describing a Chik-Fil-A sandwich with evident approval.
The Right has its versions of these people as well, but their concerns lack an academic imprimatur. In a sensible world the people who rail about a cisnormative phallocracy would be consigned to the same bin as Pizzagate Bilderburgers, but the pseudo-science blatherations of the Left’s theorists have provided a new dogma to people who hunger for overarching explanations for their own ennui and alienation.
Note: this isn’t the majority. These are the harpies shrieking from the cages of social media posts. But they provide a certain guilty, oily, private joy among people who feel as if these are the worst of all possible times. you have to pity some of them: not only do they not believe in God, they wonder why He has forsaken them.
Or She! Definitely She. Not that She exists. But if She did She would totally be She.
Things that make you go hmmm.