A Fearful Ramble

If the GOP looked that weak in Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia after two years of utterly spectacular Democratic policy failures, what is left? For a huge swath of voters in metro areas, all that is now required is to run a TV ad where you say “MAGA, Abortion, MAGA, Abortion” and all other issues magically disappear. The most privileged white-collar class in US history now votes as if they are at great personal risk from some caricatured rural redneck demons.

It is less about voters being ill-informed than about no longer wanting to be informed. The habits learned in college about only going to sites and sources that confirm existing prejudices have apparently shaped thinking in some permanent way, which easily degenerates into a need to believe those outside the bubble really are evil.

Aside from the likelihood of destructive policies and the rapid erosion of rights and liberties as such people become politically dominant, there is the habit of dehumanization. I was horrified and surprised to watch thousands of Americans march in support of the October 7 atrocities. The operant mindset is that once the tiny-brained-binary label of “oppressor/oppressed” is applied, the “oppressed” no longer have agency or accountability and a greatly diminished humanity instead. They are merely expressions of their class as are the oppressors whose very existence (like all officially white people) gives offense. The humanity of the victims must, therefore, vanish.

The Babylon Bee joked that Planned Parenthood now demands that the word “fetus” be replaced by “womb colonizer.” The mental processes of dehumanization are at work there as well. An intersectional moment?

I once believed that the kneejerk leftist swill taught in colleges would eventually dissipate for most graduates when they encountered the real world. I am now terrified at the thought that the real damage is not ideological but psychological and formational. Being immune to data, reason, and observable outcomes is bad but ultimately not as bad as becoming numb to what should be the natural human revulsion to Hamas. Nothing good can come from that mindset. Nothing.