stan:

Well, things change. The average conservative voter now thinks Democrats are evil. Including yourself, it would seem.

I’m not sure this is an improvement.

Funny you should say that.

In April, I got a commendation and an invite from Jordan Peterson.

I said in my comment that we need Tshirts bearing rhe meme “Shoot Woke Zombies”. Lead works in both cases and counters the same menace — both eat up your brains!

Last, this puts due ruducule in its place — something the far Left hates passionately.

Consider the next election. It seems to me that by using social media and creating a meme involving a short “personality questionaire” could create some change at the margins of the outcome.

I believe rhe same tool was used to elect Trump in the first place.

Why does this argument style have appeal to the average Dem voter? Obama and the rest use it because it works. Why does it work so well?

Demonization is ugly. Othering is nasty. Censorship is vile.

Why did so many Democrat voters favor imprisoning those who refused to get jabbed? Why did so many D voters favor taking the children away from parents who refused the jab? This is horrifying stuff. We ignore it at our peril. These aren’t good people. This kind of stuff deserves more than a mere “oops”.

Why do so many D voters favor defunding the police? An obviously stupid policy that devastates black, inner city neighborhoods. Are they zombie members of a cult? What ate their brains? What erased their moral sensibilities? I mean this seriously. Because these attitudes are not normal and they aren’t healthy. Danger ahead.

— important to recognize the moral immaturity and often moral defect that makes someone prone to be a Dem voter:

1) they believe that their vote is sufficient reason to give less to charity. They are showing they care by voting D. Obviously, immature and even stupid, but nonetheless this is how they think.

2) imagine the moral and intellectual shortcomings involved in thinking one can “save the planet”. They don’t have an innate sense of worth. They get it from belonging to the cult, following the catechism of the cult and performing meaningless rituals (that are often counterproductive).

3. Imagine the hatred and mean-spiritedness necessary to believe that cops are roaming the streets gunning down thousands and thousands of innocent black children every year. Or the moral vacuity of categorizing the value of all people by their race, sex, etc.

4. They are easily led by those who promise cheap salvation. They are moral because they vote.

5. They need to feel morally superior. This need is not healthy. It’s not morally mature.

6. They feel morally superior because of their hatred. The more they slander their political opponents, they better they feel about themselves for voting D. Their hatred is what ultimately drives their voting (although obviously they don’t recognize it as such).

7. This is why rich white liberals are so racist. They have a need to see blacks as inferior so they can feel good about themselves for helping. This is why racial preferences in college admissions has continued and intensified long after it was blatantly obvious that they were extremely harmful to blacks. The purpose of the preferences is to make white liberals feel good about themselves. Another example of cheap salvation.

That started to change in the 1970s when a large number of younger progressives replaced the older New Dealers in Congress and advanced in the 1990s and 2000s when the older Southern (White) Democrats and older Liberal and Moderate Northeastern Republicans Republicans were wiped out. Today, there’s much more lockstep in the party than there was earlier — and much more lockstep than there is in the Republican Party.

There can also be a convenient vagueness or silence about issues when it benefits candidates. Your dad might not have trusted labor unions. The most he’d hear about unions from politicians would be the usual pablum from Joe Biden about unions building America. Dad’s representative or yours might not talk about unions at all. But the party votes as a bloc for the legislation the unions that support it want, once things are worked out between the party and the unions. Your rep might not say anything about the Green New Deal but will vote for it anyway. All that is changing, I think. Younger Democrats accept the party’s whole program (when they don’t think it’s too moderate).

“La, La, La! La, La, La! I CAN’T hear you! Speach is violence! Property is theft! The poor built this country! H8r!”

🙂

Good points.

But now we have young people who would rather poke a stick in their eyes than be seen as sympathetic, or even open to listening, to anything that emanates from the political right. They may come from right-leaning families, but they go off to college and come out strongly on the left, at least in terms of their group affiliation (their point of view often doesn’t hold up to careful or even desultory examination, but that doesn’t change their affiliation). And – this is the point I’m actually trying to make – I don’t think their attitude comes from the old “the Left thinks the Right is evil, while the Right thinks the Left is stupid” thing.

For one thing, I don’t think that statement is nearly as true as it once was, on the part of the Right. I think a lot of us over here, uneasily and against our will, are being drawn toward concluding that the most radical elements of the Left actually are evil, and that a lot of the ordinary Progressives are willing to go along with that evil in order to chalk up a W.

But as for the young leftists – hear me out, here. You know that psychological observation that came out a while ago about how conservatives score higher on the “disgust” scale than so-called “liberals”? The extension of that study was supposed to be that political conservatives, being more easily disgusted, were correspondingly less “open” than liberals, and that liberals’ openness corresponded to greater empathy with – you name it – the poor, the different-colored, the sexually different, whatever. (I haven’t looked into these studies in detail, but I think it’s notable that they use pictures of things they know traditional conservatives don’t like, such as pictures of men kissing, to evaluate people’s disgust sensitivity. I wonder what would have happened if they’d shown, say, pictures of a couple of young “rednecks” sitting in the back of a pickup truck with their rifles…) And the thing is, I agree that disgust sensitivity ought intuitively to be stronger among the conservative.

But I think that the identification of “conservative” and “on the political right” is no longer applicable – I think these kids are conservative, just conservatively on the left. That is, just as the conservative Right used to (and probably some still do) feel, they feel that they have a very strong stake in maintaining ideological purity in their group, and their group is the Progressives.

Fear of evil doesn’t explain these young people’s attitude toward non-progressive ideas. But disgust does. The expressions on the faces of the kids shouting speakers down. The pretence of “actual harm” that they take up when hearing words or ideas antithetical to their beliefs, which is never accompanied by markers of fear or pain but rather by anger and pushing away. The language they use to describe anyone on the political Right. Their quick and total rejection of anyone they deem insufficiently pure. They’re disgusted.

I despair of ever getting a social scientist to change up how the disgust studies are carried out, but… prove me wrong.