The error here is presuming that they CAN be capable of true dialogue.

They are pure Zen people and you’re asking them to be Motorcycle Mechanics.

Historically, such peeps would have been forced by surroundings to make them compromise, and learn a bit of MM. They wouldn’t LIKE it, but they could be cajoled into it.

That quality disappeared with the Boomers in charge.

It’s possible to infer intent from results, or likely results from proposed action. This is more true as the following accumulate:

*Last time, it didn’t work out as you said it would. Nor the time before that.
*It was obviously going to be a catastrophe, not what you were selling.
*We have records of people telling you it would be a catastrophe and you blew them off.
*The actual result is a catastrophe which benefits you/your side/your class.
*You take no responsibility for it.

You see enough of that and you begin to get a clue, which is to say, a stereotype emerges.

As to the internal mental workings, that’s another question. You say, mentally clenching your teeth (if that’s a thing), “Nobody can be that stupid! Nobody.”
Therefore, they have to know better and are lying. But they seem so honestly sincere in blowing off reality that…..

I have relations who honestly think that having a weather event run on closed loop every half hour for a week on CNN erases NASA’s records of, say, heat in the Thirties. You’d have to be determinedly ignorant–possibly the midnight reset button referred to above–to keep insisting we’re about to boil over in our unprecedented heating, “unprecedented” being the operative word here.
But the mental gymnastics to keep doing that seem a whole lot more involved than simply lying in pursuit of climatista control.

When you get the same response to some version of,” Hey, buddy. I watched the hearings. You want to start over?” forever….

physicsguy:

I appreciate your concern and wish to forward discussion. I’m an ex-leftist and I can’t tell you much.

The leftist system is well sealed-off from two-way debate at the best of times. These days it’s like an agitated hornet nest and the hornets are in attack mode. For my own safety I don’t talk politics with leftists anymore.

I do talk to leftists, Dems and the Woke about other things. I aim towards having a decent interaction. They eventually figure out I’m conservative. I try to represent my side as a calm, rational, open-minded person. I leave it to them to make what sense of that as they will.

I’m reminded of a saying attributed to St. Francis, though who knows:
_________________________

Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary, use words.

Unlike Neo, he closes with a sound rebuke.

It made me chuckle.

This is, as I have noted many times, possibly THE defining element of many of the “decent, earnest” Democrats**.

As I have commented, if there was a “WQ” test to match the IQ test, then self-identified “Democrats” would consistently rank in the bottom 1/3rd of the resulting bell curve.

This probably ties into a mildly whimsical-but-real idea I’ve described, also, the
Liberal Midnight Reset Button™
— a nominal component of their internal programming that rejects processing any new data that conflicts with
Officially Accepted Liberal Dogma® as they go to sleep at night, and start processing “things learned” from short-term memory to long-term memory.

The latter makes them unable to learn anything new, which means they are like little children, who have no institutional constructs that they have developed with maturity and experience… which is pretty much the definition of “Wisdom”.

This also explains many of their behaviors, which closely resemble little children, who think that they should be able to stomp their feet to get what they want, or close their eyes to something to reject its existence or veracity (“Peekaboo!!”)

=========
** As opposed to another common, much more verminous form, the Power Democrat, the ones who, as Harry S Truman put it, “Would double cross their own mothers to get it [power] or keep it.”

But the Dem liberals are the key and the mystery. They are reasonable people. I know many of them. But they can’t vote any other way but Democrat. They just won’t change their minds even after seeing the destruction of modern society and the havoc wrought by the leftists. That is the mystery. What value do they see in the modern Democrat party? And many of them are fairly conservative. But we can’t give up on them because they are the key to conservative electoral success.

Maybe they’re all like Garrison Keillor. They support Dems because they want to perceived as “nice”.

Thanks, Miguel. That will definitely become part of my lexicon (another great Greek word!)

Insightful comment. Baltzell was right about history’s aristocracies — and right about the WASP Establishment that he came from and chronicled. What he missed is the way in which “leadership” (power) and class privileges have been linked in the years since he wrote his book in the Sixties.

I suspect John Kennedy was Baltzell’s ideal and idol. They were born in the same year and fought in the same war. Both had a preppy background, and there must have been quite a crease in JFK’s pants. Kennedy’s call to leadership inspired Baltzell, but that call resulted in the building up of the federal bureaucracy and the rise of the new meritocratic or managerial or credentialocractic elite under LBJ and other presidents in subsequent decades.

It was a good thing that Baltzell’s dream of high positions being opened up to people from outside the WASP mainstream became true, but Baltzell wasn’t able to see outside his New Frontier bubble enough to see that the new power structure replaced the old caste-ridden elite wasn’t any less able to build up privileges and abuse its power.

I give Brooks credit for seeing that he lives in a bubble, and credit for half-seeing that the policies the elite favor have been responsible for the rise of Donald Trump, but Brooks isn’t able to get fully outside the bubble. Most people aren’t able to do so either.

That’s certainly something lots of Substackers I follow have been grappling with. My husband’s family has a lot of doctors, and previously they would share non-politicized medical opinions. No more. My sibling is the head of a county planning and development department. Once upon a time you could ask her about planning issues — I remember discussing LEED certification with her, and having her dismiss it as garbage: putting up a “Let’s Save Energy Together!” poster would get you points to being a “green” building. She now just repeats mantras, visibly annoyed by any question.

I remember being struck that the Obama people were very much “A” students, with very little real world experience, but skilled in giving the “right” answer. That these “right” answers, via social media, can so easily flood the field, is certainly a part of problem. And that social media can punish so widely if a “wrong” answer is given is also part of it.

There’s a good interview with Walter Kirn about this phenomenon:

https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/07/25/walter-kirn-on-how-america-lost-the-plot/

Lorenzo Warby’s series on Helen Dale’s substack explores it (at length):

https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/worshipping-the-future

I’m in the middle of reading N. S. Lyons:

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence

And back to Brooks. Anyone remember (I think it was discussed here?) Brooks taking his “friend” “without only a high school degree” (cleaning lady?) to a upscale sandwich shop where he inadvertently “shamed” her (he thought) because she didn’t know a panini from a ciabatta?