I look forward to your analysis.
Because from where I sit the leftist mindset is very dark, and very common
I think it ultimately comes down to a combination of overall societal factors and some specific to the modern left.
For global issues, as you’ve alluded to, there’s grown a general aversion to defending one’s views and retreating to safe echo chambers. Obviously the left has a chokehold on this behavior when it’s done in the guise of emotional safety and the Universities of our country have embraced it. In a vacuum, I don’t necessarily see this as a fault. I’m sure there are plenty of hobbies I could embrace instead of political discussions online that are more productive and virtuous. The world won’t be saved by my awaited response to Sturg, and I’m not doing anything inherently valuable by arguing with conservatives and libertarians. But we don’t live in a vacuum and in recent years social media has dramatically increased the presence of politics and government in our daily lives. So those in echo chambers on both sides grow more and more convinced that they aren’t just *maybe* right about something, but *certainly* right because they can say hey, look at all the people who agree with me online!
But social media is also our entertainment, and those same algorithms keep pushing the fringes of each side to the top because engagement sells. And so we suck ourselves deeper and deeper down rabbit holes of our own making. Then Trumpism and COVID happened and something broke in our collective brain. Even on this very forum, it didn’t used to be this way. There’s a reason that only a handful of us remain, and it’s because everything is news, everything is an emergency and the emotions being invoked in these conversations are often pretty grim. A lot of the most significant civil unrest of the past decade came around those two events, and things aren’t getting better in the country for most Americans, liberal and conservative alike. So people are getting indoctrinated on both sides to take an issue like trans healthcare or immigration or whatever the hell comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth that day and make that a wedge issue for soul of the country.
Because of these issues, I think we’ve lost the ability to just be civil on things we don’t fully understand and/or don’t concern us across the political spectrum. You’re either a vile leftist Nazi or a vile alt-right Nazi based on what you think about 100 different issues, many of which most of us are unaffected by or don’t understand. You can stick your head in the sand and pretend *this* behavior isn’t a bipartisan issue. If you disagree, I can point you to a stunning amount of examples from this week alone where you or the MAGA wing have declared I am directly responsible for the death of a Ukrainian woman five states away because I personally
believe in a soft approach to criminal justice reform, as if the tide was going to turn nationally if I just held a better opinion. Look at the content that gets clicks on Twitter for conservatives. Look at the damn President of the United States. Trump does not lead through unity and civility, he does so through grievance and outrage and how the Radical Left must be stopped. I’m not placing the blame on the right, but this is absolutely something the two sides have in common
There are a few traits I agree the left generally, and the Democratic Party specifically, embraces more that can lead to outcomes like we’ve seen. There is an almost pathological expectation of adherence to some dogmas within the left, and while I can honestly understand some of the whys behind that, I find it misguided. Dems got used to a lot of progressive ideals informing the culture online and those ideals being embraced by corporate America and governments. And so as the world drifts further and further away from those same ideals, a lot of added feelings of victimhood and resentment are festering because they are dogmas. You
cannot support Charlie Kirk, even in his death, because he held the wrong beliefs about people “we” care about. You
cannot deport a single person because everyone matters. You
cannot have harsh sentencing because of the evils of systemic racism. You
cannot question the science or medicine on COVID/gender/climate because they know it all to be inherently true. The right has *some* of these qualities, but it’s pretty limited these days to you
cannot question Donald Trump because Trump is Always Right (trademark). And I think it’s easier to have breaks in your ranks when your party is trapped in a cult of one person than it is when you’re trapped in a cult of actual beliefs. So many of these angry people on the left are sheltered by their bubbles and keep growing more hateful.
The other issue I see on the left compared to the right is that there’s a much larger expectation of what we deserve from the government than on the right. So you see more public protests from the left, because they’re demonstrating the government taking away medical care or food assistance or USAID funding in ways that you wouldn’t see the right protest, as well as for changes to a police and criminal justice system that the left far more often disagrees with. While there’s never an excuse for any violence or damage that goes along with a demonstration, I do think it’s more likely that it will occur when hundreds or thousands of these angry, self-assured people coalesce in one spot rather than alone, and there will always be more protests when your target is the government rather than immigrants or criminality. Like how would you even begin to protest
crime?
So while you’ll never get me to join you in believing the Dems are promoting hatred and division more than the folks who put Stephen Miller and Laura Loomer in positions of such enormous influence within their movement, I do think there are some things the left should specifically work on to break away from this cycle. They need to be more open-minded and realize that an appeal to authority is bad whether that authority is Donald Trump or science. They need to be less afraid of alienating members of their coalition by inviting people in to the movement that might agree with them on some issues and not others. And most importantly, they need to not be so dogmatic that any dissenting voice or adverse is seen as an outright assault on our Republic.
One last note is that while I think the left is more dogmatic and prone to some of these specific things, I can’t help but point out the ways in which the right-wing grifters and hard MAGA supporters are continuing to follow some of the same script the left has for the past decade. While I think there’s less risk of any one person slipping into the dogma of
Trump is Always Right than an entire community of doctors and scientists and activists agreeing, it’s not impossible, and I’d also urge the right to truly grapple with that trend, especially if he continues to explicitly bring Christianity into the government more instead of just on the campaign trail.