Hey, folks! Alright, so here’s the deal: I’ve been struggling to manage the workload of these longer-and-longer pieces lately, but there are a lot of smaller pieces that I can still get out on a daily basis. Hence, I’m going to start just getting out a couple of quick hits every day. This series will be less-edited, but also more regular, so as to help build some more consistency.
Here goes!
There was an interesting take from Friday’s Weeds: It’s not exactly new that many voters viewed Trumpism as a moderated or center-right ideology. However, the last year or two have really driven home the point that this strategy isn’t coming from a classical “Run To The Center” model, but rather from an internal authoritarianism-driven ideological stagnation.
The scary part is… this might actually work. Even though Trumpism really isn’t a Run To The Center, voters have already fallen for the narrative of it as such. As we know here at the Discourse, narrative is a powerful thing!
What scares me is the possibility that this strategy helps Republicans cement authoritarian power under the guise of being a newly “center-right” party.
This hysteria over Roe is kind of damning. Liberals are freaking out about a “right” that they’ve only had for fifty years, all because of… well, what was it again?
Oh yeah, because they’ve been told by other liberals that the “right to choice” is a “critical human right”, even though Roe doesn’t actually protect that; it protects a right to privacy against government intrusion upon the making of that choice, not the choice itself. That is, there is no positive legal right to abortion even in Casey, let alone Roe!
Look, if you want to fight for abortion as a human right, then feel free. I’m demilitarized; I won’t stop you. But liberals need to quit fooling themselves that abortion actually is a right as “settled law” — which, again, misleadingly frames the issue as a positive right for everyone who doesn’t actually understand the law or Roe.
I don’t want to engage in too much schadenfreude here, but this is the same kind of self-own that has plagued liberals on abortion for several generations now. All-or-nothing maximalism and pro-choice zealotry have left liberals blind to the realities of this issue, in much the same way that they’ve let their concerns for the poor blind them to the political realities of achieving effective political change in the red states. To be more explicit, liberals’ problem is always that they put the cart before the horse, and end up looking like hysterical idiots while fighting to preserve what illusory gains they manage.
I guess I’m beating up on liberals today, cuz here’s another “dumb lib idea” that triggered me: “Make it mandatory for all national media to immediately cut away and show caskets of dead soldiers arriving at the airport”.
Um… no. To your average peace-loving hippie, of course this sounds like a way to emphasize the costs of war to a conscious public.
But have you *seen* the American public? They’re morons and assholes! This idea is far more likely to fill them with all the vengeance and hatred they need to fuel the next dumb war, not prevent it. Next!
Dave's Daily Dose
You have such clarity, Dave. Refreshing. I like to think of myself as a liberal but for all the points you make in your writing. It seems to me both "liberal" and "conservative" have been hijacked by American Extremism.