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Need to get some ish off my chest.
It's been incredibly frustrating the past 5 years or so navigating the intellectual public space that I came up in.
No label really works for me, but I'm somewhere between classical and neo-liberal, but generally I just am angry at everyone.
It's been incredibly frustrating the past 5 years or so navigating the intellectual public space that I came up in.
No label really works for me, but I'm somewhere between classical and neo-liberal, but generally I just am angry at everyone.
This is, of course, not to equate the American political Left and Right--that false equivalence may be the most infuriating cop-out/position of all. When facing a racist demagogue, the choice should not be hard.
But I look at the political landscape right now and it's difficult not to resign oneself to defeat. I've long understood that I'm not going to see candidates I love on any political ticket at any level of government. But no one is giving me hope of anything right now.
The Right has been so corrupted by a cult of personality that I genuinely fear for our country's future. The centrist Dems have their fingers in a dike pretending it's a plan of action, and the rising Left is pushing ideas that sound good but have long been proven unworkable.
I'm struggling to put together an actual piece addressing this last bit: which is a mess, but amounts to a profound sympathy for the Left's goals, but with a no BS understanding of our country's faults that invites more problems than it solves.
At bottom, what I've been hearing is a dismantling of the current power structures and a replacement with something better.
In the abstract, that's (potentially) great. In reality, what will follow in a nation in which 70M+ people voted for Trump is a nightmare.
In the abstract, that's (potentially) great. In reality, what will follow in a nation in which 70M+ people voted for Trump is a nightmare.
We don't try to shape public policy de novo, for a world we wished we lived in. We shape it with what we have and what we know, and that is frankly scary right now. And pretending humans aren't who they tell us they are is not reasonable.
But right now there is broad contempt--from left and right--for the traditional liberalism that undergirds our society. Yes, it is and has been endemically flawed with racism, sexism, and other normative assumptions so engrained they are effectively coercive.
But rather than try to move toward a liberal pluralism that respects individual rights, we see two polarized camps that are increasingly convinced their worldview must be correct and implemented.
That's not how freedom works.
That's not how freedom works.
And don't get me confused w/ self-pitying folks who think they've been persecuted for having bad opinions or don't want to be edited. Rather, this is dismay that one side vacillates between the ineffectual and the misguided and the other side is almost criminally wrong.
And everything is terrible. Onward.
/fin
/fin
