I have strong political views that have grown more radical with age, so I pay fairly close attention to politics. But I’m not a ‘junkie.’ Decades of observation convinced me that diving too deep in political media - even while sampling both sides carefully - can lead to an obsessive forest-versus-trees mindset.
That mindset can lead us to accept questionable claims and promote them to the status of conventional wisdom. The most obvious recent example was the legacy media’s ‘Red Wave’ psy-op that, sometime over the summer, supplanted an earlier, opposite wave of skeptical analysis. I’ll revisit the fictional Red Wave below.
The forest-vs-trees bias also leads observers to overlook trends that should be obvious. For example, it was crystal-clear to me, two months before the 2016 election, that the polls and TV pundits were not merely wrong, but lying outright. Based on a broad, but impressionistic survey of the news, I concluded Trump was going to win comfortably. I said so on social media. I fielded a lot of snarky pushback, which blew up satisfyingly in some of my friends’ faces two months later.
A range of factors, varying from observer to observer, causes the forest-vs-trees effect, but often they boil down to wishful thinking. In Philosophy 101, we learned about the importance of distinguishing the positive from the normative, that is, what is from what should be. Normative views - about the way things should be - can’t be proven, like a math theorem, only ‘supported’ by facts and figures.
It’s very, very important to understand that, in traditional American policy debate - in traditional debate generally - the positive facts and figures that each side marshalled to support their normative arguments were required to address shared underlying assumptions. For example, from 1945 through 1989, conservatives and liberals generally agreed that Soviet efforts to export communism needed to be contained. But they often differed sharply on the tactics most likely to succeed.
On economic policy, the shared assumption on both left and right used to be that government tax and fiscal policies should yield the greatest good for the most people. So the left argued for generous welfare programs, arguing that poverty breeds crime. They appealed to our concern for poor children. The right warned that a closer look at such programs often revealed a hammock, not a safety net; and in practice they had little impact on crime. But nobody wanted more crime. The right even came up with a gibe: ‘A conservative is just a liberal who’s been mugged.’
Similarly, at the local level, through the second half of the 20th century, liberals reflexively supported increased school funding, arguing that well-educated children benefit the whole community by promoting prosperity and reducing poverty and crime. Conservatives, just as reflexively, argued against throwing money at education, noting that districts that spent the most per student often did the worst job of educating them. But both sides wanted well-educated kids, and equally important, they agreed on what ‘well-educated’ meant.
Starting in the mid-1990s, increasing fitfully through the 2000s, then accelerating dramatically during the Obama presidency, I watched the left abandon the underlying assumptions that they used to share with the right. Concomitantly, individual leftists, from pundits and politicians to grassroots friends and relatives, steadily abandoned actual debate, falling back on a catechism of slogans and talking points. These were meant to be mutually reinforcing, but more often than not, on close examination, they proved mutually contradictory or simply inaccurate.
A tendency developed simply to break contact with anyone who convincingly refuted more than a couple of the standard talking points, and move on to a less skeptical audience. A poll conducted around 2010 found that leftists were seven times more likely than rightists to block a friend on social media over political differences. Goebbels’ old tactic, letting repetition do the work of argument, also became a technique indispensable to the left after 2000.
The left’s new orthodoxy openly rejects science (a process, whose results are always preliminary) in favor of The Science (TM), an edifice whose findings are immutable - until leftist authorities decide to discard them, like a used face mask or a crate of Arizona GOP ballots. ‘The Science’ harbors and systematizes the left’s catechism.
The Science can readily be distinguished from science via the key concept of falsifiabity. In science, when you propose a theory to explain a phenomenon, the process requires you to specify developments that would undermine your theory or prove it wrong - that is, falsify it. But the left can’t even imagine, let alone bring themselves to propose findings that would falsify their claims about climate change, lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine efficacy and safety, or gender theory. They don’t even try. They just fall back on The Science, and insist it’s ‘settled’ in their favor.
The left laid the foundation for The Science in the mid-20th century. They deployed unionized schoolteachers to carry out a controlled demolition of public education, from within, while maintaining a facade of school buildings, educational processes and milestones. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the baby boomers took over the faculties and administration of the universities they had disrupted in the ‘60s. By the 1990s, the K-12 ’educators’ whom the universities pumped out had systematically lowered expectations of intellectual accomplishment, and began promoting a doctrine of unconditional self-esteem. In school sports, kids got participation trophies. In the classroom, critical thinking died of neglect. Teachers propped its corpse up in the corner, pretending it was still alive, occasionally invoking the departed in disingenuous complaints like, ‘We should focus on teaching kids to think critically, instead of making them memorize facts and figures.’ Actually, they should do both, but do neither.
Like an enzyme, critical thinking requires a large substrate of facts and figures on which to work. You need a body of knowledge to think critically about. The more facts and figures you know about a topic, the easier it is to discern which are most pertinent, and the less likely you are to overlook something that leads you astray.
The death of critical thinking left public-school children vulnerable to ‘The Science,’ the progressive catechism, its slogans and talking points. Despite that, many of us - a narrow and aging majority - still understand science. We kept shouting from the rooftops that science largely contradicted The Science. And lo, science began to impact elections: In 2016, skeptics of the man-made climate catastrophe hoax seized the White House and both houses of Congress. The left, deeply alarmed, began openly to embrace coercion and censorship. In that embrace, today’s left is roughly the opposite of what it used to be, the left that we used to call ‘liberal.’
They’re progressive now. The left embraces the term, and I’m fine with it too. Right-wingers may want to put it in scare quotes: There’s nothing new or ‘progressive’ about political coercion. Today’s left is a throwback to the 1920s, when American progressives, like John Dewey, openly praised Mussolini, Stalin and their methods. In the late 2000s, Jonah Goldberg wrote a prescient book, ‘Liberal Fascism,’ about the left’s coercive impulses. Legacy media, needless to say, have memory-holed the early US progressives’ enthusiasm for murderous 20th-century totalitarians.
Not by coincidence, John Dewey’s admirers call him ‘the father of American public education.’ His role shaping the priorities of generations of post WWII public-school teachers, officials and their unions had much to do with the success of the controlled demolition of American public education and the minds of American youth.
The left lacks a majority, but with their embrace of coercion they’re convinced they no longer need one. They just need a staunch minority of angry, cognitively dissonant voters, hewing to mutually contradictory propositions so vehemently, they’ll scream curses at you if you point one out. So firmly they’ll cheer the use of force to achieve anything their leaders deem ‘for the common good.’ So firmly they’ll celebrate authorities who tell their neighbors what, where and how far they can drive, and what they can eat, in order to combat the non-falsifiable phantasm of ‘man-made climate change.’ So firmly they’ll rejoice when their neighbors are forced out of their livelihoods and their kids out of schools (the latter a mixed curse I’ll grant you) for refusing an experimental gene therapy, illegally imposed by the government, that had proven both unsafe and ineffective well before it was mandated.
I reckon the hard-core left is a quarter of the electorate, tops, concentrated among those who came of age in the late 1990s and afterward. But depending on the issue, the left could win anything from single-digit support (the people who really believe men can have babies) to 10-15% (people who broadly accept gender theory) to over 50% (the Covid ‘vaccine’ mandates at peak public support).
As many of us need to keep being reminded, politics is downstream from culture. A Red Wave could have resulted only from a cultural groundswell, a huge public attitude shift that would have been apparent long before the election. It just wasn’t there. Since we know pollsters and pundits often lie outright, it makes sense that legacy media would promote a Red Wave that they knew was unlikely. Such talk would help the left get out their vote, and demoralize the right when it fell short of predictions. Furthermore, establishment Republicans like Karl Rove - who have a lot more to fear from a Trump comeback than Democrats do - can, and have blamed the lack of a wave on Donald Trump. That’s a bizarre affront to our intelligence. Raheem Kassam makes the case that there actually was a sort of red wave: Well over 90% of the 200+ candidates whom Trump endorsed have won their races.
So the angst I see among right-wing pundits is just silly. They gave in to wishful thinking. The election glass remains half full: The GOP is poised to win the House, though brazen Arizona fraud and Mitch McConnell cost them the Senate. Not bad, in a country where 25% of voters hold beliefs that amount to acquired mental illness and another quarter are zombies just going along out of mindless partisan habit. Joe Biden wouldn’t be president if that hadn’t, for years, been the nature of the Democrat base.
Libertarians and other cynics often complain that US elections rarely change much. But during the 21st century, that’s only been true when the right wins. Left-wing victories bring dramatic change: forever wars, IRS/FBI-turned-Gestapo, $4 gasoline and the threat of WWIII. And that’s where the Red Wave psy-op really benefited the left, by distracting the right from the true nature of the challenge they face.
There was a localized Red Wave in Florida. It was multifactorial, but one key factor was thorough election reform, which included getting rid of mail-in voting except for exceptional circumstances.
I’m a Texan who grew up in Arizona, so those are the states I watch closest. In Texas, every election is a Red Wave. This week’s wave wasn’t a tsunami, but the tide kept rising. Democrats wasted vast sums accomplishing almost nothing. Voters again dismissed Beto, the preposterous fake Tejano convicted burglar who, understandably, wants to seize your guns. Tejanos in the Rio Grande Valley continue to swing right as Biden policies flood their streets with destitute Central Americans and illicit drugs.
But in Arizona, the supervisors in Pima and Maricopa Counties - representing the far left and the McCain machine respectively, who are the same team - are playing a very dangerous game. In 2020 they presided over an operation that counted 9,000 more mail-in ballots than were mailed out; a vote repeatedly marred by big tranches of ballots turning up days late; and hundreds of others found uncounted, discarded in an abandoned building. This time round, they posted 60% of early, heavily Democrat ballots within 12 hours of polls closing, then began slow-walking the count of right-leaning election-day voters in order to delay, as long as possible, being forced to announce GOP victories. In the next 60 hours, they counted only another 20 percent.
Arizona law unaccountably allows secretary of state Katie Hobbs to supervise the very election in which she’s running for governor. So what the delay likely means is that her workers have already counted most if not all the votes. The Pima and Maricopa supervisors now know how many fake ballots they need (and how many real ones to discard) to give Democrats the edge, and they are scrambling to make it happen. This was always the purpose of mail-in voting. It had nothing whatsoever to do with a virus about as deadly as seasonal flu.
This could backfire. If the supervisors fail, or if their minions get caught red-handed dumping GOP ballots in the desert, Kari Lake might become governor, and Abe Hamadeh the attorney general. Both ran on election integrity, or ‘denial’ as CNN calls it. Both would then have a fresh incentive to pursue criminal investigation of Hobbs and supervisors in both counties. So I expect the fraudsters to double down.
But what if Arizona’s corrupt Uniparty manages to steal its second election in a row? For starters, it means the left will definitely steal the national election in 2024. They have the know-how and proven methods. Their opponents lack both the will and savvy to stop them, in large part because they refuse to accept the next big take-home point: The America they grew up in is gone, socially, politically and legally. Election fraud, disinformation and law enforcement weaponized against dissent is the modus operandi of our increasingly bold and utterly lawless rulers. There’s little or no hope of correcting that within the political process.
The Red Wave talk lulled the right, whose pundits and politicians keep kidding themselves about the nature of the enemy and the utility of elections. Lev Trotsky noted a curious blind spot: ‘Despite the unquestionable greatness of the Anglo-Saxon genius, it is impossible not to see that the laws of revolutions are least understood precisely in the Anglo-Saxon countries. The explanation for this lies, on the one hand, in the fact that the very appearance of revolution in these countries relates to a long-distant past, and evokes in official “sociologists” a condescending smile, as would childish pranks. On the other hand, pragmatism, so characteristic of Anglo-Saxon thinking, is least of all useful for understanding revolutionary crises.’
Trotsky’s observation applies equally to counterrevolution. You can’t mount a counterrevolution if you bury your head in the sand. You’ve got to wake up and acknowledge that your enemy long ago abandoned Anglo-Saxon ‘pragmatism’ (that is, the rule of law) in favor of breaking as many eggs as necessary to make their omelette. Hopefully soon the MAGA movement, and others unwilling to live under a banana-republic despotism, will realize that massive sustained civil disobedience is now necessary, though perhaps still insufficient to thwart the usurpers.
If it ever dawns on the right that the revolutionaries intend the wholesale destruction of the system, the country, and the lifestyle they grew up in, they can do plenty to fight back. I’ll discuss what an effective resistance might look like in a later post, focusing heavily on Texas and other places where the right remains strong.