About the ‘student’ riots at Berkeley - what shall we call the increasing intolerance of the left, some brand or incarnation of a neo-tribalism fracturing the body politic? The centre cannot hold sundering of democracy under the malignant forces of bad parenting, bad schools and a media so corrupted by a leftist bias that things like ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ and ‘objectivity’ have had all viable meaning drained from them? I dunno - the extremist intolerance of the left, this cloistered ideology that treats its radical self serving emotionalism as a categorical imperative that will lift us all, whether we like it or not, to some socialist heaven, can lead only to a cultural balkanization, which is already happening, and then to political balkanization as any notion of bipartisanship dissolves away under a wave of acrimony and distrust and fear. I don’t think Trump is the first instantiation of this coming breakup - rather it was Obama, who despite his lofty rhetoric clearly saw America as two warring tribes that cannot abide each other, that brought us to this point - indeed, it was the ease with which he lied about his true ideology and the way that the media was so willing to endorse this malfeasance, that best defined this tribalism, an unholy alliance that made Trump possible. Actually, you could say this political tribalism really started to manifest itself during the Bush presidency - not because of what Bush did per se, but rather because of the way the media and liberal cultural elites responded to him - it was with Bush that you really started to see that reason and facts and objective argument for these people simply just no longer mattered - all that mattered was whether or not your political tribe was seen as winning, which meant seen as being right about everything, which meant being seen as right had absolutely nothing at all to do with actually being right. A precursor to the unhinged intolerance of today.
