“... we cannot agree to disagree because with bipartisanship being dead, what would this accommodation do for us? All you have now are people staking out their ideological tribal boundaries and going to war against anyone not of the tribe who dares cross that boundary by espousing the virtues of the totem they happen cling to. The demiurge of unreason stalks the body politic, partisanship being by its very nature irrational since it lives in denial of the antinomies, vagaries and opaque complexity that life clearly manifests on a daily basis… progressivism becomes but another failed religion, utterly unable to keep the promises it makes and therefore embracing ever more and more illusion, lies and absolutism as the means by which to enforce its will...”
Debate is an acknowledgement of the fact that there is no absolute truth - and yet in our democracies increasingly we see people acting as if they indeed are arguing in defense of some absolute truth - except it’s not an argument they’re making - it’s hectoring, demonizing, bemoaning, proselytizing, propagandizing - it’s atavistic, tribal - whatever - one thing it definitely is not though is a debate. Now, it will sound like me defending my tribe - but it isn’t, I think, since I’m no real big fan of my would be tribe or any tribe for that matter - but the worst offender in terms of the above is currently clearly the left, driven into an irrational, insane ideological tribalism by the alluring radical pull of Obama on one side and the counter reactionary push back by Trumpism on the other. The visceral response to Trump has really brought the extremism of the left - which, as idealists fed by emotionalism, comes naturally to them i think - to the surface - and the angst appears particularly acute because the illusion of Obama really excited the emotionalist idealism of their ideology - I think many on the left truly came to believe that their progressive Nirvanah was just around the corner and are flummoxed by the reality that what Obama actually led to was Trump - so agitated by this reality are they that they’ve embraced with greater fierceness the unreality that comes so naturally to their naive little souls.
This is why I watch with fascination the maniacal ‘Trump haters’ around me - and since I live in a prosperous large city it seems that everyone I come in contact with is a leftist full of hatred of Trump - as a person who is no fan of Trump’s but also not a leftist either [which to the left means regardless how I feel about Trump there must be something wrong with me] it’s requisite that I keep my political opinions to myself or face career suicide, cultural ostracism and eventually a metaphorical firing squad - this oppressive ideological orthodoxy is so pervasive that even my silence can come to be seen as suspicious so every so often I have to throw off some anti-Trump witticism to keep the ever present threat of a witch hunt from my door - that I have to behave this way in a modern city ostensibly espousing Western democratic values tells you everything you need to know about the religion of progressivism.
But I do watch these people - and boiled down what I see is that their point of view is never a coherent, logical, fact based argument - it’s always about some ‘notion’ whose ‘truth’ they’ve been convinced of through non-rational means that ends in seeing Trump as being a manifestation of, a stand in for, something which really amounts to nothing more than a vector through which their hatred can be focused against anything that doesn’t fit into the cloistered confines of the progressive ideology they follow. ‘Follow’ is a good word, because these people are not engaged is some rational attempt to defend a viewpoint - they are merely following a prompt that has been ‘suggested’ to them and feeds their prime desire, which is to hate Trump and all of the something which they believe, ie unquestionably assume is true regarding what he ‘represents’. This assumption, which is really an article of faith and piety and therefore no different from religion, is unassailable by facts that do not fit with what they have convinced themselves is true - which is why if you try and make a reasoned argument that opposes or merely questions what they believe, they quite literally look at you as if you were speaking in satanic tongues. It’s extraordinary - and frightening, because I do not see how a democracy that cannot abide an honest debate between opposing viewpoints manages to hold together.
