Unthinking Thought - Why The Vaporous Ideas Of Social Reform Have Such Appeal

After four years of harping, hectoring, and whingeing, the Left, badly defeated in an electoral rout to Donald Trump and the Republicans, are still at it, singing the same tune, banging the same drum, and still marching to Zion. 

 

Why is that? Why despite the radical turnaround of the country is the Left still so tiresome and banal?  The case for the black man has been made, examined, and made again; that for gender fluidity, transgenders, and the gender spectrum hawked and flogged without a rest; and that for climate change hollered, banged, and hammered to beat the band - and yet these issues to most of the country are of marginal interest, matters of indifference and irrelevance. 

The inner cities are still hellholes of violence, drugs, and social dysfunction.  The idea of a multi-faceted, fungible human sexuality has been rejected out of hand for its febrile assumptions; and concern for a fiery climate Armageddon dismissed in the expectation of rational human adaptation and ingenuity. 

 

America, say progressives, is worse than the worst African shithole - a corrupt, venal, oppressive, hateful, parochial place unconcerned about the planet, social dignity, and genuine human generosity.  It is a place which deliberately and persistently marginalizes the poor, demonizes life in the middle, and pursues the almighty dollar at all costs. 

Only a few, they say, have the foresight, the intelligence, and the commitment to revive and revitalize what few democratic sentiments still exist; to educate the ignorant swamp dwellers, crackers, and Mississippi coonhound, gunrack, bass boat racists.

 

These prophets of doom and self-appointed evangelists of mercy are so shuttered, cloistered, and immured in their own apocalyptic nightmares and as wild-eyed and crazed as the most unhinged streetcorner preacher that no one is listening.

The freak show and circus acts of the 'upenders', the born-again social reformers for whom only a brave new world of vision, compassion, and righteousness is the answer are history.  They have not just been demoted and removed from office, but relegated to some nasty gulag, some horrible reservation in North Dakota, isolated and forgotten. 

'La lucha continua!', shouted Bob Muzelle, longtime social justice warrior, veteran of freedom rides, barricades, the Pettis bridge, attack dogs, and ax handles. Stalwart supporter of women, gays, the poor and disadvantaged; and resolute enemy of the entitled rich.  He was a liberal's liberal, a man without blemish, without error, and without a doubt.  

He was at once the champion of the now routed Left and an example of why it has so lost favor.  His absolute fidelity to progressivism was his political myopia.  His devotion to the canon and his irreproachably unquestioning acceptance of its principles made him the poster boy for political hysteria.  

There is no doubt that progressivism is a religion, secular but with all the trappings of true belief.  It has its credo, its doctrine and liturgy; its saints, priests, and acolytes; and its book, altar, and cross. That can be the only explanation for a progressive faith without proof, a collection of unproved assumptions which if recited enough become part of the holy order.  

Someone who looks reality in the face and rejects it in favor of some kind of beautiful illusion is ipso facto religious. The reality of America - prosperous, land of opportunity, practical, enterprising, and patriotic - is replaced by a miasmic vision of hell and notions of salvation. 

 

Bob had been so indoctrinated, so completely coopted by The Movement that he could no longer think for himself.  Taking a shit could only remind him of the shambling outhouses of slave quarters; making periodic love to his wife made him think only of le droit du seigneur and the sexual advantage taken by plantation grandees and their overseers. Eating was never a pleasure but a reminder of plenty amidst want.  He was a painfully insistent man and an intolerable bore. 

The poor, the black, the marginalized fit into every discussion, every backyard barbecue, every Christmas dinner.  Bob hammered away at the shibboleths of the Right with unremitting passion, undaunted by their solidity and resistance.  Right and good would always prevail. 

If this wasn't enough, Bob met with his support group every Thursday night, men and women for whom the ascendancy of Donald Trump was not just an electoral victory, but the beginning of the End of Days. 

These weekly sessions were the only emotional outlet for Bob and his colleagues.  Every other hour of the week was consumed with political activism, battlefield operations, and theatre strategy.  The group offered solace and tears - it was OK to cry here, every shoulder was there to shed a tear on. It was as weepy as women at a wedding or disconsolate over the loss of a lover.  

‘Oh, God', wailed Bob, bawling like a baby, embraced by his friends but unrelieved of the horrible existential pain of defeat. 

The whole progressive kit-and-kaboodle was being tossed aside by the MAGA Trumpers - not one pillar of the carefully constructed liberal architecture would remain standing and the whole edifice would collapse on itself in one final, devastating crash.  

What would they do? Where would they go?  No one wanted them anymore, but they all still had fire in the belly, and an absolute faith in the rightness of their cause.  'Impaled on the horns of a dilemma' Bob remembered his old Yale professor Vincent Scully saying about the mountains of Cnossos and the goddesses of Crete and the conundrums of life. 

Irony and sad humor aside, where indeed would Bob go?  Now at the very fag end of his career, he was hoarse with decades of rebellious defiance, a bit saggy and lined from years in the trenches and on bad beds, sallow and grey from too many hours in moldy basement hideouts, and mentally agitated and confused after so many varied causes.  

'Time to retire, dear', said his wife Corinne, herself an indefatigable advocate for peace and justice, but far more sensible than her husband. Yet the thought of life on a chaise lounge on a Florida beach was anathema to him.  He would rather die in his traces, the death of a hero. 

Retirement came to him, he did mot choose it. Fewer and fewer organizations wanted him and his antiquated notions of integration and communitarianism, so his engagements were few and far between.  Now that he and his colleagues had been routed and were heading for the exits, there would be no podiums, daises, and platforms; so why not buy that condo in Sarasota?

Even with that consoling thought Bob could not give up thinking of the black man, the inner city pestilence in which he was forced to live and the white supremacy which kept him there.  He tossed and turned with alternating images of pina coladas and steel-grilled, pimp-walking street dons. 

Ninety percent of life is just showing up said Groucho or Woody Allen, and so it was that showing up on the balcony of his condo in Naples, sipping a sundowner, and reading a trashy novel was part of the ebb and flow of life.  Now, most of his younger colleagues thought it strange that a man of such political commitment and religious fervor could vegetate like that, a turnip, a beet; but Bob had met with his maker and they agreed that his dues had been paid and a few years time off before heaven was certainly OK.