Michael Shellenberger has some great content on his Substack; you should check it out, especially if you are still confused about why liberals are so confused about why more and more voters don’t trust them.
Progressive politics took a beating in South America, a trend that has spread to Europe, where the dirty peasants have risen up. A decade or two of imported violence and gang rape has finally knocked them out of the mystical diversity trance cast upon them by EU elites. “A continent that imported group rape and then prosecuted the people who tried to stop it...”
Schellenberger isn’t just sharing brilliant observations or revealing the ingredients to the secret sauce; he’s pimping a book, but if the pull quotes and commentary are any sign, it’s a great book that more than a few people desperately need to read.
At its simplest, the article and the book explore why liberals cling to beliefs that have been falsified.
In The Left’s War on Reality, Gutentag and I argue that the Left not only creates dream worlds from which reality itself looks immoral, and therefore in need of denial, but that those dream worlds require the Left to blame its enemies for the harms it causes. Modern political religions, wrote Voegelin, do this by holding “nonrecognition of reality” as their “first principle.”
Consider how this has worked in practice. The open-borders movement holds that the nation is wrongly made and can be corrected by erasing the line between citizen and stranger. Climatism holds that industrial civilization is wrongly made and can be corrected by rationing energy. Liberals during Covid created a dream world in which “trust the science” meant one man represents science, and in which the FBI, Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center should categorize opposition to vaccine and mask mandates as a sign of “domestic violent extremism.”
The dream world cannot admit failure, because its adherents have invested their identities in being on the “right side of history.” The problem is never that mass migration brought group rape to German cities; it is that the AfD spreads “hate.” The problem is never that lockdowns were so extreme that many were ruled unconstitutional; it is that “extremists” undermined public health. The problem is never that the models burned coal that does not exist; it is that “deniers” oppose climate policy.
A dream world meant to usher us all, willing or not, toward another fantasy, the Marxist utopia, through which we may be forced to endure subsistence living under the brutal jackboot of tyranny, but with the promise that it will all be worth it.
The lesson of history they can’t believe is that it will be worth it for the tyrants, but not for anyone else. The same human failings that pretend diversity is our strength, when we can see it is the opposite, prevent them from accepting that everyone already did “socialism” right, because the people who want Socialism to work are the people who will insist it has, despite the evidence.
The European elites invited third-world rapists to have their way with their young white European women and then criminally charged anyone who dared to point out the problem.
In America, abortion has killed tens of millions of babies while often doing significant physical and emotional harm to women they told would be empowered by it.
The black family was strong in America until the left destroyed it with welfare and tales of systemic racism.
COVID. Well, let’s not get started there, but for all its evil, there was a significant social and cultural upside. Millions of people who had previously believed the government and doctors had their best interests in mind discovered they did not. And that our State and Federal Constitutions exist to protect us from the great harms labeled as “public health” or “good intentions.”
Liberals are all about good intentions, which have resulted in the rise of toxic empathy whose intentions are to use any means necessary to ensure the progressive mind never has to wrestle with the possibility that someone might disagree with them because they are wrong.
[E]stablishment figures struggle to understand why people across the West are rejecting their policies and views. For the liberal establishment, voters across Europe are voting to close their borders not because migrants commit crimes, depress working-class wages, and strain welfare states but because Elon Musk uses his algorithm to make people angry, racist, and “far right.” People are still angry at Anthony Fauci not because he created the Covid pandemic and then demanded lockdowns whose effects are still being felt, but rather because they are anti-science and/or weak. And governments are not scrapping climate policy because climate scientists lied for decades about everything from rockslides in Nepal to hurricanes to polar bears, and demanded degrowth, but because people are greedy and selfish in their desire for things like air conditioning and automobiles.
The liberal mind is a bag of cats, fed on policy ideas meant to accelerate a one-party state. Ideas framed using emotion and marketing, meant to support a centrally planned government in control of everything, and they are so enamored of it that you can’t convince them of the misery and evil that is destined to follow.
The simple solution is to stop voting for the people (Democrats) who will try to use government power to make the lies in their dreams come true, not because they are wrong, but because they can’t get there from here without robbing everyone else of their rights and property.
You see, that’s how we tell the difference. In our view of government, we don’t have to be right, but if we’re wrong, it only affects us as individuals or, at most, a tiny circle of family or friends. If even that.
When liberals are wrong, it wrecks families, the village, the county, the state, and perhaps an entire nation.
Our dream is to ensure as level a playing field as possible, so you have the freedom not just to define your own dream but how to pursue it.
To liberals, there’s only one dream, and it’s theirs, and you need to shut up and pay for it.
And they don’t like it when you say no.
