Waging Permanent Ideological War

Over at The Federalist Joseph Backholm has some fun with progressive writer John Pavlovitz who writes about how he's not a radical leftist, but belongs in the "human middle."

Then Backholm goes on to show how whacko the left has become in 25 different ways, like:

They went from “coexist” bumper stickers to suing grandmothers who preferred not to decorate a same-sex wedding.

According to La Wik, "Pavlovitz is an American Christian pastor and author, known for his social and political writings from a liberal Christian perspective."

And just today, Pavlovitz has issued a rant about he who shall not be named. You see, someone asked him: “John… what happens if he wins again?” and he gave him a comfortable answer. But he was thinking:

He can’t win again.

That isn’t an option.

It simply cannot be allowed.

If he wins again, November 2016 will seem relatively uneventful; a partly cloudy day in advance of a Category 5 hurricane.

And on and on into a lefty partisan rant.

And here was I thinking that the Trump win in 2016 was just the normal "time for a change" election after 8 years of the other guys. With the innovation that Trump made a connection with the white working class that has been abandoned by the Democrats as the ruling class has pivoted away from class politics to race and gender politics. And all he did was get them to feel that "he cared about people like me." Which is Job One for every politician.

I suppose that Pavloitz belongs to the political tendency that interpreted Barack Obama's two terms as president as a "fundamental change" in American life.

And here I was thinking that Barack Obama was First Black President: been there, done that. We've elected a black president, so we can't be called racists. Now back to your regular scheduled programming. Not.

One of the interesting things about the last half-century is how giving people political rights doesn't solve anything. You abolish government-mandated race laws like Jim Crow and instead of race dropping off the radar you find that the whole of society becomes obsessed with race. The Supreme Court declares gay marriage to be a thing, and gays start running around finding deplorables to cancel and put out of business.

Couple of dozen PhDs there, in my humble estimation. Because more research is needed.

And then you have politicians that don't concede elections. I remember, back in the day, when Time magazine would have a post-election issue about how the election is over, and we are all Americans, and how we all come together after elections, and how, bless their hearts, the losers can content themselves with "wait until next time."

Here's what I think, and I think that the John Pavlovitzes should pay attention.

I think that it is a problem when 90 percent of media articles about a president are negative.

I think that it is a problem when the government schools and universities are almost uniformly Democratic, and where conservative voices get silenced and canceled.

I think it is a problem when corporations are enforcing an ideological line in response to pressure from left-wing activist groups.

I think it is a problem when there is no defence against an accusation of racist-sexist-homophobe.

In other words I think that, whatever your beliefs and certainties, it is a really good idea, from a strategic point of view, to let the other guys have their say. Hey, if nothing else, you get to see what absolute clueless idiots the other guys are. It doesn't get any better than that!

 I also think that we should understand left-wing ideological activist enthusiasms strictly as religious "great awakenings." And sometimes we should think of them as religious cults activated by "prophecy."

And then what happens when "prophecy fails?"

You can think of the leftist frenzy since 2016 as a case of a failure of prophecy. Lefties thought that the world had changed, that progressives like Obama would rule forever. And their prophecy failed.

Which, you might say, is why the Founders decided against a state church, so that prophetic cults would not get mixed up in national politics.

Of course, there is no way to keep prophecy out of it. But you can at least put in roadblocks, to make it hard for prophetic groups to grab a hold of the political power, the way that the Bolsheviks and the Maoists did.

And there is nothing like repeated failure at the ballot box to bring the prophetic urge down to Earth.

That's what happened with the Sixties. The Democrats thought they were going to rule forever. Then they lost four out of five presidential elections in a row, and finally, the New Democrat Bill Clinton got elected as a moderate.

But then, as the Bible says, there came a Pharaoh that knew not Joseph, a rising generation of lefty progressives that did not live through the aftermath of the Sixties.

And so it looks like they will have to learn about politics and ordinary lunch-bucket voters the hard way.

Yeah. Because the guys that wage what seems like permanent ideological war are usually rich kids, scions of the ruling class.

But most ordinary people just want to live their lives and wive and thrive without being jerked around by ruling-class jerks.

I wonder what they mean by that?