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AJT Musician's avatar

“Those who have been keeping up with me know what I have to say about how this happened: The American left is deeply, dangerously isolated both ideologically and increasingly, socially. Despite the claims of right-wing culture warriors, modern cancellations have largely been a phenomenon of the left towards others dissenting liberals or leftists, and we are finally witnessing the consequences of this approach on the tribe as a whole: they have mutilated themselves. Having purged anyone capable of disagreement from their ranks, they are blind and helpless and likely to remain that way.”

This is precisely correct. Thank you for articulating it so clearly.

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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

"The American left is deeply, dangerously isolated both ideologically and increasingly, socially."

When the American Left converted en masse to the Social Justice faith it also adopted (mostly unknowingly) the habits of thought and behavior of the Social Justice priesthood aka the academic Left.

What's happening to the Democrats now reminds me a lot of the atmosphere in campus Humanities depts of the 1990s and of other "Left spaces" of the past generation or two, esp involving ideology and activism: a hothouse quasi-Maoist environment of constant accusation and recrimination where everyone has to walk on eggshells in case they say something politically incorrect, an intensely moralized and policed environment based on ideological purity and fealty, with the ideology itself being rigid, dogmatic, punitive and absolutely intolerant of dissent.

The main difference now being that these prior battles took place in classrooms and faculty lounges, but now the virus has escaped the lab and infects one of our 2 political parties and almost our entire thinking and culture classes.

I think ideological frenzies are similar to cult movements, where the True Believers will do or say anything in order to not admit that the cause they gave their lives to turned out to be false and destructive. In the case of the Social Justice Left (which provides the brains and cash for the Dem Party), only a massive social cataclysm or a massive electoral repudiation will snap them out of their ideological fever. We shall see which one hits them first.

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