The Left Elucidated
I grew up in Santa Cruz County, California. The county is a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, and it’s also one of the most leftist areas in the United States. When I was little, it was a refuge for aging hippies as much as it was a home for tech geeks. We used to say that Santa Cruz was where people lived when San Francisco was too conservative for them, and that wasn’t an exaggeration. It’s the kind of area where elections are between the Democrats and the Greens, with the Democrats being on the “right,” and voters genuinely believe the national Democrat Party is the centrist party. For them, politicians such as Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters have always been center-left moderates.
My experience in and continuing connection to Santa Cruz give me insight into the modern Left that many Republicans and other conservatives don’t have. That includes others who have left the Democrats over the last several years, since most come from more politically balanced communities than I did. The thing is, that the political beliefs that the Left are fighting to normalize right now were already normalized in Santa Cruz by the time I was in college twenty years ago. For people who still live there, in their own echo chamber, Republicans oppose things that have been normal for the Left for at least 25 years, and since they have no understanding of how much further left they are than Democrats in the rest of the country, they see Republicans being “regressive” about “long-settled” issues. If you saw someone questioning whether we should “normalize” the use of cars instead of horse-drawn wagons, you’d think it was pretty questionable. That’s how the Left feels about the gender issue, among other things.
That attitude reinforces the overall messaging and multi-generational preconception that Republicans want to establish an exclusively White, Evangelical theocracy and literally kill anyone who does not comply or conform. As an example, my father, who still lives in Santa Cruz, has long believed that Republicans are conspiring to overturn the entire system of American governance in favor of theocracy via the Supreme Court. He is an otherwise intelligent man who made his career applying formal logic to computing on behalf of major tech and financial corporations, but politics is his blind spot, and the demographics of the Supreme Court don’t register as an initial flaw in his theory.
Democrats, especially those far to the Left, do not see gradations of conservatism. Nor does party leadership encourage such nuanced thinking. During the 2016 election, leftist voters truly could not see any substantive differences in policy or belief between Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, or Ben Carson. They don’t distinguish between Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins. Any discussion of differences in voting records are dismissed as superficial, meaningless, or purposely manipulative. They don’t distinguish between Christian social conservatives and people who just want lower taxes and a modicum of government accountability. As a result, they are also incapable of distinguishing between lifelong Republican voters and people on the center-left (often blue collar workers) who vote Republican because they feel the Democrat party left them behind.
Any statements made by Republicans or a Republican-run government entity are presumed to be propaganda. For instance, while there are Democrat voters who want better border control and law enforcement, they’ve been told that the mission of ICE, et al, is to “disappear” US citizens who are political dissidents, and that the deportation of illegals is just a cover story. Likewise, it doesn’t matter how many peer-reviewed studies the CDC produces to support policy decisions–those will all be dismissed as manufactured evidence to drive ideologically-based health policy. The same goes for any dismissals or prosecutions of corrupt politicians or government employees. There is absolutely nothing we on the Right can say and no evidence we could present that could convince them we are acting in good faith.
If you bring up Republicans who are on the center-right or points of overlap between Democrat and Republican platforms, you will be told you are naive. It’s obviously a trick or lie to lull people into a sense of complacency. If you point out the commonalities between Trump’s campaign platforms and Bill Clinton’s 92 and 96 campaign platforms, you’ll be told that what Trump has said doesn’t matter, because it’s all fake. They don’t believe his words to be consistent with his agenda OR his actions. If you point out diversity in the Republican party, whether ideological or demographic, you’re told that those numbers are just propaganda or reflect “tokenism”.
It’s not TDS, because it is not limited to and did not begin in response to Trump. It’s the culmination of decades of party leadership and political activism poisoning the well against civilized discourse. They won’t listen to or believe us for exactly the same reasons that you and I wouldn’t listen to Mao give a PowerPoint listing out the advantages of his Five Year Plan. I know that, because it’s how I was actively taught as a child in the 90s, not only by my parents, but by teachers, religious leaders, friends’ parents, the news, and pretty much every adult I encountered. And my parents and their friends consider themselves to be center-left.
When you live in an overwhelmingly blue area, you don’t live in the same reality as red or purple areas. It’s not just a matter of being insulated from opposing viewpoints or hearing and reading news that has a leftwing political bias. The news simply doesn’t report the same stories. Back when Benghazi happened, my relatives on the Left didn’t even know it had happened. A few had heard gossip that Republican commentators had fabricated a terrorist attack in Libya in order to come up with an excuse to attack Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but none had been exposed to news stories reporting on it as an actual event. And to put media bias into perspective, for that crowd, PBS and NPR are conservative news sources, with the HuffPo in the middle, and Mother Jones on the center-left. If you think that NPR is conservative, then being horrified by Fox News is a pretty understandable reaction, to say nothing of Republicans complaining about left-wing bias on those news outlets. Now, imagine how Republicans sounded when they later brought up Benghazi on the campaign trail.
In the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, many people on the right or in the center are horrified by people on the left celebrating murder. None of us should be surprised. Where I grew up, a normal attitude for people who protested Vietnam in younger years was the assumption that militaries, especially the American military, never have the moral high ground. I was in college when 9/11 happened, and I knew a lot of people (not just on campus) who firmly believed that the United States deserved to be attacked and had no right to retaliate. There were people who openly celebrated it. There was also a lot of talk in Santa Cruz about why Bin Laden actually wasn’t a bad guy or why he was a patsy for government machinations.
There’s a saying that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and that’s an idea that the Left has taken to heart for decades. On the left, terrorists are generally given the ideological benefit of the doubt, especially if they act against a better-equipped, formal military. The assumption is that anyone engaged in terrorism has a cause (their “truth”) they consider worth dying for, even against impossible odds and negative press. They are also presumed to be driven to terrorism by oppressive forces that leave them little or no access to prettier, more civilized means of driving change. If the terrorist was funded by America’s enemies, all the better, since the worst is assumed of American military goals and those of our allies. That was true of the PIRA in Northern Ireland and Che Guevara in Cuba (despite his deliberate targeting of homosexuals). It’s still true of assumptions about Islamic terrorist organizations in general, and it’s a major driving factor in antisemitism on the Left.
The Left hasn’t exactly hidden these attitudes either. The Right has just refused to connect the dots. Many on the center-left, especially the camp of the Democrat party made up of union workers, have been sufficiently focused on their own interests, that they simply didn’t pay attention to what the rest of the party was doing. Either that, or they mentally minimized the significance of what they saw and heard to justify continued alliance. The fracturing we see now is the acknowledgement of that mistake.
On the Right, here in the United States, we generally view the political spectrum as between totalitarianism on one side and anarchy on the other, but we also see it in gradations of social conservatism or liberality. On the first spectrum, communism and fascism are both on the far end of the totalitarian side, and most conservatives fall somewhere on the center-right, between the middle and anarchy. We want a government strong enough to do the things it must do, but limited and decentralized enough not to interfere in our daily lives. We also view social liberalism as a means of keeping people sufficiently disorganized and traumatized on a personal level that they either need or are vulnerable to external control. We view social conservatism as a means of encouraging sufficient self-discipline that we can all live with minimum governance.
At the end of the day, the Left, as it is presently formulated, is not on the same political spectrum with the rest of the country. They aren’t just on a different page–they are in a different book. For them, politics consists of the European right/left dynamic, with communism on the left and fascism on the right, and most people landing somewhere between the two on the socialist spectrum. Most think they are socialists or communists, but many actually promote something closer to a textbook definition of fascism. However, since that is the spectrum they understand, anyone who opposes communism must, by definition, be a fascist, regardless of any formal definition of the word. The idea that anyone doesn’t fall somewhere on that spectrum of totalitarianism simply doesn’t compute.
