Intransigence
The Curiously Sticky Nature of Progressive Ideas
To progressives’ obvious horror, the people who agree with them are doing terrible things in very public ways. Even worse, the policies those progressives supported have not worked.
“Nothing frightens me more than a person unwilling to learn, even at their own expense. That’s a darkness I will never understand.”
-Leave The World Behind (2023 film)
Surely the wave of progressive political violence which has swept across our country in the past 9 months has convinced people on the left that conservatives are not the primary (or at least the only) threat to political norms? In the vast majority of cases it has not. People use one ethical standard for people they agree with, and another for their opponents.
Let’s perform a recap regarding the news during the past few months: an illegal immigrant who was given a CDL by the state of California killed 3 citizens on the Florida Turnpike; migrant hotels are becoming increasingly embattled in Great Britain, where the popular enthusiasm for draining the exchequer to pay for comfortable hotel rooms and iPhones and visiting dentists (while the natives languish in a country which is falling below the economic health of Bulgaria) has fallen below 15%; ICE raids (despite a tremendous amount of incendiary protest and media confabulation) have mostly been effective and on-target; the cities which embraced bail reform and COVID school shutdowns and budgets which amount to a kind of partial progressive embezzlement scheme have seen their public safety disintegrate and are now beset with hordes of drugs addicts camped out indefinitely and robbery teams comprised of thousands of 16-year olds, who ten years ago would have mostly been in school; the Democratic Party has seen net voter registration fall in every single state and is now at a 4-year 4.5 million registration deficit relative to the Republicans.
Shoplifting has driven hundreds of groceries and pharmacies out of poor neighborhoods. Public schools in New York City and Baltimore and Chicago spend nearly 3x what a student in Florida is educated for, with considerably worse outcomes.
Fundraising for leftist nonprofits and the DNC has cratered in the aftermath of the USAID exposure and reform.
How has the issue of federal deficit spending fared? The people who claimed that indefinite and geometrically-increasing government debt was good seem awful quiet these days…
The Power of Prediction
Every political claim and idea is also, in a sense, a prediction. Policy-making is usually extraordinarily complex, and so we shouldn’t be too surprised that even the legions of professional economists (and those who play the role on television and in the pages of the New York Times) have so far been mostly wrong about the effects of Trump’s tariffs. We shouldn’t be surprised that the claims of the bureaucratic agents and academics tend to be woefully wide of the mark, especially when we consider their organizational incentives. We shouldn’t be surprised that Democratic voters (those who remain, anyway) are loathe to confront the real-world results of sanctuary city policies on public safety, or the effects of generous migrant social support on city budgets. Politics is mostly a toxic mix of emotion, confirmation bias, and hidden greed for money or power or status.
But most people aren’t greedy. Most voters and media watchers have no direct stakes in most of the policies on which they opine. Their opinions are just opinions. The question we should be asking is: why are their opinions so sticky? Why do voters in Oakland or Baltimore continue to be grifted and underserved by their leaders? Why do parents of public school children in Philadelphia continue to accept the state of the city’s schools (or, for that matter, its courts)? Why are there a million mostly wealthy and ‘educated’ voters currently pulling for Zohran Mamdami?
As I said, every political opinion is also a prediction, at least a hypothetical one. The opinion that Trump’s protectionist and revenue-raising policies are an economic mistake is a very clear prediction: if those tariffs go into effect, then goods will become considerably more expensive for American consumers and our economy will shrink, relative to its state without the incentives. The opinion that public schools’ outstanding issues would be resolved by more funding is a prediction that, if more funds flow into the schools, things will get better. The opinion that bail reform will promote equity and cut down on over-policing and over-prosecution is not just a prediction that these things will happen - it’s an implicit prediction that bail reform will not ignite a surge of carjackings and rapes and murders.
DEI should have improved organizational output and promoted a host of outstanding candidates, who were being (according to the theory) overlooked and disadvantaged by implicit biases and structural factors. Has that happened? Is anyone even claiming that it’s happened, or have progressives simply abandoned the prediction of new, stellar workers and students, and now occupy their (unfalsifiable) fallback position of moral duty?
Sometimes the predictions are so obviously, embarrassingly wrong that the opinion quickly fades from view. No one ever apologies, or accounts for their mistakes (this is political dialogue, after all), but a new and deafening silence falls over the entire issue. That’s the case with ‘defund the police,’ which is now almost never uttered by even the most doctrinaire progressives (even when they want it to happen). We are supposed to forget that a huge chunk of the intelligentsia were shaming everyone who disagreed with them on this issue a few years ago, with the same tone of moral certainty that they still deploy.
That is the clear and undeniable sign of a massive, national political error: the arguments stop being made and the slogans stop being used. I can think of several major issues on which the progressives have essentially ceded the field in this manner during the past few years. The issue of cosmetic gender transition policies for minors is in the slow process of being reformed in this direction. It probably already would have happened, if there weren’t billions of dollars for medical providers and pharmaceutical companies and a kind of religious fervor among therapists and certain parents at play.
Helen Joyce has wisely observed that parents who’ve helped their children transition will never be able to psychologically separate from trans ideology. They "sold their child a bill of goods that they can't deliver on" and if they begin to doubt, they will have to confront the “awful contemplation” that they’d harmed their child and destroyed their fertile future and their psychological identity. For such people (and for those millions of professionals whose career or economic security depends upon embracing inaccuracies) it’s no mystery why opinions are sticky. But we’re discussing the hundreds of millions of normies: boomer voters in Canada and California parents of K-12 students and black female voters in Virginia and city councilors in Oakland. How much error and incoherence can your worldview accept before it shifts?
A rare instance of someone publicly switching positions, and accounting for it.
The Glorious Future, as Seen from 2020
Let’s take a different tack: let’s place ourselves back into the headspace of a mainstream current events viewer in 2020 and see how the predictions and assumption of that year have held up. Our news consumption is so frantic and myopic today (huge stories are gone without a trace within 24 hours - unless there’s some promise of progressive political gain, in which case it’s more like 72) that we rarely go back and evaluate the things we thought were going to happen. People make a bunch of predictions… and within a month or two (or longer) it’s pretty clear that the predictions were horribly incorrect. By then though, there are new issues and predictions and claims flying around. I call this endemic (and, I believe, intentional) short-term perspective ‘churn.’
Almost no one is ever held accountable for the ridiculous arguments and the faux moral certainty that they carry everywhere. It’s truly bizarre. We have an entire class of people who pride themselves on being educated as to the patterns of society, who make predictions every day on X about the benefits of immigration and the value of therapy and the danger of homeschooling and the necessary reforms of police and these people are, it seem, always wrong about these issues, and this goes on for years. It’s almost as if they’re being paid for wrong opinions, or rather as if they’re being paid to shift the narrative away from the sensible and the morally intuitive.
So let’s step back into 2020. I can place myself back into that headspace fairly easily. My life and my opinions were very different back then. I was in a transitional phase regarding both (I still am) but I can answer the progressives who tell me that I’m brainwashed or uneducated or inexperienced: No. I’m not.
In 2020 I was working in a metal warehouse as the suffocating blanket of COVID restrictions fell over the country (even Florida, for a few months). I never stopped going to work, and I regarded the six-figure workers bemoaning their Door Dash diets and retarded social lives with some bemusement from my non-air conditioned worksite. I was a critic of police violence (having known an unarmed Dominican man who was shot to death by a police officer in New York City) and tended to buy the Keynesian policy arguments and the internationalist-interventionist rhetoric of the media and the managerial class. My opinions on each of these things has shifted as I’ve come to understand (I believe) the profound cowardice and pretensions of our sense-makers, and their ideological distortions. As for so many others the inflection point was partly the result of COVID policy.
I don’t even have to relitigate the policy mistakes of COVID. It has turned out, I think, that almost every contentious policy question that came out of the COVID epidemic has vindicated the skeptics and the conspiracy theorists. Not only were the skeptics correct, their suspicions turned out to be even less damning than the truth. Vaccines do cause a great deal of potential harm to patients, especially adolescent boys. RNA treatments were actually quite risky, and not safe as we were assured.
This NIH article would have resulted in every author being de-platformed and their careers ruined in 2020. That’s not an exaggeration. Incidentally ‘Quo Vadis’ is Latin for ‘Wo Watches…’, as in ‘who watches the watchers?’
Pharmaceutical companies were pursuing corrupt and profitable arrangements with national governments, including trying to push their untested and inflammatory new ‘vaccines’ on every small child in the United States. Public school students did sustain severe and probably irreversible social and cognitive deficits due to school closures. Government scientists did lie and collude in hiding and misrepresenting information concerning the ‘lab leak’ theory and other pertinent questions. The government did slander professionals, and collaborate with tech companies and institutions to distort information (by generating its own misinformation, along with other strategies) and ruin careers. All of this is now public record. No one honestly disputes any of this. There’s just a vast legion of educated professionals who now avoid talking about it.
‘Take children from’ and ‘Fine and imprison’ vaccine critics and the unvaccinated
Russiagate
Who are the intransigent? There are older (mostly white) legacy media viewers who’ve been consuming tainted information for so long that they cannot tolerate authentic accounts, like starving people who die when fed. There are the professionals who need to believe that their ideas are not just accurate, but moral. They require this apprehension in order to justify their incomes, their sense of social standing, and their psychological self-identification (these are the folks who become enraged when confronted with black or Native American traditionalists, or Hispanic open borders skeptics). There are the people who are smart and well-informed enough that they should know better. Sam Harris is an excellent example of the latter category - a man who devoted decades of his life to pursuing a rigorous program of non-attachment who has been undone by his attachment to Trump-aversion; a man who built his brand upon careful thinking and rationality and now studiously avoids confronting the collapsing narrative around vaccines and online ‘moderation’ and Russiagate.
I never cared too much about Russiagate, but I certainly believed it (the media told me that there was something there!). Now we are finding out that the people involved were probably executing a coordinated conspiracy, which involved many media companies and the CIA and the FBI and Barack Obama, etc.
This is one of those stories that the legacy media can’t even really spin, so they mostly ignore it and hope it goes away.
Surely revelations like this would shift people’s attitudes? Surely this would be shocking to Democratic voters? It has mostly proven to not be. I speculate that the reasons for this involve some toxic brew of continuing media distortion, confirmation bias, emotional affiliation as a driver for political viewpoints, and cynical self-interest.
As their ideas lose energy and their institutional dominance fades, the left alternates between emotional dysregulation and increasing extremism. This is cognitive dissonance, on a national scale. It’s not sustainable.
The View From 2025
Go down the list. Read some articles from 2020 and 2021. You will find a kind of politico-cultural bizzarro world, in which the AfD Party in Germany is ‘far right’ (it now represents about 45% of German voters, and the people who claimed to be ‘defending democracy’ are, in many cases, trying to ban it outright), in which the Biden administration is full of decent public servants, and American political violence is an issue of concern on the right. DEI will uncover vast reservoirs of hidden talent. Anti-black racism is (apparently) a bigger issue than urban crime. Immigration is barely an issue, the deficit and bail reform are completely absent from the national dialogue, and the only people who want to limit biological males from women’s sports or from childhood ‘gender clinics’ are hostile transphobes. It’s a floridly unreal world, when viewed in retrospect, and it is the world that we were assured was. It was not. We should doubt the people who promised us that it was, and we should start casting about for new voices and new ideas. Fortunately, that’s already happening.
The intransigent will mostly lack the wisdom or moral development to question their own beliefs or account for their errors or try to amend the harm to which they’ve contributed. Most people, of any fervent belief, can’t be swayed.
But they can be replaced.
Great article! I hesitate to make a correction, however:
Who watches the watchmen in Latin:
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
"Quo vadis" means (roughly) "Where are you going?", and was spoken by Peter upon seeing Christ in The Golden Legend, a 13th century text. Peter was escaping Rome during Nero's persecutions. When he asked "Quo vadis, Domine?" Christ responded "I go to Rome to be crucified again." Originally, the encounter was derived from the apocryphal book Acts of Peter (2nd century AD).
It's astonishing how many of these progressive ideas have:
a) obviously failed
b) obviously nurtured massive social dysfunction, both individually and in communities
c) Liberal political parties have latched onto them with a death-grip
It's not that the opposition Parties are necessarily brilliant or dependable for good governance, but man the Parties and Organizations that have embraced these horrible ideas just can't let them go.