Some Friendly Outsider Advice for America’s Leftists

If progress and tolerance and decency are your core attributes why are you only gaining support among educated, comfortable, white urbanites?

I’ll leave the question in the subtitle open and remind you that if you want to fight for the lot of People of Color and the immigrants and the working class and gay Americans (sorry… Queer Folx) and use their interests as a shield and banner you should probably arrest your loss of support among these groups.

I’ve written elsewhere about the illiberal and unAmerican orthodoxy of Social Justice so I’ll forego that rant here but maybe you want to take a closer look at that…

Here are some messaging and strategy and idea tips that shouldn’t counteract your important reform efforts or contradict your values:

1.) Re-center Family - family is important for socialization, education, happiness, mental health, and identity. Pretty much everyone has a family and parents are usually pretty important in their kids’ lives. Recognize that marriage and pair bonded parents are great prophylactics against failure and crime and addiction. You can STILL emphasize ‘systemic’ variables and group identity but ignoring the value of fatherhood and marriage and stay-at-home mothering (in certain cases) flies in the face of the social science data and precludes a vitally necessary part of any efforts to improve individual or group or community life. Modern feminism doesn’t like to acknowledge the importance of fathers but they are the best antidote to ‘toxic masculinity’. You can try to lecture and scold and train the aggression out of men… good luck with that. In the meantime, let’s stick with the only thing that’s proven to work in arresting cycles of violence and sexual predation. Feminism struggles to situate pregnancy and child-rearing near its demands for female integration and promotion in the workforce and in government but women have babies. They often really want to, they’re the only people who can, and if they stop our society (and then our species) fatally collapses. Birthing children must be done by women and raising them must be the primary responsibility of women. All of those driven and successful professional feminists who employ other, poorer, (browner), women to perform home tasks and childcare won’t be hiring men to do these things anytime soon. Much like conscription, the job of nanny lacks any gender parity and that’s okay. No one really wants to change that. It’s only an issue if it conflicts with some disconnected academic ideology but there isn’t anything like that in the modern Left wing, right? Lol.

Support and promote and prioritize marriages and families and children. They’re popular and necessary and ultimately more important for social cohesion than 100 Obamacare programs could ever be.

2.) Support Nuclear Power - we don’t have the transmission or storage or backup generation technology to run our civilization on wind and solar. It doesn’t exist and it may NEVER exist. That’s okay! We have a very safe and low-externality, carbon zero energy production technology in the form of nuclear power.

Modern French and American and South Korean reactor models are FAR safer than the Fukushima plant was, and that was far safer than Three Mile Island, and that was far safer than Chernobyl. If reducing carbon emissions within a reasonable period is a priority you must include nuclear power. It’s unavoidable and anyone who says different isn’t in contact with reality. There are still engineering challenges but they’re nowhere near the ones facing solar power, for instance.

Solar panels are being made by enslaved concentration camp inmates en masse in China. They are impossible to recycle efficiently and require vast surface areas and are poorly suited for a huge share of the Earth’s surface. The storage technologies require cobalt, which is being mined in war zones by enslaved children. If concentration camps and child labor and slavery and waste don’t concern you, then, well: fair enough. Maybe you could explain exactly what is progressive about your worldview, though. I’m curious!

There’s a misanthropic strain among the green movements that loathes growth and development and material advancement but those are going to be tough ideas to sell to the developing world. I notice that these people bemoan population growth but never seem to consider THEIR existence or consumption to be problematic. I also can’t help but notice how many of them happily live in climate-controlled metropoles and buy loads of clothes on Amazon and maintain passionate attachments to commercial aviation and their smart phones. Since this group is deluded, utopian, elitist, and hypocritical I will safely ignore them (at least until they start throwing soup around my local art museum).

Meet some of the essential workers foundational to all of your green technology supply chains. Reparations for the partial and distant descendants of American slaves is an urgent imperative. Addressing the plight of today’s slaves is whatever. I mean it would be nice but you need a smartphone, right? They’ll probably be okay. These workers are often enslaved, they don’t receive healthcare, and rape and war are not infrequent threats… and you probably don’t really care. They are however blessedly free of the systemic inequities and white supremacy that defines American life. Look at those smiles!

3.) Support Educational Reform Instead of Teachers’ Unions - educational improvement will require better paid and supported teachers and THAT will necessarily involve firing many people who currently hold the job. If teachers were generally excellent and capable already pay raises wouldn’t be imperative. Pay raises allow an occupation to attract smarter and better qualified candidates and they are most valuable when those hires replace under-performers. This is a poison pill for teachers’ unions of course but we conclusively saw that these organizations are only marginally concerned with the education and well-being of students during COVID. The Democrat party must stay tied to the unions until death do them part but that’s an arrangement of mutual interest, not a spiritual commitment. Unions want to protect and enrich their members (even the lazy and worthless ones) and that’s to be expected but there are serious gaps in educational attainment between racial groups and classes in the US, and COVID widened them drastically.

Any commitment to social progress or egalitarianism must begin in the K-12 classroom. Equity and the abolition of standardized tests and critical theory-based instruction are all corrosive and counter-productive to the project of improving American public education (which is now at its lowest level of reported public trust in history). Improving education doesn’t involve blurring the metrics of success or promoting activism in the classroom. You can do all of that of course (I know you want to!) but improving education means improving teaching and improving teaching means improving education. If you’re not discussing how to increase the effectiveness of the teaching profession (smaller classes? More resources? Mental health support? Extracurriculars? Great!) then you’re not interested in improving education.

Be interested in improving education please. It’s the surest and quickest way to improving our democracy.