When Reality Punches Ideology, We Must Embrace the Flaws in Our Perspective
So many Americans are convinced that the Coronavirus is a hoax. Even as the number of cases skyrockets, they refuse to wear masks or social distance or bother to acknowledge COVID-19 as a thing.
In a CNN interview I saw, a frontline nurse describe these patients as being so firmly persuaded it’s all a bunch of hooey that as they lay dying of the disease, they can’t wrap their minds around the fact that this hoax is killing them. They aren’t angry at Trump for minimizing the danger or at their respective state governments for denying the existence of it. They are angry at the unreality of reality as it smacks them in the lungs.
Ideology has its limits and those limits come into stark contrast when we are suddenly confronted with reality that contradicts it.
A long-time stance by conservatives comes from Milton Friedman of the Chicago School of Economics. The idea, firmly planted, is that if government releases businesses of regulation and taxation, the savings will ‘trickle down’ the pyramid to the masses. This guiding principle has fueled more tax cuts and deregulation than any other idea.
The problem? Over the course of fifty years it has been proven to be false time and time again. Even Friedman disavowed it. Taking away the emotional hyperbole of pitting the wealthy against the rest of us, the simple truth is that this economic model has been tried in many countries and failed every single time.
This repetition of failure has not changed the conservative perspective. Like an anti-masker dying of COVID, the disbelief would be almost comical were it not for the dire consequences of continuing to dry hump the ideological twist. Adherence to this model has destroyed the middle class, stymied wages, eliminated the power of unions, and helped create the largest income gap in the history of, well, fucking history.
This sort of disconnect between the real and the certainty of zealots isn’t new nor is it specifically American. When the Roman Catholic Church was informed that Galileo Galilei had engaged in proving Copernicus’s theory that the sun was the center of the galaxy rather than the earth, they simply excommunicated him. When reality didn’t mesh with their superstition, superstition won.
This year the rhetoric thus spoke: if more people voted, the country would defiantly demonstrate how progressive and liberal it truly was. The writing on the digital wall told us that “people of color” (of whom, apparently no longer includes Asians) would vote Blue overwhelmingly. The polls (which we had already seen have their heads swirlied in the giant toilet bowl of Election 2016) convinced us that there would be a “Blue tsunami.”
Reality throat-punched the rhetoric and then stuck its cock in its ear.
Exit polls in Philadelphia found that Latino voter support there for Mr. Trump leapt to 35 percent this year from 22 percent in 2016. In Texas, Latino turnout soared, almost entirely to the benefit of Mr. Trump. Muslim voters also confounded Democratic strategists with their support for Mr. Trump reaching 35 percent. Trump received a larger percentage of the black vote than any other conservative candidate in history.
Asian-American Californians opposed the affirmative action measure in large numbers. Prominent Latino nonprofit and civil rights organizations endorsed the affirmative action proposition even as all fourteen of California’s majority-Latino counties voted it down. In rural Imperial County, in the southeastern corner of the state, 85 percent of the population is Latino. The voters there who gave Joseph R. Biden Jr. a nearly 27-point margin of victory went against the affirmative action measure by 16 percentage points.
Looks like race is a piss-poor metric for figuring out what matters to people. Looks like race is less important than the economic benefits of a candidate. Looks like categorizing people by their racial make-up isn’t as wonderful an idea as the Progressive Left thought.
It’s hard to square the whitewash of white supremacy when so many non-white voters reject the basic premise. When millions of voters who are not white vote for the obvious racist candidate there has to be a more nuanced and data-driven rationale. If the Progressive Left can say with a straight face that Biden won because of black votes or black women votes or Indigenous votes then they must accept that Trump came far closer than expected because of black votes or Latino votes or Muslim votes.
As the anti-masker denies the reality of the disease and the conservatives deny the failure of ‘trickle down’ economics, so the Woke deny that their singular focus on race is rooted in fantasy.
It’s fine to fail even on an epic playing field. If you refuse to learn from that failure, you’re an ideologue and an idiot to boot. A real world example is the Trump Right. He lost the presidential election resoundingly yet they are so ideologically bent that a lunatic refusal to acknowledge it renders them all useless and dangerous at the same time. If the Progressive Left wants to distinguish itself from these cartoonish morons, they must embrace the failures and learn.
More rhetoric spills out to indicate that Trump’s power grasp is indelibly harmful to democracy but it isn’t and won’t be. More people voted in this election than in history. That suggests nothing less than a healthy democracy and the institutions built have the staying power we give them. Trust is given, not earned, and trusting that good ideas will prevail over superstition and ignorance is the kind of trust we on the left of the spectrum need to give our citizenry.
Economic equality, climate change, Medicare for All. These are the ideas that resonate with the multicultural Left of Center crowd. Police reform played well across the board but #DefundThePolice was a boner for most of the country. Medicare for All is widely accepted but socialized medicine scares the shit out of Cuban Americans who still have Castro in their mouths. The Green New Deal would be far more accepted if the screed were not so much in favor of eliminating the jobs of millions without a moment’s pause.
Reality has smacked the Woke across the gonads. Will they embrace the flaws in their message? Will they soften the rhetoric in order to genuinely persuade instead of shame? Can they?
Unlikely but that’s pretty much the same tune sung throughout history. Zealots gonna zealot and all the facts in the world ain’t changing their minds nor their message. That’s why it’s good that they represent the smallest slice of the American Left.
