What Moved the Left Left?

A friend recently commented on my recent post about the Trump assassination attempt, and my observation that "it is the bending of the knee to the progressives and the socialists, as much or more than anything else, that has positioned the Democratic Party to lose this year."

He bulls-eyed (Biden reference intended) the Democrats' failure:

All they had to do was... be normal
And they just couldn’t do it

This poses the question, "why," and it triggered (bad pun intended) a thought:

Cancel Culture.

More specifically, the confluence of the desire to be noticed and of fear of the cancel mob.

There is a cultural phenomenon called Tall Poppy Syndrome, where those who rise above are targeted and cut down. It exists in many societies, and I've blogged about the Scandinavian version (the Law of Jante) here, here, here, and here.

Progressivism and social media combined to create a perverse reward system that congratulated those who did the cutting, and changed the targeting basis from "standing tall" to "standing out." That is to say, failing to conform.

With the act of attacking someone made trivially easy by Twitter et al, the consequence for attacking someone negligible (as long as the attacker conformed), and rewarding the attacker also trivially easy (hit that like button!), attacking others became a competitive sport and generated the counterpart of Tall Poppy Syndrome: the best attacks get the most likes.

So do the first attacks. Not much glory in jumping on a bandwagon, but if you're the one to unearth some long-hidden transgression, you "win." As normal no-nos saturate the market, finding new no-nos becomes more difficult, but also more rewarding. Being first counts, and being loudest wins out when you can't be first.

If this is as far as it went, if we were merely dealing with the braying of individual loons and troglodytes, people would laugh off the attacks. But, then there's the dogpile. The dogpile has proven its canceling power, and that power creates fear. So, normal people who don't number themselves among the cancel-proof (see: JK Rowling, Joe Rogan, and last-f**k-given octogenarians) go quiet rather than voice a contrary opinion.

That "going quiet" is what I think happened to the normal Democrats. Fear of being ostracized or excommunicated was so strong that many went along with the wild-eyed fringe rather than voice common sense. This produced such excesses as the obsessive striving to massively and rapidly decarbonize the economy and electrify everything, the defense of biological men in women's sports, and the abandonment of any effort to control the southern border.

The far-Left, mistaking silence for concurrence, overreached. Flew, per the tragedy of Icarus, too close to the Sun, with predictable results. Normal Democrats and liberals finally started to recoil. In part because the excesses become excessive, in part because leftism was alienating enough voters to scare them, and in part because leftism is an irredeemably destructive ideology that is negative-sum in thinking and at odds with human nature in practice.

Trump 2.0 now appears inevitable, and I don’t think the sudden hagiographies and retconning of Kamala Harris will overcome her fundamental flaws. I don't lament this, because I think the Left needs a rebuke. I do lament where Trump has taken the Right, as I've noted before. I hope that this rebuke will put "normal" liberals back in charge of the Democratic Party, and that such normalcy will help stanch the worst (i.e. most populist) ideas emerging from the Trumpian Right.

Unfortunately, the conditions that created the leftward shift and the expansion of the Overton Window in that direction remain, and the shrieking harridans at MSNBC and CNN will likely see viewership bumps if Trump reascends to the White House. This means that the "normal" liberals will still have to deal with the growling heel-nippers on their left. Only time will tell if they again go quiet or if, this time, they tell the loons to sod off.