LIBERAL CONFORMISM

“…Liberal groupthink is the most important factor in the general-opinion environment and has been for all my life. But now, because liberal groupthink is subject to sudden eruptive enthusiasms and insanity-inducing reversals, American life proceeds with a sense that the laws of physics don’t really apply. There’s a creepy unsettledness to life in America. And it’s because journalists are lobotomizing themselves in the name of their favorite cause, the Democratic Party.

If you were a faithful believer in what the New York Times says and fell into a coma just one month ago, you went unconscious thinking that Joe Biden’s incapacity was a right-wing psyop inflicted on the gullible by unscrupulous conservatives using deceptively edited videos. One of the reasons you knew you had to believe this is because Kamala Harris is a political joke who has “has a public perception problem, a self-fulfilling spiral of bad press and bad polls” and “the lowest net-negative rating for a vice president” since such measures had been taken. That was the party line: Biden’s just fine, Kamala’s terrible. Believing anything else is stupid. Less than four weeks later: Biden’s terrible. Kamala’s amazing! And if you say different, you’re a dummy…

…Now liberal opinion marches around ostentatiously like a North Korean military parade, performing impossible-seeming about-faces and quick-time maneuvers while holding bayonets up, sharply fixed. Anyone who even accidentally goes against the routine is bound to be impaled.

I’ve watched liberals converge on the opinion that anti-Chinese racism was more dangerous than the coronavirus and that the vaguely libertarian Silicon Valley people who were concerned about it were kind of racist. Then, almost overnight, they converged on the opposite opinion, that the coronavirus was a threat that justified the suspension of normal life indefinitely. Also, they improbably converged on the theory that it was racist to believe that the virus had emerged from a lab in Wuhan that was experimenting with coronaviruses. Somehow, because progressives believed it, it was less racist to believe that it emerged from the folklore-driven superstition and disgusting hygiene practices around Chinese wet markets.

And then, even as religious minorities were being demonized as antisocial sociopaths and killers for gathering — outside, no less — for funerals, liberal opinion instantly switched to the idea that social distancing was no longer mandatory, enormous public demonstrations (and riots) were now mandatory, and so was defunding the police…”