Eight years ago, on the day of Donald's Trump's first inauguration, I wrote the following:
[T]here is no clearer indication to me that American voters are flirting with disaster than Donald Trump's flagrant disregard for objective reality. His "policies" are nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to acknowledge a fictitious reality (already believed-in wholesale by millions): where trade deals screw American workers, where "hard working" means "white", where immigrants run rampant committing violent crime, where middle America is becoming poorer because of a gravy-train delivering their tax dollars to coastal elites and minorities, where their country is weakened by weak-kneed politicians cuckholded by foreign leaders. This alternative reality is undeniably racist, but racism is not even its biggest problem. Its biggest problem is that it is fake: disguising complex problems as ones that can be pinned on scapegoats, and thus easily solved.
I concluded that the right way to resist Trump was to lean in on objective reality, to demand that evidence and reason be given a front seat.
To my mind, this is the line that cannot be crossed. Acknowledge the legitimacy of the election. Respect the office, if not the man. Celebrate the peaceful transition of power. But never, ever recant on reason, on deduction, on the need for verification and falsification. The rallying cry for Liberalism in 2017 should be from the pages of Wikipedia: "citation needed".
It seemed self evident to me, at the time, that liberals were the political faction that would stick with objective reality. Liberals tend to support action on climate change because the science is clear that human-caused climate change is damaging our planet. Liberals tend to be pro-choice because they place more importance on developmental biology than the concept of a human soul. They tend to support safe drug supply if evidence shows that safe supply will help save lives. This conversation with Newt Gingrich, a conservative, is particularly revealing and is a good argument for why I consider myself a liberal.
The future went in a direction that I didn't imagine at the time. Liberals, or (perhaps more accurately) progressives, abandoned objective reality and adopted Trump's tactics. Joe Biden's increasing cognitive decline over the course of his first term was apparent to everyone ... everyone except those who felt it was important not to talk about it, lest they give an advantage to his opponent. And so we got in a weird place where we ignored reality right up until we couldn't.
With Biden out, he was replaced with his vice-president, which makes a certain kind of sense. But it allowed the Democrats to avoid having a conversation about whether the illiberal elements of progressive ideology were damaging their politics more than they were helping. Kamala Harris ran a campaign bereft of policy, and bereft of an honest discussion of the policy she had run on in the 2020 primaries.
On the other side, Trump has leaned in on authoritarianism, and for his continued disregard for reason, science, evidence, democracy, civil society, and basic human decency he was rewarded with his biggest coalition and his only win of the popular vote.
I do not think that either of these gross abberrations of liberalism or conservatism could exist without the damage done to our political conversation by social media. Silicon Valley has commidified outrage, and outrage has poisoned us. Many democratic institutions are now far too weak to oppose Trump, and if the electorate does not care about his abuses of power, it is difficult to see how those abuses of power will not continue to grow until they reach a critical mass where they are simply unassailable.
I framed my original post with Orwell's quote "War is peace" as a way of illustrating the absurtity of unthinking obedience, but I am not longer confident that there is any political camp that is in a position to resist, as long as the media environment remains as it is. And so I think more and more about that much darker passage from 1984:
There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.