LIFE UNDER 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.

My youth was filled with liberals at least kind of debating things among themselves. They often coalesced and converged on one opinion, but slowly. The liberal blob had predictable instinctive sentiments. You knew which side they were on if a story pitted the goal of preserving nature or art against the depredations of commerce. But there was plenty to debate. I remember dining-room-table discussions about Bill Clinton versus Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown before everyone slowly and individually resolved and reconciled themselves to Clinton’s talent. I remember some liberals slowly embracing the modern Clintonite Democratic Party and others still holding out for a party more like the one Dick Gephardt would have led, with more focus on American jobs and workers. The liberal debate over gay rights seemed like a long one. I knew one or two liberals who still vaguely associated homosexuality with the decadent rich — in their minds, the sons of privileged Republicans and Tories were gay at their prep schools; of what concern was this to liberals? Others came around to the idea of civil unions but reserved marriage to traditional couples, thinking that the conjugal nature of their relationships was distinctive. A few radicals viewed marriage itself as a heteronormative conquest of queer culture. It took time to consolidate opinion in favor of gay marriage as a matter of equality.

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.

Well, this happens when your ruling class is a monoculture.