Great piece, Lauren. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of well-educated progressives and their shambling “movement” is their propensity to berate those with differing views as “stupid”. We saw this on Reddit, for example (Reddit being whiter, younger, more urban, better educated, and more liberal by far than the general population) since the day after the 2016 election. Trump won? It’s because Americans are mostly stupid. And it goes on: you think ranked-choice voting is hard to explain to low-information, low-engagement voters? You’re stupid. You’re wary of packing the Supreme Court? Idiot. You have misgivings about crisscrossing a big, mostly thinly settled nation with expensive high-speed rail lines? You’re really stupid. These folks may mean well sometimes (though not when it comes to social-engineering control fantasies), but their inability to tolerate other points of view is in the long run self-sabotaging and isolative.
Great piece, Lauren. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of well-educated progressives and their shambling “movement” is their propensity to berate those with differing views as “stupid”. We saw this on Reddit, for example (Reddit being whiter, younger, more urban, better educated, and more liberal by far than the general population) since the day after the 2016 election. Trump won? It’s because Americans are mostly stupid. And it goes on: you think ranked-choice voting is hard to explain to low-information, low-engagement voters? You’re stupid. You’re wary of packing the Supreme Court? Idiot. You have misgivings about crisscrossing a big, mostly thinly settled nation with expensive high-speed rail lines? You’re really stupid. These folks may mean well sometimes (though not when it comes to social-engineering control fantasies), but their inability to tolerate other points of view is in the long run self-sabotaging and isolative.