,
13 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
"Lefty friends keep asking me if — or telling me that — I’m a conservative now. But I’m just a liberal who remembers what they’ve forgotten. I remember what it meant to be a liberal back when I really started to identify as one, back around 2000."
"I remember when conservatives were the science deniers. There was evolution and then there was climate change. In 2000, during the debates, George W. Bush called the recommendations of Al Gore’s economists “fuzzy math.” Through most of college...
... I retained this image of conservatives, and of liberals as their rationally-minded, empirically-driven opposites. So I laughed and laughed when Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness” to capture the way conservatives “felt out” what was true and false."
"I remember when conservatives were the snowflakes, too, when they were the ones who had fits over wording and believed that “silence is violence.” Republicans in Congress changed menus so that “French fries” were called “freedom fries.” Absurd, I thought...
... A small symbolic change with no effects other than to salve the feelings and prove the power of those who had pushed for it. Everyone was going to keep calling them “French fries”. But it is precisely these sorts of changes that form the core of identity politics activism."
"And it is the left, now, that pushes away centrists, that says that even center-left liberalism aids and abets fascism. Fascism — and racism, sexism, even capitalism — these things are the left’s “terrorism”."
"They want to tell you what songs you’re allowed to sing along with in your own car, by yourself. They want to institute an elaborate “sex bureaucracy” to manage and control the clumsy hookups of college students...
.... I remember that being a liberal meant believing in privacy — the privacy of consenting adults in their own homes, for instance."
"In my discipline, philosophy, there is a fairly large and active group of professors who believe that there’s a pervasive sexual harassment problem amongst philosophers; in this group there has been talk for years of the idea that “due process culture” is “outdated”."
"One curious thing about leftist intellectuals during the Bush years was that they actually blamed themselves, and the conceptual tools they’d developed in their critiques, for some of the administration’s excesses."
"Perhaps the most interesting dynamic post-Trump is that there has been no reassessment this time. Instead, there’s been an acceleration. The 2016 election seems to have proven to liberals not that their shift in principles was wrong...
..., but that they didn’t shift enough, because they didn’t realize just how powerful the hateful, mystical forces arrayed against them really were."
