I noted in an earlier post:
The telling part in all this is how fellow Democrats respond to [AOC]'s intellectual malpractice. . . . If the fellow Dems normalize, excuse, evade evidence of, and otherwise enable the malpractice, then they're implicated in it.
Lo and behold, they just can't help themselves, can they:
A new Axios/Survey Monkey poll shows that 74 percent of Democrats and those who lean toward the party would consider voting for [AOC] if she were able to run. As is, the Constitution prevents anyone under the age of 35 from serving as president.
If this isn't a sign of serious intellectual disease, I don't know what is.
This has gone beyond the Democrats having an AOC problem, an illegal-immigration-enabling problem, an anti-freedom problem, an incestuous & rent-seeking public-sector-pension funding problem, a knee-jerk-blame-everything-on-racism problem, a fairness-for-the-accused problem, a deep-state problem, a corruption-enabling problem, a fake-news problem, an envy problem, etc. These are symptoms of the disease.
[Edit: "But American healthcare is too expensive," their last-gasp retort might be. Even there the best solutions for reducing healthcare demand are far better than what the Dems have to offer. What retort do they have left after that?]
AOC isn't even remotely qualified to be president, so any thought of considering her to be so is folly. She doesn't even demonstrate basic civics knowledge. She insisted that she corrected herself in real-time -- by first stating "three chambers [sic] of Congress" and then stating that "the three chambers of government" are the House, the Senate and the Presidency -- but this is not a correction at all. In other words, she only dug herself deeper with her claim that she corrected herself, and like any other Dunning-Kruger case, she's damn sure that she did correct herself.
The internet's cataloging of instances of AOC's ignorance will continue apace for as long as she keeps on making pronouncements. I place her into the same category that I place Rand-bashers: intellectual lowlife (for now, anyway ^_^ ). Perhaps a fine bartender but a shitty stateswoman (but she means so well; but like so many leftists she's mushy-headed). (And anyway, if Trump is a shitty stateman, what does that make her, exactly? They both have deporable aspects, for now.)
There is an appropriate parallel case to point to from the other side of the aisle: the Republican Party putting Sarah Palin on the 2008 presidential ticket. On the merits this was a disaster. She, too, was manifestly unqualified for the position she was seeking. This is a sign of intellectual disease on the Republican side as well. But at least they don't preen themselves so much as to self-identify as 'progressive' as Democrats do.
There are plenty of people on either side of the aisle who are easily more qualified to be president than either Palin or AOC. No one who takes their responsibilities of citizenship seriously would consider these two as viable candidates for the job. Their being elevated by their parties to presidential-level status would, in justice, damage their respective party brands for as long a time as it took to clean up their acts.
When Palin revealed her ignorance every other time she opened her mouth, the Democrats and their allies in the "progressive" media pounced, and rightly so. Just as the Republicans are pouncing, rightly, on every AOC ignorance-spouting.
Palin has been relegated, rightly, to the bozo-bin; she is now a non-factor in politics and, of course, has since been overshadowed by the Trump phenomenon -- itself a sign of the diseased state of our politics.
When AOC 'does the Palin', as it were, Democrats not only do not pounce, they look the other way. They enable her manifest ignorance with their silence. They are accomplices to it. (Or perhaps worse: they try to upend common sense, get disingenuous, and "explain" in the usual tribal ways how it's not egregious ignorance among their own. [Edit 1/23/19: this from today's episode of MSNBC's Hardball (sic) with Chris Matthews is but one new example of the intellectually-bankrupt doubling down among Democrat AOC-enablers to which I refer. What drives Republicans crazy about AOC? Why, it's because she's a woman of color, of course! If you find this intellectually satisfying, refer back to this post's opening image.]) And now we have evidence that approximately three-fourths of them would so much as consider rewarding her for her manifest ignorance, with the highest position in the land.
And they think Trump is bad?
It wouldn't be so offensive if these philosophical illiterates would at least have the decency not to call themselves 'progressives,' implying some sort of intellectual and moral superiority they do not possess.
The signs of seriously debilitating Democratic disease were already there with their disgraceful anti-due-process, smear-Kavanaugh campaign. For this, they earned the designation Demon Rats. Now they've taken it to a whole new level.
How did it come to this? Intellectual bankruptcy -- more specifically, philosophical illiteracy -- brought on by a seriously deficient national education infrastructure.
And guess which political partisans are mostly in charge of running that, and much to the detriment of critical thinking which things like viewpoint diversity would help to restore. Now we get spectacles such as a conservative Ivy League professor being screamed at hysterically by a mob of 'progressive' fellow Ivy Leaguers in place of serious dialogue. As long as this sort of behavior continues in the academy and elsewhere in the "progressive" landscape, it is becomes more and more legitimate to ask: Are the campus "progressives" deliberately ignoring Haidt's advice to seek out in good faith diverse viewpoints lest they become intellectually complacent, atrophied and diseased?
This situation is downright fucking pathetic.
If there's one thing I don't like to see, it's intellectual potential going to waste, and I definitely don't like to see it happen under the pretense of progressiveness and "education."
This only lends that much more credence to Ayn Rand's indictment of the "progressive" education establishment. What if her fictional depiction of a pervasively dysfunctional "progressive"-run polity -- absent the support of the best minds, of course -- is much more than a mere figment of her imagination? The accumulating evidence suggests that she was very much onto something quite damning of the "progressive" mentality.
You might think there's still supposed to be a bulwark of "liberal" thought in American left-wing politics that hasn't yet totally squandered the Enlightenment legacy of the Founders, hasn't totally abandoned the freedom idea as the fundamental defining feature of American politics. You might think that this remaining "liberal" bulwark (found in the likes of Dershowitz, say) would take heed of classical liberal icon J.S. Mill's words -- "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that...." -- and do some shaping up in how they deal with opposition opinion. (If you want to see really downright fucking pathetic, just try to get "progressives" and even "liberals" to discuss Ayn Rand's ideas intelligently and fairly, i.e., without resorting to some lazy strawman or other [where to even begin with the mountain of examples available?]. She's their most formidable adversary -- just do a careful reading of the Galt speech and other of her writings and then try to think of any other thinker that comes all that close in this regard -- and the "progressives" are a no-show, a blank-out as Galt might say.) Without diligent and vigilant maintenance and upkeep, the intellectual tradition to which the "liberals" lay claim will only erode and be taken over by inferior and diseased specimens.
Unfortunately, the Democrats' Democrat problem will almost surely get worse before it gets better and they finally clean up their act.
They can't even promote their ideas and policy agenda with intellectual credibility anymore, certainly not in the face of the toughest challenges from the brightest conservatives and libertarians (for a few dozen named names and works, see chapter 5 of my book), despite all the supposed intellectual ammunition at their disposal. Doesn't this bother them?
How else do they think Trump got elected?
