A bit of stoned blogging about Better Living Through Philosophy / End of History

(this is all from one hit, mind you, plus a bunch of stuff accumulated over decades right here in this stoned noggin)

An idea that keeps re-occuring to me as I get stoned and admire/examine my really nicely-stocked physical (and digital) library: One possible(-world) humorous subtitle for my in-development Better Living Through Philosophy book is something along the lines of:

or, 100 essential books condensed into one

First off, the value-added if this were pulled off as represented would be really high for one book...

So the monetary angle aside for the moment, and looking at this from a theoretical-philosophical-moral angle with all the implications involved . . .

It has a certain similarity to what the venerable 20th century philosopher-public-intellectual Mortimer J. Adler was doing with what is arguably his magnum opus, Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought, which is more or less a 960 page, double-column synthesis of the (Western) wisdom of the ages contained in the famous Great Books series of which he was the chief architect/curator/commentator.  So at the very least I would like to approach something similar to what Adler is doing in just that one book.  For the average reader/citizen, just that one book is arguably a godsend from the condensed-value-added standpoint.  For yours truly, it was more or less an edification or beefing up of a bunch of stuff I had already integrated, book-smarts-wise plus lots of attentive cultural observation, over the course of decades.  Also, if I could condense what Adler was doing down to something more like 420 single-column book, it would be that much more value-added-wise.  Thing is, Adler's magnum opus is not even in print any more; you have to buy it in a used marketplace somewhere, or find it at a local library.  It belongs in every learned person's personal library, anyway.  I have it in mine; it's like a no-brainer, that one.  Is it in yours?

If it's in mine and not yours, that's one distinct research-advantage I have over you.  And I use it now as as source of inspiration for how to compose an epic, sprawling, magisterial and fun - above all, fun - book on the subject of Better Living Through Philosophy.  And that's just the tippy top of the iceberg when it comes to books in my personal library to draw inspiration from.  Now to induce whatever principle is involved here:

I have selected a few hundred of what I regard as essential books for Any Learned Person to Have on Hand, for my personal library.  I've had to be somewhat selective in what I have been able to purchase and make room for, but I think I have developed a really strong sense, over decades of experience, for what is a promising, uh, lead when it comes to various things cultural and intellectual.  It doesn't mean I know a ton of shit about a ton of shit.  (One promising beginning lead here, though, might be the New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge, which I have on hand.  Do you? . . .)  It does mean, though, that I am probably the very best researcher that I know of.  I fucking love what I have in my personal library (paper and digital...) and I especially love how I have it so nicely organized.  How do I have it organized, you ask?  Well, isn't that something of a trade secret, if you will?  Do I just wanna give it away, right here?  I've told a few close friends about how I have it organized.  If a Resurrected-Aristotle were to organize his library nowadays, on what sort of principle might he organize it?  How are libraries proper organized, pray tell?  What comes first?...  (I've given this subject a lot of thought.  Have you?)

Then I have about a dozen Oxford Handbooks (you know what those are, right?) in my physical library (they're kinda pricey...).  Do I have any in my digital library?  Well, do I?  You tell me.

I really find Oxford Handbooks quite useful, most of the time.  So I'm able to distinguish more useful Oxford Handbooks from less useful ones.  How about you?

So I've got Adler's Lexicon and then I also have the (out-of-print as well) Adler-edited Great Treasury of Western Thought.  A Resurrected-Aristotle would definitely have this one in his library, right?  (In the Academy, Aristotle garnered the nickname of 'The Reader,' BTW.  Books were definitely important to him.)

So one thing Aristotle (in a manner similar to Adler, but perhaps different) might do or consider doing in composing a treatise on the subject of Better Living Through Philosophy is to, more less, take the reader/audience on a guided tour of essential (Western-intellectual-tradition) books for a learned citizen.

So, what selection criteria would Aristotle use to narrow down his selection of essential titles through which to usefully take his audience on that guided tour?  I don't know, actually; I'm not Aristotle, after all.  I'm me.  And I have some idea of either what my selection criteria are or of the product of my selection criteria.  So in my list of top-100 essentials I would have those two big Adler books I've mentioned, probably a number of Oxford Handbooks (the more useful ones, anyway), and then, letsee, I have the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (both 1st and 2nd editions) on hand.

But maybe that's all the leads I'm gonna give on that subject in this post.  I already have a shit-ton of promising leads already on this blog.  I know where to go to find 'em just in case.  I know when I "reviewed" Norton's Personal Destinies on this blog.  I have quick recall of a lot of destructive-leftism-related links just in case the need to prove my point yet again about destructive leftism arises (yet again, sigh).  (BTW, those losers-qua-leftists up on stage last night were going on and on about Better Living Through Big Government.  They just don't get it, do they.  Would Resurrected-Aristotle-in-Drill-Sergeant-Mode tear them a new one, or what?  [Edit: How about this, which I'm not sure the leftists would ever figure out on their own in a million years: Better Social Capital Through Philosophy.  Eh?  Eh? {Edit: Is a warranted induction on the principle here expressed as follows: Better x Through Philosophy, where x could stand for any number of desirable things?  Ya think?}])

So anyway, I think I know (about) a ton of promising leads on certain important End-of-History related subjects.  (You know all about what 'End of History' refers to, right?  I've given this subject more than a teensy bit of thought over the years, mind you.)  That doesn't mean I know (about) a ton of leads on a ton of shit.  I couldn't tell you who won the Kentucky Derby in 1963.  I do know that Wilt Chamberlain was NBA MVP in his rookie season but not the season he averaged 50 points a game and scored 100 in one of them.  Now who in the fuck would have beaten Wilt out for the MVP award that year?  I know.  Do you?)

So the one hit is starting to wear off, the magic inevitably to wear off as well.  Now I've got the munchies.

[Addendum 10/16 (un-stoned): I'm sure getting a lot of emails from academia.edu with links to papers closely connected to the topic of Aristotle's intellectualist conception of eudaimonia lately; how about you?  I don't know/remember how this turned out to be the case, but it's not a bad subject to get a lot of academia.edu emails about, is it?  What would be more perfect a topic to get such emails/papers about?]

Some good stuff

I have (of course) noticed that many of my posts of late have been political-polemical.  Here are some positives:

Coleman Hughes, black undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia, making any number of eminently admissible arguments about race issues which it appears (here come the polemics again...) the American left is neither prepared nor has the good faith to take on.  If he's right, then the American left has been shitting the bed for long enough that even a single undergrad philosopher can run circles around them, more or less.  Nothing that I've seen in the comments sections of his articles (I went through the entirety of the comments for this one, just to see...) would suggest that the American left has much in the way of rebuttals that would make any reasonable and duly informed person think that the American left has anything like a monopoly on good arguments on race issues.  (Much as with the Trump-Clinton election, the American left would have you think that it's some kind of knock-down, not-even-a-close-call argument in favor of the leftist viewpoint on this and a wide range of other issues.)  I did google 'criticism rebuttal response to coleman hughes' and the search returned all of one result of any usefulness, also a thoroughly admissible entry into the discussion.  However...

In the course of reading a number of Hughes-related posts, I encountered this article, "Why Does Racial Inequality Persist? Culture, Causation, and Responsibility," by Glenn Loury, and it is about as thoughtful and humane an article as I've ever seen on the subject of America's Racial Problem.  But it is most certainly not a leftist article - and it's the kind of article that I would be surprised to find the left having the courage, integrity, honor, good faith, etc., to take on (which would require admitting that the left, by narrowing its focus to only certain causal factors, has been shitting the bed for decades).  So basically it's either-or: Either Hughes and Loury (and numerous other often-black conservatives who've studied and written about this topic indepth) have eminently admissible arguments, in which case the American left has been shitting the bed, Or the American left's MO has been reasonable, normal, dialectically accountable, honorable, etc.  Take your pick.

Hughes and Loury are, in effect, throwing down the glove to issue this challenge: "Okay, leftists, let's do talk about the legacy of Jim Crow and redlining and ongoing systemic injustices.  And you, lefties - you get to address the problem of the sky-high rate of single-parent families in the black community.  Deal?"  Concerted silence/evasion in the face of this offer/challenge is what I expect from the American left.  (Implicitly contained in the challenge is what I've alluded to above: that the American left acknowledge how badly it's been shitting the bed and make a hearty effort to prevent further bed-shitting.  I don't expect that to be forthcoming any time soon, i.e., I would be rather surprised - pleasantly so - if that were to happen.)

On to another positive, without the polemical implications this time (except those pertaining to the ecologically oblivious/their enablers...):

I recently read The River Why by David James Duncan, which I spotted on a home bookshelf.  It's both fun and thought-provoking, and made an impression that books rarely do for me.  (A few other titles of lasting interest for me: Mises, Socialism; Letters of Ayn Rand and The Romantic Manifesto; Norton, Personal Destinies; Nozick, The Examined Life; Rasmussen and Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature; Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment.)  Then again, I'm not especially well-read when it comes to books and I'm not a particularly fast reader; for building my reading list I have to use my sense of quality/importance over the pursuit of quantity.  As for The River Why, one might get a good sense of its qualities from the goodreads users' reviews.  I just wanted, at the least, to provide a pointer in its direction (just in case I kick the bucket before the next blog posting, etc.).

Demo rats as a/the new Stupid Party

(context)

From a facebook timeline:

"For decades I have chuckled with Democrats about the astounding idiocies of the Stupid Party. Now that the Democracy has taken on that dubious mantle, I sure would like to chuckle with the Republicans for a change. Alas, this is tricky, seeing as how the GOP has not lost its Stupid Party standing by getting any wiser."

It's not just Trump/Republicans/right-wingers saying this stuff, folks.  The intellectual meltdown of the American left both before and after Trump is not only (sadly) the real thing, but is becoming increasingly obvious to those with a clue.  Gone are the days of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, i.e., of maintaining some intellectual quality control and of checking leftward drift (which come to the same thing...).  Not only that, the Dems, who dominate the institutions of "education," have that much less of an excuse for becoming such a pitiful spectacle.

[Addendum 10/16: Many members of this new Stupid Party use up quite a bit of valuable brain space and talking energy informing everyone that "Hillary won the popular vote," making no mention of the fact that neither Trump nor Clinton bothered to campaign in states like CA.  Do these numbskulls really believe that Trump wouldn't have gained in popular vote totals if he campaigned in CA more?  Can they not accept the fact that (a) there is wisdom in the Electoral College format; and (b) Trump simply out-campaigned Clinton in the crucial swing states?  Clinton's failure to even step foot in WI is her own responsibility regardless of whom she chooses to blame; the bum lost.  The only thing her attempt to shift blame/responsibility does, is to reinforce the impression that Demo rats are the type to shift blame for their own failings so as to justify higher taxes on the 'winners' and using the proceeds to subsidize failure.]

Trump vs. fake news, in a nutshell

"That is a lot of fake news back there."

Trump: "Fake news is the enemy of the American people."

Fake news: "Trump says a free press is the enemy of the American people."

Either you get what's going on here, or you might just be clueless/a Democrat.

Why are Trump/GOP assholes re LGBT+ rights?

If there's anything the GOP obviously has a poor track record on, it's LGBT+ rights.  (Another would be too much blindness to real racial injustices, and that includes their hypocritical support for (predictably?) failed big-government "drug-war" policies that have disparate racial impacts.  Not that this vindicates the left all that much; they're the ones hypocritically pointing out the failures of big-government policies in only this one area, immediately crying racism whenever an "unarmed black teenager" is killed by police (e.g.), etc.)

From what reporting I've been seeing, the Trump administration is arguing in front of the Supreme Court against standard Civil Rights protections for LGBT+ people.  Here's something I find revealing in this context: while there's no shortage of Fox News links on any number of Google News topics, there aren't any on this subject, not on the first two pages of results, anyway.  If Fox News isn't reporting on it, chances are good that the activities involved are really too shameful for them to direct its audience's attention that way and to really air the Cultural-Political Right's laundry on this.

The Congress is chock-full of selectively attentive cowards who refuse to do the right thing when it comes to (a) ending federal cannabis prohibition (consider, e.g., the callousness and willful cluelessness involved toward medical cannabis users), and (b) updating the Civil Right act to include the same protections for LGBT+ people.  These are such no-brainer issues that it's not hard to figure out what the "right side of history" position is.  (Although see my tentatively-proposed position as a libertarian below.)  And it's GOP politicians who (on average, of course) are more toxic on these issues than those across the aisle.  (It's just too bad that the Demo rats bring so much credibility-destroying toxicity to just about any issue; see below, for example, on their anti-libertarian attitudes toward Christian bakers.  And good luck getting them to couch their arguments for weed legalization in the language of freedom rather than racial equity or [their perennial addiction] tax revenues.)  While it's believable that a Democrat-controlled Congress would do the right thing on these issues at some point in the not-distant future, I have a hard time believing that a GOP-controlled Congress would ever get around to doing so (unless they faced severe political repercussions for their shameful inaction).  [Edit: on a related note, would states like Texas ever have gotten around to repealing their sodomy laws (which are premised on the patently evil idea that people's lives are the state's and not their own to dispose of) on their own accord, absent SCOTUS intervention?]

If it were merely about the right of a baker to refuse baking a cake for a same-sex wedding, then we have an apparent clash of deep constitutional values.  (I say it's "apparent" because I don't see any warranted presumption that a business "open to the public" must do things that violate the religious convictions of the business-owner.  Also, the libertarian principle involved becomes more clear-cut when "bake my cake, bigot" morphs into "wax my balls, bigot.")  I don't see what clash of deep constitutional values is involved in the right of a business to fire someone on the basis of their sexual preference or gender identity when there are other relevantly-similar protected classes under prevailing law.  (Again as a libertarian, I say the presumption should be in favor of the right of a business to discriminate as long as it openly advertises its bigotry.  But I'm tentatively saying that it's a presumption, and that context matters in reasonably delimiting the scope of property rights.  No doubt some asshole business-owners would abuse this presumption to the maximal extent if given the chance....)

If you don't think anti-intellectualist, anti-liberal strains of religious dogma don't have something to do with this, then I would urge a look into attitudes toward LGBT+ rights in the Bible Belt.  Just because those attitudes aren't as shitty as they were a few decades ago, doesn't mean they still aren't shitty.

Have a look at Trump's shameful, anti-evidence behavior and policies (which go beyond the usual distractions associated with Trumpspeak) in this and some related areas.  Not only isn't he friendly toward LGBT+ rights as advertised, but he's also clearly blanket-Islamophobic. (From what I can tell, you might as well treat his and Pamela Geller's views on Islam as interchangeable).  (And while we might treat his 2016 campaign-season proposal to ban all Muslims entering the country as the usual casual-relationship-to-truth Trumpspeak which had little to zero chance of ever being implemented, along with his quickly-abandoned campaign-season proposals to kill the families of terrorists and bring back torture of terror suspects, the sentiment behind it is unquestionably Islamophobic.)  It isn't just a matter of the usual blustery things he says, but what he has done policy-wise.

And whether or not it affects his policy decision, when Trump contradicts himself from one time period to the next, as he has done most obviously on the cannabis-legalization issue, and doesn't explain himself, then that is evidence of bad faith and/or cynical pandering.  "It's just Trumpspeak" doesn't help when he unaccountably contradicts himself.  (Likewise, "Trump's saving grace is his ridiculous/unhinged/dishonest opposition," while quite arguably true, doesn't transform him into a non-asshole.)  (Likewise, one doesn't have to be one of these toxic-af radical trans activists - too toxic even for many on the "progressive" left - to recognize how transphobic and/or downright ignorant of transgenderism so many on the Cultural Right are; "God created two biological sexes" won't erase the distinction between sex and gender, for example.  How about this: there's plenty of toxicity to go around on this subject, coming from any number of directions.)

I'd just like to know, what these GOP people think is the upside to upholding (whether actively or by omission) the putative right of businesses to fire people for being gay, given their not upholding the right to do so in the case of biological sex, race, or religion.  And the philosopher's question: just how far, exactly, are they willing to go on this, before even they get ashamed and disgusted with themselves?  (My first philosopher's question for leftists would be: just how egregious, exactly, does a distortion or smear of Ayn Rand have to be, before even the leftists start calling foul?  They've been real lowlifes on this subject, as it is....)  Something specific, please.

[Addendum: An extension of the philosopher's questions: for those who aren't outright assholes, just how far, exactly, do their colleagues on their own side of the aisle have to go in being assholes, before the non-assholes start calling the assholes out?  (Or: how far, exactly, does the non-called-out asshole behavior have to go, before those failing to call out the assholes start becoming assholes themselves?  Something specific, goddammit.)]

[Addendum 10/12: Some common sense reasoning requiring little to no mental gymnastics in either (left/right) direction: Sexual orientation and gender identity are in the same category of 'immutable characteristics' that make sex, race, and religion protected classes under the Civil Rights Act.  How much, exactly, ahem does one need to read into the Civil Rights Act to see that it is about protected classes based on immutable characteristics and not only about those classes concretely enumerated in the Act?  Congress refuses to do the right thing here, after all....]

Trump: "My unmatched wisdom"

Apropros this tweet:

1. Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump Oct 7
   

   As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!). They must, with Europe and others, watch over...

   125,411 replies39,816 retweets140,294 likes

   
   

   
   

(1) A sage publicly touting his/her own wisdom is probably a contradiction in terms.

(2) Trumpspeak probably has its roots in WWE-style kayfabe and smack-talk.  If you don't get that, then you miss out on a lot of the dynamic between Trump and his fans.  (If you're an elitist you might tend to look down on both of these entertainment genres and their fans.)  (Incredibly enough, I didn't encounter a dropdown menu option for "trumpspeak" in google search.)  (Are Demo rats and leftists all too easily trolled by Trumpspeak?)  (Last but not least: is it wise for a POTUS to engage in WWE/kayfabe smack-talk regardless of whether some or all people are "in on the act"?  No, I don't think so; I think it indicates a degradation of the political, but a degradation rather commensurate with the intellectual bankruptcy of both our politics generally and of Trump's opposition especially; that is, Trump is more a symptom rather than cause, bringing the intellectual bankruptcy to the fore of everyone's attention in an undiluted, unapologetic fashion.  It's not the kind of shit you'd see Marcus Aurelius, an actual historical ruler-sage, engaging in.  Speaking of Trump's intellectually-bankrupt left-opposition, shouldn't the public-sector "educators" be all over the example of Marcus Aurelius like flies on shit, on the assumption that they want/need historical examples of non-intellectually-bankrupt politics to point to for inspiration/instruction?  If they're not all over that sort of thing - and it appears they're just somehow not interested - then ain't that just fucking ridiculous?  These are the people to whom the nation should be entrusting the next generation's education?  I mean, it's one thing for unionized public-sector employees to face perverse incentives, but just how fucking hard can it be, exactly, to learn and teach about Marcus Aurelius?  Or Plato and Aristotle, for that matter?  A philosopher's question: Just how bad does it have to be in this regard, before the People really begin finding this situation to be most unacceptable?  50% worse than it is now?  100%?  What's the breaking point; that's all I'd like to know.  And how can the "educators" really complain about having a Trump as president when they fail to know and teach about serious counterexamples?  It's not just Marcus Aurelius, either; all the key American Founders were seriously philosophical people, a fact which the "educators" seem to bury underneath such facts as the Founders having been slave-owners, say.)

Leftism's reverse-Midas effect: toxicity (e.g., "white privilege")

Following up my recent post on the "educators" indoctrinating their impressionable captive audience about "white privilege":

"White privilege" is an academic-leftist neologism that has not been run by the mainstream of America before the left foisted the notion on the rest of us.  I encourage readers to look at the wikipedia link on "white privilege" to see the notion explained.  From the introductory section:

White privilege (or white skin privilege) is the societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people, particularly if they are otherwise under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. ...Writers have noted that the "academic-sounding concept of white privilege" sometimes elicits defensiveness and misunderstanding among white people, in part due to how the concept of white privilege was rapidly brought into the mainstream spotlight through social media campaigns such as Black Lives Matter.^[9] As an academic concept that was only recently brought into the mainstream, the concept of white privilege is frequently misinterpreted by non-academics; some academics, having studied white privilege undisturbed for decades, have been surprised by the seemingly-sudden hostility from right-wing critics since approximately 2014.^[10]

Again, I encourage a reading of the full wikipedia link, where what is explained as "white privilege" is advantages that whites (qua whites) experience relative to nonwhites in America.  The "advantages" enjoyed by whites are actually the effect of (real or contrived-by-leftists) unfair and unjust treatment of nonwhites.  In essence - and I'm doing my utmost to characterize this notion accurately - what the wikipedia link describes is a set of circumstances in which whites are not treated unfairly relative to nonwhites.

In essence, then, "white privilege" is whites not being treated unjustly.  No, it's not some special or acquired advantage, as the term "privilege" traditionally denotes (or is it connotes...).  It doesn't mean an advantage conferred, per se.  It means a disadvantage inflicted on others.  (And speaking of things that disadvantage black youth, does the greater prevalence of single-parent families among minorities and black people in particular also contribute to "white privilege"?  Should we double down and insist that this disparity is due to the white-privilege power structure, etc.?)

At this point you might understand how this notion would "elicit defensiveness and misunderstanding" among those upon whom the notion is foisted.  What is taken by the leftist authors of "white privilege" to be defensiveness and misunderstanding is really nothing more than disorientation and confusion as to how the term "privilege" is genuinely applicable to a situation in which what makes the "privileged" privileged is that they're not treated unjustly.  Instead of a term that conveys, commonsense-like, the unjust treatment of nonwhites, the leftists have decided that bastardizing altering the language is a preferable move.  (More examples of leftist language-alterations here.)  And you'd better go along with this alteration pretty darn quickly, lest you be complicit in perpetuating "white privilege."

I wish that there were something that I'm missing here, but I've given up on giving leftists the benefit of the doubt.

If the "white privilege" notion were an isolated thing, not intertwined with a bunch of leftist ideology, with a related cluster of neologisms and dogmas, etc., then one might reasonably treat it as an unfortunate inexactness, or a lapse in an otherwise cogent, good-faith critique of prevailing American institutions.  But that's not what this is.

I think leftism is toxic wherever it is found, but a thesis I'd like to advance in connection with this (the "white privilege" topic as well as all the other intellectual failings documented quite exhaustively in my leftism-related links) is as follows:

The American left is especially toxic and intellectually bankrupt, because of how at-odds leftism is with uniquely American founding and operating ideals, namely: freedom from state power.  The American left is set up starkly over-and-against the American mainstream, standing in a position (as it were) of dialectical alienation.  (This is why leftism seems to be a much "better fit" in European nations such as France, where (e.g.) the French Revolution of the late 18th century illustrates the contrast with America's revolution/break with the English Crown.)

A key example: the ideas of Ayn Rand are within a legitimate Overton Window of range of opinion in America.  There is a (relatively) healthy debate on the American Right over the role that Ayn Rand should play in forming culture and politics.  A great portion of the ideas in Atlas Shrugged resonate with a large segment of the Right (particularly the free-market, libertarian right).  How does the Left respond to Ayn Rand?  I'm speaking here of the American Left; the Left as well as non-Left in Europe don't treat Rand as being within the Overton Window of discourse there.  (Just how punitively high should taxes on the rich be, is the point in contention in these Euro-welfare-states.  Just how much someone should be able to keep what they earn through providing value-added to customers/purchasers in legitimately voluntary transactions, is the point of contention in the American mainstream.  Or: does your life fundamentally belong to you, or to the state/demos/collective?  And: is politics the most just, appropriate, humane, etc. way of addressing social problems?)

Returning to the question: how does the American Left treat or respond to Ayn Rand?  My very extensive experience with this is that these leftists do nothing more than misrepresent, distort, and smear Rand, when they're not ignoring or evading her message.  ("She would let the poor die in the gutter, since her heroes say their lives belong to themselves and not to the poor or govt agents purporting to act on their behalf."  And they choose to ignore the message from Galt about virtue-based aid to the unfortunate.  The leftist assumption here seems to be that if it isn't state-directed aid, it is too precarious and conditional to fit the requirements of justice.  That's an area for good-faith disagreement, not for unquestioned assumption.)

Given the founding and (still by and large - at a roughly 65% rate, anyway) operative principles of America, the legitimate Overton Window would be the range of opinion between Rawls and Nozick/Rand.  [Edit: And a Rawls vs. Nozick/Rand debate might not even take all that much into consideration the reasonably well-argued opinions of many of those describing themselves as conservatives, which pretty much makes it that much more difficult for the Left to defeat non-leftist opinion on the merits.]  But this is not what the American Left sees as the legitimate range of opinion.  The "center" of leftist opinion in America today is the more Euro-style "democratic socialism" of Bernie Sanders and AOC, with Rand/Nozick written off as terribly misguided, inhumane, evil, etc.  What else explains the absolutely pathetic way the American Left debates - i.e., avoids debating head-on, in good faith - rightist ideas (including those of conservatives/Republicans and Trump supporters in general)?

The American Left has replaced a good-faith dialogue with the American Right, with an ever-more-inbred debate about, e.g., how exactly to construct the "white privilege" notion, or just how racist Trump and his supporters are, or just how much more GDP should go to the public sector, or just how evil Rand is, or just how much illegal immigration should be incentivized, or just exactly which past American presidents and national symbols should be besmirched and boycotted, or just how exactly to blame capitalism for high healthcare costs, or just exactly how fundamentally unfair the capitalist system is, or just how exactly and how much to smear Brett Kavanaugh, or just how exactly to distort/smear/deplatform/cancel/evade what conservative opinion that does exist on college campuses, and on and on.

Is it any surprise, then, that the chief source of toxicity in American politics today is leftism, with the Trump phenomenon a backlash against that?

Here's another, related thesis: on the actual merits, many of the best political minds in America are on the Right.  The American Left, by virtue of an atrophied dialectical sensibility, is full of hubris - namely, the assumption that they possess a superior intellectual and moral compass (made more developed by proximity to big coastal cities and college campuses, apparently).  By their own lights this puts them at odds with an American mainstream full of irredeemable deplorables, racists, religious fundamentalists clinging bitterly to their Bibles/religion, rednecks clinging to their guns, etc.  Given their hubris, their outsized commitments to political activism (a substitute religion) as a source of meaning, and the roadblocks to their political vision presented by conservatives, libertarians, Republicans, Trump, talk radio, Fox News, the electoral college, and the Constitution as interpreted in good faith (i.e., with the strong presumption of liberty), it's no surprise that they come off as so miserable and nasty over not having gotten their way.

I would say that the problem has gotten only worse over time (and will continue to get worse) because of the irreconcilable opposition between leftism and America and the American left's doubling down on the correctness of leftism (with the complicitly of the "educators") in the face of this.

I won't belabor this further; either you see how I'm right (here and in all the other blog posts about leftism/leftists I have provided ample leads for above) or you don't.  If anything, this here blog post demonstrates that it's pretty much the end of the line as far as American-leftism's credibility is concerned; it serves more or less as a culmination of all those other blog posts.  This here blog post can and will serve well as a one-stop unit for future reference, whenever I mention how intellectually and morally bankrupt the American Left is.  (The further left you go, the more deranged and toxic it gets.)  Had they ever engaged in good faith with the likes of Rand I might have concluded differently.  If they were nearly as progressive and forward-looking as they pretend to be, they'd be gung-ho on philosophy and philosophical education.

As it is, my one-word summary of the American left is: pathetic.