What if Dems actually know they’re lying? Then what?

I am still trying to process the election, so thinking out loud. I wrote some stuff last night, then deleted it on the grounds that my 3 AM ramblings maybe aren’t the best. So trying again…

Most of the liberals I know fall into one of two categories: The SJW True Believers, and the Principled Pragmatists.

The SJWs are basically everything you expect out of SJWs–annying, self-righteous, and they blame everything on the cis-heter0-white-patriarchy. They call everything “problematic” or “racist” and basically sound like Tim Wise all the time. Most of them strike me as aggressive assholes who’ve found a new way to show their superiority, but a few are quite sincere and really do make sacrifices to help others.

The Principled Pragmatists are more like your old school liberals from 1995. They hold to values like freedom of speech and equality of opportunity, favored free trade, and if they thought about Muslims, their primary concern wasn’t Islamaphobia but female oppression. Most of the PPs share the SJWs’ concern for helping others, but are a lot less annoying about it (and thus come across as more sincere.) Many admit that the SJWs are unpleasant, if not actually nuts, but they also recite a lot of SJW talking points, because these days, SJWs dominate the left’s memetic constructions (and I’m not talking about funny pictures people share on the internet.)

Slate Star Codex is a good example of a Principled Pragmatist. He is pro-trans, pro-gay, polyamorous, votes Democrat, and as far as I can tell, donates lots of money to African charities, but he gets a lot of flak for saying that he thinks SJWs are mean to people. (Somehow people mistake “Please be nicer to people” for “Right-wing zealot!”)

Just as the @Wikileaks “Podesta Emails” show that at least one person in regular communication with Hillary’s campaign knows exactly what everyone in the orthosphere has been denigrated for saying:

“What makes for successful immigration?

It’s no brain surgery, but the media have long failed to provide a clear credible answer. They are unable to come up with an answer or don’t like the answer that’s staring them in the face. The main reason behind successful immigration should be painfully obvious to even the most dimwitted of observers: Some groups of people are almost always highly successful given only half a chance (Jews*, Hindus/Sikhs and Chinese people, for example), while others (Muslims, blacks** and Roma***, for instance) fare badly almost irrespective of circumstances.”

The “Multikultistan” email is also interesting; I urge you to read it if you haven’t yet.

Many of the Principled Pragmatists I know personally admit, at least in private, to agreeing with much of this. Unlike the SJWs, they have no illusions that Muslims are pro-gay or pro-feminist. They are aware that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime and that Affirmative Action exists because they don’t score very well on SATs. (SJWs, by contrast, will threaten to send you to the gulag for suggesting that blacks and whites score differently.) They also know that Jews and Asians regularly out perform whites on various tests and make more money.

There’s a rather similar situation in religion (and, yes, I know liberalism functions like religious belief,) as I touched on way back in A Complicating Wrinkle of Uncomplicating Insight. Mainline and moderate Protestants tend to regard Christianity as largely metaphorical, but containing some sort of important truth. Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, by contrast, tend to be very literal. They believe in a literal Hell, a literal Devil, that Jesus is actually God-son-of-God made flesh, that God took 6 days to make the world, etc. The Evangelicals are more fervent in their belief than the moderates, and the moderates think the Evangelicals are a little nuts, but they’re still both Christians, and push come to shove, they tend to support each other. (Moderates who have actually become SJWs don’t count.)

Hillary Clinton likes to talk about SJW-buzzwords like “intersectionality,” “structural racism” and the importance of “implicit bias training” for police officers. But Hillary doesn’t need to invoke pseudo-scientific balderdash to explain why so many black men are in prison: her husband put them there, a move she supported them with her famous “superpredators” speech back in 1994.

In 1994, Hillary knew that inner-city ghettos were full of drugs, crime, and violence, and supported white police officers doing something about it, but when Donald Trump said the same thing, she called him “ignorant.”

Any rational person can evaluate the data on police shootings and conclude that high rates of interaction between blacks and the police probably have more to do with high black crime rates than implicit police bias. Hillary certainly knows this, which is why she doesn’t live in a poor, black neighborhood, even though she could save a bundle on housing cost that way.

So if they don’t believe it, what is, really, all the fuss about? The biggest thing motivating Trump’s voters are 1. Opposition to mass immigration, (especially Muslim) and 2. the conviction that libs don’t like them. On point 1, I’m pretty sure libs can at least understand the argument that increasing the labor pool lowers wages. Even if they think the argument is wrong, it’s hard to fault someone for believing it. (And they know that Muslims tend to be pretty socially conservative.) On point 2., well, it’s really hard to miss the disdain Hillary shows toward her “basket of deplorables.” Conservatives are fairly regularly told that they are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamaphobic, irredeemable, “not even American,” or otherwise downright evil. It gets a little old.

Obviously democracy itself (and our specific variety of it) is to blame for the left-right split into two different tribes duking it out and trying to obliterate each other at the ballot box, but still… what’s the point of it all?

I’ll have probably sorted some of this out by the time this posts.

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