Like everyone else, I’ve been spending too much time thinking about the hall of mirrors that is American politics, where every accusation seems to contain the reflection of an admission. When I saw this article about a state senator who wants to make all porn illegal, outlaw divorce, and restrict sexting to married couples only, my first thought was, “This guy’s fantasies must be a real shit-show!” Haven’t we all learned by now that moralizing holier-than-thou types generally turn out to be closeted maniacs projecting their private perversions into public pronouncements?
And it keeps getting worse.
Extremists on what used to be the freedom-loving “Left” scream for the scalps, jobs, and reputations of anyone who uses the wrong pronouns or dares to voice doubts over whether a person with a penis is accurately termed “a woman,” while those on the other end of the political spectrum (but adjacent on the extremism spectrum) betray any definition of “conservatism” by calling for revolution, not wanting to conserve much of anything, far as I can tell. “Burn it all down. Drown it in a bathtub.”
This morning, sitting by a peacefully crackling fire while a blizzard raged outside, I read Anand Giridharadas’s analysis of our historical moment. He notes that the right has been transformed from the staid party of buttoned-down bankers to the party of passion and raucous rallies: “One of the strange dynamics of the Trump era,” he writes, “is that, as the right has become, more and more, a movement of passion more than reason, of emotional appeal more than policy solutions, the political left has, as if to be symmetrical, drifted the other way.”
The left, who used to be the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll folks, have curdled into dour scolds seeking shelter in safe spaces, political correctness and “normalcy,” while the MAGA crowd parties down with who-gives-a-shit abandon.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tangentially Speaking with Chris Ryan to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.