This perceptive article makes many excellent observations. I would like to add some of my own thoughts and reflections.
Most people choose their ideological world view for non-rational or emotional reasons, inheriting their political viewpoint from their parents, peers, or casual observation of media/social media. Some rebel against the herd and choose positions opposite these persons. But careful thoughtful analysis usually has nothing to do with it. They choose not out of firm conviction but simply following the sterile conformity of non-conformity.
Political beliefs are to them a superficial emotional preference like one’s favorite ice cream flavor, music genre, or palatable cuisine.
Whatever is fashionable, trendy, and “cool” is often chosen. They have been taught since childhood to play nice and be non-judgmental of other persons and their life-styles. Intolerance, they are told, is the greatest societal sin. But the dogmatic progressive mantras drilled into them from near birth have also made them rigid, inflexible, and incapable of comprehending critical independent thought outside its narrow perimeters. They lack disinterested reflection and prudential judgment. Politics, and political decision-making, is a gut-level, emotional exercise.
And because we live (as Gore Vidal perceptively observed) in the United States of Amnesia, these ahistorical millennials and Gen Z mouth-breathers are virtually clueless about what happened before their birth, such as the hard reality of the Cold War, the abject failure of socialism, and the brutality of communism where over 100 million persons died at the hands of their own collectivist regimes.
All they know from contemporary media and university instruction is that capitalism is greedy and mean; socialism is about caring and sharing.
As I have often repeatedly pointed out today’s vapid and incurious youth will not generally watch a movie older than themselves. They live in the perpetual present, lives characterized by nihilism and despair.
2:50 pm on May 20, 2019
