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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

Thanks! A really excellent piece that sheds so much light on our current political and cultural dysfunction aka our Age of Performative Outrage.

I think you really hint at a larger truth in mentioning "the accrued symbolic power of the social groups of whom they have made themselves veritable totems."

How drenched in the symbolic is our post-religion yet deeply religious discourse? Are black people and their skin color not the ultimate American symbol, by which I mean doesn't every American brain fill in so many other meanings and descriptions with just one glance at black skin: for the Left, the eternally suffering victim, the literal incarnation of our evil ancestors; for the Right, the dark and menacing dangerous Other. (I've always felt that one of the many burdens we place on black Americans is that they have to be symbols as much as humans.)

And could any issue be more fraught with symbolism than Trans? A tiny sliver of the population that one side weaponizes in their eternal battle to deconstruct and demolish the backwards bigoted Old in favor of the Glorious Equal new, and which the other side fights to protect traditional mores and the sexual innocence of their children.

America has always been the land of aggressive entrepreneurs and of puritanical moralism, so it makes sense that the two would combine and thus create the modern beast known as the Activist, an aggressively puritanical moral entrepreneur, looking to do good and do well at the same time. This has always been part of our history (see the Progressive movement of 100 yrs ago), but it seems to have been supercharged by our suddenly moralistic oligarchy and by the decline of religion and the subsequent funneling of so much religious passion and energy (for better or worse) into politics.

Just as the poor will always be with us, so too will the aspiring saviors of the poor, always looking to save souls and corner the market on public morality.

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Diamond Boy's avatar

Woodhouse, where have you been all my life? This guy is fantastic, he is so incisive and just plain right! I find Freddie DeB and Jessie S to be both earnest and brilliant but kinda muddle headed at least compared to this Woodhouse fella.

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