Binary Extremism

Extremists both Left and Right are okay with dismantling the American experiment to insulate their feelings and make everything their favorite. Democracy ends not with a bang but an entitled whine.

The extreme Right is further along in this process, so we're correct to focus our attention and resistence there. Moderate conservatism no longer exists, because MAGA extremists have subsumed the whole structure, like a wolf pack taking down an elephant. So that's our big problem at the moment.

But the extreme Left is rife with the same angry kooky performative entitlement, only with different agenda points. And it hasn't yet subsumed the mainstream Left, so it seems as fringe as the extreme Right did pre-MAGA. So, for now, the rant below is just some writer shouting on Twitter for clicks. For now. But imagine a figure cut from this cloth who's charismatic enough and shameless enough to really rile up the crowds, screaming from lecturns about stuff that touches people's emotional buttons and channels their latent rage.

Moderate liberals wouldn't have a chance trying to contain such a figure, because they have only boring things to say. Extremism is, alas, galvanizing. And whiny angry entitlement is like catnip for a society of bored aristocrats who live to cosplay victimhood.

Same as the Right. Same as Trump. It's the same societal predicament.

If you don't know the story of the Nazis in Skokie, it's an essential and remarkable document of American values, and you should at least scan the Wikipedia page.

Calling someone a cat lady is not nice. The exterminators of millions of my people marching to lament the incompleteness of that operation also is not nice.

But America prioritizes freedom of expression over enforced niceness, because dehumanizing those who don’t fit your niceness bill is how extermination happens. The Germans didn’t find my ancestors nice.

Everyone has a different notion of niceness, each as fiercely righteous as yours. The Solomonic answer is tolerance. No contingent (not even if they're certain they're correct) gets to to dictate to the rest of us how to think, speak, or feel. It’s beautiful, though rarely nice, and it requires everyone to tolerate expression they deem intolerable.

Alas, it's notoriously hard to persuade aristocrats, or narcissists (much less aristocratic narcissists), to tolerate an aversion. A princess is increasingly vexed by smaller and smaller mattress peas.