What Are We Gonna Do Long-Term Re: National Unity 'n' Stuff?

Community organizations that go around the internet?

What?

   It's hard for me to see saving the left without a resurgence of left-of-center liberalism, because I think progressivism is an irredeemable disaster... But obviously I could be wrong. Maybe there's some way to moderate it and bring it back within the scope of ordinary American...something. Without just ditching it or switching to something else. I'm not sure what to say there. There's probably no clear distinction between the two.

   (It's worth remembering that contemporary PC/Identity-politics leftism is not "the left," despite the way I talk about it. PC/IP is a pretty weird an idiosyncratic view. Marxists, for example, think the PC/IP crowd is f*cking nuts... So...Marxists are right about at least one thing...)

   The equal and opposite point would be something like: how do we bring the GOP back from Trumpianism and bring it back within the reasonable and ordinary bounds of American whatever?

   My own view, of course, is that progressivism has flown so far out of bounds that it's hard to figure out how to renormalize it without just eliminating it. Where as Trumpianism fails largely as a matter of tone. Aside from that, Trumpianism is a conglomeration of stuff including a perfectly reasonable--though possibly wrong or at least sub-optimal--populism. You might think protectionism is wrongheaded...but it isn't radical nor out of bounds. Of course some disagree.

   But look: 

Enforce immigration laws is not a radical view. Be nicer when you talk about doing it is a pretty minor adjustment. OTOH the progressive/Dem message on immigration is so radical it's actually a danger to the country. It's not a matter of tone. It's a matter of substance. Specifically: their position is already hard to distinguish from de facto open borders...and it's just getting worse. And: as in so many other cases, the position always comes with an adjunct position: if you question the view you're a racist (like Donald Trump, who is a racist, as we may have mentioned). The radicalism of that omnipresent PC rider is another important problem--perhaps the biggest problem.

   I switched sides on this stupid tribal red-v.-blue dust-up because the radical lurch leftward of the blues turned many or most of the disagreements into that kind of disagreement: a pretty ordinary view misrepresented as radical-because-racist...vs. a view that is actually, substantially radical/crazy...but misrepresented by its advocates as compassionate/obligatory/scientific/demanded-by-anti-racism. 

   We always think of resolving our political disputes in terms of "finding common ground"...but I dunno, man... Doesn't that give radicals an illegit and dangerous advantage? All they've to do to ultimately win is to stake out more and more radical positions until the "middle ground" is what they actually wanted all along. 

   The Burkean conservative option is: start with the status quo (ante?), state both cases, consider a small move in some direction; if we make the move, let marinade for awhile, state another case if you're still not happy with where we are. That is, roughly: the anchor point is the status quo, not the mid-point of the two positions. Non-conservatives will argue that that illegitimately advantages conservatism...

   The difference is (from a Burkean perspective): there's a lot less arbitrariness in the status quo than there is in the middle ground, since the middle ground is a half-function (is that a thing?) of some position that might as well have been pulled out of the blue. Doesn't it have something like the status of a hypothesis? So: a guess, a leap in the dark (or: the dusk...). Hm... That's not the dumbest analogy I've ever made...that may be worth thinking about... Thus do I drop the other point and leap up to chase a dog with a puffy tail...