Benjamin Kerstein: Watching America's Crack-Up

Very much worth a read, IMO.

I've lost so much of my objectivity that I don't much know what to think anymore.

   But seems to me that Kerstein is--and this is common--trying to make both sides out to be equally crazy and equally responsible for the current mess.

   Of course I don't see things that way, for reasons I state and restate obsessively--so I won't do so again now. 

   I'm not sure it's profitable to try to figure out exactly which side is crazier, when the sides are divided up as we traditionally do, at any given moment. Though I also think that the people I tend to read and know and hang out with have a deep and false assumption that conservatives are deeply bad, and always either wrongest or threatening to be. The left tends never to accept outright criticisms, outright arguments that it's just wrong about x or y. Rather, it tends only to accept arguments of the forms:

You're doing something that will help the right.

or

You're right, but your means are ineffective/counterproductive

or

You're not far enough left.

   So I do think it's important to recognize that the left has gone insane, and now threatens to destroy the country--and to do so without turning it into yet another argument against the right. And given that the right is always assumed to be the worse of the two sides, I find it tedious to refuse to acknowledge when the left is worse. By, e.g., pretending that both sides are equally crazy. Thus it's always: the right is worse...or the two sides are equally crazy. 

Funny how those are the only two options.

   I do admit that bad shit is happening on the right. But I don't thin it's even vaguely plausible to say that QAnon somehow balances out the cult of Woketarianism. QAnon isn't threatening to destroy Western civilization... Unlike the vanguard of Woketarianism, it certainly doesn't aim that that, at least. "Common Good"ism is a strange development...though, honestly, not something even most conservatives know anything about. Who is unaware of BLM, climate apocalypticism, Woketarianism, transgender ideology, or the resurgence of Democratic sympathy for socialism?

   Well, anyway. There's lots of bad shit going down. I can agree with Kerstein on that much. 

   And perhaps his most interesting point is his lead one: the continued existence and flourishing of the USA is not a foregone conclusion...