Chauncey DeVega: The Left in Yet Another Nutshell: "Forget the Autopsies: Democrats Need to be Bold--and Ruthless"

facepalm

   If you want a summary of the crazy on the contemporary left...here's one.

   This peculiar synthesis of abject indifference to facts, bizarro obsession with language, and hard-left radicalism is no less nuts for now being so familiar.

   This might even be worth criticizing in detail at some point.

   The two puzzles here, IMO, are:

[i] How did the academic left go so utterly nuts?

and

[ii] How did the Democrats let this lunacy take control?

   It's just such a cesspool of dumbassery and pseudo-intellectual hogwash...it wouldn't be worth thinking about at all...if it weren't such a danger to the nation.

   I long for the days of the Democrats living in the actual world of facts, pushing to raise the minimum wage (about which I tend to be skeptical) and yammering for universal healthcare (about which I'm also skeptical). You know--ordinary policies that have something to be said for them, and something to be said against them. Instead, the Dems now sound like the love-child/grad-student of Judith Butler and Michael Foucault (not that a child is a plausible outcome of that pairing...)

   I still think the Dems will come to their senses sooner or later...but their reaction to the last election mitigates my optimism.

   The nightmare scenario is: the Dems stay crazy, and the Pubs blow it by becoming even crazier themselves.

   I don't think that will happen. Rather, I think that the Dems will regress toward the mean, and the Pubs will become drunk with repeated victories and get somewhat nuttier...but even that relatively more optimistic scenario will make us worse off than we are now.

   Really, I think the Dems coming to their senses is kinda sorta our only hope.