Trump's winning and there are widespread rumors of anger and panic among party Dems. In public, there are other losing cues, like all the finger-pointing and blame-mongering. Black men, white men, old white men, young white men, white women...
who is responsible for this travesty??? Chirpy lefties on Twixxer are whistling past the graveyard by ignoring the disintegrating vehicle all around them. Who should President Harris appoint Attorney General? one representative tweet asked. Well...I'm not sure that's a problem worth solving...comrade...
I keed, I keed.
About the latter part...
None of this goes for sane people voting for Harris. There are a lot of good reasons to vote for the Democrats. Perfectly good policy reasons, for one. Trump for another. None of this goes for those people, to be clear.
Just for the chattering-class woketariat.
The left has come up with some woke psychobabble--wokobabble, if you will--explaining how depressed and disaffected young men just sit around playing videogames and being converted to fascism by Joe Rogan all day...
The right's ready response is: you jackasses hate men. It's obvious. You've injected your misandry into every institution you've taken over--which is just about every institution. They're done with you. And there's basically no puzzle here: more men are voting against the party that hates and disrespects them and for the one that doesn't.
I think there's probably turth in that, though I've got a long-standing explanation that's different. Dunno who's right. They're not all that incompatible. My hypothesis (stated in a couple of places that I'm not going to look up) was that males have less tolerance for patent, pious bullshit than females do. There's a certain kind of person--who is more typically male--such that exposing them to nonsense like political correctness / woketarianism is like waving a red flag in front of a cartoon bull. This kind of guy is more likely to rebel against religion when he's young, and more likely to lose patience with politically correct pieties more readily as well.
Jordan Peterson thinks it's because of differences in the "big five" personality traits--especially that women are more "agreeable," on average, than men.
Anyway, these explanations are basically consistent because woketarianism is pious, totalitarian bullshit and part of it is contempt for men. The contempt is "theorized" (as they love to say) and expressed in typical postpostmodernist/critical-theory-style bullshit terms...and honestly I don't know which I find more contemptable. Well, it's the latter, really. I'd prefer to be in dialog with a rational woman who hates men than an airhead popomo bullshitter.
Anyway.
Sure seems like what happened is pretty simple:
The left went bugshit crazy. This didn't matter all that much to partisans, because that's what humans are like. But people not wedded to the blue team tend to be repulsed by their insanity. And those people are somewhat more likely to be male. Because the grip social approval and disapproval have on men is somewhat weaker than it is on women.
And, a somewhat deeper explanation: the actual doctrines of Woketarianism are more appealing to women because women are more susceptible to appeals to kindness. Including not just reasonable appeals to kindness, but crazy, stupid appeals to kindness. Including crazy, stupid appeals to kindness that are twisted and overextended to the point of cruelty.
Sane people are looking at what the Democrats have become and seeing it for what it is: madness and cultishness.
Again: other sane people are thinking Yes, the blue team has gone nuts...but the alternative is Trump...
Part of all this, IMO, is something I've never quite worked out, but I'm sure someone has. It's something like this: Woketarianism (and, I'd say, a lot of this kind of leftism including even more centrist kinds) involves a slight glitch in the objectivity module. People who think it's important to be evenhanded and fair and not favor yourself or your own group end up going too far in the other direction and actually disliking their own group. Whites--Caucasians is actually a better term--are the only race that doesn't have inordinately positive attitudes about itself. [I could look this evidence up but I'm not going to.] Left-leaning whites actually report more negative opinions of whites--that is, their opinion of white is lower than their opinion of non-whites. They've overshot objectivity and simply latched onto the opposite bias. Non-lefty whites, though, seem to have pretty race-neutral opinions of the races.
Perhaps interestingly, some evidence also suggests that men have fairly unbiased views of men and women, but women tend to favor women...
I suspect this is why the left really hates the center: the center is objectively epistemically superior.
That last bit is speculation.
But anyway.
The left is just lefting. They have a whole worldview now based on a pervasive network of biases, and almost all their "arguments" are accusations of bias. And we know they cannot tolerate people disagreeing with them. So they freak out in the face of disagreement, and cast about for some prejudice that can explain their opponents' appalling beliefs and actions. Only misogyny (racism, white supremacism, colonialism, homo"phobia", "trans""phobia") can possibly explain their evil stupidity!!! They think everyone who disagrees with them is motivated by prejudice and bias...and when people disagree with them, they explain that by accusations of prejudice and bias...
It's a closed loop of crazy.
Part of their edifice of crazy involves taking over the institutions that used to act as neutral evaluators of competing cultural and political views--e.g. academia and the news media--and then using those institutions to officially deem their own view correct. Some call this "idea laundering." Opposing views are now officially deemed disinformation, fascism, and all the rest. Not just by the political left, but by the institutions established, you might say, to officially make such judgments.
This means that, normally, the left would just deem Harris the superior option. Deem her President...
But we have elections.
And when they have spoken--when they have told us all what we must do--they expect to be obeyed.
If the election doesn't go their way, they're going to face a fact that they can't just deem away.
They hate that shit.
So, if they do lose, they're going to absolutely lose their damn minds.
But...
It's really the right that, in 2020, simply refused to accept the outcome. Trump didn't accept it. Wide swaths of the right didn't accept it. It is now an article of faith among many conservatives that the election was stolen. So this doesn't seem to fit my theory so beautifully well...
There are ad hoc hypotheses I could deploy to try to save it, but that's a dicey game.
I mean, for one thing, I'm not saying that the other side can't be stupid and big-headed. Right-wing stupidity and pig-headedness does seem to take a different form--just flat-out stupidity and pig-headedness. Sheer Neanderthal refusal to accept wrongness and defeat. Untheorized. Manifesting itself in a spasm of stupidity like the Capitol riot...
That doesn't mean that the theory of what's going on on the left is wrong. But it doesn't make for such a neat dichotomy, nor such a neat explanation.
Also, again and of course: Trump.
That guy, as my dad would have said, would make the Pope cuss.
Hm. This post seems to be losing coherence...
I'm not even sure to what extent this point about the right undermines anything I just said about the left.
Well, insufficient coffee, for one thing.
Also I'm just making shit up, so there's that...
[Oh, there's also a conspiracy theory flying around the leftosphere now about how Trump is actually losing but conservatives are flooding the poll-o-sphere with right-leaning polls to skew the averages to Trump. This, they say, will then be used as evidence of fraud when he loses. And this will be the excuse for refusing to accept the outcome. So there's that, too.]
[Oh and: of course this is the nightmare scenario: Harris wins and Trump and the fever swamp refuse to accept the loss. Then: January 6th on a massive scale...
A real possibility. And another real reason to vote Dem / vote against Trump.]
[Also relatedly: there's some chatter--perhaps just righty wishful thinking--that Harris has basically given up. She's not doing as many campaign stops as a candidate would normally do at this point. Sometimes she is--allegedly--talking for only a few minutes. One rumor is that she is exhausted. Another is that they know they're not going to win. I report, you decide...]
