I'm delusional and haven't learned a thing. My IQ is so low that introspection is beyond my intellectual capacity and I will never be able to grow or mature as a human being.
Reasonable leftists are still a thing, but they're a dying breed. I was one for a long time. You can only be told "don't believe your lying eyes" so many times before you get sick of the gaslighting.
Find me one, I dare you. Leftism as an ideology requires the participant to either be too stupid to realize that their ideas have killed a hundred million people, or too evil to care.
Democrats from the 1950s were reasonable, but those kind of people have all been ran out of the Democrat party.
Joe Lieberman was the last prominent member of that Democrat party, and he got primaried in the 2006 Democrat primary for Connecticut Senator, and had to run as a 3rd party. He won, but that was his last term, he didn't run again.
Pew research has a long running poll series that documents the sentiments of Democrats and Republicans, and they have tracked the far left shift of the Democrat party over the years. 30 years ago there was not much divide between the average D and R, with the means of the chart being center left and center right, but over the years that mean has shifted far to the left for the average D, and barely budged to the right at all for the average R.
We all like to say that to the average woke lefty, anyone to the right of Pol Pot is a "right wing extremist," and to a large extent this is true, because the woke left now has more in common ideologically with Pol Pot than not.
That's the problem with accepting emotional rationale for your ethics--somebody can always claim a greater emotional cause. It generates a moral arms race that shifts the ideology further and further to the fringe. Most left thinkers don't have a concrete set of moral stances--just "Suffering is bad, and we should prevent suffering wherever we can". Well, suffering is unfortunately not objective and thus the goalposts move themselves.
Reasonable leftists are still a thing, but they're a dying breed. I was one for a long time. You can only be told "don't believe your lying eyes" so many times before you get sick of the gaslighting.
Find me one, I dare you. Leftism as an ideology requires the participant to either be too stupid to realize that their ideas have killed a hundred million people, or too evil to care.
Democrats from the 1950s were reasonable, but those kind of people have all been ran out of the Democrat party.
Joe Lieberman was the last prominent member of that Democrat party, and he got primaried in the 2006 Democrat primary for Connecticut Senator, and had to run as a 3rd party. He won, but that was his last term, he didn't run again.
Pew research has a long running poll series that documents the sentiments of Democrats and Republicans, and they have tracked the far left shift of the Democrat party over the years. 30 years ago there was not much divide between the average D and R, with the means of the chart being center left and center right, but over the years that mean has shifted far to the left for the average D, and barely budged to the right at all for the average R.
We all like to say that to the average woke lefty, anyone to the right of Pol Pot is a "right wing extremist," and to a large extent this is true, because the woke left now has more in common ideologically with Pol Pot than not.
That's the problem with accepting emotional rationale for your ethics--somebody can always claim a greater emotional cause. It generates a moral arms race that shifts the ideology further and further to the fringe. Most left thinkers don't have a concrete set of moral stances--just "Suffering is bad, and we should prevent suffering wherever we can". Well, suffering is unfortunately not objective and thus the goalposts move themselves.