American Life under Liberal Conformism

N ews organizations are actively engaging in exactly the practice carried out by Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, memory-holing their previous publications to fit the new party line. Kamala Harris was never a border czar; that’s right-wing disinformation now. All previous references to her being the border czar, an unofficial title and real role given to her by Biden and his close advisers to humiliate and embarrass her, have been duly erased. And while we’re at it, how about a round of applause for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the astounding unity of the Democratic Party! We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

Liberal groupthink is the most important factor in the general-opinion environment and has been for all my life. But now, because liberal groupthink is subject to sudden eruptive enthusiasms and insanity-inducing reversals, American life proceeds with a sense that the laws of physics don’t really apply. There’s a creepy unsettledness to life in America. And it’s because journalists are lobotomizing themselves in the name of their favorite cause, the Democratic Party.

If you were a faithful believer in what the New York Times says and fell into a coma just one month ago, you went unconscious thinking that Joe Biden’s incapacity was a right-wing psyop inflicted on the gullible by unscrupulous conservatives using deceptively edited videos. One of the reasons you knew you had to believe this is because Kamala Harris is a political joke who “has a public perception problem, a self-fulfilling spiral of bad press and bad polls” and “the lowest net-negative rating for a vice president” since such measures had been taken. That was the party line: Biden’s just fine, Kamala’s terrible. Believing anything else is stupid. Less than four weeks later: Biden’s terrible. Kamala’s amazing! And if you say different, you’re a dummy.

My youth was filled with liberals at least kind of debating things among themselves. They often coalesced and converged on one opinion, but slowly. The liberal blob had predictable instinctive sentiments. You knew which side they were on if a story pitted the goal of preserving nature or art against the depredations of commerce. But there was plenty to debate. I remember dining-room-table discussions about Bill Clinton versus Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown before everyone slowly and individually resolved and reconciled themselves to Clinton’s talent. I remember some liberals slowly embracing the modern Clintonite Democratic Party and others still holding out for a party more like the one Dick Gephardt would have led, with more focus on American jobs and workers. The liberal debate over gay rights seemed like a long one. I knew one or two liberals who still vaguely associated homosexuality with the decadent rich — in their minds, the sons of privileged Republicans and Tories were gay at their prep schools; of what concern was this to liberals? Others came around to the idea of civil unions but reserved marriage to traditional couples, thinking that the conjugal nature of their relationships was distinctive. A few radicals viewed marriage itself as a heteronormative conquest of queer culture. It took time to consolidate opinion in favor of gay marriage as a matter of equality.

Now liberal opinion marches around ostentatiously like a North Korean military parade, performing impossible-seeming about-faces and quick-time maneuvers while holding bayonets up, sharply fixed. Anyone who even accidentally goes against the routine is bound to be impaled.

I’ve watched liberals converge on the opinion that anti-Chinese racism was more dangerous than the coronavirus and that the vaguely libertarian Silicon Valley people who were concerned about it were kind of racist. Then, almost overnight, they converged on the opposite opinion, that the coronavirus was a threat that justified the suspension of normal life indefinitely. Also, they improbably converged on the theory that it was racist to believe that the virus had emerged from a lab in Wuhan that was experimenting with coronaviruses. Somehow, because progressives believed it, it was less racist to believe that it emerged from the folklore-driven superstition and disgusting hygiene practices around Chinese wet markets.

And then, even as religious minorities were being demonized as antisocial sociopaths and killers for gathering — outside, no less — for funerals, liberal opinion instantly switched to the idea that social distancing was no longer mandatory, enormous public demonstrations (and riots) were now mandatory, and so was defunding the police. Mayor Bill de Blasio literally explained at a demonstration of tens of thousands that such gatherings were justified in a pandemic but that even outdoor religious services could not be. And he did so in typically moralizing terms. “This is something that’s not about which side of the spectrum you’re on. It’s about a deep, deep American crisis,” he said, referring to racist police violence, not the pandemic. “Sorry guys, there’s a world outside New York City. So we’re dealing with this.”

This isn’t a matter of just being annoyed at the way social media drive opinion cascades and hating how someone is wrong on the internet. Liberal conformism and sudden-onset enthusiasms have real consequences. Over the pandemic, it became clear that conformist liberal opinion was the most powerful constraint on public-health officials, driving them into conformity and into fearfully extending extraordinary restrictions lest they provoke the press by seeming to give in to conservative or Trumpian criticism of those measures. Liberal conformism caused mayors to allow lawless encampments to grow in their cities. “Oh, it’s the summer of love.” And it won’t get shut down until a few children have been shot.

It’s clear that liberal opinion conformity is driven by something more than the pressures of social media and the way they hypercharge opinion-sharing and make it obvious where the wind is blowing. It is driven by the unprecedented levels of cynicism, cowardice, and insecurity of the liberal opinion-forming class itself. This is a generation of people who have had the least amount of moral formation in our history. With them incumbent, we no longer have sense-making institutions; we have a nonsense-infected mob that destroys the reputations of all the institutions in which its members are nominally stationed.

I find it psychotic that Kamala Harris went overnight from an emergency option to a cult of personality. But Harris herself may be the primary victim of this recent conformist psychosis. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Harris had done what any ambitious Democratic politician did. She distinguished herself as both progressive and tough on crime. When she decided to run for president, however, in 2020, such a resume was a liability in the short-lived “defund the police” era. She dreaded being called “Kamala the Cop.” Then-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard slammed her for being flippant about her own marijuana use when she had locked up thousands of nonviolent users in her time as attorney general. Roughly 90 percent of Harris’s most insane statements and gestures on policy, the ones that will feature in commercials that Republicans will spend hundreds of millions of dollars airing, were made as she tried to run for president in 2020. Being herself fundamentally an empty person, she was vulnerable to this sudden swell of moralism and emotion on the left.

The people who told you that Joe Biden was hale and hearty just four weeks ago are trying to rebuild Kamala Harris into “the Prosecutor” who is facing off against “the Felon.” But that previous about-face in 2020 is going to haunt her. Back then, she promoted a bail fund that helped put murderers and rapists back on the streets. She compared ICE to the Ku Klux Klan and entertained demolishing the agency. She promised to decriminalize all unauthorized border crossings. She wouldn’t promise not to try packing the Supreme Court. She said restoring the vote to convicted felons, even those guilty of the most heinous crimes like Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is a “conversation we should have.” Liberals believe that if they just enforce the party line on each other, they can make the entire nation forget this.

Good luck, I guess.