I'm tired of reading the same (correct) take on the Democrats' failure

A plea for originality

I don’t know how many times I can bear reading and hearing the same politically moderate take on why the Democrats lost in the last elections, for the second time, against a candidate who should’ve been a soft target and a culty party behind him. Here’s the general thesis of a thousand thousand pieces on Substack and heterodox outlets:

• The Democrats lost because of too much focus on symbolic identity issues that only affect people in lofty socio-economic positions and not enough focus on the concerns of the working class.

And: that’s true! Fine. It was a pretty obvious take before the election even happened.

Other obvious and oft-stated takes: Democrats shouldn’t have tried to lie about Biden’s viability; Democrats should’ve had another primary, given Harris’s unpopularity in the previous one. And so on.

Say it once and move on.

I enjoy reading analyses that will impact nothing, so long as they help me understand situations in a fresh way. I like being informed! The issue is that a lot of moderate punditry and journalism is simply not fresh.

Of course, I could leave the matter there: write something new. A simple point. If someone has already written something, respond to it and say something new, or just share it.

Even papers for college classes often require “originality.” The professional writing/talking industry should hold their output to a higher standard than term papers.

However, being as I remain myself, I want to go on about this a little further.

Moderates enjoy beating dead horses

Here are just a few takes, in no particular order, I’ve seen in moderate media more times than I’ve frolicked in a grassy meadow (which is to say, a lot of times):

• The institution of DEI is radically ideological and narrow in scope in unhelpful ways, has a lot of grifters in its new industry, and its fundamental ideas of antiracism and anti-colonialism (in particular now, anti-Zionism) are rather niche and unpopular, at best, and often wrap around to just racist stereotyping, antisemitism, etc.

• Ideological capture in media has led to an intense wave of bad journalism on the left.

• Gender-critical feminism should not have been repressed by activist media and academia, and is mostly a moderate and majority position or set of positions.

• Right-wing media is too unserious and detached from reality to merit debunking, for the most part.

• Calling everything that slightly disagrees with the prevailing version of progressivism “white supremacy” or “transphobia,” or whatever the in-term is for original sin, instead of having an argument to make, is bad.

• The term “harm” has become too inclusive of stuff that isn’t harmful.

• Youth gender medicine is an under-researched area of medicine.

• Supporting terrorists is bad.

• Pseudoscience is being promoted at high levels of major institutions.

• Cancel culture is real, and is bad.

• Trans activism went in an unhelpful direction and adopted bad methods in the 2010s.

• A slightly new one: a lot of free speech advocates are hypocrites and only cared about free speech when it was affecting their conservative speech.

• Political polarisation is bad.

• This is more of a set of takes. Like the identitarian left, moderate thinkers and journalists and talking heads don’t like whatever term is used for them: they hate the terms heterodox, politically homeless, and sometimes even dislike centrist and moderate. But they use them anyway, with a little signalling that they don’t like them—and this is probably because they don’t like being considered an identifiable political faction. Even though they often have nearly the exact same stances on everything. As we can see here.

• Similarly, nitpicking some language against ordinary usage (e.g., claiming that only women can be feminists, rather than feminism being a set of ideas) is fine because it isn’t woke nitpicking. And radical feminists invented the whole social justice language nitpicking and altering trend, anyway—six cheers for Mary Daly!

• Viewpoint diversity is good!

• Academia became dominated by activists with unpopular, radical stances, which they then enforced on their ideologically captured institutions, losing public trust and integrity. Ditto for mainstream journalism and other symbolic capitalist industries.

• DOGE is doing some good things! And some bad things.

• The Trump administration is too vulgar.

• Trump is capitulating to Putin in a bad way.

• True Christianity goes against the MAGA movement’s ethics. (Because religions are only their original sacred texts, not a tradition and what people actually do.)

• If only religious people would adopt secular values instead of maintaining their religious convictions (e.g., conservative Christians shouldn’t act according to their belief that heathens go to eternal torture after death and the kind thing to do is save us at any cost), things would be better. Because religious people aren’t actually religious and should adopt secular, wishful readings of their scriptures. Or something.

• Trigger warnings aren’t good to enforce.

And so on.

Here’s the thing: I agree with most of those.

A lot of those points are often criticised in bad faith (e.g., a lot of the criticism of critics of DEI as actually hating “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” not as critiquing something far more specific and institutional that named itself with those terms and is far from the only, or most popular way to pursue those goals).

Others of those points, I’m clearly annoyed by and didn’t pretend to be neutral about. Religion would be good if it agreed with atheists! How convenient.

Regardless of whether I agree with them, I’m just sick of seeing these and other such points made over and over and over and over with no new insight.

The debates over trans activism’s methods were so mainstream among online transes a decade ago that both sides already had derogatory or self-aggrandising terms for themselves and one another. Both (or all) sides had figureheads and stereotypes who were so recognisable that they could be parodied without even naming them as the object of the parody. I don’t need to read about that yet again as if one or the other take is fresh, or to rehash it yet again myself. (Mostly.)

Heterodoxy is defined against a rather niche social sphere

This is something of a side-tangent.

I like the term heterodox for people who go against the grain of their own institutions. A heterodox person or group needs to oppose an orthodoxy. In fact, the very introduction of heterodoxy can be the only reason the thing they’re opposing ends up being called “orthodox.” Orthodox Judaism was just Judaism until a heterodox alternative arose.

The term heterodox is, otherwise, meaningless.

Institutional orthodoxy can vary: Kat Timpf, for instance, is a stellar example of heterodoxy, because she works at Fox, not because she disagrees with most people in the US. She doesn’t.

However, in the new landscape of independent media, the orthodoxy still seems to be perceived as progressive outlets and academia, not independents and other independent media. This, despite the fact that “alternative” media is definitely not alternative anymore. There’s now a third alignment that’s a recognisable orthodoxy unto itself, even if it’s more accepting of dissent than the others.

So, I cringe when someone who got married and had kids at a young age is portrayed as brave and heterodox and writes and talks about and argues for their lifestyle as if they’re brave and heterodox. In what universe is that an unusual thing to do? In what universe is it unusual to say it’s a good thing to do? Or even the only right choice?

Even a few years ago, where I grew up in a normal part of the US (a small town in the rural South), most people got married and had kids at a young age. That trend hasn’t ceased there, here, or in most places worldwide. It never has and never will. I was actually confused when I got older and realised that there are people who don’t think of that as a normal thing to do.

Nobody needs to read another argument that most people already know, for something that most people do and have always done. Just because it’s not the norm in big-city media and academic cliques doesn’t mean it isn’t the actual, global, transhistorical, norm—and even dogma. I can pick up a 19th century tract or ancient religious text on the matter that would sound exactly the same: Marriage is good! Being a parent is good!

Come on, now. That’s boring, as are so many other takes that are based on the indefensible idea that most of the world is like the offices of the New York Times or UC Berkeley.

I see a lot of moderate media types act as if feminism was a total and perhaps even overdone victory in the US. Everyone all over the country was wearing girlboss merch and wielding misandrist mugs. Nobody was getting married, or if they were, it was to write a memoir about their divorce being empowering.

Said media type also tends to claim to be more tapped into the perspectives of the average American than mainstream media figures.

Hahahahahahahaha. Is the only reasonable reaction. Crying is the other option. Hahaha.

Moderates enjoy betting on losing dogs

I used to hold out a vague hope that the US could get a third, moderate party. A third party getting even a few seats in Congress could be game-changing. The issue is that moderates don’t do much, politically.

We—no, I’m not being falsely modest here—tend to like being wordy and critical. Good, I say, of course. That works for me. But statistically, moderates are less likely than wingers to actually participate in politics. And being non-partisan rarely endears us to a party.

This quiz by Pew and its accompanying data opened my eyes a bit.

I show up as Ambivalent Right, per the quiz. In other words, centre-right. Of course, the quiz doesn’t ask about some things on which I’m very progressive, but this is where it puts me and I think a lot of people would agree with its assessment, even if I feel squeamish about it for no good reason.

The site gives helpful, broader data on the categories it sorts people into. Here’s a long quotation from its most relevant section:

Surveys by Pew Research Center and other national polling organizations have found broad support, in principle, for a third major political party. Yet the typology study finds that the three groups with the largest shares of self-identified independents (most of whom lean toward a party) – Stressed Sideliners, Outsider Left and Ambivalent Right – have very little in common politically. Stressed Sideliners hold mixed views; Ambivalent Right are conservative on many economic issues, while moderate on some social issues; and Outsider Left are very liberal on most issues, especially on race and the social safety net. What these groups do have in common is relatively low interest in politics: They had the lowest rates of voting in the 2020 presidential election and are less likely than other groups to follow government and public affairs most of the time.

Of course, the moderates I’m whinging about here are deeply interested in politics, and even professionally invested in the topic. But I suspect the same general issue holds true for them, too.

The desires of my shrivelled heart

I don’t think the function of most media, or virtually any academia, should be activism. We need to know that our truth-tellers are telling truth and not spinning a narrative, and that that’s their only goal, especially right now when it’s so obvious that many, if not most, are happy to lie.

So, I trust a lot of media figures who write the types of thing I’m saying to stop writing in this screed. I trust ones whom I have reason to believe aren’t liars.

I don’t mind that there’s a growing genre of writers and pundits who happen to agree with me. I think a lot of people with normal views have been sick of most media outlets pushing obvious and distinctly non-normal agendas. I also don’t think it’s bad to have predictable views, because that tends to just indicate consistent principles.

Journalists don’t need to pretend to have, for instance, far-right views on gender but far-left positions on race just to amuse me. Although that would be funny.

I just want to read something high-quality and original. The sphere of media I appreciate tends to be high-quality, but increasingly unoriginal.