Note to libs: Quit the lecturing
Americans hate it
Jeffrey Denny
As the U.S. lurches toward our 250th anniversary next year, one thing has remained true from our start:
Like gentle-parented toddlers who rule our households, Americans hate being told what to do. We’re a uniquely revolting people.
Certainly, America doesn’t hate autocrats per se. Especially if they promise to free us from government that serves us, taxation to pay for our expectations, and the victimization of billionaires who abuse the truth, law, women and power.
But Americans hate virtue-preening pecksniffs who impose their superior values. Not so much the birth-forcers, book-banners and devout Christians who hate everyone Jesus loved. I’m talking about my fellow libs.
Politicos, pollsters, pundits and pontificators, like Bono, still haven’t found what they’re looking for.
Namely, the unifying theory as to why America — even the longstanding Democratic base — voted for Trump. Even more this time. Despite everything.
They blame the failings of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. That an egg costed a dime or two more. That Democrats chose the woke class over the working class. That we ignored how tired, poor, huddled masses of homeless tempest-tost gang criminals are swarming our towns to work hard for the American Dream like our grandparents. That Trump voters are suckers for a flimflam man or just confused, poor dears.
But as the Second Trump Reich begins and we flail about with brilliant answers and bitter accusations in our typical circular firing squad (but with with talking-point bullets, not real ones), let’s call on William of Ockham, the 14th century English philosopher and theologian, who posited that the simplest explanation is usually the most accurate.
To me, what Occam’s famous razor suggests is that most Americans are sick of highly educated elites (like William of Ockham) telling them what’s what.
At least Friar Bill suggested that simpletons might be right.
Today’s highly educated elites of the liberal persuasion pat the MAGA bunnies as if to enhance their early brain development like the children’s book.
We love to teach the hoi polloi how they should think, live, believe, behave and express themselves.
The new liberal Democrats have transmogrified into our Goldwater conservative GOP grandparents, imposing starchy, pearl-clutching, frowny Miss Manners judgment on the Trumpy ill-mannered in our highly refined social sensibilities.
We’re nearly religious in our liberal fervor while snorting at organized religion as the fentanyl of the dumbshit masses.
Harder still, we make everything — everything — political, even from what we eat to eventually how we flush it.
Even many libs struggle and ironically snort about the rules we’ve imposed on others that we also shackle ourselves with lest we appear hypocritical.
Yet our selected media — which confirms our beliefs but certainly less, we think, than Fox does for MAGAs — encourages us to tell the unwashed about how they should live because we’re right.
Witness: In my 80% white wealthy highly educated liberal ward in historically Black Washington, DC, folks compete to be the most liberal and love teaching others the One True Way, even when it comes to race.
We’re more BLM than BLM. Our gotcha trigger fingers are Dirty Harry itching to own even inadvertent infidels. Like if anyone wants the police — who are mostly Black, by the way — to stop crime.
If my fellow Dems ever want to win America again, then let’s stop lecturing America to be as enlightened as we are.
For instance:
Stop lecturing about the climate
Like how our children need a safe planet, when having them hurts their planet even more than jetting to our climate conferences to save them.
No climate-sensitive living, shopping or eating, costly solar panels, sustainable rain gardens, composting or infinite recycling bins will ever compensate for when we procreate.
Biden’s “Green New Deal” was brilliant branding in our sustainable climate policy hothouses. But it failed to land for dying industrial towns we used to care so deeply about because we don’t live there anymore.
Sorry, but despite their sturm und drang nearly as powerful as deadly climate storms, our youth didn’t vote climate.
Stop lecturing about cars and drivers
Like how gas-powered internal combustion engine cars — we label them ICE—are evil like the border patrol. Even EVs, now especially Teslas, are wrong for the planet. Everyone should bike everywhere all the time like the Dutch. Or the destitute in Africa.
Stop lecturing about gender roles
When it does violence to the agency of women, men and the 72 other genders who prefer certain “traditional” roles. For instance, when women have to do everything because men suck at everything. But no gender progress is going to liberate me from the task of sensitively liberating giant spiders from the home.
Stop lecturing about healthcare
How it should be nationalized, even if it makes the gold-plated care our loved ones need right away harder to get. And how a troubled young man who assassinated a health insurance CEO is a folk hero. With a gun, which we otherwise hate.
Stop lecturing about Northern Europe
And the many ways big diverse America should be more like far less populated, 80–90% white nations, including Canada and New Zealand, many also struggling with progressivism versus reality.
Stop lecturing about language
Most Americans don’t want to hurt people with their words, at least not face to face, lest they’ll be punched. Irredeemably disturbed MAGA troglodytic trolls go online to express their fighting words anonymously because they’re sad cowards posing as brave patriots.
But nobody wants to be censored by language bullies who take weird pleasure in tripping you up with their ever-shifting proper patois. Especially if they’re powerful elite progressive youth who love to teach their parents and grandparents how to save the world from capitalism, conflict and climate disaster. Even if they never learned to boil an egg. Or ever struggled to buy one.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer