A Six-step program for Progressives
To begin to end their addiction to insanity, inequality, and hate:
[If you’re MAGA, Fughedabout it. Progressives, though, I think you can transcend.]
1) See things clearly and without prejudice. Clear eyes, full hearts can't lose. Don’t use simple heuristic victim/oppressor, colonialist/indigenous, or POC/supremacist lenses. Emphasize facts, not presumptions. Evaluate arguments critically for (c)omissions not by how they feel, and ABS, always be scanning for bad logic. Be epistemically humble because truth is hard to know and even harder to represent.
2) Listen to actual victims. Don’t dismiss Jewish suffering because it doesn’t fit your narrative. Don't “but” Jews. For instance, don't use “the 10/7 was bad but” line of reasoning when you're talking to Jews who are once again the uber-victims (by many factors) of hate and racism. Imagine that Jews are actually POC, and they’re trying to tell you about their oppression. As POCs, you would have been outraged on their behalf at the first mention of even a micro-aggression. Now be more outraged than you’ve ever been in the last decade, because of the litany of hate, accusations, discrimination, oppression, violence and calls for their actual Genoc*de.
3) Relitigate the history of wokeism and anti-racism. Do an audit on what went wrong with so many aspects of the progressive movement. Go back and pull down the false idols like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibrahim Kennedy and Angela Robinson and analyze them with a critical lens and see through their hatemongering, illiberalism and grift. Repudiate BLM for its corruption, racism and antisemitism. Cancel the cancel culture. Tear those edifices down, not in a mob-like rage the way your cohort tore down the statues of historical figures, but in a rational deliberative way, like with the Nuremberg trials. Put them all on philosophical trial. Use reason and true justice (not justice as a buzzword) and recognize that we're all complicit.
4) Stop telling people that you have/had to stop Trump no matter what. Stop denying or making excuses for Democrats’ behavior and policies, simply because you claim(ed) that the alternative is worse. Stop with petty tribalism and painting “the other side” with broad brushes.
5) Take a philosophy class, preferably that includes symbolic logic. Learn more logic. Take a statistics class too. Learn probability and statistics. Understand the power and limitations and even abuses of conclusions offered based on statistics. Start thinking in second derivative terms. Take an economic class. Definitely take several economics classes. Understand and think in second-order effects[1]. Practice by litigating the all too oft-used argument “you’re throwing away your vote.” Find the flaw(s). Get thinking, get humble.
6) Now apologize to all the libertarians (and even the real conservatives), whom you've criticized and called racist, or out of touch, or immoral, or claimed they don't care about the plight of the masses. Apologize to them, for saying things like: don't throw away your vote or you don’t care about poor people. Apologize for your ignorance, because you didn't understand and/or want to understand second-order effects. Apologize because you were part of what brought us here, to this political shit-scape. Yes, you helped give us Trump, no thank you. But congrats, you’re officially working to repair the damage. God speed and gratitude my sisters and brothers.
[1] Learn about Federal Reserve policy and the Great Financial Crisis and its effects on income (and wealth!) inequality. Learn how the Affordable Care Act was a bonanza for certain health care companies, e.g. sending stocks like UNH up 20x. Understand and internalize the foreign policy failures of Obama and Biden and how pro-jihad it was.