Two smart Substackers, writing recently on apparently disparate topics, reveal one of the weirdest aspects of our current political crisis, which deserves closer examination because it’s likely to get even weirder.
Last Thursday, Josiah Lippincott exposed the absurdity of the Democrat’s escalating lawfare against Donald Trump. As Lippincott explains, some on the Left now claim that even if Trump were re-elected to the presidency he could be removed from office by being tried and convicted in Georgia or some other jurisdiction on state (not federal) crimes.
Of course, as Lippincott notes, if “a sitting President can be removed from office by a state court, there is nothing stopping Texas, Wyoming, or West Virginia from charging Joe Biden with multiple felonies relating to his business deals with Hunter overseas,” using any flimsy pretext to establish state jurisdiction.
It is no secret that the left doesn’t care about intellectual consistency, and political fights have always involved double standards to some degree. But there is more going on here.
Chris Bray recently approached this topic from another direction by writing about the “epistemic closure” afflicting our ruling-calls intellectuals, who go to bizarre lengths to make reality conform to their political preconceptions. Our elites, Bray notes, are “sitting in a mental basement and constructing their own shadows into something they feel pretty sure is a picture of the world.”
Too many people on the Right are tempted to dismiss all as this cynical political calculation and to criticize leftists for their “hypocrisy.” But that misses something important about our political divisions which goes to the heart of the current crisis.
When the Left makes arguments that seem crazy and ignore how their own tactics and arguments could be used against them, they are not engaging in hypocrisy. In their minds, they are perfectly consistent because they literally do not believe the same standards apply to both sides.
The ideologues on the Left don’t merely see conservative Republicans as political enemies, but as an alien race that exists on a separate moral and metaphysical plane. Liberals and conservatives, the woke and the deplorables, can’t be held to the same standard because they aren’t the same—and therefore, of course, can’t be fellow citizens. The Left doesn’t see our political divisions as apples and oranges, but as apples and orangutans.
Noticing that Left and Right are occupying different realities is hardly new: Scott Adams has offered the arresting metaphor that Left and Right are “watching different movies.” But it’s still a challenge to grasp this at the deepest level because, ironically, the Right is now more modern and cosmopolitan than the Left, even if neither side fully realizes it.
Today, it is traditional conservatism (and even the New Right) that is more attached to the ideals of the Enlightenment. Despite some qualms about “liberalism” and “equality,” the Right still believes in objective truth, the power of reason, and a non-arbitrary morality that comes from God or nature—and thus not merely a social construct.
The Left, on the other hand, may mouth slogans about “science,” but in practice, this is just a weapon wielded by the self-appointed experts who would rule us without our consent. The postmodernism reigning in our elite universities sees truth as a function of power and regards everything from biochemistry to punctuality as an imposition of white hegemony.
“Equity” means whatever outcomes the elites desire for settling racial grievances. So the average leftwing zealot is—all in all—far more primitive and tribal than the typical Republican, who prefers individualism over group rights, and still wants equal treatment under the law rather than an ad hoc system of “social justice.”
In my new book, I discuss the work of a brilliant but obscure Nietzsche scholar, Harry Neumann, who captured this new/old leftwing mentality with the following description. Imagine “savages incapable of adding five of their own canoes to seven enemy canoes.”
For them, this would be equivalent to adding five stars and seven eagles to obtain twelve star-eagles. One can only add commensurable things. From the point of view of the savages, a “twelve” capable of comprehending themselves and their enemies abstracts from or disregards life’s most fundamental distinction. For them, the true common good, the object of their deepest eros, is their tribe.
When the Left denies that their enemies are entitled to free speech or due process… believe it. They view their opponents as aliens in the most fundamental sense. Their double standards are not “hypocrisy,” but the highest expression of their tribal loyalty.
Glenn Ellmers is the author of The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy and the Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding at the Claremont Institute.
