Millennial PTSD

Fox News is having a field day.  "Millennial snowflakes!"

A post election survey of college students reported that 25% had PTSD due to the election of Donald Trump.

The progressive left is enforcing discipline on itself. It is dividing into the people willing to hold their noses and vote for a Democrat, and people who refuse to vote for one. But in both cases, progressive activists are sharpening their attention to "right thought." Policy ideas on borders and immigration that were mainstream among Democrats six years ago are now condemned as so xenophobic and racist that they cannot be discussed in polite company.

Facebook group purifies itself.

I wrote yesterday about my own experience with this. 

Two progressive Facebook groups banned me when members decided I had "centrist" tendencies, and was therefore exposing them to dangerous, false ideas. They were enforcing thought discipline. I had written that the Mexican caravan created bad optics for Democrats and provided a political opportunity for Trump.

Outrageous!!!!

The incident takes place simultaneously with Fox News chortling and sneering over a report by research done at Arizona State University that found evidence of PTSD among college students traumatized by the 2016 election, Click.

Click: Washington Post article

The study is proof colleges are breeding snowflakes, Fox says. They cannot bear to hear anything except affirmations of their own thoughts. They should get a grip, grow up, and realize that in the real world not everyone agrees with them.  

The sneers of Fox News have some political traction among the wider voting world because, in fact, the political left is growing in confidence of their own power and virtue, and they are pulling inward toward that core. They are confident Bernie Sanders could have won in 2016, which means they possess both virtue and voter appeal. Political virtue is the path to power. People agree with us, they say, and will vote our way if we maintain the true faith. 

[I understand that thinking. I felt it myself in 1972. Every single person I knew in my circle of friends at Yale was going to vote for George McGovern, proudly, because we were right and the whole country agreed with us, we were certain. Now I am old.]

I found very useful the comment to yesterday's post written by "BrendaH", who said she leans progressive/socialist and will not vote for a Democrat no matter who, seeing little or no difference between Trump, the Clintons, and Obama. "BrendaH" is not a snowflake. She reads and engages with this blog. But she gives insight into the exit of the progressive Socialist left from the Democratic Party, and it helps explain the current process of division and purification in the left. Democrats aren't "pretty good." They are a version of evil.  

And within groups on Facebook, they don't want to discuss evil. They want to shun it.

Thad Guyer Guest Post. I consider his perspective to be shaped in part from extensive time spent living in both Europe and Asia in the past decade. He is witnessing the effects of mass migration on the politics of Europe, and he crosses borders frequently in Europe and East Asia. He sees how a wide variety of other cultures and political systems deal with border security and national identity.

Guest Post by Thad Guyer

“Trumpian Politics is Not for the Fragile”

Thad Guyer

The attacking comments you posted and others I saw reflect an immaturity and fragility about politics and its consequences. Even the longer ones posted against you were rants and rage unaccompanied by logic or political discourse. I know the groups are self-styled as places for sharing progressive thought, but it is not clear to me that, at least the one, is actually political in nature, but more of a kind of therapy group. The last thing a politically fragile participant needs is someone saying anything inconsistent with their bubble-speak. 

I think perhaps you intruded upon them. Maybe you should leave fragile progressives alone unless they come your way first.

Trumpian politics is not well suited to the ideologically fragile and politically sensitive. They really don’t see a political issue with the humanitarian specter of thousands of men, women and children marching on the Arizona and Texas borders. Anyone like you or me cautioning that mass migration has destabilized the EU and US democratic political orders is regarded as a racist or deplorable. Instead of demanding that Democrat leaders get to the political table and seek a compromise to salvage what humanitarian values we can at the border, these fragile people scream “no compromise”, even “no political discussion.” 

The purity of their border demands has taken a terrible toll in Europe with Brexit, far right parties in Germany and Italy, bodies in the Mediterranean and Arizona desserts, Trump and a regressive Supreme Court. These are social and humanitarian ills that Democrat elites and progressive activists have unleashed on us just as much as the GOP and far right have. It is a moral complicity in the shameful consequences that were sure to suffer as a result.

Effective political participation requires engagement with adversaries, discourse with enemies, unholy compromises and just plain holding your nose. Trumpian politics is no place for the politically immature, fragile and undisciplined, the kind of people who denounced you as a racist. Those poor souls only make Trump’s approval rise and his coalitions strong. The inevitable result is that we are all punished.