Why I cannot be a Democrat even though I will vote for them
by Lee Bright
10/10/2024
by Lee Bright
10/10/2024
In discussions reflecting on the September 10, 2024, Trump-Harris debate, I was asked if men could vote for Kamala Harris. I will be voting for her, or rather against Trump, but I don’t think gender is an issue with thoughtful men on the left or right. What is at issue is the people and ideas in the room with her and the policies she represents. Right now, it is much easier for a man to be a centrist and Democrat than a woman. While Harris did not give much to go on policy-wise, I expressed the hope that she would tack towards the center and resist the far-left elements of her party.
There were some concerns. There were statements that she wanted to expand government healthcare massively and would be giving out large tax breaks to small businesses. While that may not seem much of a tack to the left, compared to Trump, who offers nothing that is something. As soon as we ask where the money will come from, I’m accused of being belligerent. When asked what was wrong with what I said, I was told it was tone…
It is a Trump-level of irresponsibility to expand entitlement spending when nearly a third of federal spending for the year is deficit spending ($2.2 trillion) and there is no conceivable way to pay off the $35 trillion total federal debt besides massively devaluing the currency (usdebtclock.org 9/15/2024). With the US national debt at 123% of GDP, the most likely end to the debt is default, with catastrophic consequences both leading to and following from default. That is damn near an objective fact and does not require any further nuance. Therefore, any disagreement that cannot intelligently or empirically justify additional spending is sacrificing the future for the present - merely hastening the day of our delayed national suicide.
There is nothing wrong with my tone.
The whole saga of the Greek default on their public debt is an illustrative case. Around 2000, when the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) had control of Greece, Goldman Sachs of Wall Street was employed to hide Greek debt through private trading (Hass & UCCS 2013). Greek debt needed to be hidden so that it looked like they were abiding by the Maastricht Treaty, which qualified Greece to enter the Eurozone currency union. Much of this debt had been incurred distributing largesse to the public for whichever political party to stay in power. When more honest leadership came into power, they disclosed the surprise debt.
Unfortunately, this happened in 2009 amid the Great Recession that began in 2007. The reevaluation of the Greek finances to a debt-to-GDP ratio of 115% led their creditors to question the country's solvency. Already highly socialistic with over half of the population working for the government, a strong tradition of tax evasion, and a dependence on tourism that wasn’t there during the recession, the country quickly ran out of places to get money. A brain drain and humanitarian crisis emerged as Greece descended into default. And all of this when the rest of the Eurozone was least able and least willing to help. For a time, the default of Greece threatened to collapse the entire Eurozone despite its diminutive economic footprint.
Just imagine the worldwide economic collapse if the United States defaulted. Imagine all the petty dictators filling in the power vacuum. How incredibly foolish to ever put the nation's finances even close to default. And yet, the United States government spends money like it is in an existential crisis and now pays more in interest payments on debt than on defense spending - almost $1 trillion.
A long-predicted demographic crisis is underway throughout the West as the Baby Boomers making up over 20% of the population enter retirement. This will result in all government social and medical services being pushed to the brink with a projected peak in Social Security spending reached in 2035 (CBO Aug. 2024). During this time the tax base that must support these retirees will be decreasing both in population and income (eg. CBO Jan. 2024). Since the United States is already massively deficit spending on entitlements - Medicare & Medicaid $1.82 trillion, Social Security $1.48 trillion - this further makes any expansion of entitlement spending a ludicrous proposition.
Summary of the Latest Federal Income Tax Data, 2024 Update - taxfoundation.org
If disagreement that more unnecessary spending is irresponsible comes without a thread of justification, one can only assume some naïve or irrational ideology has captured the person. Amongst the Republicans, this ideology is the personality cult of Donald Trump - the antichrist of the moment, edging toward autocracy. Among those who call themselves “Progressive,” there are all the minor personality cults that follow the Marxist and Neo-Marxist far left. These either follow some strain of Critical Theory, Dialectical Materialism, or Nationalism and reside on the Socialist/Communist/Fascist spectrum of ideology. Examples in history abound showing the personality cults and endpoints of these ideologies such as Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Worker’s Party (ie. Nazi Party), Benito Mussolini in Italy, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Mao Zedong in China, Joseph Stalin and the USSR, the Kim dynasty of North Korea, Enver Hoxha in Albania, Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania, Mátyás Rákosi in Hungary, the early Francisco Franco in Spain, and Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.
The Rules for Rulers (2016) by CGP Grey - youtube.com
Ideologues are not concerned with responsible, sustainable, freedom-espousing government. They don’t care about the budget. They want to be in power with their agenda, and if not that, revolution. If default leads to revolution, they see that as an acceptable, if not preferable, result (we are looking at you, Paul Krugman). In fact, in doctrinal Marxist thinking, one of the aims is getting to permanent revolution.
The most influential strain of Socialism in the United States comes from the Frankfurt School, an offshoot of Neo-Marxism. The Frankfurt School is the typical designation of university professors who fled Germany after Hitler banned the Communist Party. Most of them went to the United States and found university positions teaching in humanities and philosophy departments. Broadly known as Critical Theory, the branch of the Marxist tree they developed became one of the major components of Modernism and Postmodernism. Both of these “isms” are intent on breaking down all human structures - particularly capitalism - to achieve some vague and ever-moving utopian goals. That is to say, not dealing with reality.
The more realistic among them recognize this is a long project that requires a multi-generational evolution of mankind. Still, evolution requires children raised in a reasonably stable environment who themselves go on to have children. In over 200 million years of mammalian evolution, natural selection has only been shown to select males and females who are heterosexual or possibly bisexual. However, recently, some untrustworthy artificial insemination donors and doctors have shown strong signs of evolutionary success. The birthrates in the West and North have plummeted well below sustainability in all slices of populations that are not religious and relatively conservative (eg. Pew Research Center 2015). The last census in the United States showed that births were down to 1.7 births per female, well below the 2.1 needed to sustain the population. The only thing keeping the United States from a major population decline is immigration and the continuing life of the Baby Boomers.
Population of United States of America 2020 - PopulationPyramid.net
The stable environment children need to prosper is not being provided in part because Critical Theory has undercut the norms, discipline, and institutions that worked (eg. Buck 2023). Marriage is illiberally looked at by many progressives as illiberal, so they do not support it. Since the decline in marriage is so correlated and causally linked to poverty and crime (Aber et. al. 2015, ch. 2), this inability to see the institution of marriage realistically debunks much of the progressive project.
The Backstory of the AEI-Brookings Poverty Report (2015) by Jonathan Haidt - heterodoxacademy.org
The divergent understandings between and within modernism and postmodernism have led to a cacophony of voices, many of which are just disordered and selfish. An example is expanding the concept of violence beyond physical violence to include any uncomfortable thoughts breaking through the echo chambers of Critical Theory (eg. Cantu & Jussim 2022). Such Orwellian concept creep has justified all sorts of Safe-Speech Zones and safety-ism, making children too thin-skinned to ever become adults, and adults too unstable to settle into the roles necessary to society (Lukianoff & Haidt 2018). Although there are moderate strains, the tendency of Critical Theory is toward doubling down on identity politics, groupthink, and whiny struggle session activism, which is then used to justify bullying, violence, and the breaking of any inconvenient rules and norms. All people are equal, but Critical Theorists are more equal than others.
Professor Jonathan Haidt speaks at UCCS (2019) - youtube.com
What is missed in all this is any possibility of a shalom type of peace or a stable government based on the rule of law or the dynamism that raises people out of poverty - all the benefits of Classical Liberalism.
Jonathan Haidt: Three Stories About Capitalism (2014 WORLD.MINDS) - youtube.com
The Democratic party has moderates, but the tribal and sexy ideas are on the far left. All the moderates can manage is managed decline, as demonstrated by the Biden administration and to a large extent the Obama administration. When Democrat-majority cities or states decline far enough, the electorate tends to get a no-nonsense pragmatic Republican to restore them, such as with Ronald Reagan in California or Chris Christie in New Jersey.
Jonathan Haidt has shown that there has been a huge lurch to the left in universities through the 2000s, but that has yet to be matched by a huge lurch to the left among the general population. Through the Obama administration, general resentment grew as more far-left ideas and policies began to come into view, barely making majorities in legislatures, or more often than not, foisted upon people without representation by courts, technocrats, and executive orders. Apart from the minor victory of the Sequestration, the Obama administration left the most articulate politicians who could moderate this resentment without anything to run on. The media was all too willing to seize upon any foible or perceived gaffe from the moderate right. The stage was set for a wily populist leader to come to power.
How a Bill Does Not Become a Law (Season 40, 2014) SNL - youtube.com
In walked Donald Trump, the master of agitprop and otherwise narcissist know-nothing, who addressed the dispossessed that the left had so ignorantly walked over. By one-upping one controversy with another, he was able to make the liberal press say his name so often that they practically chanted “Trump... Trump... Trump…” With no moderates to moderate and conservatives and evangelical Christians so firmly part of the dispossessed, the Republican party quickly became Trump’s party. Those with spine enough to stand up to Trump were either bullied out or, without a constituency, forced to leave. What we are left with within the party of Lincoln are jellyfish, Trump enablers, and conservatives who hold their nose when they vote so Trump will do their bidding. Like thousands of others, I changed my affiliation from Republican to “none” after Trump was elected the Republican candidate.
In one of the great historical ironies, the proletariat rose up against the leftist illiberal elite and voted for Donald Trump as president. And they may do so again.
My political views have certainly developed over time, but have truly never been found outside of Classical Liberalism. Growing up and into my University years, I was much more concerned about meaning and the question of God’s reality. This question drove everything else. If God, then the most systemically responsible, sustainable, and stable politics addressing the human condition and person created in the image of God is called for - in a word, Personalism. If not, nothing really matters, including politics. Political thinking was more or less suspended until the more foundational question could be answered.
Whenever I was brought to a decision about national politics, even the moderate left looked reckless and contradictory, and still does. At base, the modernism and postmodernism permeating the left are about the tribalist instinct when nothing matters. That’s why the left is filled with so much novelty activism. Activism is supposed to be about caring for people, but for so many on the left, it is about recognition, self-justification, and individualization within the tribe of ideology. We have a modern term for this - virtue signaling (eg. Krispenz and Bertrams 2023).
After the God question was settled, contemplation of how the world should best be ordered was allowed. This has led to more precise settled views that must now be called convictions. It is not that I couldn’t be moved from my convictions, but the person trying to do so has a high bar to overcome. I had a belief once upon a time that rational discussion could resolve almost anything. My idea of reason was never entirely insensitive to a postmodern critique, so I did suspend judgment on many things. However, Critical Theory has “jumped the shark.” I now realize how pointless and even dangerous it is to try to have a reasonable discussion with anyone so ideologically bound as to deny the orderliness of the universe and the implications that has for the sciences and truth-seeking. As George Orwell wrote: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
Most of my convictions have been negatively influenced by the low bar that has justified so much ideology, party politics, and social science. Since left and far-left practitioners have overwhelmingly dominated the social sciences, the question of motivated reasoning and research has always been in play there.
Following the seminal work of John Ioannidis - Why Most Published Research Findings Are False (2005), which laid out the statistical basis of the title - the Replication Crisis that has emerged over the past 15 years has been found to permeate all the social sciences. Taken as a whole less than 50% of social science studies can be replicated to the statistical standards provided in the original study. Around 30% of studies are off by a factor of two or more. Some studies are even contradicted. It should be clarified that it is not necessarily the hypothesis being tested that is failing, but the test’s representativeness. However, hypotheses based on earlier unreplicated data - almost everything in Social Psychology, for instance - are bound to be ill-formed. While the Replication Crisis is found in all of the soft sciences - Ioannidis's field of expertise was originally in Epidemiology - more pervasive sources of bias are found in the social sciences, making it impossible to trust any ideas they deem to be rational or empirical without deeper scrutiny (Baker 2016).
Veritasium: Is Most Published Research Wrong? - youtube.com
And yet, the sciences provide ideas that can at least theoretically be verified if not falsified. How then will I ever be able to trust ideas outside the sciences that are not a part of my personal experience? How then can I ever trust Marxian or Freudian-based analysis without first making a declaration of Faith? With such foundational criticisms of illiberal liberals, regressive Progressives, and undemocratic Democrats, one may wonder how I could vote for so many Democrats.
First, Donald Trump really is the antichrist of the moment. Back in 2016, the Evangelicals could have voted for several of a field of at least moderately decent people. Instead, they put their considerable moral license behind Donald Trump, the most demonstrably evil character ever elected to the White House. The important similarities to an event chronicled in chapter 27 of the Gospel of Matthew should give every Christian pause.
Second, there are a surprising number of people on the left who will remain on the left who have made considerable effort to understand and even adopt, where they can, views of the right. Jonathan Haidt, often cited above, is one of those. I’ve followed Haidt loosely for about 20 years now and have seen him go from arrogant and irritating with a sound research focus to a persistently reliable source of rationality against the overreaches of both the left and the right.
Jonathan Haidt: The moral roots of liberals and conservatives (2008) - youtube,com
Haidt remains very much a creature of the left, but these are liberal beliefs, not illiberal beliefs. He is unlikely to go so far as the post-war Neoconservatives - “a liberal who has been mugged by reality” in Irving Kristol’s famous quote - although in some areas it looks like he might. You win some and you lose some. If I’m going to lose, I want it to be to someone like Jonathan Haidt. That is not only far easier to live with, I have some trust that he will rectify what is found to be ill-conceived.
The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012 (2023) by Jonathan Haidt - persuasion.community
I have reason to believe Harris will get people like Haidt into her orbit.
As I’m finishing this, Liz Cheney, with the blessing of her arch-conservative father, the former vice-president Dick Cheney, is campaigning for Kamala Harris. That gives me some hope. I hope Harris wins and then doesn’t squander the moment.