The pattern is the same for the non-binary fad's elder sibling, the trans-first fad. The proposition that there's no good reason to bar natal males from women's sports must have its true believers, but it certainly has its downstream swimmers. The Democratic congressman Seth Moulton, who had previously expressed concern about natal males' physiological advantages, reacted to the Supreme Court's approval of bans on their participation by skirting the substantive issue of physiological advantage that had troubled him before and declaring, "Every young person deserves the chance to learn and play sports alongside their peers without being targeted for who they are." Now it seemed that the only issue was a contest between bigotry and inclusivity. In the interim, Moulton had encountered the verbal equivalent of withering machine-gun fire from his left flank. (Yesterday, despite his ingratiating efforts, he lost a senatorial nomination to an incumbent whose left flank defied turning.)
This sliding away from concrete challenges to the refuge of abstract attitudes is an aspect of the political horseshoe that brings Left and Right cognitively nose-to-nose with only their touchstones to keep the twain from meeting. The result is a gang war between severely hopped-up gangs that drives sane people to distraction. Each gang's territory is a forbidding Neighborhood of Make-Believe (abject apologies to Mister Rogers).
The crazy make-believe of the Right is basically that of one man's mind propagated through a cult of personality. It has been attended to in this space more than once, and it will be attended to again.
There's a temptation to say that the crazy make-believe of the Left is also that of one man's mind, the man being Marx, but that would be inaccurate. The man is Lenin. Lenin's mind channeled Marx's earnest vision of economic classes into an opportunistic gamesmanship that has indirectly made the concept of class available for adaptation to various political adventures. It also transferred leadership of the Left from the working class to the intellectual class.
Thus, Lenin thought of his modernizing revolution as a proletarian revolution and of workers playing the leading role in the revolutionary movement. They do so, however, as represented by intellectuals or, as Lenin put it more often, by his Party or simply by "us." The introduction of "the Party" is generally seen as Lenin's major modification of or contribution to Marxism, but it does not merely add an organizational element that was absent in Marx's Marxism. Marx's social-democratic successors had added such an element long before Lenin did, but it continued to express Marx's concern with the working class. The introduction of Lenin's "party of a new type" involves a change of the ideology from a laborite ideology to one of intellectuals. The Party is, and "we" are, in Lenin's mind clearly distinct from the working class and must lead that class where it would otherwise not go. In short, it is intellectuals, not workers, who give direction to and lead the revolutionary movement.
— John H. Kautsky, 1994, Marxism and Leninism, Not Marxism-Leninism, p. 43
The people who participate in such a movement may pride themselves on cool objectivity (at least their predecessors did so), but opportunistic adventures breed conceptual invention and, in time, the passion of rank tribalism. The American Left first became a cyclist who must maintain forward motion to keep from falling over and then became a mime who represents the cyclist by a demonstration of furious pedaling. After all, there is no forward motion in a "movement" that appears now against a backdrop of ardent feminism and now against a backdrop of sexual self-identification; now crying, "Save democracy!" and "Follow the science!" and now crying, "Down with Western Civilization!" and "Scientific thought is whiteness!" There is only furious pedaling. This is the all-important manner of progressivism from movement to movement, even when movements overlap in time. The substance can be supplied by that make-believe which justifies the movement at hand. For the contemporary Left, strategic make-believe began in earnest with the politics of abortion.
There cannot be separate truths about wanted babies and unwanted ones. Most babies are hailed as babies from the first intimation of pregnancy. That sense comes unbidden to all concerned. Left free from political tampering, it would be a hard case indeed who bucked the awareness that to be pregnant is to be carrying a new life, a baby, a child. The notion that life begins at conception is not peculiar to the religious Right. Nor is it a mere convention. It's a presumptive truth that requires motivated scientific pronouncements to reject. If not at conception, then when? Well, there must be some place where one can draw the line. And so begins the search for a place to draw it. An extremist fringe draws it, with gruesome legalism, at the moment when the fully-developed baby has made good its escape into the outer world. Many more people who support legal abortion prefer a stage of gestation beyond which expert opinion holds the fetus to be viable. But viability is an ominous criterion. After all, human beings are not viable, as a practical matter, for several years after birth. We absolutely would not survive without interventions. It may be that no one will ever try to legalize infanticide, but the criterion of viability does give the legalistically-minded a basis for it.
This is not the protest of one who categorically opposes abortion. Quite the contrary. It's the protest of one who, after much soul-searching, concluded that the Gordian Knot of a woman's needs entwined with those of an unborn baby must be cut where the cutting is at least humane to the woman. I take the pro-choice side while conceding that the choice of abortion is a tragic one. I agree with then-President Clinton that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. In contrast, those who have arrived at a pro-choice position via progressive politics can't abide the third part of that formulation; nor will they let the word tragic pass their lips in reference to the termination of a pregnancy. As with leftist politics more generally, it's unthinkable to concede that the thing one advocates is a mixture of good and bad. Heirs to Leninist strategy and tactics, for all their intellectuality, take the simplistic view that the surest key to success is the most rigorously self-serving propaganda. Instead of debating what to do in the light of common knowledge, they set about filtering the light.
For a while, single-minded advocates of abortion spoke of the fetus as part of the woman's body. But that was too patently untrue. No part of a human body has its own blood supply, heart, brain, eyes, ears, nose, mouth or limbs. The placenta functions to protect the fetus from the woman's body and (not always successfully) from some of the choices she makes, such as smoking. It also manages the supply of nutrients that enable the fetus to pursue its development as a discrete organism. Repugnant though it may be to say so, the woman's body acts as host to another human body during the early stages of its development. The fetus is contained in, and connected to, the woman's body; not part of it. The woman's sovereignty over the fetus can't be asserted quite so peremptorily.
Where there's a will, there may still be a way. The next way attempted was to speak of the zygote, becoming the embryo, becoming the fetus in all its stages or up to some contended stage, as tissue (a word so impersonal that mere becomes superfluous). It was possible to present images of the thing in question that did seem to justify thinking of it as only a lump of tissue. Surely there could be no sensible objection to removing it? However, this bespoke scientific philosophy was ironically overtaken by impersonal technology. Ultrasound imaging progressed and progressed, revealing the human form at earlier and earlier stages. Summary justification of abortion by denying the baby's humanity now requires a desperate will. Two things can be true at once: that it's out of the question to consider the welfare of the unborn baby without considering the welfare of the woman, and that it's morally and intellectually wrong to consider only the welfare of the woman on grounds that the unborn baby is something other than a human life. When it necessarily comes down to choosing between the two, that choice should be recognized as a solemn one entailing an awful responsibility. One may conclude, as I have done, that the already-born human being deserves the greater consideration; but one should never lose sight of the tortuous moral road that leads to that conclusion.
The public activism of the American Left abhors both morality and tortuous roads. Having fixed on a political objective, it barrels ahead in a beeline. Obstacles must be discredited or simply suppressed for fear of losing speed or scope. When cold-blooded appeals to science fall short, hot-blooded stigmatization becomes the order of the day: only a religious fanatic could entertain the idea that life begins at conception, and only a terrible person could speak of a woman as "host" to a fetus. Instead of grappling with the world and its complications, the Left promulgates a changeling world purged of them. Across its range of interests it offers several such worlds, each suited to a purpose, and summons us into them by turns: a feminist world, a trans-first world; a world where science and scholarship reign supreme, a world where lived experience reigns supreme; a world outraged by the elevation of fealty above competence, and a world that obsequiously elevates representation above competence.
Given a choice between the make-believe of the Left and that of Donald Trump,.... Yes, but what a disgusting choice!
