[mduggles]

I’ve never read an author who liked his own writing as much as this fellow. I had a couple of issues with it.

- You have to accept that the concept of “the left” is in deep trouble and the root of this trouble is that it has a strict definition of itself that doesn’t include well-meaning folks like conservative religious folks.

- That a figure like Hitchens registers on the scale of “moving political systems”. I personally don’t care if a philosopher who writes mostly about religion believes in the invasion of Iraq.

It read like a lot of words to get to “secular liberal governments are actually bad and we need to embrace conservative values because rust belt”. If I missed some crucial point let me know.

[inglor_cz]

One of the things that happened in the meantime is the rise of the social networks, which shifted public perception towards the most visible people on those networks.

As a result, the Right is seen as a bunch of bleach-injecting, QAnon-infested Russophiles with Confederate flags, while the Left is seen as a murder of nonbinary crow-identifying blue-haired individuals with rainbow flags; with both absolutely happy to trample the current societal order (and the national flag) into dust to achieve their Nirvana.

Doing anything constructive in such condition becomes a lot harder, because these stereotypes engender a lot of division, hate and distrust.