"As with all games, the direct approach to winning is to outcompete the opposition. The indirect way is to bribe the refs or have the rules changed to favor you or your team." Do you think the left has played to this strategy because they been largely ineffective at out-competing opponents otherwise?
The answer to this could well be a whole essay, maybe I should do that? The abbreviated answer is that the left (in particular the Progressive Left, or PL) is simply indifferent to anything but power, getting it, and using it. Universities are now finishing schools in how to get power in the context of a being intellectually out-gunned. One way to look at all those college kids terrorizing their professors and blocking speakers is to see them as kids throwing a temper tantrum. The other is to see them as having figured out how to win with their 20-year-old brains against (often left wing) 50 year old full professors. The secret is to change the rules. To make words equal to violence. To make "offending" certain people unacceptable.
The PL understands that as soon as you get any sliver of power, you use it to change the rules in your favor. More “bourgeois values", live-and-let-live types, like that shoe seller in my example, would never even think about using their earnings to bribe/lobby the government to shut down their competition. They don't look beyond the "outcompete economically" game. The PL only cares about what works, which makes their strategies better from a power dynamics perspective, until we get to the point where the shoe sellers figure this out and fight back, but that requires courage and collective action that is harmful in the short run. There are some very important non-transitivities of strategy: to push back the PL requires understanding these.
"As with all games, the direct approach to winning is to outcompete the opposition. The indirect way is to bribe the refs or have the rules changed to favor you or your team." Do you think the left has played to this strategy because they been largely ineffective at out-competing opponents otherwise?
The answer to this could well be a whole essay, maybe I should do that? The abbreviated answer is that the left (in particular the Progressive Left, or PL) is simply indifferent to anything but power, getting it, and using it. Universities are now finishing schools in how to get power in the context of a being intellectually out-gunned. One way to look at all those college kids terrorizing their professors and blocking speakers is to see them as kids throwing a temper tantrum. The other is to see them as having figured out how to win with their 20-year-old brains against (often left wing) 50 year old full professors. The secret is to change the rules. To make words equal to violence. To make "offending" certain people unacceptable.
The PL understands that as soon as you get any sliver of power, you use it to change the rules in your favor. More “bourgeois values", live-and-let-live types, like that shoe seller in my example, would never even think about using their earnings to bribe/lobby the government to shut down their competition. They don't look beyond the "outcompete economically" game. The PL only cares about what works, which makes their strategies better from a power dynamics perspective, until we get to the point where the shoe sellers figure this out and fight back, but that requires courage and collective action that is harmful in the short run. There are some very important non-transitivities of strategy: to push back the PL requires understanding these.