Over the last several years my alienation from progressivism has grown so complete, I’ve wondered if I’m still a left liberal at all.

I decided that a good way to gauge my drift would be to return to the book I have considered my political Bible and see how I respond to it now. That book is Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country.

The answer is, of course, that I have not drifted at all. I agree with it as much now as I ever did before. It is progressivism that has changed — and it has changed in a way Rorty tried in vain to warn us about.

It is a huge irony that this book became famous for a shockingly prescient passage that predicted the election of a Trump-like demagogue, and not for the insightful critique of cultural leftism that laid out the causes of the foreseen event. Most — but not all! — leftists were content to just boggle at the prophetic accuracy.

Had they taken the rest of the book to heart, they might have sobered up and avoided Trump’s reelection. But instead they pushed things even further in the wrong direction.

There is a consensus that there has been a vibe shift and that the left is “done with woke.” I see what they see, but I think the diagnosis is superficial. I have only seen changes in mood and emotional intensity. The root cause — the ideology and its habits of interpretation — is unchanged, and I feel sure it will reactivate and cause more damage when events jolt it back from dormancy.

Very few people think about how they think — only what they think. Education trains them to think like all educated people think. After this training, they process information almost automatically, like a program.

Because they think exactly like others think about the same information fed from the same sources, they reach the same conclusions, and this creates an illusion of objectivity. “Everyone has independently come to the same conclusion as me because I’m thinking logically with valid information, and arrived at the truth.”

There is nothing wrong with this. We cannot change the fact that people think uncritically. The only variable is the ideology they are programmed to run.

In a healthy society the population is programmed with ideologies that support society. In an unhealthy society the population is programmed with ideologies that undermine, weaken or even intentionally harm society. It’s still passive, uncritical conformism, just a passive, uncritical conformism that believes itself assertive, critical and independent.

What this bad programming is essentially is a cultural autoimmune condition that causes the body politic to attack itself.

Again — the cure to this cultural autoimmune condition is not teaching true critical thought, but accepting the fact that 95% of folks are never going to think critically about anything, and that this is good. If you feed them critical thoughts they’ll be as thoughtless as ever but do thoughtlessly destructive things instead of thoughtlessly constructive things. Better to provide them a solid ideological foundation to serve as a platform for their achievements. We have never found better programming than liberalism.

(If this sounds cynical, it is because you overvalue philosophical thought. There are many other virtues, and those are more worthy of admiration than philosophical virtue. There is moral integrity, courage, honesty, industry, ingenuity, thoroughness, athleticism, artistic talent, beauty, charisma, tenacity… so many others.