Academia: The Suicidal Glacier of the Regressive Left
A Rock Glacier, where the stones pour down the side of a mountain on a bed of ice.
On Tumblr, people probably see me as a Gun-toting, taxation-evading, Communist-hating, Freedom-loving, libertarian. At my workplace, a planetarium, on a public university, I'm your mild-mannered perhaps more charismatic than most astrophysicist, which lands me a great job doing education and public outreach for the science community and getting to meet and work with experts from astronomy to zoology. My coworkers may have gotten a few hints that I am a libertarian, I wear a camo-hat on ocassion, I was on the university shooting-sports team, I was a an active member of the YAL chapter, whatever that is. I get to be a fly on the wall to progressives in their natural habitat and I think I see some interesting things. This environment is not friendly for conservatives or libertarians, home-schooling groups, Christian schools, Charter Schools, trade associations, company retreats, routinely get snickered at or disrespected for being too-religious, too conservative, backwards, hick, red-neck, ignorant, greedy, polluters and it's a symptom of a larger problem.
Imagine a glacier forming on a mountain-side. It snows up high and gravity slowly pulls the ice lower to where it melts. A glacier needs a high seat on the mountain where snow doesn't get melted in the summer to stay healthy otherwise it will all melt away. As gravity pulls the snow down the slope the ice catches loose rocks, it can also rip rocks from the ground and quarry the ground. Slowly but surely the glacier commits suicide, it removes enough material that the elevation of the slope that it goes below the zone where snow can accumulate and the glacier and sustain it self.
In the same way I want to think of the Leftist movement of the United States having first gained the high ground of academia, the media, and culture at the peak of this metaphorical nation. They sit up high having gained their power to push downslope and they gouge out people who disagree they no-platform, they shout racist, and homophobe, and bigot without having to assess their arguments. They take these rocks down with them and remove them from the top of the mountain and suddenly find themselves without the support, without the elevation to continue accumulating snow, and they melt away a cascading violent rock slide ensues as the ice gives way and they slip down the gradient.
Leftists have so long taken for granted their control of the media that necessarily they became soft. Their insulation was so complete for a time they believed their own propaganda and the result is the cascade of jagged stones crashing down now.
If you enter into debate you accept a very important premise, that people can be convinced of good ideas with facts, reason, evidence, and logic. If you are in a debate and suddenly you pull out a gun it's quite certain that you have given up on trying to convince people with words. The left doesn't believe in debate, they believe in their ideas, but not in debating them. Their control of the state and enforcement of their ideas is not about convincing people but shouting them down, and ultimately their faith in taxation, regulation, and government itself is a complete rejection of human rationality and/or human virtue as the state doesn't rely upon voluntary contribution but coerced contribution to its wars, cronyism, and bureaucracy.
Now obviously the people I deal with day to day are not idiots, they are not evil, they simply have been exposed to an extra 4-8 years or government-run propaganda through the university system that glacier high-atop the mountain. I think that only the most principled and objective souls can escape the trap and gouge out the mountain that lies beneath this glacier. The crushing nature of gravity just as true as evolution made man's mind capable of reason did the left's rejection of reason set the left on a path to defeat.
I don't want to make you optimistic in the sense that because the left is incapable of reason, or that it will always fail to take power and grow the state. You should be afraid because they have proven themselves quite capable of enforcing the nightmare of full-spectrum dominance and "scientific" dictatorship. Cultural, economic, and personal freedom will always be at stake so long as their is a state, a mountain, for which the left to plant itself upon, but the laws of nature shall always topple it. Make no mistake that the laws of economics, and western moral philosophy are not trivial biases but verifiable observations of nature's laws and they are just as immutable as gravity and evolution. Just like gravity, in the case of economics, which is the study of human reason, belief is not required but participation is mandatory, otherwise you'll find yourself as a splat on the ground, or as a rock rolling down a hillside.