Say what you will of the political right, but at least they are politically consistent. From the decrepit-moderate branch to the slow-people bible study group that controls the most powerful country in the world, Republicans just want to hurt people. Jeb Bush is fine with "stuff" happening to the poor and disadvantaged, and Ted Cruz needs women to suffer for their chromosomal sins. Our left doesn’t know what it wants, especially in our generation, and it only wants to point out the ideological sins of its compatriots.
I’m a Democrat. I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. I look forward to her winning. She is not terribly exciting, but she’s better than young idiot-on-the-move Marco Rubio. Sanders’ personality is appealing and his accent more so, but these qualities can’t make up for the mustiness of his politics and policies, which he time-traveled here with from 1969. I respect Ben Carson for daring to mount a campaign while still coming off of some very strong tranquilizers, but most can agree he has no place in the White House.
However, my progressive coevals do not value Hillary’s many accomplishments, like negotiating the Gaza ceasefire, the Iran nuclear deal and the Copenhagen Protocol; they simply call her a racist fascist. The fun, energizing parts of politics — indignation, polemic, chants — are more popular than ever, but the realities and exigencies of what politics can and need to do have been ignored.
This is larger than the presidential race, with another example being cultural appropriation. The only time I hear mention of Native Americans is when millennials, nearly college-educated, bitch about people wearing headdresses. It’s never about their astronomical and increasing rates of HIV/hepatitis/syphilis, or that eight of the 10 lowest-income American counties are majority Native American or Alaskan Native. It is clear no one genuinely cares about Native Americans, other than being culturally offended on their behalf.
These people do not know very much, except what they can glean from a bleary-eyed scroll through their news feeds. This news feeds’ algorithm shows users’ points of view they agree with. "Sharing" is thus entirely solipsistic and politically stillborn. Such young activists turn against all they know: progressive liberal values.
They advocate suspension of free speech and press: University of Missouri protesters chanted, "Hey hey, ho ho, reporters have got to go!" and a professor yelled for "some muscle" to help get an Asian American student reporter out. They advocate political violence: My Facebook friends laud Martin Luther King Jr. as a supposedly violent activist (he was not one) and cheer at each Jew stabbed in Jerusalem.
In this worldview, those who mourn for those killed in Paris are only "white people" shedding crocodile tears to distract the media from the events at Yale University. These activists are cultural relativists but support violent theocracy. They go on SlutWalks but totemize the burqa. They like "We Fucking Love Atheism" on Facebook, but approve of murdering journalists who publish cartoons of the Prophet.
A comment on a photo from the Facebook page Humans of Tehran is the "The Diary of Anne Frank" quote, "I still believe people are really good at heart." I am not sure the Holocaust-denying Ayatollah gives a shit. I am not sure ISIS cares that Joyce Carol Oates is curious to find something "joyous" about them.
In a complex world, it is comforting to think of it divided into racists and anti-racists, and you are always in the right. Americans have always been a religious people. The new and insipid religion of political correctness is sinister for its mercurial embrace of self-contradiction. I once encountered "activists" who accused the "Zionist" state of "pink-washing" its "apartheid crimes" by not making homosexuality a capital crime, as do Saudi Arabia and Iran.
When politicking is a courtship ritual, we have already lost. The new politics of identity and the fetishization of grievance will end with a left without an identity and a grieving nation.
Alas, no one ever got laid for supporting Hillary.
Ann Manov is a UF French, English and Spanish senior. Her column appears on Mondays.
