While the Moderates Watched the Polls

My social media feed is filled with mainstream media posts with moderates panicking over the growth of nutty fringes in their own camps. Mainstream media trying to convince people to reject Bernie Sanders, Ocasio Cortez in left side and Magaists, or religionists in general in right side.

Moderates do not understand that while they were focused on the next election and on how to keep those they disliked out of power, the real battle of ideas was being fought—in schools, in movies, in universities, in religious temples, in art galleries.

The American People went on being constantly exposed to ideas. Instead of being exposed to America's best ideas, they were taught that reason is invalid, that their faith and emotions are the true guide, that capitalism is oppressive, that the collective matters more than the individual, and that the purpose of government is to take care of people using other people's money. These ideas were repeated day after day, much as same way Joseph Goebbels spreaded hatred of Jews in Nazi Germany.

More importantly, Americans were not taught to question ideas or to think for themselves through observation, knowledge of history, and logic. They have no intellectual weapons to challenge the ideas of what they now call “opponents” have because the fact is that they fundamentally agree with them. They agree that the individual must be sacrificed for the group. Any “but” after that sentence will not change that.

Moderates fail to understand that those they oppose are driven by fundamental ideas—ideas that the moderates themselves refused to question, evaluate, or challenge with a fully consistent alternative.

So now these ideas are exposed by politicians for people to nod, cheer in approval, and offer their votes. The moderates do not understand that people were prepared years or decades for that. Whatever they say now will fall flat to those who are already convinced of bad ideas.

Now many moderates seem to have hit the panic button. The real question is whether they will use their crisis to look at the mirror and begin to take ideas seriously, or they will continue to believe that election nights in November are what truly determine the nation's fate.

Will liberals and conservatives stop rearranging the chairs on the Titanic and instead seek to understand what would keep the American ship afloat? Time will tell.

Recent events do not give us much hope. It seems that moderates of both camps are also convinced of a particular kind of bad idea: the idea that thinking and ideas do not matter.*

* I believe the reasons why moderates hold such idea can be explained, but I leave this to another discussion.