Even the winners get lucky sometimes

You can't always get what you need. But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you want.

Before proceeding, I have to warn readers of some things. Some of this piece is going to sound very abstract. I’ve done my best to make it understandable, but there’s only so much I can do. Some of the things I will discuss are very foreign to those who aren’t crazy online like I am. Unlike most of my pieces, this one is going to be a bit of a polemic. I try not to do that, but sometimes that’s just how it works out.  

I briefly mentioned in my piece last week that the worst thing that can happen to someone advocating for a cause is for them to win. That doesn’t make much intuitive sense so I think it’s worth exploring some here. The crux of it is those who dedicate their lives to fighting for a particular cause wind up losing their relevance when they get what they want.

Some causes are always with us. We have been having debates over the role of government in the economy for centuries and I don’t see that ever ending. Issues like taxes and immigration are always with us. They can be settled for a while, but inevitably new things will happen that bring them back.

Social issues are different from economic issues in that regard. We have always been fighting over social issues, but particular matters can and do get settled. Gay marriage was a hot button issue not too long ago, but is now legal everywhere and widely supported. Abortion is being fought over now, but it, too, can be settled and my guess is eventually it will be in favor of the pro-choice side.

Those whose focus is on economic issues are unlikely to find themselves no longer relevant. If the tax code is someone’s main cause, it’s an ongoing issue and is unlikely to ever be something nobody argues over. Social issues are a different story and we’re seeing that now with the success of the push for gay rights.

Gay people today can marry, are protected by anti-discrimination laws and can serve in the military without having to hide who they are. From a policy standpoint, it’s great. For those who dedicated their lives to pushing for gay rights, it’s a win, but it means they’re no longer relevant. When gay marriage became legal in 2015, activists and groups who were dedicated to fighting for it found themselves without a mission.

Nobody wants to be irrelevant. Someone who has fought for a particular cause for so long is not likely to be content to retire or find some other line of work. The same is true for advocacy groups. It’s a rare event when a group declares victory and disbands. Without a cause to fight for, things get boring fast.

That is what has happened to groups who pushed for gay rights. Since gay rights was no longer something that was argued over, the new cause became transgender rights. For those wondering where the fight over transgender issues came from, that’s the main story. We always have to argue over someone’s rights and since gay rights is no longer being fought over it became transgender rights.

The fight over transgender issues really started to happen right after gay marriage became legal. Almost immediately, the groups pushing for it shifted their focus to transgender rights. I’m not arguing over the merits of it here. I have written before about where I stand on it so feel free to check it out. I’m just using it as an example of how success can be a blessing and a curse.

Another example of losing by winning is the National Rifle Association. The NRA has long been a staunch advocate for gun rights and has been extremely successful. They have won just about every major battle they have fought. For those who agree with their mission, it’s been great. For the NRA, it has proven to be an existential crisis.

While the cause of gun rights has never been stronger, the NRA is functionally dead. Since winning all the major battles, they have found themselves without anything to fight for. Like so many groups on the right these days, the NRA has become a giant grift. There have been lawsuits and scandals involving their leadership living like hogs on the group’s dime.

Without anything to fight for, the NRA has become an all-purpose advocacy group. They have taken positions on just about every issue under the sun regardless of whether it has anything to do with guns. That is usually a problem on the left, but nobody is immune to it.

Unwillingness to take the W

I have written several times this year urging people to take the W, including in my last piece. When you get what you want, you should be happy about it and declare victory. If someone who used to disagree with you on an issue now agrees with you, that’s a good thing. The proper response is to thank them for it, not to demand that they agree with you on every last thing there is. Some people have a really hard time doing that.

One of my biggest criticisms of environmental groups is their refusal to celebrate success and be thankful for it. Although they are among the biggest offenders, they’re hardly the only ones guilty of that. We saw it earlier this year when congressional Republicans refused to support the border bill they had claimed to want so badly.

There are many different reasons for why people and groups are unwilling to be happy with succeeding. The risk of losing relevance is high up there as is the lack of sincerity in believing what they claim to.¹ It’s not just activists and advocacy groups who are afflicted with that problem. Here is where this piece is going to start to sound abstract.

As someone who follows politics obsessively, I read many different political writers.² Over the last few years, I have noticed that many of them have become wedded to a particular narrative that they will not budge from no matter what. When data conflicts with their narrative, it gets ignored, they find ways to downplay it or insist it’s wrong.

While I am not a fan of the left, I am even less of a fan of some of their critics. It is among that crowd that I have noticed a tendency to refuse to accept winning, largely out of what I think is a fear of losing their relevance. This is particularly true when it comes to cultural matters.

When I first started blogging in the summer of 2020, I agreed with many of those writers. The left’s influence was at its peak and it was rarely a good thing. Looking back, that time was a real life version of Through the Looking-Glass. The worst ideas from the left got a lot of airtime and were given legitimacy by many who should have known better. For example, many left-wing advocacy groups whose missions have nothing to do with policing endorsed defunding the police.

It was during that time and in 2021 when racially loaded terms and phrases were at their peak use. Policies that had traditionally been accurately talked about as benefitting everyone were reframed as being all about “racial equity” or some other kind of identity marker. For a while, there was talk about giving out vaccines based on race. It wasn’t just on policy where everything was framed around identity. Certain authors became huge hits overnight for writings that were obviously extreme then and with the passage of time only look worse. As I have said before, that period was peak wokeness.

The writers I’m now critical of were right about how bad those things were. They were also right that left-wing cancel culture was a big problem in some circles. It had been a problem on some college campuses and in certain workplaces before 2020. After George Floyd, it went into high gear. There were people I liked who either lost their jobs or quit because of the insane culture at their workplace.

Those writers and others who pushed against those things have been vindicated. The good news is almost everyone now agrees. The wave of cancel culture from the left has long since abated. The craziness on some college campuses has worn out its welcome and very few places are putting up with it now. Some colleges had made mistakes in the past, but have now reversed course, i.e., reinstating SAT/ACT requirements, getting rid of diversity statements in hiring. Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences, the bums lost.

I’m glad to see all that. I’m glad wokeness is on its death bed. I’m glad nobody relevant is making excuses for crime anymore. I’m glad vaccines were never given out based on race. I’m glad that the leftist ideas pushed for on immigration have been abandoned with gusto.

All of that is something to be happy about. The problem is those writers aren’t acting like it. From reading or watching them, you could be forgiven for thinking nothing has changed.

It’s as if those writers are frozen in time and 2020 never ended. In their minds, that’s basically what is going on. While they were right to worry about those problems then, they’re dead wrong to keep worrying about them now. Things have changed drastically since 2020-21 and most everyone has moved on from it. Those writers have not and I don’t think they ever will.

Why not celebrate the victory and move on? Because it would violate their narrative. In their telling, the left rules everything. Every last institution is firmly under their control. Every problem on earth is caused by wokeness. No matter what it is, if something is wrong in the world, wokeness and the left are to blame. Even if people on the right do bad things, it’s only because the left forces them to.

At this point, their entire brand is railing against the left. That is literally all many of them do anymore. It’s unfortunate because I used to like (and still like) many of them and I hate seeing them lose their minds. They have gotten to the point where if they acknowledged how many good things have happened over the last 3-4 years, they would have no fans. I suspect almost all of them now have an audience that is heavily right-wing and would stop paying attention to them if they didn’t keep bashing the left.

Some of the writers I am criticizing here still have their bearings, at least to an extent. Others have become bat shit crazy and I no longer read what they write or listen to anything they say. What they all share in common is living in a tiny bubble. They inhabit a small, mostly online world where the craziest people on the left rule everything, where a random idiot on the left saying or doing something stupid proves everyone is like that.  

Almost all of those writers live in either DC, New York, LA or the Bay Area. That’s a problem I have written about before. The small world they live in really is dominated by the left and so any kind of craziness they encounter is from the left. What they don’t understand is how unrepresentative the circles they hang out in are.

I’m not going to name any names here. I have problems with many writers, but it’s not about any specific person. It’s about a whole group of people becoming afflicted with a mental disease. They have become so consumed by their hatred of the left that it’s become central to their identity and colored their view of everything.

While I won’t mention any names here, I have written before about a particular writer for those who want to get a more concrete idea of what I’m talking about. My goal in writing that piece was not so much to talk about that specific person, but to illustrate a broader point. I would say it’s in the top 5 most scathing pieces I’ve written.

I still read that writer and think he’s right about plenty of things. Unfortunately, he’s still wedded to the same narrative I criticized him for. I don’t think he’s ever left DC in his life. Half the time when I read something by him, I find myself thinking only someone living in DC could write that. He really needs to go outside and touch grass.

I wrote more than a year ago about how it’s important to not let people you dislike eat your brain. Those writers have failed miserably at that. They’ve become so obsessed with hating the left that it’s rendered them incapable of making any judgment calls that don’t involve blaming that crowd for every problem there is.

That pathology is hardly unique to those writers. I could write about many others who have the same affliction, but I’m writing about them here because I still like some of them and think they’re right about many things and it’s disheartening to see what’s happened to them. They are guilty of the same things they rightfully accuse the left of and sometimes are even bigger offenders.

We all have agency

Although I strongly dislike wokeness and MAGA, it should be clear from my writings that I don’t think they’re equally problematic. MAGA is the bigger threat and it’s not remotely close. Wokeness is completely irrelevant in Democratic Party circles while MAGA firmly controls the Republican Party from top to bottom. For those who are into Tolkien, think of wokeness as an Orc and MAGA as a Balrog.

While both are worlds apart on the surface, they do share one big thing in common. Both deny agency to groups they see as victims. Of all the things I dislike about both of them, that is high on the list.

Not every last thing is within our control, but some things are. I hear lots of excuses about how Trump forced someone to do X or the left/wokeness forced someone to do Y. It’s an endless cycle of garbage. The reality is when it comes to personal behavior and political beliefs, nobody is forced to do anything.

Trump didn’t make people on the left embrace unpopular and terrible ideas, they chose to. Trump being cruel on immigration didn’t force anyone to oppose all immigration enforcement, that was a choice. Trump is a human plague, but he isn’t at fault for every last problem on earth.

Trump is the most immediate threat this country is facing, but there are many problems we have that weren’t caused by him and will still be problems if he loses in November. The failure of blue states to allow adequate housing to be built is the fault of left-wing NIMBYs, not Trump. The red tape holding back badly needed energy infrastructure was not created by Trump and its biggest defenders are on the left.

It’s convenient for politicians in blue states to use Trump as a foil, but he didn’t create their states’ self-inflicted wounds. Blue state failures on housing are a choice. Trump didn’t force left-wingers there to be NIMBYs, they chose to be that way. Trump doesn’t force left-wingers to put up “In this house, we believe…” yard signs while they do the opposite.

By the same token, nobody is forced to be a Trump supporter. There is no group of people more infantilized than that crowd. They’re all adults with minds of their own. Believing the 2020 election was stolen is a choice. Those who were in DC on January 6 were there by choice.

Living in a right-wing bubble and being a conspiracy theorist is a choice. Liking candidates who are repulsive is a choice. Prioritizing “owning the libs” over everything else is a choice. No one has to do any of that.

My least favorite part of the current political discourse is the notion that people are voting for Trump because of wokeness and/or the left. There is nothing more thoroughly stupid than that. When I hear or read that I want to ask whoever is saying/writing it whether they have ever met a Republican.

A typical Republican doesn’t live in DC or San Francisco. They live in places like Iowa, Montana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and South Dakota. The odds that anyone living in those places has ever encountered wokeness or the left are close to zero. In the places a typical Republican lives, Democrats are rare and the left is almost non-existent. The idea that someone living in Nebraska who has voted Republican their whole life is voting for Trump because someone in Midtown Manhattan said men can have babies is beyond parody.

People vote for Trump and Republicans because they choose to. Their reasons can vary, but all of them make the choice to vote that way. Nobody forces them to do that.

The writers I have criticized here have all made choices. I believe they were right in 2020-21, but are wrong now, but they’re choices all the same. Being woke is a choice and so is treating it like it’s the worst problem on earth. Becoming so consumed by hatred of the left that you go insane and become a Trump supporter is a choice.

The moral of this story is we all are capable of making decisions for ourselves. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. Anyone saying they’re being forced to vote a certain way or believe certain things is full of shit. We all choose what to believe and who to vote for. Believe whatever you want and vote however you please, but don’t tell anyone you had no choice.

1. Another big reason is being allergic to celebrating anything. It’s a problem many on the left have with their embrace of doomerism. They can’t ever acknowledge progress because then we might not be doomed after all. For MAGA and right-wing culture warriors, they’re always under attack. No matter how many elections they win and laws they pass, they’re still victims and are constantly besieged.

2. As I have used that phrase before, I’m not only referring to people who write about politics, but also to people who get paid to talk about it for a living.