An Observation

As you may know if you have been one of the handful of people who read this little backwater blog, I make a concerted, sometimes, but not always, unpleasant, effort to read news sources from outside my "bubble."  This means going a bit further than reading George Will, Ross Douthat, and Brett Stephens in the Post and the Times, but I do try to steer away from Breitbart, InfoWars or other such sewer holes of propaganda.  I'm going to draw upon a fairly regular and disciplined experience spanning a couple years now with reading Conservative and Libertarian sources to talk about something that probably appears to be a far-right idea, but which is a crucial influence even on those of a more centrist persuasion.
The thing that I see happening among even the most reasonable of those who are a bit to the right of me is something I will call grievance.  I'm leaving off the modifier (white) that often gets attached to it in a lot of liberal/left writings, because I don't think it's unique to racial issues.  Here is the phenomenon as I see it: conservative people feel as though the culture war is going badly for them. On many social issues they find themselves well outside the majority opinions, even if the issue in question is not one they feel particularly emotional about, they still feel marginalized. I am not going to argue about the validity or even the reality of this feeling. I'm going to approach it, as I would any other sort of grieving process, after all grievance and grief are related.  The feeling is what is important, even though, I know, that sounds very liberal snowflake-ish. The feeling is important because it drives behavior and attitudes that, when they coalesce, can create a circumstance that dramatically effects our political life together.
Donald Trump seized on the depth and breadth of grievance in his campaign, talking about "American carnage," and bellowing about "Making America Great Again," the key word in that phrase being "Again." I have deep skepticism about our political life and process, but even on my gloomiest day, I would not describe life in this country as "carnage," nor would I suggest that America is not already great in many categories, but millions of people chose to believe Trump, despite voluminous evidence that he was a fraud.
Why?
Because grievance makes you do strange things, just like grief does.  The sense that you, and your values, are on the edge of the mainstream is both an alienating and an invigorating experience.  There is nothing quite like the feeling of righteous indignation to get people to do things that aren't particularly great ideas.  Trump's most shrewd and dangerous move, throughout these past three years has been to vilify the press and the "elite," by which he indicts the intellectuals of the academic community and anyone else with enough wealth and fame to be a problem for him. He was able to do this because, quite frankly, the press and the "elite" can be pretty obnoxious a lot of the time.  It doesn't take too many stories about a college kid getting "oppressed" by his lib-tard professor because he wouldn't use gender neutral pronouns to really make the blood boil.  And honestly Political Correctness (capitalization intended) has gone too far at times.
The thing is though, for a lie to work, it has to have just enough truth in it.  For Trump to be able to convince people that immigration is a huge problem, we do have to have millions of undocumented people living and working here.  For him to convince us that they are "criminals and rapists" it does help that MS-13 is a real and savage threat.  For him to convince us that trade wars and violating the standards of international decorum are just getting tough, China and Iran do really have to be pretty bad actors.  For him to convince people whose primary sympathy is with Fox News particular slant that the New York Times and the Washington Post are "fake news," those outlets do have to disagree fairly frequently with Sean Hannity, which honestly you would have to do if you were anything like objective and neutral.  But honesty seems to have taken the gas pipe lately, not a day goes by that I don't read at least one opinion or factual account of how dangerous the current assault on the First Amendment (the freedom of the press part, but also free speech in general) could ultimately become to our practice of democracy.
So here's my plea, and I know it doesn't seem fair, but we "liberal snowflakes" need to stop giving the grievance crowd so much ammo.  We need to stop crucifying people for small missteps because we become like the boy who cried wolf. We have been wailing about small time offenders so long no one really paid any attention to us when the wolf actually showed up.  Remember Gary Hart? Whose presidential bid got derailed because a picture of him with a pretty blond on his lap (who wasn't his wife, but who did not really seem to be his mistress either) showed up and tarred him as philanderer.  What about John Edwards? Mark Sanford (Appalachian trail/Argentinian mistress governor of South Carolina) remember these guys? Did they do bad stuff? Yep.  Did they pay a price for it? Yep. But did we over do it? Yep, we definitely did.  People got so tired of it that eventually even nearly 20 credible accusations of sexual assault and at least two cases of paying hush money to women with whom he had had affairs... well it would appear the moral majority just plumb ran out of moral outrage.
If we want to be able to hold the real villains accountable we need to have some perspective about who they are.  If we want Harvey Weinstein gone forever, we probably shouldn't come down quite so hard on Garrison Keillor and Al Franken.  Paradoxically, giving grace to the merely flawed is probably the best way to avoid falling into the clutches of the truly evil.  Like the old saw says, the perfect is often the enemy of the good.  So if we stay on the rampage against anyone who dares challenge our politically correct hegemony, we're going to create more and more grievance out there in 'Murica.  If we do that, things could get worse. That's the thing with the sorts of people the Brits call "Prigs," eventually everyone gets tired of them.