A word about Lindsay Clancy's supporters, the Left, and the infernal Left-Right dynamic, which will never repair. The Right will never message effectively, except to other people on the Right, about Lindsay Clancy and her supporters. Thus, the divide and enmity will only deepen. I don't say this to blame the Right. It is certainly the Left who are in the wrong on this point, but the Left aren't just in the wrong; they're lost in the wrong. They have no hope of seeing it any other way, and I mean that. Only someone outside the Left has any hope of talking about the issue in a way that breaks through. That responsibility mostly falls to the Right, but the Right is only interested in talking to itself about the issue and morally preening for each other. I've covered this about a thousand times over the last four years, so I don't really expect this to land either, but I feel like someone should say it. The punchline is that as long as the Right keeps talking to itself and morally preening for each other over these kinds of moral issues, this problem will keep getting worse. The short version of a politer way to get to the point is to say that the Right doesn't understand the Left, so it cannot talk to or about the Left without the Left using it as justification to become worse, and the Right refuses to understand the Left. I don't mean they can't. I mean they won't. They simply refuse. They're too busy preening for each other by moralizing the Left instead. (And, yes, this is part of why I'm going back to using the third person plural (them), where I had been brought toward the first person plural (us), for talking about the Right.) I'll try to do this in new words since the old words didn't get anywhere no matter how many times I said them. I don't think these will either, but I've got to try. The Left's primary driver gets discussed a lot. People say envy, and there's no doubt about that being there. They say hatred, and that's prominently there too. They suggest pride, and that's part of the mix. None of these is actually foundational to the way the Left encounters the world, even if they're emotionally primary. 1. The Left sees the world in terms of being trapped in a world not of their choosing and not to their liking. The envy flows directly from this feeling of being trapped in an unjust world. The world works for some people, just not people like them. Maybe it isn't them personally, but someone they can identify with. The hatred flows directly from this same feeling, but with an extra piece. They hate the world not for being the way it is but for being kept the way it is. They hate the people who keep the world the way it is. Conservatives and "the Right" are usually tasked with exactly this, so the Left hates the Right. The pride is connected to this same idea, again with a twist. The Left thinks it is above the world the way it is, and above the people who keep the world the way it is. So, they think they know better and are better. A lot follows from this pride that we would all recognize immediately. But now we see an opening to the second point. 2. The Left sees the world not as necessarily bad but kept as bad by people who they believe benefit from the world being kept bad. This means that the Left believes a better world is possible. A better world is a world where they don't feel trapped by a world they don't like, that doesn't suit "people like them" or with whom they identify. It isn't the world itself but people in the world who make the world the way it is. The Left hates those people and the system and society they maintain for themselves. That is, the Left believes it is trapped by an all-pervasive system that keeps them trapped. The system has economic dimensions, political dimensions, social dimensions, and moral dimensions, all of which it believes are socially constructed and therefore mutable. The world could be different, they think (often wrongly), but people who benefit from the existing status quo don't want it to be and won't let it. Thus, they suffer, or they see people with whom they identify suffering (in which case they suffer too, "empathy"). With regard to Lindsay Clancy supporters (and rather horrifying super pro-life advocacy), the Left primarily feels trapped in a moral system they believe is wrong and that is arbitrarily upheld by people who don't understand or care how it makes people like them, or those with whom they identify, suffer. This is why the Right consistently talks about both of these issues incorrectly, effectively morally preening for each other on the issues while failing to make any headway with the Left and driving them to further extremes in (pathological, yes) reactance. The Right moralizes these issues, which is exactly what the Left feels like the trap is constructed out of. Thus, they feel more trapped, and act more like a rabid racoon in a trap. I insist again in my well-earned pessimism: the Right will not do otherwise. In fact, it will refuse to do otherwise because doing otherwise would be a moral sin in its own moral game. It will refuse on principle to have a different conversation or even to dare to think differently or about the perspective the people they mostly rightly oppose might hold. This is going nowhere, but at least we can understand it, I guess. 3. The Left hates the system that traps them and the people who maintain it or benefit from it. I know I already technically said this, but it's really important to drive home. Because the Left feels trapped by the system, whether crazy or not for that, they hate the system. They also hate the people who maintain the system. They will do anything against those people, including pushing even harder in the opposite direction of the system and its supporters and thinking it's good to do so. Until you understand that the Left's entire worldview is constructed on a foundation of feeling like they are trapped in a world they do not like, which is arbitrarily established to the benefit of others who refuse to understand why they feel trapped and to change things so they feel less trapped, you don't understand the Left. (The high-minded here will recognize that they're in the mold of Rousseau, ultimately, thus Leftists.) 4. Moralizing makes it worse, not better, because the "trapped" feeling is made out of being moralized to. When the Right moralizes about issues like abortion or the support they're giving Lindsay Clancy and the self-recognition they see of themselves in her (mostly in personal terror, by the way), they feel more trapped. They understand that the Right, who doesn't get it already, refuses to try to get it, doesn't want to get it, and wants to impose the exact problem they perceive upon them even harder. I'm not saying they're right here. They aren't. I think they're insane, in fact, but their insanity is comprehensible and thus potentially curable. What they see in the Lindsay Clancy situation (or abortion) is the possibility that something like that might come up in their lives and massively derail everything for them. They're terrified of it because they already feel the real stresses of life, particularly in these cases with regard to female fertility and the responsibilities and pressures of motherhood/parenthood. (I'm not saying this is a healthy way to look at it, again; I'm saying they are stuck seeing it this way.) Therefore, they're terrified that, there, but for the grace of God go they, wherein horrors compound over their lives and ruin literally everything they care about (which isn't always just themselves), and they see and hear the Right saying, "You're God-damned right, you stupid, evil bitch." Say it as nicely as you want, guys. I'm telling you; that's what they hear. They are telling you, badly, what they feel and what they think. They're telling you they're under pressures which are quite normal but that they don't feel equipped to handle. They feel, perhaps wrongly, though sometimes with strong points, that "the system" out there isn't adequate to catching them if they fall and might even be making the risks worse, perhaps for deeply cynical (and evil) reasons. They're telling you they know they're on the edge and don't have help. You're telling them you don't care. You're telling them to get it together like you have it together. You're telling them their concerns are all crap and that their fears are expressions of evil and selfishness. You're increasing their (yes, pathological) feeling of being trapped. They, in response, lash out, act out, exaggerate, scream, and do positively antisocial things in the opposite direction. 5. Psychological reactance is real, even if it's sometimes stupid. Their reaction is based in a psychological phenomenon called "reactance." Reactance occurs when someone believes they are losing something they already have, particularly a right or a freedom they have and/or feel entitled to. Leftists do not believe they are entitled to murder their own children, not even in abortion, except in extremely pathological and rare cases (which always make headlines). Leftists believe they have a right to set the course for their own lives (not to create their own lives) and for that life to be generally good, comfortable, and happy. They are mostly right and partly wrong about this, of course. They do have a right to set the course for their own lives, mostly. This is what Jefferson famously called the unalienable right of the "pursuit of happiness." There are contingencies and realities, though, like female fertility and the demands of motherhood/parenthood. That is, there are responsibilities that shape that course. I'm not saying the Left is seeing this issue correctly. I don't think they are, in fact. I think they feel trapped by responsibilities are simply facts of life, not all of which are perfectly "equitable" in every way (e.g., fatherhood and motherhood are different in many ways, not identical, not "equitable"). Further, no one actually has a right to have a good, comfortable, happy life. That's an aspiration, a hope. A lot of people (including most of the young politically active conservatives who are swinging Woke Right for the same reason) get this confused. They think they have a "human right" to a good life, a comfortable life, an affordable life, a happy life, free this, free that, blah, blah, blah. They don't. They have the right to pursue those things mostly unhindered by state interference or the interference of powerful others. While the Left gets this issue wrong in very important ways, this is where their pathological feeling of being trapped has a real foundation: the moralizing Right arguably does impinge upon their inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness by telling them they have to live their lives in certain ways. Now, the Right will surely jump on this and morally preen to each other over it because we're literally talking about filicide, killing one's own children. No one actually has a right to filicide, but the Left is so psychotic about it that they're asserting it. That is, this conversation has already gone way off the rails. Preen all you want. You're right, but you've lost the point in seizing the opportunity to lick your own moral feathers. The psychological underpinning is the same, though. The Left, both when right and wrong about the details, perceives the unjust restriction of an inalienable right, so they are reacting with reactance. People experiencing reactance will go to extremes to reassert their perceived right (right or wrong about them). They will, for example, assert that they don't just have the right but a more expansive version of the right than they really do. They will act crazy, even physically violent, personally destructively, or incredibly performatively (for clicks?) to reassert this expansion of their perceived right when acting in reactance. The Right will morally preen for one another at this point and accuse them of being evil and desiring to do evil things, moralizing them further. I'd say it's performative, but honest to God I think they can't not. I think it's part of the psychological constitution of being on the Right to do this, just as much as I think it's part of the psychological constitution on the Left to do the other thing. Either way, it increases the feeling of being trapped, losing "rights," and reactance. The way we "got here" is many cycles of this playing out over and over and over again between social conservatives on the Right and radical feminists on the Left. My personal belief is that the Right was probably too restrictive in some ways, but the feminist Left's toxic "trapped by reality" worldview was the driver of the problem. In any case, more or less since the 1950s, this cycle has been ratcheting up to where you see what you see with regard to women supporting Lindsay Clancy. 6. Can anything be done about it? No. Nothing can be done about this. The Left sees the world this way so deeply now that it's horrifying and batshit insane. The Right cannot help itself, and honestly has very few other options, but to morally preen for each other and moralize at the Left, increasing the problem. The Right also firmly refuses to understand that the driver of the whole problem is that the Left feels trapped, sometimes in real ways and mostly in now deeply pathological ways. They would feel complicit in immorality to even admit the Left has a perspective that can be described in any terms other than rank evil. (Again, I don't think the Left's perspective is right or even valid, but it what it is and has some valid underpinnings that in theory could be approached and addressed in better ways.) The Left will believe moralizing reinforces the trap they perceive to be their lives, and the Right will moralize about their reactions to feeling trapped. That's the cycle. That's the dynamic. Welcome to hell. Isn't the dialectic fun? 7. To repeat, the driver of this entire situation is that the Left feels trapped, unjustly by human-constructed systems, in a world that they hate and fear, which they did not choose, and which they believe could be escaped except for the Right. That is, they're what I call "Sociognostics." Gnostics whose "spiritual" realm of control by a false evil power posing as the fundamental ground of all reality is sociality and society itself. Until you understand this about them, there is no conversation that starts to unwind this problem and its profound dysfunction and increasing psychosis. There is only more of the dynamic at hand and an ever widening gyre against which the center cannot hold.