By Don Hall

The Left has globally been kicked to the curb and it’s our fault.

Fascists and Nazis and White Supremacists don’t win because they’re right or more powerful or because the population is stupid or racist or poverty-stricken. These assholes win because our Big Ideas are being co-mingled with our Excessive Ideas.

What are the Big Ideas of Leftist thought?

Equity.
Reparations.
Affordable healthcare for everyone.
An end to rampant income disparity.
Retarding the advance of climate disaster.
No more war anywhere.

What are the ideas that obfuscate them?

Representation in movies.
Which comic book hero is most intersectional?
Which pronoun to use?
Which celebrity to cancel?
Which insults are to be classified as hate speech?
Tribal politics.

The Women’s March in 2017 was massive and all encompassing. The movement was derailed by intersectionality and tribal politics.

Reparations is a serious idea to be considered and implemented and is easily ignored by the majority required to get it going by the preening need to denigrate white people.

Equity is a solid Big Think approach to the failure of Equality but as soon as ridiculous examples become the norm, the Big Think idea becomes a race to see which minuscule demographic gets their piece of it, too.

Our biggest idea is that if you aren’t on board for all of it, you are the enemy. That J.K. Rowling, that bastion of leftist thinking, when drawing the line at allowing transgender women to be fully accepted as biological women, is now the worst TERF of all and that all of her Harry Potter fans must disavow her. She is now the enemy.

Jeanine Cummins writes a novel about a Mexican family who through a series of circumstances become an illegal immigrant family. The novel is lauded by everyone yet she is accused of “brownfacing” because she isn’t Mexican or an immigrant. She is now the enemy.

Let’s not forget that the men who created the foundation for what is arguably the most advanced experiment in democracy are now the enemy.

There is a high chance that today's young people will starve to death, die of thirst, be crushed or burned alive by a climate disaster, fold due to a super virus unleashed from the permafrost, asphyxiate from air pollution, be beaten to death in a riot, or shot or blown up in a war initiated by an unstable child-man long before they survive to AARP status. 

So, obviously, the best course of action is to give any of our battered attention span the Big Questions of the Day: Should I eat at Papa John’s Pizza? Did those police really make a quilt from the signs of homeless people? Why did the rampant racist J.J. Abrams not feature the Asian actress at the expense of the already overstuffed Star Wars finale?

The effort to pick the low hanging fruit is lazy and ignores the hard to get stuff at the top of the idea tree. Christ, how vapid will we allow our addiction to “likes” and online notoriety to form us? 

Will the next MLK be derailed by the discovery of his marital indiscretions on Tinder? How can the next Jonas Salk cure the next polio when the fact that he is a white heterosexual guy who once tweeted something about fat people gets him fired? Will you really fucking care about which bathroom you drop a deuce in when your skin blisters for walking outside for twenty seconds?

Equity.
Reparations.
Affordable healthcare for everyone.
An end to rampant income disparity.
Retarding the advance of climate disaster.
No more war anywhere.

Sack up, kids. Time to get back to the real work of progress.