What's My Beef with Progressives?

I have been pondering my critical remarks about the left in many of the posts I have published so far, and wonder how fair I have been. Mostly, I think, I am voicing my resistance to conformity with the Neopagan (especially Wiccan) community, and my distaste for the particular kind of rage and illogic endemic on that side of the political spectrum. (The right has its own species of rage and illogic!)

Perhaps this isn't fair. The GOP has become something of, well, a joke over the last few years. I did not vote for Obama, but not so much for his political views as my belief that he was a phony, a good speech giver and little more. I get my distrust of rhetoric from reading a lot of Plato many years ago. But boy has the Republican party gone completely off the rails over him, whether from racism, which I doubt is a big factor, or some other reason, I don't know. The result is that the fringes of the party have come into prominence, even respect, in a way they never could even during the Clinton presidency.

If the right was ever the voice of moderation and reason, it certainly is no longer. It is doing even more to make the U.S. a banana republic than the Democratic party, it is anti-science, and it is still the voice of social conservatism in this country. It's even worse than the Democrats in its love for war-making, and has been for several decades.

So, as much as I personally feel uncomfortable with the way progressives speak and act, and as much as I very strongly disagree with playing identity politics (it's why I stopped following the Center for American Progress) -- nevertheless, I think that I will back off a bit. Beating up on the GOP is like shooting fish in a barrel, and beating up on progressives when I agree with them on many issues doesn't really help anyone, either.

As a final, contrarian note, I do wonder whether Republicans are really "the party of unreason." Here's an interesting study that suggests that both the left and the right believe what they want to believe, regardless of the evidence -- just on different issues.