In this line of work, I’m often confronted by intelligent people who are progressives, and they ask me to give account for some nutty belief that floats around somewhere on the “the right.” Like the belief that Bill Gates has put microchips in the Covid vaccines. Or geocentrism. Or that the Founders were libertarians who believed that we just needed to recognize each other’s negative liberties. These are beliefs held by marginal kooks and some of my fellow think tankers, which is the same thing.
In a country of over 300 million people with only two major political parties, it is unavoidable; you’ll be grouped with some people who have strange beliefs.
But, for a few years now, I’ve always rested easy in these conversations. Charles Cooke’s recent piece on “Lia Thomas” is the reason why.
I feel no need whatsoever to defend geocentrism or stolen-election theories.
But on the left, there is the belief that human beings are born into the wrong bodies, that one can become and ought to be treated as a member of the opposite sex than one’s own, just because one insists on it, and that one can have a “gender conformation/affirmation” surgery that transforms one’s body in some way to the gender one feels oneself to be. They believe that the photo here depicts the results of fair competition. This is not a set of beliefs held only by low-functioning kooks and a handful of ideologues.
Every single educated progressive I know feels an absolute obligation — whatever they personally think — to defend these magical beliefs about gender and sex. Because they don’t have the same relationship to the past that conservatives do, they don’t see the parallels with progressive eugenics and have no mental model for the idea that these beliefs will be condemned as both barbaric and silly in the future. They will defend them — sometimes even very loudly and in public — with the insistence and wide eyes of a man backing away from a condemned man about to face history’s firing squad. It’s genuinely comical for anyone who has confidence in reality.
Somehow knowing this as a sociological fact about educated progressives of our time grants me a serene confidence in any conversation with them.