I’ve never read an author who liked his own writing as much as this fellow. I had a couple of issues with it.
- You have to accept that the concept of “the left” is in deep trouble and the root of this trouble is that it has a strict definition of itself that doesn’t include well-meaning folks like conservative religious folks.
- That a figure like Hitchens registers on the scale of “moving political systems”. I personally don’t care if a philosopher who writes mostly about religion believes in the invasion of Iraq.
It read like a lot of words to get to “secular liberal governments are actually bad and we need to embrace conservative values because rust belt”. If I missed some crucial point let me know.
One of the things that happened in the meantime is the rise of the social networks, which shifted public perception towards the most visible people on those networks.
As a result, the Right is seen as a bunch of bleach-injecting, QAnon-infested Russophiles with Confederate flags, while the Left is seen as a murder of nonbinary crow-identifying blue-haired individuals with rainbow flags; with both absolutely happy to trample the current societal order (and the national flag) into dust to achieve their Nirvana.
Doing anything constructive in such condition becomes a lot harder, because these stereotypes engender a lot of division, hate and distrust.
- You have to accept that the concept of “the left” is in deep trouble and the root of this trouble is that it has a strict definition of itself that doesn’t include well-meaning folks like conservative religious folks.
- That a figure like Hitchens registers on the scale of “moving political systems”. I personally don’t care if a philosopher who writes mostly about religion believes in the invasion of Iraq.
It read like a lot of words to get to “secular liberal governments are actually bad and we need to embrace conservative values because rust belt”. If I missed some crucial point let me know.