The blood-brain barrier is one of the defenses that the human body has perfected during its evolutionary development to protect the brain from harmful substances circulating in our bodies. It is therefore a very useful biological tool but, paradoxically, in different circumstances it can prove counterproductive. For this reason, the first step for scientists is to recognize the reality of the problem and act accordingly–an attitude that could also prove extremely useful in politics–if only politicians could act more like scientists.
Two of the issues that, more than others, torpedoed the presidential ambitions of Kamala Harris and the American Democratic Party last November were immigration and the various “social justice” iterations, grouped under the acronym DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion).
On paper, the spirit of these various initiatives is commendable as it represents an attempt to create cultural spaces of normalization and tolerance for individuals belonging to social categories (homosexuals, transsexuals, ethnic minorities…) that, for centuries, have been reviled and marginalized.
The problem, however, is that America is the country of extremes; of wild cultural swings from one excess to another.
Had the progressive movement’s growing concerns for minorities been perceived by public opinion only as an attempt to correct an historical injustice; as a long-due extension to these groups of opportunities for emancipation that had been denied to them, perhaps this would have prevented the conservative movement and the right-wing media apparatus from manipulating it to their advantage.
If the laudable effort to remove the cultural detritus accumulated over centuries of prejudice, stigma, bias and racism towards particular social groups had occurred in a less “arrogant” and pontificating way, maybe it wouldn’t have suffered the cultural backlash it has received.
The fatal flaw of the contemporary progressive movement is to believe that to improve things, “being right” is enough. But concrete and lasting change occurs only when a political message and a set of values are fully understood and shared by the majority of the people.
Dozens of sociological studies have shown that, left unaddressed, the vicious circle of poverty, alienation and antisocial behavior perpetuates itself endlessly and that many of the repressive policies adopted in the past to suppress crime not only have not mitigated the problem but have often made it worse.
The vast majority of people however, knows absolutely nothing of these studies, and when liberal states like California pass laws that downgrade a whole range of crimes like shoplifting, to simple misdemeanors, what people see in their daily lives are the videos of gangs of kids stealing undisturbed from stores under the helpless gaze of security guards or the sad sight of deodorants and moisturizers locked away to prevent them from being stolen; a perception of disorder and chaos that is obviously amplified by the right-wing media ecosystem regardless of whether or not this same perception actually reflects reality.
Just as with crime, the other major hot-button topic affecting the election was immigration.
The conditions of extreme poverty and underdevelopment affecting many countries in what was once called the “Third World” push thousands of people to leave their homelands in a desperate search for better opportunities.
This phenomenon is rightly seen by progressives also as the result of colonial and imperialistic exploitation policies perpetrated for centuries by rich countries.
Moreover, the United States, like many other developed countries, has a declining birth rate; a trend that, if not adequately addressed with careful management of controlled immigration, has the potential to cause enormous damage to both future economic growth and to the sustainability of the already thin American welfare state.
But, once again, the vast majority of people know nothing about the relationship between demography, economic growth and the social safety net.
What people see are only the news reports showing masses of desperate people illegally pouring across the border or crowding urban areas and “expecting to be fed and housed at taxpayers’ expense”, as Fox News puts it.
And these are not even the worst instances of the self-destructive liberal tendency to deal with reality “as it should be” rather than “as it is”.
Language is that segment of a nation’s culture that, more than any other, evolves organically and spontaneously from the bottom up and that poorly tolerates external impositions.
Every attempt to regulate language by forcing others to adopt expressions manufactured in academic labs with no connection with a live, cultural tradition, inevitably brings with it Orwellian echoes.
Terms like “they-them,” “latinx,” “persons with vaginas,” “birthing person,” “menstruating person,” and all the other linguistic somersaults created from scratch to define the (real…) spectrum of human sexuality have often been imposed with the threat of social excommunications and boycotts for transgressors.
In light of this, it is profoundly ironic to see the extent of the progressive fury in the face of some of Trump’s demented diktats such as the renaming of the “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America”.
As the American left reacts with legitimate indignation to Musk and Trump’s current attempt to destroy the scaffolding of consolidated rules and conventions in order to dismantle the administrative state, it doesn’t seem to realize that, in the cultural sphere, they have acted in the same way and provoking the same negative reaction from large swaths of public opinion.
Of course, there is a huge quantitative difference between the two because things like the number of trans athletes in female sports is insignificant and ideological censorship carried out on social media by left-wing activists has a limited scope, despite having cost several people their jobs and personal reputations.
When it is a government that, through its own ideological impositions, overturns an established order affecting millions of people, the damage can be incalculable.
Qualitatively, however, the arbitrariness and illiberality of these behaviors are similar as they both refer to a common feature of American culture: its tendency to excess.
If a scientist were to continue manufacturing drugs against Alzheimer’s just because their chemical formula works “in the lab” but ignoring the hurdle represented by the physiological reality of the blood-brain barrier, he would be immediately fired.
Similarly, the American left will spend a long time in the political wilderness if it continues to ignore the fact that the country’s abysmal economic inequalities are also cultural ones and this reality makes many liberal laudable values untranslatable and incomprehensible to those without the intellectual tools to understand them.
Moreover, a more productive strategy is easily available.
Since most of the groups and minorities it wants to defend and emancipate are also part of the most economically deprived strata of the social pyramid, the progressive democratic movement can regain their consensus by reconnecting its activism to this more traditional and all-inclusive economic struggle rather than continuing to be dragged into “culture wars” by a conservative movement that has no qualm about lying and distorting reality to its own advantage.
