I whole-heartedly believe that the United States is in the midst of an unprecedented cultural civil war. American political theater has grown increasingly less about the mundanity of policy disagreements, and more toward disputing the key philosophical foundations of America’s founding, and, in a broader context, Western Civilization itself.
The effects of this culture war are evident in the very real ways Americans have opted to treat their fellow citizens in the face of this growing socio-cultural chasm. All too often we hear of countless relationships, both romantic and platonic, ceasing almost immediately in the wake of heated arguments over various political disputes.
After all, how is a man who, intending to cast his vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, supposed to address his long-time friend who reposts an infographic on Instagram reading “If you support Donald Trump, you are a racist.”?
It would appear that, in the midst of all the political chaos, we have allowed ourselves to shy away from real, probing discourse, and have instead opted to pass down vague judgments of character onto those which whom we disagree.
The wider the socio-cultural chasm grows, the more people begin to embrace arbitrary identity groups based on who they support politically. Your voter registration is now a personality trait. Such is the case with the so-called “Resisters.”
You can find these types on Twitter, primarily, but they exist on other platforms and most likely somewhat identify with the label in real life. “#Democrat, #Resister, #BLM” are common in both Twitter and Instagram profile bios.
The idea of being a “resister” is predicated upon the left-wing presupposition that we live in a systemically discriminatory and bigoted society. All people of color and other minority groups are automatically cast as perpetual victims in the face of a spooky, white male status quo that exists to cast the racially and ethnically undesirable into a terrestrial hell.
Of course, it is very rare that a self-proclaimed resister ever elaborates as to what particular institutions are discriminatory, or to what extent that particular institution has been corrupted. The oppressive white male status quo seems to just exist in the ether, and many Americans just accept this narrative as is, no further elaboration or context needed.
And yet, for all their proclamations regarding social justice and fairness, I’m not so sure what the resisters are actually resisting.
Many of them have vehemently defended positive coercive action, courtesy of the federal government. They seem to love federal and state coronavirus vaccine mandates, where the unvaccinated are increasingly segregated from society and are subject to countless rounds of hyper-stringent moralizing from a group of people who believe that they’re morally superior for getting vaccinated.
Many resisters are also quite fond of censoring certain speech they disagree with in the name of countering “misinformation.” Many of them turned the other way when Merrick Garland’s Justice Department released a memo telling the FBI to investigate vocal parents who were angry about Critical Race Theory-inspired pedagogy being implemented by their school boards in K-12 curriculums.
Resisters generally don’t like capitalism too much, claiming it is part of the oppressive order that keeps minorities subjugated and maintains the power of white people, along with your usual “revolution of the proletariat” nonsense; except when a corporation, or group of corporations, caters to your ideological predispositions. Large corporations are evil, except for Twitter and Facebook, who retain “free market autonomy” to trample upon the First Amendment however they see fit.
They’re also not into guns too much. Many of them, from my observations, would like to see most guns (if not all of them) subsequently confiscated by the federal government. It would appear that most resisters don’t really like the idea of law-abiding citizens owning firearms, even if said firearms would, in fact, enable them to resist in the event of genuine tyranny, but that’s another conversation.
So are the resisters resisting the government? Well, sort of, not really. What they’re resisting, from what I can tell, is the classically liberal order that is the foundation of much of Western Civilization today. In their eyes, all right-wingers are treasonous fascists, and therefore must be censored, lest those evil Republicans destroy our democracy. This order must be resisted and uprooted.
And what is to replace this supposedly oppressive order? Well, judging by their positions as to what government should and should not be able to do, an order in which no one is able to resist them.