All modern debate with the progressive left is unproductive, whether one on one or in the town square.  That we now dispute information as being real or as misinformation or disinformation renders debate worthless.  The impossibility of "meaningful" debate is now the sad hallmark of a polarized America.

How does one debate with a side that claims with a straight face that the supply chain problems are an indicator that President Brandon has fixed the recession (according to Sec. Buttigieg) or that the $3.5-trillion infrastructure package is already paid for?

Progressives with impatient head shakes, eye-rolls, and snark mock us otherized people a lot.  Mocking is a classic "tell" that a person has partnered up with deceit.  Progressives are not the least guilty about their acute appetite for ignoring or stamping out inconvenient facts and truth.  In fact, they unwholesomely relish doing so.  In their great and spacious building that is the world, progressives slouch in their chairs with their shredders next to them, ready to shred both the information side of debate and the universal principles side.  They simply deny the existence of immutable truth.  As such, they smugly deploy their "customized" truth or declarations of  "my truth" as a sly, by-any-means-necessary tactic.  To a degree, many Democrats, in name only, have come to recognize the progressive left as bad-faith players all the way down to the sub-basement level of human existence.

Divinely based transcendent truth is an imperative for the reason that customized truth is relative truth.  It offers no appeals process.  To what standard does one appeal?  For progressives who see a world embodying social justice, such justice is unattainable without the North Star of universal truth.  Anything else is just "whim" identifying as justice.  So it goes with the rest of the progressives' cherished conceptions of non-defined values like peace, freedom, and equality.  If progressives can't admit a firm foundation of divinely transcendent or self-evident truth undergirding their value conceptions, the whims of the White House might as well declare to CNN, GMA, and Joy Behar that peace, justice, freedom, and equality have been achieved and they can all go on vacation permanently.  Oh, were that to happen.

What the progressive left does not want to admit or comprehend is that leftists themselves exist only as spiritual trust-fund babies.  Like self-absorbed scions of the famously wealthy, they contribute little moral capital to society other than repeating whatever orderly conduct someone at some time modeled for them.  That they can engage in fundamentally changing America is possible only because they are living off the social order handed to them by divinely inspired forebears. 

It is not as if, say, Baby-Boomer progressives aren't privately hip to the disorder quickening in America, the world, and their own communities, or they wouldn't retreat to the dulcet "seriousness" of NPR.  Alternative media with its modern vibe digitally documents the incessant chipping away of Western Judeo-Christian values — think Cardi B.  Remember, even Travis Barker and Katy Perry at one time were thought to be uniquely edgy.  You know that things are precarious when Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols shares with us others a punk rocker's contempt for the cancel culture.

Spruce Fontaine is an artist and retired college art instructor.

Image: Chris Dodds via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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