utopian or pre-civilizational and reactionary?

Well. Here’s another example. Trump says something reasonable – that taking an absolute and fanatical binary position is not a good way to sell a point of view – and the usual suspects go bonkers. The headline claims are that he flip-flops his position or that he abandons his based or downhill from there. American Thinker has two essays about this phenomenon. Trump pokes a hornet’s nest with comment on abortion and midterm results (Rajan Laad) — “The knee-jerk reaction is that Trump was attacking his pro-life base.” — “The GOP certainly failed in countering the media narrative and delivering a coherent message on abortion. They failed to expose the Democrat position which isn’t pro-choice but pro-abortion. They failed to reveal that most blue states have unrestricted abortions on demand until the point of birth.” — Trump’s statement on abortions was wise, effective, and prudent (Monica Showalter) — “According to Newsweek, this passsage from Trump’s post-midterm statement “proved” that Trump had done an about-face” … “Trump was basically going where the American people are going, which is for some restrictions on abortion at this point, but not an immediate full-scale ban at one swoop, when the voters aren’t ready for it.”

This is about principle versus reality and growth of an idea. Principles Are A Grand Thing – A Guest Post – by John Ringo – According To Hoyt but — “I’m going to use Dien Bien Phu as an example” — “The Left has been ‘boiling the frog’ for a long time and it has mostly been by weaponizing empathy around ‘cultural issues.’ The Dems have always been win/lose against Republicans but the Left has taken over every major cultural high ground. Academia. Media. Entertainment. Now major corporations.” — “The PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! crowd has been a Conservative Surrender Chorus for as long as I can remember.” — In light of his view, consider America’s Persecuted Political Prisoners (Jeff Crouere, Townhall)) — “The conditions in these prisons are so horrific that 34 January 6th (J6) prisoners asked for a transfer to the military terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay” — “The harsh treatment of the J6 prisoners is in sharp contrast to the rioters who burned and looted in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd” — “The unrelenting abuse of President Trump by his enemies is obvious.” — principles have a low priority on the Left where identification and destruction of the enemy always comes first.

Then there’s the The Baleful Cargo of Woke Diversity Worship (Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness). — “What do all our notable fabricators—George Santos, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama—have in common? — Well, quite like the Ward ChurchilIs or Rachel Dolezals of the world, one way or another, they lied about their identities. Or they sought fraudulent ways of suggesting their ancestries were marginalized. Or they had claims on being victims on the theory their constructed personas brought career advantages.” — “There are warning signs all around us of our fate to come if we do not stop this nihilism” — “The old 1970s cynical canard that racial quotas would not extend to pilot training or neurosurgery is no longer true.” — “We forget that what once separated the Western world from the rest was not race, climate, or natural bounty, but its gradual creation of meritocracies replacing the pre-civilizational rule of the clan, the tribe, or the race.” — “we are headed, dangerously so, into an historically ugly, hateful, and volatile place—all the more so because we lie that it is utopian when it is pre-civilizational and reactionary.”