Expressing disdain toward another person’s indignation will never reduce that indignation. And if we’re honest, we’ll admit it isn’t meant to. It is meant to add insult to injury. It says “I can injure your pride with impunity, and ridicule your protests with impunity. I do not have to care what you think or feel, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

The “not all men” meme is an example of such disdain. The “white fragility” diagnosis of attempted arguments to “antiracist” doctrine is another. These are not arguments. They are speech acts that demonstrate profound disrespect and refusal to respond to appeals to reason.

When progressivism passes out of favor, which this is happening very rapidly — and when more moderate and reasonable leftists try to dissociate themselves from the excesses they tolerated, downplayed or ignored — and when they find their attempts at reason summarily rejected with “not all liberals” or “woke fragility”, I hope at least a few decent souls will remember that I tried to warn them.

If you want to make appeals to liberal principles, you must also honor liberal appeals when they are made to you.

Everybody is a liberal when they are weak. But when they are strong enough to oppress, they suddenly become critiques of liberalism and see it as an impediment to progress.

In the next few years, the left is going to lose power. It has been contemptuous and abusive to ordinary Americans and proven itself unfit for leadership in a liberal-democratic society. And the right, which has been championing liberal values for the last decade will throw off its sheep’s clothing and show its true wolfish, illiberal nature.

And when chastened leftists try to protest and appeal to liberal principles, I’m going to remind them that they renounced those principles.

I wish people would just stop pretending to be principled. I can count the number of principled people I know on my two hands.

You can be unprincipled and good, at least to some small degree.

And good to a small degree is good enough.

Trying to be more moral than you really are does more damage than good.