Nate Hochman of National Review Online explores the political left’s inability to see its own bias in debates about important policy issues.
Recent months have seen Democrats and the broader Left sustain a series of humiliating losses in the culture wars. Particularly in education, the energetic grassroots backlash to critical race theory (CRT) has spawned anti-CRT laws in at least nine state legislatures, and red states across the country are set to pass a slate of similar laws in the upcoming legislative session. Gender ideology’s march through our institutions has encountered similar resistance, as ten states ban biological males from competing in women’s sports, and two more ban transition surgery and puberty blocking drugs for minors. (Here, too, similar legislation is also likely to pass in more red states this year). And a record-breaking number of state-level abortion restrictions were passed in 2021, spurred on by a conservative Supreme Court that could well be set to overturn Roe v. Wade. …
… But, in the famous words of Upton Sinclair, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” At both an ideological and institutional level, all the “experts” that the FiveThirtyEight writers cite in their piece are invested in believing that the progressive worldview is the objective one, and that any deviations from it are the result of irrational or insidious impulses in the electorate. By virtue of their own biases, elite progressive opinion-makers are unable to see this. At times, the expert class seems literally incapable of self-critical reflection, even in articles ostensibly dedicated to such an endeavor. And that, of course, is the real reason that Democrats are increasingly out of step with voters in the culture wars. …
… In the elite progressive worldview, left-wing cultural policy is simply the norm, whereas any attempt to push back against it is unserious, cynical political maneuvering.
