Theophilus Chilton says that one of the biggest weaknesses of the Biden administration was their addiction to the idea that appearances mattered far more than reality:
For the previous four years, one of the constant refrains from the Left that we kept hearing over and over was “the adults are back in charge”. Trump is “childish” while Biden was “the adult in the room,” or so the media-driven narrative kept telling us. Trump just hung out on social media and made fun of people during his first term while Democrats did the serious business of guiding the ship of state through the rocky shoals of the modern world when Biden was in office, and all that. The whole point was to mask the serious deficiencies in the previous administration and its underlying ideational premises, deficiencies that existed at both the structural and personnel levels because of the fundamental ideological puerility of the Left.
It’s become common for observers to (only partially jokingly) note that until very recently we had a “theatre kid occupied government”. What’s that mean? Well, everything we saw from the past four years (and really, a lot longer than that) was performative — it was about giving appearances rather than getting anything useful done. All the way back to the terminally midwit show The West Wing, the belief among up-and-coming leftie PMCers was that government could essentially be conducted by stagecraft. All you have to do is write the script, teach the actors their lines, and create whatever you want out of the production. More generally, the theatre kids in government thought that they could rule the world merely by wishcasting things into reality, which explains a lot of the “questionable” spending to and through USAID and various NGO organisations. They have the very juvenile tendency to think that wanting something to be a certain way can make it so, regardless of intervening realities.
Fundamentally, that is the whole character of modern Western and American progressivism. Modern leftists display a whole suite of childlike behavioural patterns that, as it turns out, are not conducive to good government. Really, progressivism is essentially based on wishful thinking and daddy issues. Once you understand this, you understand about 90% of where the Left’s thought process comes from.
One good example of this is the whole transgender push. While there is obviously an element of grooming/recruiting involved with it all, the main point to it is that it’s a means of social conditioning and control. They pretend — and demand that others pretend — that boys can become girls and that girls can become boys. Until recently, they were able to punish normal people who didn’t at least pay lip service to this. Even without this power, there is still a good deal of attempting to emotionally manipulate people about the matter (you don’t want to commit TRANS GENOCIDE do you???), which is itself a means of trying to exercise power, though in a juvenile manner.
Of course, the fact that the whole trans agenda rests of wishful thinking, on the attempt to stage manage reality into accepting something blatantly at odds with it, should go without saying. There has been a concerted effort to build a Baudrillardian hyperreality around this issue, to create a “consensus reality” that muddies the distinction between fact and fiction. Baudrillard himself defined hyperreality as “… the generation by models of a real without origin or reality”. The entire process is essentially semiotic, which explains the obsession of the modern Left (not just now, they tried this in Weimar Germany in the 1920s as well) with transgenderism — it’s a spearhead which, once successfully pierced through the veil of classical reality in this one area, can justify the same exact process being carried out in any other so that any symbolic-yet-unreal consensus can be built, even if by fraud or force.
There are real world consequences to this sort of theatre kid performativism. It leads to them impeding traffic on busy highways to protest whatever their idiotic cause du jour happens to be (physics isn’t real bro!). It’s also why (ostensibly adult) Democratic elected officials think they can impede federal immigration enforcement efforts. For so long, progressives in our TKOG were able to force everyone else to go along with their delusions or face punishment. Even though they’re now not able to do this (at least here in the USA, other places in the West aren’t so lucky), they still think they can obstruct and counteract the implementation of policy simply because they don’t want these things to happen. Like little kids who can’t accept that they lost at a game, these folks believe they can roll back the results of the latest election by throwing tantrums and trying to get in the way. Hopefully, a few arrests will clear up this misconception.