I was thinking recently about how effective the Left is at moving the Overton window to frame their latest belief system. How do they manage this? Then it hit me: the Left always move as a herd which gives them the power of a block vote.
By this I mean that virtually all Leftists fully embrace all aspects of Leftist ideology. And, when Leftist ideology changes, Leftists move quickly to adapt to the changes. We have seen many examples of this recently. For example, the gender identity issue came out of nowhere in the last 5 years yet all Leftists quickly adopted the same position. Another example concerns the working class. The main raison d’etre of the Left used to be to fight for the interests of the working class. These days, Leftists pay no mind to the working class as new interests have caught their attention.
There are 2 reasons why Leftists are like this:
1) Leftists like the safety and protection that the herd provides. They don’t want to be an outlier, they feel most comfortable when they share the exact same views on all of the major issues of left-wing ideology as other Leftists. Why don’t Leftists want to have different views? That takes us to reason #2…
2) Leftists will vilify and ostracise any Leftist that does not hold the acceptable views on points of Leftist ideology. We have all seen the vicious way that Leftists will turn on each other. For example, J K Rowling was a high-profile Leftist during the Brexit years but then she didn’t adopt the Left’s mantra that a transwoman is a woman so the Left turned on her. The Left will turn on their own with a viciousness that belies the ‘tolerance’ with which they like to associate themselves. Leftists will be far nastier to other Leftists who aren’t totally on board with the latest thinking on Leftist ideology than they will be to Rightists. As such, there is a huge pressure on Leftists to conform.
This conformity explains why Leftism is such a strong force. They are much more united than the Right. Rightists act as individuals, they do not move as a pack. Rightists will make their own minds up on how they feel about each social issue of the day. Rightists are not influenced by the latest Right-wing ideology. In fact, Rightist ideology does not change. Rightists follow a philosophy of ‘live and let live’ whereby the Rightist is happy to let other people live their lives as they see fit as long as that behaviour isn’t detrimental to others. Such diversity of thought is an anathema to the Left who much prefer everyone to think and behave in lockstep with each other.
The Left moves as a herd and that gives them a lot of influence.
Atticus Fox 