Something occurred to me, late last night, as I was drifting off to sleep. I've often referred to the tantrum-throwing left as toddlers...and that connected with all the kids pretending to be anything other than what they are.
This is a normal stage in human development.
Both my imp (now 16) and my pixie (soon to be 14) threw tantrums. I showed them through being firm and consistent with consequences that tantrums would not only not get them what they wanted, but would get them the opposite of what they wanted.
Unfortunately, we've got eighty years of protests of varying levels of justice and violence demonstrating to a lot of these overgrown toddlers that yes, tantrums do work. Unfortunately, it's going to take a lot of harsh consequences, fairly and consistently and constantly applied, to undo that lesson.
Both of my children had phases of pretending to be an animal--a dog, a cat, a dragon, a dinosaur (oh my gawd the dinosaur was Pixie, and she jumped on Imp and bit him. Because "dat's whut raptors do. I a dinosaur! RAWR!). I...put a stop to the dinosaur stuff, but not because I stopped the imaginative play, but because I did not need them biting each other.
They sort of still play make-believe, but via Minecraft, now. Other than that, they've grown out of it.
Leftists...haven't. I'm not sure if it's because they didn't engage in imagination play as toddlers/preschoolers (kind of hard when they're overscheduled for every second of every day by parents that didn't want to parent their kids), or if it's because they're told that they're bad for being born white/male/cis het/rich/poor/female or whatever. But whatever the reason is...
...leftism looks, from the outside, like a giant case of Peter Pan syndrome. Delayed development. Socially-enforced retardation.
Call it whatever you will, they need to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and let the goddamn grownups actually run the country. Because trying to enforce kindergarten rules on a grown up world has backfired spectacularly. If your cunning plan depends on "if people will just..." it won't work. Because people will not "just."
I'm personally tired of putting up with behavior that should have been met with a spanking before the little 'tards hit kindergarten age.
I vote we start calling the behavior like we see it--socially-enforced retardation--and treat them like toddlers: ignore them, up until the point their behavior crosses a line and must be corrected.
Because that's the other thing about toddler misbehavior: they're doing it for attention. If we stop giving them the attention, some of them will stop acting out...and some will earn the richly deserved slap-down.
