BUILD THE WALL & OTHER PROGRESSIVE IDEAS

image by me and my midjourney prompt

Today I awoke to a curious bit of news—Kamala wants to build a wall?? How dare she. That’s MY progressive idea… What you’re about to read is an essay I wrote in 2020 and never published—a bit of abstract political whimsy that has, overnight, transformed into surprisingly current commentary…

Nothing disturbs us progressives like the near-halt inching of incrementalism. Progress has been our 20,000 year compulsion for good reason—we want out of the lowly rot molesting our Gucci bodies, to transcend the humors of animalistic mulch. Faster! Lift us up and beyond! Remove us ever from this death-marred reverie we were born to. Progress is measured, after all, by not how close we are to, but how far we are from.

For us, progress is evolution¹. For we secretly think (but wouldn’t dare, in our delicious magnanimity, admit) an obvious trivia—the only indicator of evolutionary malfunction is CONSERVATISM.     

Exactly how many more years will we have to endure these multiplying fugitives of evolution, we privately wonder? Is it our fault their evolutionary lag is so rotundly pronounced? No! (We think). The more they oppose us, the louder, the sharper we must hurtle through their provincial thicknesses, we think. We must tear through the Play Doh minds and dollar-clinched fists balling up their pages of aged language. We must shatter their high and tight hairdos into plasticine history. We must overwhelm with numbers, with displays of inexorable, inevitable, PROGRESS!!!! 

            Or…perhaps that’s all wrong². 

            Shall we take a look? 

They say that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.  Presumably, then, when we blame conservative reactions to progressive ideas on “a lack of education”, we must be referring to our own.

Must we really keep averting our eyes from the very nature we have been attempting to transcend all this time? Shall we continue to contend that progressivism is only a product of nurture (by which we do not ever mean anything so supple, but to amount the dimness of the conservative to a lack of education)? Or do we have the courage to take a look at that science we so laud in platitudes but so often avoid when it suits… 

It is no wonder we progressives have always outwardly inflated nurture. Context, environment, and education are those things within our control, after all. It is no wonder, too, that we have forever sought to deflate that which is more often out of our control—nature. Sure, we give it the odd nod in matters of evidence so ostentatious that they cannot help but be acknowledged. But most everywhere else we rather willingly decry it. (I won’t get into the details here, as we progressives aren’t ready to hear too many of them).

While the dissident right craftily now arms themselves with the flimsy science of “race realist” IQ data, the left continues to avert its eyes from far more compelling science* about our brains… and theirs. This is science that not only would dispatch the crippled efforts of the right to science-i-fy itself, but would give us the wisdom to deal with the fearsouped conservative brains we’re always coming up against.

So let’s stop doing that. Let’s confront these brains. And the science of them. 

Take a deep, yogini, progressive breath, and conjure that empathy you’re always going on about…because this isn’t going to be easy for you (and even less so for conservatives).  

How should I put this… According to a wild and growing number of studies, conservatives have the brains of frightened children.

I repeat, conservatives have amygdala-heavy brains according to fMRI studies of actual brains. There’s this study and this study and this study and this study, too. This may be old news for some of you. But I’m guessing, for most of you, this is just the sort of news that gets suppressed by our dandy liberal outlets before getting to you.

What these studies all show is that conservatives have more active amygdalae, on average, than do liberals, while liberals have more anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity. The amygdala is the fear center of the brain, responsible for our flight, fight and freeze responses to danger. The ACC—a more recent evolutionary development—handles more advanced brain processes like pattern matching and abstract reasoning. So, yeah. Ouch. These studies show conservatives not merely to be generally less intellectually gifted than liberals in some vaguely educational sense, but, bluntly, less intellectually evolved genetically.

(For my 2024 thoughts on the most recent—and devastating—study on the topic, see this footnote³).

To the liberal knee-jerk which says “we can’t blame it on their biology, that would give them an excuse!”—are we so addicted to the catch-all fable of “education” that we are willing to avoid scientific truths? Are we so convinced by larger marches? By more outrage? By pressing harder on the gas? Do we utterly lack the flexibility to consider how we might move beyond the biologically fear-throttled brains of our opponents?    

Think of the conservative platform: More guns—fear of harm/intrusion. More border security—fear of foreigners/job loss. Anti-abortion—fear of God. Anti-queer—fear of sexuality. Bigger military—fear of invasion. More police—fear of chaos. Yes, the racists and sexists and queer-fearing squares, the cock-small assault-rifle’d mall-faced buckaroos, them. Them who shoot and prowl and taunt. Them. Them who seem to live for the thrill of domination… It’s them who are scared. That’s why they act that way. It’s their damn amygdalae.

But lest we get all eugenics…

Let’s remind ourselves of fear’s place in nature. Fear is important. Fear is probably more overwhelmingly responsible for our survival than any other natural response. Well done, conservative brain. So, instead of turning ourselves into eugenicists, let’s consider the approach taken by a team at Yale who turned conservatives into temporary liberals. 

What kind of sorcery was used to convert them?  Woo-woo lefty meditation, naturally. 

Inspired by the revelations of the conservative amygdala, Dr. Bargh devised a supplemental study at Yale. He gave conservative and liberal groups the same questions. Each group answered them as would be expected. But before the next round of questions, the conservatives were given a thought experiment—to envision themselves impervious to harm. Utterly safe. What happened next? The conservatives suddenly responded indistinguishably from the liberal groups. 

The conservatives became, in their trance of safety, liberals. 

Everything from here out will not survive the purity tests of progressives fever-melded to the far blade that, as if by design, can only cut the left hand. I have no contempt for such puritans, having been one myself (as drawn to the martyred status as the next self-immolating punk), so understand that what I offer in the following paragraphs land at some surprise (and, probably, expense) to myself. 

It is now rather clear that if conservatives felt safe, they might be less inclined to grind liberalism to a halt. It should now also be clear that fear makes the conservative position stronger!   

Indeed, the more combative our progressions become, the stronger the conservative position naturally becomes. 

And that ^ really is problematic for us, isn’t it? We really prefer to be combative when making our change. We sort of deride anything less than combative as soft-centered.  “CHANGE NOW!” is the rhetorical cornerstone of progressivism, after all. But don’t let the irony be lost on you—our combativeness also slows progress by way of the hyperbolic opposition it engenders. 

It bears repeating—the more combatively we tell conservatives the world is changing, the more conservative they become, the more they try to stop our world from changing, the harder it becomes to change our world. Yes, we on the left have been shooting ourselves in the sandals. If the conservative evolutionarily lags, we revolutionarily snag. Our “never compromise” puritanical ways are engineered not for efficacy, but for an infinite supply of opposition against which to vainly struggle.

(On compromise, check this extended footnote⁴ for thoughts on how liberal and progressive activists should be using strategic anchoring to “compromise” to their advantage.)

So, are we ready to test our meta-political will to progress? Because I think I have the perfect test…

A wall. Yes, that wall. 

What is the main criticism of “the wall” again?  That it does nothing and that is is purely symbolic?

Sounds promising. 

Before I blithely suggest completing Trump’s wall, let’s get some analyses in. 

In the early 90s, there were only 15 walls delineating countries around the world.  Today, there are 70. Aside from their universal brute ugliness, there is little else universal about them. But let’s try an analysis anyhow (we know the Trump administration didn’t do one) (seriously, they didn’t). 

First, border walls might screw up the migratory patterns of animals. Trump’s wall would “possibly” negatively effect the migratory patterns of 89 endangered species. That’s pretty awful.   But it’s also speculation that not being able to mosey into Texas would kill a leopard (ok, that did felt heartless to say).       

Second, their construction tends to displace people. In the U.S., eminent domain is the right of government to turn private property to public use. It’s baked into the bill of rights’ 5^th amendment: “nor shall private property be taken for use without just compensation”.  While that sounds fair-ish, it is, of course, historically low-income neighborhoods that are targeted for eminent domain. Not into it. 

Third, there is the reasonable conjecture that the greater the difficulty in illegally crossing a border, the more criminal enterprises benefit. But, again, this is conjecture. There is a real lack of decent data-driven averages of effects of border walls. 

Lastly, the more common criticism, the one with hard numbers—the cost. 

Trump’ wall would cost money. It’s was on track to cost $11 billion.  Seems like a lot.  How much is it?  It’s as much a nuclear aircraft carrier ship. How many of those do we have? Eleven. …Still seems like a lot. Let’s get even more perspective. How much would the Bernie Sanders progressive love child, The Green New Deal have cost?  Between 10 and 90 trillion.  With a “t”.   

Compared to even 10 trillion, 11 billion is a trifle. But the Green New Deal was designed to have a genuine, data-driven, positive impact on the environment and the economy. How effective would a wall be? 

It turns out, the wall’s “effectiveness” was never never important.  The Trump administration has produced neither a cost-reward analyses nor an analysis of what it would accomplish. And may I suggest that there’s a reason the Trump administration never bothered with an analysis—the wall’s effectiveness was utterly besides the point.  The point, rather, was to provide a sense of safety, not safety itself. What parts of the wall have been thrown up, illegal immigrants are already literally cutting through with “inexpensive power tools”.  

The last piece of data to remember in conjunction with this cost/reward analysis is the conservative amygdala. I know, at this point you’re sick of it. But it’s the point of this entire essay. Conservatives have made it fairly clear that they would feel safer with a wall. Granted, they’d also apparently feel safer with a machine gun taped to each forearm. We wouldn’t agree to the latter because we have immense data proving the increase in violence with widespread access to guns. But can we say the same about a wall?  

Pardon me for noticing…but a wall is precisely the kind of thing that makes progressive sense. Aside from potential harm to migratory animals, its harms to progressive values is difficult to prove. 

What Trump proved himself about a wall is that it is mostly a rhetorical device designed to make conservatives feel safer. In its flimsy, un-impactful superficiality, the wall represents exactly the kind of “concession” the left should be actively concocting to pacify the amygdalae of the right—to swing the right more to the left.  

Here it is plainly: if we want conservatives to behave more liberally, we may need to fill them with a sense of safety—just like when we’re trying to get a frightened child to try something new. That is, if we truly care about quickening the pace of progress.

We should be thinking of metaphorical, ridiculous, symbolic offerings for those frightened, xenophobic brains…something to enwomb the conservative mind, secure it in offerings of safety… To make them effectively, liberals. To turn them into allies. To balm their synaptic squeaky wheels with night-night juice. To curb their anxieties with toddler swaddle. 

Yes, sometimes we have to throw our children over our shoulders, kicking and screaming, and forge ahead… But sometimes their weight will not only stall your ascent, but send you rolling back down the hill. Sometimes, when your child has marred enough of your nights with their sleeplessness, its just smarter to install a nightlight. Yes, it costs some and makes the place look cheap. But it makes your little ones feel more safe so that you may get on with your work. 

Now that’s progress. 

1. There is a terribly compelling argument contradicting the position that progressivism = evolution, one which actually uses evolutionary theory and environmental selection pressure modeling to prove our position wrong and prove progressivism to be evolutionarily maladaptive—but we don’t want to hear about that, do we? No. We wouldn’t believe it anyway. …OK, fine, I admit I have written about it and I’ll post about it.

2. During the 4 years of Trump’s presidency, everywhere victories unraveled. 100 environmental restrictions rolled back.  Drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge given the green light. A packed conservative court. Reversals of women’s right to choose. A Muslim travel ban. The lampooning of empathy. The return to prominence of white nationalism. Did Trump do some things we don’t give him credit for? Sure. But bi-partisan bills protecting national parks cannot offset the environmental damage of pollution rollbacks any more than his subsidizing of historically black colleges can offset the proliferation of white nationalist organizations. Gains we were taught in high school—particularly the gains of the civil rights era—were revealed as having progressed in such diminutive form as to make them feel now like reversals of fortune, cracked lawn jockeys in the sullen footprints of vanished totems.   

With the exception of the sudden mainstreaming of the gay white man (owed in half to his being a white man, and in equal half to the gender-non-binary movements which, in their more esoteric displays of lexicon-heavy queernesses and “exotic” lists of discriminations, have normalized the gay-white-male by way of Overton contrast), and the near-exception of the magical bi-partisan consilience on prison justice reform, the bulk of grand progressive achievements of the past 40 years look to be, with the benefit of Trumpish context, underwhelming.  

3. While the essay links to several fMRI studies of the brain in a moment, new studies keep mounting. Most recently, this state-of-the-art study of IQ and polygenic scores of siblings exposed to identical environments is evidence, if not proof, that conservatism is highly correlated with non-environmental, genetic predispositions to lower intelligence.

4. Let’s talk about that thing…what’s it called… compromise. It’s likely that no one in history has ever joyfully cried  “Yes!  I finally compromised!” In the realm of the progressive, concessions are for the spineless and the not-to-be-trusted!

But there is something about compromise that we do not take full advantage of—strategic anchoring. Similar to starting high and haggling down. Surely, those of you with children or siblings understand that your “compromises” are often totally made up, anchored to abstract conditions, and have used that to your advantage. For instance, if a parent who loves ice cream offers a run to the ice cream parlor as leverage to induce a child’s cooperation on homework, it is not a concession at all. The parent only pretends it is—secretly, they want that mint chocolate chip themselves.  

Sticking with the child analogies (they’re just too apropos here), every parent has taken something away from their unruly child only to be able to offer it back at the price of the child’s cooperation. The child believes they’re getting a concession from their parent in reclaiming the television, but the reality is that no concession was given at all. The child was watching the TV before the negotiation and is now watching the TV after the negotiation. Nothing has changed except that the parent has gotten what they wanted.

Similarly, there are an infinite variety of “concessions” we liberals could be thinking about to grease the conservative amygdala into cooperation. Are we capable of going there? Do we care enough about progress itself?