Left politics and the closing of the liberal mind

American liberals are finding it increasingly difficult to imagine ideological disagreement.

Brian Beutler, writing for his Substack:

Examine the engagement around any remotely positive statement or piece of news about Biden circulating online and you’ll find it drowned in a torrent of left-wing coded attacks… We know Trump world is behind some of these schemes. I strongly suspect that a peek under the hood would reveal they’re behind it all.

Brian has always been an unambiguous liberal, but watching his politics devolve over the past several years has been genuinely disquieting. In 2016 he maintained a fairly reasonable relationship with the left; you can get a sense of it in articles like this one. Here he has no problem with conceding “the fact that the Sanders bloc is large and growing” or accepting that this “simply reflects ideological divisions”. How the hell did he go from that to this unhinged conspiracy theory that Trump is behind all “left-wing coded attacks” of Joe Biden?