How indeed?
Manchester Green Party:
In other words, we of Manchester Green Party require that all members affirm a conspicuous and absurd lie. We regard refusal to do so as irrational hatred. We affirm that such refuseniks are not welcome as members of Manchester Green Party.
It’s Trumpian. Why does Manchester Green Party want to be Trumpian?
Good news for all the true believers who quit the Manchester branch of the Women’s Institute; they’ve got somewhere else to go to bully women.
It’s always the most extreme with the Greens, only slightly less so with the LibDems, and still only slightly less with Labour.
These parties have come to represent little more than points along the Overton window rather than distinct and thought-through political philosophies. Which is to say, they’re groupings of people based on their own personal sense of where they stand relative to how they perceive others to be. To be A Green is no longer to prioritize the environment over other political issues. (To be honest I’m not sure that it ever was, really; though I’ve never paid much attention to the Green Party in either the UK or Canada.) Rather, to be A Green is to see oneself as maximally more virtuous than others and desiring to signal so to everyone else.
Of course the further one strays from the political middle, the smaller the pool of peers they have; and that means the stakes are higher for everyone vying to hold their place out there. I suspect that was part of the reason the FtB lot became so entrenched and hostile: atheists were a small minority with an uphill battle to fight; the intellectual-atheist-activist-blogosphere was a small world within that, and the socially liberal cohort within that was smaller still. So much dependence on such a small group of peers — so much scarcity of social support and social status within the group — is a breeding ground for purity spirals and meltdowns.
Looks like the Greens are pulling an FtB.
Arty, it’s always been about seeing themselves as more virtuous. Young white women calling other white women racist so they could feel better about themselves. The woke calling others ‘transphobes’ so they could feel better about themselves. And so on … and so on … and so on.
MAGA is the same way. Many of them (I know this from my family) embrace their political, religious, and social beliefs as a way of putting down others, especially others who are better educated (coastal elites?) or are perceived as some sort of ‘snobbish’ ‘liberal’ fool. It’s like Trump all the way across the spectrum from right to left, with perhaps a small window in between them where some people who aren’t about feeling better about themselves might take refuge now and then (but most of the so-called moderates are also busy touting their moderate credentials in an effort to show that they are the superior ones).
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