Obtuseness of Democrat Establishment

Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic is a useful interpretive framework for understanding Democrat nincompoopery.

The German philosopher Hegel is often criticized for what has struck many as a needlessly complex and arcane prose style that at times seems downright impenetrable. In light of the terrible events of the 20th century, his dialectical view of history—of civilization developing through a logical process—now seems quaint.

However, it seems to me that his concept of how individual consciousness develops (or fails to develop) is spot on. He illustrated this concept with his Master-Slave dialectic.

To put it simply, a man’s consciousness of himself and his place in the world can only develop through the experience of struggle. In Hegel’s dialectic, two independent beings who possess self-consciousness encounter each other and engage in a life-and-death struggle. As the essayist J.D. Feilmeier put it:

In this struggle to determine the objective truth of itself, each consciousness seeks to establish the certainty of its being not only for itself but also for the other. In other words, each consciousness is trying to prove its worth to the other as well as to itself. Therefore, although the clash begins as struggle to the death, the victor in the battle spares the life of the vanquished so that the loser may provide an external, objective witness to the power of the winner. Out of this life-and-death conflict emerges a master-slave relationship where the victor is master and the vanquished is slave. Through defeat, the loser has become aware that he is not the objective standard of truth in the world; he has achieved self-consciousness. The master, however, has not discovered his limitedness. He continues to see himself as the measure of all things.

This is a useful interpretive framework for understanding why the Democrat Establishment became so hopelessly obtuse following Biden’s victory in 2020. With their victory, the Democrats were given free rein to implement all kinds of radical social experiments, with vaccine mandates and censorship being the most pernicious. Drunk on power, they had the extraordinary temerity to choose Kamala Harris as their candidate for the 2024 election.

In every major Democrat stronghold, the government has recently sunk to new abysses of nincompoopery. This morning of was reminded of this when I saw a report on President Biden’s Farewell Address. As Headline USA reporter Ben Sellers reported:

In what may be the most repugnantly hypocritical claim he has made since December, President Joe Biden used a farewell address to the nation to deliver an unhinged rant about the “oligarchy” taking root in America—just weeks after brazenly giving one of the nation’s highest civilian awards to several of his far-left donor friends.

I hope that the experience of suffering a humiliating defeat will sober the Democrat Establishment and prompt it to return to social and political normalcy. Likewise, I hope that Trump’s team will strive to remain prudent and avoid sliding into triumphant nincompoopery.