Cope-ologia
This is a great example of libertarians, centrist-liberals and rāytās doing what I term “Cope-ologia” for Leftists.
> student protests aren’t necessarily great, some of them are RIGHT-WING! > leftists should support a small government, because what about when the right-wing is in control of big govt? > I agree with your concerns, it’s just that we don’t have REAL capitalism but CRONY capitalism. They’re not REAL free-market billionaires, they’re RENT-SEEKING billionaires. > Hinduism is liberal actually! It is feminist, environmentalist, tolerant, everything you want!
You’re begging leftists to agree with you on some irrelevant triviality or abstraction (“student protests not necessarily good”, “small govt”), or pay lip service to your ideology (capitalism, Hinduism), while conceding everything of substance.
You are fudging or overfiting your ideology to make it imply all the leftist policies and beliefs; like an apologetic for leftism claiming all the leftist tenets are the “true realization” of your ideology.
And for what? The leftist has no fear of the RW “using big govt against him” because he is totally secure in the fact that his side is vastly more powerful and more ruthless at leveraging it. He is not afraid of being persuaded that illegal immigration is bad because of some student movement against it—even if it mattered, he already has the tools to respond to it anyway: “those were fascist students, like the Hitler youth” “those were evil wealthy students” “those were brainwashed racist students” …
most serious one: rationalizing left-wing economic policies by handwaving about “externalities” and “monopsonies” when you know very well that’s not how they came up with those policies, and you have not actually quantitatively calculated how much the externality is, whether the proposed solution is an improvement, etc.
You are “explaining away”, like the famous anecdote about the student asked to explain why the part of the plate further from the fire is hotter than the side near the fire (it was secretly rotated) and he answers “heat conduction”. Except in this case you are not fudging your theories to fit reality, you are fudging your theories to fit leftist commands.
(IIRC Bryan Caplan also had a post critical of this behavior, like “Are externalities an intellectually sound bridge?”)
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Another reason Cope-ologia manifests is as a way to cope with the direction the culture is almost inevitably moving by rationalizing it to their ideology.
Widespread anti-corporate sentiment? “Yes of course anti-corporate sentiment is totally libertarian, because we live in CRONY-CAPITALISM, so bringing down corporations is libertarian” Or libertarians in 2016 saying marijuana legalization suggests America is moving in a libertarian direction. Neither anti-corporate sentiment nor marijuana legalization are caused by libertarian ideology among their proponents, thus their other consequences will not be libertarian.
(even the “wokeness is just corporate PR” “it’s just about luigi being pretty” “it’s just greenwashing” stuff is partially this: you’re scared of admitting the dominance the left has over the culture, or of identifying it as the enemy, so you want to fit a more palatable, right-wing explanation for all of it. Patriots secretly in control, you see.)
You are tired of fighting, so you want to cope out a rationalization for why your enemy’s rule is actually acceptable; to submit to your enemy’s rule and frame your war as a mere political disagreement, hoping they’ll let you save face.
They won’t.