A brief conjecture to explain a phenomenon much on display in American politics in recent days: why do liberals in groups display a greater susceptibility to conformism, hive-mind politics, and rapid but near-unanimous changes of position than non-liberals do? I won’t pause to establish the fact of this phenomenon — it seems to me undeniable — but merely take it as true for the sake of argument (and I refer the reader to Ryszard Legutko’s excellent discussion of the phenomenon in “The Demon in Democracy.”)

My conjecture about the basic cause of the phenomenon is that the liberal, as such, has no transcendent criterion for establishing political truth, but relies on social proof as the fundamental criterion of truth. What everyone (at least everyone in the liberal’s space of reference) believes to be true, is true. The notorious liberal appeal to being on “the right side of History” is just social proof set in a time frame: it amounts to an appeal to and prediction about what almost everyone will believe tomorrow. Hence the liberal is peculiarly susceptible to intellectual conformism, sudden belief cascades, and other herd-like phenomena, all the while imagining himself as especially evidence-based, open-minded and enlightened. Hence we see liberals, and their dependent minor intellectuals and journalists, suddenly and vehemently deny today what they affirmed yesterday, or the reverse, without any apparent sense of contradiction.

Politically, this is both a source of tremendous power and tremendous weakness. There is power in the sudden stampede of the herd all in one direction, creating an irresistible mass. But where there is some reality constraint on belief — if for example the herd is heading towards a cliff — then the results can be disastrous. Only the end result can tell us which case currently obtains.