Your second comment here is also very valuable and insightful. Thank you for both.

People who love tech often describe humans as computers that have an operating system. This analogy is a very bad one because it cannot account for the fact that as a species we continually create the world in terms of stories and feelings.

I understand this criticism, but I wasn’t intending to take the analogy that far. We are feeling organisms because all advanced organisms operate on feelings, I think. Because feeling works. I only meant the analogy to differentiate between behavioral traits with which we’re born, versus behavioral traits we adopt through learning.

This is similar to how supply-side religion became mainstream as Republicans rose in the same period.

I think this is taking the religious analogy too far. I agree with you that supply side thinking is not very well supported in fact, but there are plenty of beliefs not particularly supported in fact that don’t rise to the level of a religion. I don’t want to fall into the trap of simply painting “X is a religion! See, it doesn’t match facts!” because that’s generally a sloppy argument and typically just used to deplatform or diminish a differing point of view. But in SJ’s case, particularly in it’s current, relatively recent form, after intersectionality got totally baked in, it really really works like a religion. It is literally an ethos installation tool, not just a way to back-end excuse tax cuts for the rich or whatever.

What we can easily forget is that most Democrats are NOT SJW fanatics, any more than most Republicans are supply-side fanatics.

I might go so far as to say that there are noticeably more supply side fanatics within the Republican establishment by ratio than there are true SJ fanatics within the Democrat side, quite honestly. But the impact of the two, by comparison, is very different. If you bail on supply side thinking, you’re not excommunicated from the Republicans. If you bail on SJ thinking, publicly, you are almost literally excommunicated from the Democrats in their modern structure. The SJ folks have an influence over the D party today that is much more similar to the influence the Moral Majority had on the R party in their heyday of influence. Breaking rank with them on, say, abortion, would get you run out on a rail. Even claiming to be an atheist was a nonstarter within the Republicans when the MM was behind the wheel. The Moral Majority did a lot of damage to the Republicans by making a wide field of articles of faith into wedge issues. Goldwater had some good quotables here.

Now that dynamic has flipped. See if you can find a single candidate who can make it past a D primary race willing to say “this whole privilege thing is being overblown a bit.” There isn’t one. That’s political seppuku. Even though many of them probably think it, they have to think it privately.