Jeremy Gordon: How to be wrong (The Outline)
I would hope that, should Sanders lose the nomination, I’d avoid the emotional lethargy that followed his defeat in 2016, when I assumed Clinton was a foregone conclusion and thus didn’t need my focused support. (Somehow working up enthusiasm for Joe Biden would, I think, be the most magnificent personal development of my lifetime — but then again, what’s the alternative in that situation?) I would hope that, should Sanders become president and fail to enact any of his ideas, I wouldn’t take this as evidence that his leftist ideology was completely inapplicable to American society. I would hope that, should Sanders win the nomination and lose against Trump, that I wouldn’t swing back to the “actually, we need to get more racist” of electoral pragmatists. I’d hope to put aside my own saltiness about feeling like a giant dumbass, and continue support and search for the politics that would lead to the best outcome for everyone, not just the one that would satisfy my own ego.
In short, I’d hope that my beliefs would not be centered in any need to be right, which is probably the worst motivation for believing in anything. Of course, this desire is the animating factor behind a lot of human behavior, political or otherwise, which is partly what makes following election coverage such a nightmare. Across all the websites and all the cable channels, in the pages of newspaper op-eds and glossy magazines, on social media platforms and obscure blogs, we find hundreds and hundreds of incurious, selfish jerkoffs extolling their wrongness as if it is a virtue, confident in the conclusions they’ve arrived at through assumption and ignorance.
This is not only because of that human tendency toward adopting confidence despite the opposing evidence, but a more pernicious truth: that the financial and professional incentives for doggedly pursuing this wrongness are, in fact, quite immense. You can build an entire career on wrongness, staggering from one idiotic position to the next with no consistency or morality, and just… keep doing it. Nothing is going to stop you.