It’s interesting to think that they’ve been able to demonize “extremism” and “ideologues” to so many otherwise smart-ish people. You hear it when boomercons play that silly “I hate the far left AND the far right!!!!” game.
They’ve managed to make it so midwits expect for the best society to be one without ideology, one where there’s no hitler or stalin on any side. In reality, there’s just no overt surface-level ideology, in such a utopia it would all be hidden in the rooms of the elites while the ‘smart’ libertarian idly whiles away his life thinking society is doing just great.
I guess that’s about how they lived for the last half century though. No “idealogues”, just people pretending that all these issues simply didn’t exist.
Sloppily put but there’s an idea there I need to explore sometime.