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Notes -
I recently read the full Abolition of Man for what might be the first time in 15 - 20 years and it struck me just how contemporary a lot of it felt.
Lewis spends the bulk of the book arguing against the postmodernism in general and the deconstructionist mindset in particular on the grounds that it is fundementally anti-enlightenment and anti-western. The core argument being that these impulses "must inevitably dissolve into moral absurditity" and it's hard not to read the absurdities he describes in both your post and @RenOS's below. Granted he's writing this in early 1943 so theres a whole load of extra shit going on that goes unmentioned in the book but it's interesting to see a prototype/precursor of later internet arguments over whether aithiests can be moral actors in the idea that totalitarian dictatorships like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are the default endstate of unrestrained liberalism because if being polite and rational are your only values, you'll go along with anything (including tyranny and mass murder) and anything can and will be rationalized.
Bringing this back to your post. Romney in 2012 was very much a compromise candidate. The go to example on both sides for "reasonable centerist" and it did not protect him from having his name dragged through the mud. The lesson the GOP-base took away from 2012 is that being a "reasonable centerist" gains you nothing, the democrats will hate you regardless.
A common sentiment you'll see in a lot of conservative spaces is that for too long people like Romney, the Cheneys, French, Et Al. have been putting politeness and "not rocking the boat" before anything else, and this has led them to regularly enable and defend numerous bad actors. "Trumpism" is, if anything, a reaction to this percieved tendency.
This is probably a post in itself, but something Lewis gets into is how being "nice" is not the same as being "good" and being "meek" doesn't mean being spineless despite the efforts of postmodernist thinkers to confate the two.
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