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I understand that you feel that way, but I think youre not engaging with my arguments at all. Im not saying the government should "decide what the overton window is". I think they should apply some effort to persuasion. The whole reason youre worried youd have to agree with trans ideology is that your country is already so divided that theres two diametrically opposed ideologies which can change places based on 2% fluctuations of the vote. Wouldnt it be great if you hadnt gotten into this situation to begin with?
We worry a lot about factions in power being corrupted by that power, but we should also worry about factions out of power developing unrealistic and insane standards because they can afford to. In your comment below, you like church, family, and community: do those work without something to pull the people in them towards agreement? No, but you arent paranoid about it there because youre not worried about the enemy tribe. Very well then: have a national divorce, once, and then run your government as I described. Dont raise paranoia into a general principle which would in the end tear down that new nation as well. The liberal principle of the separation of state and society that you want to use to protect traditional institutions, is the same principle by which the state thinks it needs to protect individuals from them.
But the thing is that you can only actually get there by manufacturing consent. The only way to get from a very divided situation of a 2% swing on a major issue like trans, and especially trans kids is to do exactly what was done (and had been done previously to normalize gayness and before that integration) take control of the education and mass media systems and pump the culture with pro trans content. Which is why kids are getting easy-read books in their schools so that five year olds can be taught tge wonders of grown men pretending to be women. And then when they turn on the TV every citizen will be given hours of such propaganda and every show must have a token gay, trans or bisexual character.
If people were honestly coming to the conclusion that such things were good, fine. But that’s not how most of this stuff happens. Most of the ideas that we have consensus on are not coming about from people in their own homes and communities wrestling with the issue and spontaneously deciding to go along. It’s people being subjected to propaganda, then eventually accepting that they have to go along because they don’t want to be seen as the bigot. And eventually they are made to understand that HR will be+displeased if they say such crimethink out loud.
I agree, thats going to be diffcult to get out of either way. But if you could start out in a situation without problems like that, do you think theres no reliable way to prevent opinions from shifting too far apart other than evilbad propaganda?
Stop resting the legitimacy of government decisions on the backs of the peasants. When there was a monarchy, people didn’t try to convince the peasants, they tried to convince the king.
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