Republicans are regularly called “stupid” by Democrats, but there is one label that so comprehensively describes and predicts the political behavior of today’s left-dominated Democratic Party that it deserves to be regarded as a meta-label: postmodernist.

Institutionalized, formal postmodernism is almost exclusively centered in higher academia; you will search in vain for an average man on the street who says, “I am a postmodernist.”  However, academic postmodernism has long been reaching out from its lofty eyries via its “educated” acolytes, who have been busy for decades quietly worming their way into American life from top to bottom, including not just politics, but education at all levels, entertainment, journalism, corporations, foundations, even churches — everything that affects you and me.  Postmodernism is much more than a philosophy; it is today’s foundational cultural driver.

If you doubt that expansive claim for postmodernist influence, consider the poll results published almost a decade ago by the Barna Research Group, an organization that does polling for Christian organizations.  You’d expect evangelical Christians to hold to a cornerstone belief in an absolute (Biblical) standard of good and evil, right?  Wrong.  Barna’s poll showed, astonishingly, that an overwhelming majority of evangelical adults (68%) cleave instead to postmodernist moral relativity.

For a normal, intelligent person to get his hands around academic postmodernism is a daunting challenge: the literature of the movement, particularly of its most ardent proponents, is definitely — deliberately? — unperspicuous.  Nevertheless, some basic principles that anyone can understand and that point clearly to a political matrix can be extracted from this intellectual miasma:

1. Rejection of universal, objective truth and meaning.
2. Rejection of universal moral absolutes.
3. Rejection of rationality.
4. Rejection of language as a way to convey objective information from author to reader.  Postmodernism informs us that the reader is now in charge of deciding what the text says.
5. Rejection of individualism.  An individual’s concept of truth and rules of morality are determined solely by the group to which he “belongs,” from which there is no exit.
6. “Truth” and “morality” are “social constructs” that vary from one group to another.
7. One group’s “truth” and “morality” are as worthy and valid as another’s.
8. Historical prevailing truth and morality are merely the opinions of the group in power and are designed to serve their goal of oppressing the powerless, the victims.
9. Because “truth” and “morality” are relative and “reason” is a futile delusion, victim groups must resort to raw power and, if necessary, deceitfulness to throw off the oppressive shackles imposed by the powerful.  Lies, propaganda and bullying, sometimes even physical violence, are necessary armaments in the arsenal of the oppressed.

Now, which of the two major American political parties is this beginning to sound like?  Surely you need only one guess, not three.

Yes, today’s Democratic Party is profoundly infected at its rootby postmodernism — an outrageous fraud cleverly covered up by a fog of arcane gibberish and deceitful, euphemistic code words that permit its adherents to imagine that they are members of a superior, elite gnostic coterie when in fact they are intellectual eunuchs and just plain lazy.  It’s so easy to be a postmodernist: now that objectivity has been declared to be dead, we no longer have to suffer the onerous mental toil and exertion required to be right.  That’s one of the chief reasons for its appeal to ignorant people.

A second lure of postmodernism is simple lust for tyrannical power over others.  One doesn’t have to be a member of the activist Democrat power elite to enjoy such wretched malefaction; one can drink deeply of it vicariously, and countless ignorant supporters do just that when they gather in their mindless mobs like they did recently in Madison, WI.  Moreover, postmodernists have a near-pathological obsession with “bullying,” as is made obvious in the offshoot movement known as “diversity training.”  Could it be that they know down deep that their unprincipled non-morality is a wide open door to power-mongering and abusive behavior?  That they themselves are the biggest bullies in town?  What about the SEIU thug who bit off the guy’s finger?  The fusillade of e-mailed death threats delivered to Republican legislators in Wisconsin?  The constant braying of leftist postmodernists about “bullying” has a distinct odor of projective slander.

It would be hard to find a more perfect example of the fashionably foolish nonsense of postmodernist “deconstruction” and other putative postmodernist “thinking” than the utterly bogus, deceitful model of constitutional interpretation, so worshiped by “critical legal theory” proponents and their deluded Democrat janissaries, that says the U. S. Constitution is somehow a “living, breathing document.”  Read: the Constitution is a wax nose to be pummeled into any shape radical-left Democrats desire at the moment to advance their tyranny.  Who says we can’t know what the founders meant when they wrote the Constitution?  Those patriots were some of the most prolific writers in human history.  Yes, there was some disagreement among them but vastly more agreement; otherwise, they wouldn’t have bequeathed us our Constitution.  Every one of them would surely be scandalized to learn that some citizens today imagine they know better than the founders themselves what they, the founders, meant.

While postmodernism has taken over the Democratic Party at large, obviously not all registered Democrats are postmodernists.  Recognizing the hardcore, dyed-in-the-wool postmodernists among them, however, is not difficult; the above list of basic principles provides all the guidance needed.  You will know you are in the presence of such a one when your interlocutor:

1. Responds to your linear, reasoned arguments with a hodgepodge of talking points and logical fallacies that can be tied together only by reference to raw power and domineering personality.
2. When you refuse to be confounded by the talking points, begins talking faster, then louder, then faster and louder, refusing to be interrupted before demanding the last word.
3. When outcomes 1 and 2 above are greeted by your tolerant chortle and shaking head, resorts finally to ad hominem attacks on you and your ideological compatriots.  That’s when the serious bullying begins, and it will only get worse the longer you hang around.

However, you should never permit outcome 3 to get underway; at that point further conversation is irremediably futile.  Instead, when outcome 2 shows all signs of intensifying, and no signs of abating, you should rise, politely excuse, yourself and walk away.

The above personal transaction template is a small-scale simulation of a universal conservative response to our overall political environment today.  It is a painful but all too undeniable reality that the era of good-faith politics in America is over, maybe forever.  We can no longer reason together.  Because conservatives and radical leftists no longer share a common cognitive/interlocutory matrix, there is no realistic possibility of ever arriving at any junctures of common interest on any but trivial or inconsequential issues.  We conservatives can respond to Democrat power-mongering only by truthfully, intrepidly calling out the better nature of our fellow Americans to drive all Democrats from their fortress of tyranny over our nation.

This post first appeared as an article in American Thinker on September 20, 2011.