My favorite essay of the past few years – I share the author’s sentiment as well as his sense of humor – David Bentley Hart, Three Cheers for Socialism:

Persons of a reflective bent all too often underestimate the enormous strength that truly abysmal ignorance can bring. Knowledge is power, of course, but – measured by a purely Darwinian calculus – too much knowledge can be a dangerous weakness. At the level of the social phenotype (so to speak), the qualities often most conducive to survival are prejudice, simplemindedness, blind loyalty, and a militant want of curiosity. These are the virtues that fortify us against doubt or fatal hesitation in moments of crisis. Subtlety and imagination, by contrast, often enfeeble the will; ambiguities dull the instincts. So while it is true that American political thought in the main encompasses a ludicrously minuscule range of live options and consists principally in slogans rather than ideas, this is not necessarily a defect. In a nation’s struggle to endure and thrive, unthinking obduracy can be a precious advantage.

Even so, I think we occasionally take it all a little too far…

Two other good ones –

Abraham Josephine Riesman, The Best Way to Explain the G.O.P. Is Found in the W.W.E.:

The old-school kayfabe system — an oligarchy controlled by promotion-owners who acted as puppet-masters, giving wrestlers their marching orders about whom they had to pretend to be furious at for the next show — already had aspects that deeply resembled politics. Elected officials, too, pretend to be foes while actually being drinking buddies. Candidates sometimes tell rich backers one thing, and the public another. Election statements often sound ridiculous to those not caught up in the heat of the campaign.

So, too, did wrestling seem absurd to those who weren’t fans. In fact, it was absurd to many fans, too — even a child can notice, after a while, that some wrestling moves are impossible to perform without cooperation between the fighters. But these enthusiasts didn’t care that it wasn’t on the level; they loved the personalities and the spectacle, and they longed to lose themselves in the illusion. They wanted to believe. Whether out of pride or shame, fans would rarely acknowledge to detractors that their beloved “sport” was fixed. To defend its honor, they upheld the lie that it was real. Even if fans didn’t know the word, they were complying with kayfabe.

That is, until Vince McMahon killed it.

Adolph Reed Jr., Race and Class: The Beginnings of an Argument.  Some personal and theoretical reflections on intersectionality and its discontents:

The punch line here is that focusing at the level of daily life—the conditions under which people actually reproduce their material existence and define and pursue their aspirations—upends the British Jamaican sociologist Stuart Hall’s apothegm… that “race is the modality in which class is lived.” Race is certainly a modality within which people experience life under American capitalism. However, class—as the expression of location within the political economy—is the framework in which race attains meaning.