I’ll throw out a lazy curve: Humans are biologically programmed to have a nemesis. There’s a thing in our brains that really wants at least one Other to hate or sneer at. On the Right it’s damned near formalized and codified, the message lays down the rule. Patriot! Worker! Tax Avoider! Religious!
So yeah. I see a bunch of that day to day in Kentucky, by which I mean I see it ten or twenty times a year. If I watched Fox, I’d see it twenty times a day.
Flip side, I’m certainly a hardcore liberal/Democrat for the foreseeable future, and not much outside of real policy changes would move me on that. But, I am frequently insulted by the sneering and racist attitude towards anywhere other than coastal blue sanctuaries. I’m sure some will think “Racist?! Fuck you, I’m not racist!” but then think about how you talk about the south and the midwest negatively, and then examine whether your picture when you are thinking that way is particularly pointed at white people when those areas have the highest concentration of black people.
I get it, don’t get me wrong. But check yourself occasionally and see if there aren’t certain broad strokes you’re blind to in service of your need to have a whipping boy.
The interesting thing is i consider the Midwest the most polite place in the US. I lived in Nebraska and Iowa, and while Omaha had a few yahoos, the rest was the best place in the US for warm and kind people. Everyone was courteous and welcoming FAR better than my time on the West Coast and Id have to snicker trying to include the East Coast as it was dead last as far as that was concerned. I still have fond memories of people waving at me on the road as i drove past in Iowa! That was alien to me when it first happened, but i totally loved it after getting over the shock lol. I’m also a 6’3" white male who was in the military at the time, so I’m cognizant enough to realize that might have played a part in my experience and perception
Yes, we should certainly use the thread created to talk about how to deal with the threat to democracy and stability presented by right-wing extremism to talk about what’s wrong with people on the left. Carry on.
Yes, carry on. Whenever someone is shooting at you, the most important thing to worry about is whether someone else, sometime in the future, somewhere else, might buy a gun.
Or worry about gun control at anytime later right?
Listen scottagibson. I really love our chats, i really do!
I take the time to lay out my logic and reasoning and context and thinking and you respond with a drive-by insult mixed with conflating my point into an absurd straw man fallacy with a dash of being pissy! It’s great, always a joy! 👌
You could read the thread title, read the OP. You could make another thread to promote your bothsides hobby horse. But no, you won’t do that. So, yes, carry on.
I can’t figure out if you are dense or being intentionally dense. I read the OP, asked questions, offered my thoughts, and even asked for feedback. Ideally looking for someone to engage civially and in a like-minded thoughtful discussion.
That you read my take us a " bothsides hobby horse" is a very much a YOU problem! That wasn’t the point I was trying to make even remotely and that you try to tie that to me, shows how badly you operate in bad faith.
By pointing out it occurs as a human behavior in our culture period, I’m making the point of how do we address it so we don’t get here again, to the OPs point! Classes on critical thinking, ext? or what?
This is probably a vain attempt to restore this to an earnest discussion since you’ve never had one with me in good faith previously, but i can at least say i tried.
I don’t think there is any way around this except better policy choices to deal with the winners and losers of technological and economic changes. That means better people making policy. Win more elections —> better policies —> better outcomes —> win more elections. That’s the feedback loop we need.
In a way, it’s a recreation of the political status quo from 1932-1968, except of course that that era was optimized for the best outcomes for white heterosexual men and not so much for anyone else.
People on the right love to disparage ideas like a Green New Deal, or government-funded health care, or better economic supports for unemployed people who have been displaced by change. But it is precisely those kinds of policies we need.
Someone posted the manifesto of demands that accompanied the March on Washington in 1963. It is primarily remembered as a civil rights march, but three of the articulated demands were about jobs and good wages and fair conditions and opportunity for everyone. They wanted a national program to train and employ unemployed people of any race, a national minimum wage tied to a decent standard of living, and extension of the fair labor standards act to cover all employment. Those demands are still salient today, especially in an era where we see some states moving to tear down labor regulations.
If we want to be a bit reductionist, we can distill all of this down to economics, or more accurately, class, in a Marxian sense. While Marx was a product of his time and place, and a rather dreadful prophet whose works are woefully inadequate as actual templates for revolution, he was a superb analyst of capitalism as a holistic system. For a variety of historical reasons, class as a concept and framework never took hold in the American intellectual tradition, much less in the popular mind, like it did in other places.
The absence of a formal class analysis in American discourse–as opposed to the way Americans use the world class, which generally means income and sometimes includes cultural assumptions associated with income levels–means that we are unable to recognize and articulate the underlying causes of much social and economic phenomena. Because we reject the concept of class in a theoretical sense, we have to explain everything in other terms. Usually we fall back on culture, identity, and wealth, all of which are products of class dynamics rather than causes, at least the way I see it.
So we end up with a huge portion of the population who are objectively getting the short end of the stick, but who feel their interests are more aligned with the folks screwing them over than with their fellow screw-ees. This is of course not accidental, as the history of labor and race and gender in America, among other things, shows quite clearly. Without a framework to establish commonality between the groups of people on the bottom who have more or less superficial differences that are exploited by those on top, you can’t really build a movement for real change.
This requires a solution to actually get people to associate the better policies with the better outcomes with the people who got that done. Elections are rarely about this or at least those things are simply secondary to other things in most voters minds. Certainly demonization of policies by media doesn’t help(the people who hate Obamacare but love their ACA) but I think a lot of is just the complicated cause and effect where people can’t draw the line between policy and their own outcome.
I would say this is more a function of the defanging of the left in the US, and the success of the far-right in the US ever since WWII.
If the average politician was like myself or Armando, while the US would be a lot better, happier, more colorful place, there would be folks who would want to keep taking things farther, or would be afraid of losing the changes, and that fear would lead to a feedback loop.
@Houngan, at least in the queer leftist community, those sorts of attitudes you talk about are policed against by the community. It’s regularly pointed out that the folks outside of the sanctuaries the lucky ones get to live in are the most oppressed, and need our help to be liberated. Then again, that tended to be a younger community until COVID.
FWIW, I don’t think it’s correct to conflate contempt for someone’s policy choices with racism, and I think the people of color in e.g. Mississippi are victims of the racist policy choices of their white neighbors, rather than being the architects of those policy choices. POC in Mississippi don’t make the regime they live under. Opposing the new confederacy isn’t leftist racism. And blue sanctuaries aren’t coastal. They’re urban, and they’re everywhere. The ‘coastal elites’ language is just another right-wing attack on race.
Oh, I agree. You see this laid bare in polls that show respondents have contempt for liberalism while broadly supporting nearly all of the policies proposed by liberals.
But if we are talking about this feedback loop that drives ever-greater right-wing extremism, where else can you start to fight it without gaining more control of the reins of power?
The more I think about the feedback loop on the right – and the frothing sort of madness that it seems to encourage – the more it sounds and feels like the events of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.
That’s the burning question in my mind. How do we offramp narrative thinking as a healthy element of political discourse? How do we reinforce in people’s minds that narratives, feelings and beliefs as a policy framework ARE dangerous?
That the boring facts, data, evidence, and historical success (or failure) of policies should be the PRIMARY deciders got lost in the last few generations, from my perspective.
I think beliefs as a policy framework can be dangerous, but they don’t have to be. It really depends on the belief in question. It’s hard to think of any policy framework that isn’t underpinned by beliefs. For example, I think as a matter of policy it ought to be convenient and easy to vote, and the policy framework for voting laws should reflect that. I think so because I believe that it’s good to give people a say in who represents them. But that’s just a belief, isn’t it?
This. In many ways, we are living the better days now. They aren’t in our history. They’re right here.
