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Liberals are sort of, fundamentally incapable of understanding that the republican voter is more than just like, some stereotypical idiot white southerner, or self-interested multi-millionaire, I think. They're incapable of understanding that republican voters can often be some of the more marginalized in society. The disabled, and migrants, as we've seen. Dumb people, even, right, people with less education. Explicitly, explicitly this is the case, they bring it up all the time! As though that lack of education is some sort of moral failing, or thing to poke fun at. They don't understand that conservatives will rightly point out that sort of mockery and call them cruel elitists. It takes this cruel and apathetic stance towards those groups, this unempathetic stance that has no interest in understanding how we got there, this incurious stance. It's so overly moralized, to the point of incoherence. Well, that disabled person or migrant voted for trump, so, FAFO, they deserve to die, I guess. What am I to do? Well, looks like the palestinian voter in michigan decided not to vote, so, FAFO, guess their family is reserved to being buried under beachfront property. What am I to do?
It's callous, it's a self-callousing kind of reaction. It makes you number, and it makes you dumber. It's cope, basically, I guess is what I'm saying. It's a way to contend with a cruel reality by becoming crueler yourself.
It also has some intersection with two things. This assumption of free will, and thus a kind of innate moral character and disposition, a constant internal moral agency for all your actions, and so there's obviously something it inherently shares there with liberalism philosophically, right.
It also, in the positive rhetoric, has an intersection with this sort of, political armchair jockeying, where everyone theorizes that rhetorical moves are being made by politicians for some theoretical person out there that isn't them, but the fundamental character of the party is still agreeable, and okay. You can't question the party's positioning on Gaza. Even if you can cede that it's immoral, explicitly, then it has to be done because it's electorally advantageous. I don't understand how they can't see how this alienates a ton of people right off the bat, because it shows that you're willing to do things which are actively morally detestable and still not win. It's never the case for policy which itself is a positive end, like healthcare, that they are willing to violate legal and political norms in order to take action on that. Or even, say, violating political norms in order to stop a genocide. It's only that they're willing to keep up a genocide in order to win electorally, and then whatever follows is sort of what you're just supposed to get as a reward for sitting through 200,000+ people dying.
So I dunno, that all just pisses me off. I wish people could argue about actual tangible policy, and then pursue that unabashed as an unqualified good, rather than being tricked into believing that their own sense of good, their own goals, are naive, and they need to settle for more exploitation as the cost of doing business. It's both a cope that makes you callous and it's a nihilism that grinds you down. An apathy, in the face of politics.
I also don't understand why in the political realm we have all been so reduced to viewing things purely in terms of like, whatever is within our black and white moral compass. So team-based. No attempt at nuance, understanding, or empathy. It's insane, I think social media has truly kind of rotted people's brains, in that respect, by shaping the contexts in which these kinds of interactions happen, reducing the means of people's expression into pre-approved categories, into little sequestered realities. We're maybe cooked cause of that, I don't know.
There are plenty of people who are marginalized or lacking in education who don't vote Republican because it doesn't take a college degree to see that Trump tried to overthrow the government. Just because guys who are mad about not getting laid become neo-Nazis doesn't mean the rest of us who are dealing with hardship do. Black people have been getting shit on since well before this country was even a country and they're the most reliable Democratic demographic there is. Pretty much everyone has access to the internet and if they cared to learn about they world they could.
I mean, you can understand why black people have and have had historically a very unique position in this country as a kind of uniquely ostracized population, right? That's not a 1 to 1 comparison we'd make in like, any other circumstance, I dunno why we'd start now. Effectively, what I'm saying is something that goes back quite a ways, you could come up with a lot of historical examples of this, it's not new. Italian immigrants after ww2, eastern european immigrants, irish immigrants, even jewish immigrants to a certain extent, they were all able to be subsumed by the larger umbrella of whiteness precisely as they voted in accordance with more conservative interests which explicitly do not like them. The same thing that would have happened in this election with latinos, except we've run up on the rails of that process because things are materially different. What I'm saying is that it doesn't really make sense to get mad at that voterbase for voting in that particular way.
The broader point I'm making is that there's a difference between thinking about these things critically, and getting mad at the wind, and I see a lot of people getting mad at the wind. Except, unlike getting mad at the wind, their anger is actually harmful, actually creates a constant feedback loop in how it's directed. Some people get mad at a dog for biting them. Certainly, it makes sense to get mad in general, since you've been bit, that's painful, and the dog is the most directly at fault object for that. Some people get mad at the owner, since they can't control their dog, you know, maybe that's a step removed, maybe that's even actually effective at preventing future bites, I dunno. Some people just start to move towards the medicine cabinet as soon as possible, so they can clean their bite. I would rather be the third person, in that example.
I have plenty of blame to go around, and I'd put people who voted for Trump after four years of him being president and trying to overthrow the government after only the fascists and the media that enable them. He's not an unknown quantity anymore.
I know a lot of people in this country are dumb and selfish, but they don't get off the hook because of that. Plenty of white people don't vote for blatant racism, my parents grew up in a rural town in the "good old days" and figured it out.
but they don’t get off the hook because of that.
That's precisely my problem, there. I don't understand why people are "on the hook", or what "the hook" even is. Why we entertain this idea that people even have any agency whatsoever, for one, right. Like, the inherent problem of free will, people will just reject that either at its face, and supplement it with absolutely nothing, or they will reject the core lesson at play there.
Like, if this "hook" manifested in terms of people going out and engaging in mutual aid, or resolving to live, out of a sense of keeping other people accountable through just their own living, their own existence, that'd be cool. I've seen some people actually do that, and that seems productive, sure, why not. Hell, if "the hook" manifested in people going out and starting to move luigi style, against the people that are enabling this in, order of magnitude, I'd be fine with that. Other forms of militant action would also be acceptable.
Instead, oftentimes "the hook" just manifests in a bunch of easy rhetorical owns that often aren't even really productive for letting off steam. Probably because people aren't really capable of any other form of agency, or "holding people accountable", in their own lives, so they just resolve to like, making kind of aggressive twitter posts at people. That feels like fun and epic praxis, but it's not, it actually actively serves a counterproductive purpose as it is manipulated by these larger algorithms. That's the sort of thing that I'm talking about when I talk about, say, people FAFO-posting about how happy they are that conservative migrants are gonna get sent to the fucking death camps. There are liberals who are overjoyed at the irony in that idea, and I don't think that serves to do anything but make people rightfully more bitter at that behavior.
Like, what's the purpose of this "blame" here, what does it do? I don't want to shoot myself in the foot just to spite someone else, is what I'm getting at.
I know nothing's gonna come of me shitting on Trump voters but they get coddled by the media and they're voting to kill all of us. I want everyone to have free housing and healthcare, including them, but I'm still fucking pissed that people with a third-grade education have made it so I have to flee the country. I was finally building a life and had a home for myself and I have to chuck that all out because there's no way the gestapo doesn't start rounding up trans people in the next few years.
You know, I think despite what I've all said, being mad is good. It drives people towards action, it's just that I'm concerned about what said action is. I don't want everyone to get trapped in another 2017 #resist spiral, and I don't want us to fall into the trap of believing that feeding rhetorical owns to the algorithm in the form of content is some kind of valuable praxis. I don't want everyone to just kind of, have their punches absorbed by this kind of non-newtonian fluid machine that we've been met with.
I do agree that they get kind of, coddled by the media, or maybe a better word is, infantilized. Current VP basically wrote a book which basically did just that and rode that to his current position. Of course, you know, it's impossible to have these kinds of conversations with a lot of them, you know, it's impossible to have conversations about what's good to believe in, much less what to believe, much less what's good, if you're almost barely capable of talking in the first place.
In any case, I can empathize. I haven't built anything out of my life, many of my friends haven't really been afforded the opportunity either, especially those ones which are sort of, compoundingly less fortunate. I really worry that I won't be able to do anything substantial for my trans friends, you know? I can get them DIY, I can host a couch surfer, but to not be able to really solve these things at any larger level is kind of a motherfucker. It's depressing enough to look around at your own life and realize that everything is shit, it's much more depressing to realize that's also the case for everyone you know and care about, or is worse. I dunno. Depressing note to end on, but I guess that's how it goes.
So team-based. No attempt at nuance, understanding, or empathy.
team-based???
In the sense that one team is fine dismantling our government and sending key demographics to camps or worse, and that's not a team I'm willing to be on, yes I guess that makes me "team-based."
I'm not going to have the Gaza argument here again other than to say I see where you are coming from, and although I disagree with it, I also understand why "Trump won't be any better for Gaza" wasn't enough of a reason for some to pull the lever for the Biden/Harris admin.
Maga has trampled all over anything resembling empathic discourse for oh, about 8-9 years, and the US right in general for years before that. The time for reconciliation was before they installed the dictator. Now that we're all just descending into hell together atop the smoldering wreckage of our government, the folks I'm going to hug on the way down aren't the ones who voted us here.
For fucking real. Are these pleas for nuance ever aimed at the people voting for real actual neo-Nazis, instead of the people the neo-Nazis are going after?
Are these pleas for nuance ever aimed at the people voting for real actual neo-Nazis, instead of the people the neo-Nazis are going after?
My point is that those people are often the same. We saw a lot of this in the immediate aftermath of the election, with people pointing towards the apparently shockingly large contingent of latino trump voters. These are people who will be explicitly targeted by the administration that they voted for, and many liberals are fully willing to turn around and blame them for their current circumstance, laugh at them, mock them, whatever. I kind of find that behavior disgusting, is what I'm getting at, basically. More than just being kind of, uncouth, in my mind, it's unproductive. You're not gonna win over a voter with which you would actually have much in common, with those methods. I think it's easy to forget that in our current hyperpolarized social media age, the sort of, uninformed idiot centrist voter, even though they now have the pretense of being extremely informed and extremely radicalized after listening to two hour podcasts, they still exist. Those idiot bros now pretend to be super informed and edgy extremists, and we get that, again, even in your latino voters, but the fundamental lack of information still remains. These are just people who have been manipulated, they're not actually real or substantial ideological opposition. They exist in this propagandized state, this eclectic and confused ideological ball of misinformation, as a kind of explicit rubber stamp for our current political landscape. Many of them can still be convinced.
We do need to break through the propaganda. It's just frustrating being told to be nuanced with a huge chunk of people who either know what's happening and don't care, or have the ability to find out and don't. I'm nuanced with people I know in real life, but talking about Trump voters in general, 🤷♀️
Empathy and nuance aren't something that you do because you're guaranteed to get something in return from the other person as a kind of, reciprocal action. They're tools that you use to analyze your opposition, understand them better, and plan accordingly. They're internally rewarding methods, rather than being something you just do to get a reward.
I think we've all understood it to be the case for quite a while now that plenty of conservatives, being relatively uninformed blank slate or single issue voters, will actually agree with communism, as long as you don't use the word communism. Liberals, even, will not commonly do this, because they usually have much more pre-established and calcified opinions about the reasons why the world is the way that it is that go beyond just the surface level. That could even be considered a symptom of their higher education. We've understood that to be the case for like the last 20 years.
Why, then, is there still such a significant commitment towards mocking your rural conservative idiot voter, in the rhetoric of the left? I think there's a lot of people who still hold onto some semblance of liberalism in their culture, their rhetoric, their attitudes, even after they become a part of the left. I think there's probably also a significant proportion of actual liberals which, being controlled opposition, seeks exclusively to widen that divide and sort of, function as the pepsi to the coke, even as that strategy actively drives us towards more and more extremism and destroys the country. In any case, beyond the extremely cynical corporate institutional wing that actively desires for the country to be more right wing in service, at least theoretically, of tax breaks and a lack of regulations, or maybe more coherently, in service of short term gains, the regular individual should understand that this rhetoric, this strategy, it isn't really getting them anywhere. It's actively harmful. I think at some point with the individual participation in this behavior, people start to build up their own complexes around it, eerily similar to the complexes that conservatives begin to take, as I've described previously. A belief in a total and logic-defying free will, an innate moral character, meritocracy.
They fall for true liberalism. It shouldn't be any mystery why I might not like that ideology, I should think. Not in my leftists, not in my liberals. We should understand that's failed.
Why, then, is there still such a significant commitment towards mocking your rural conservative idiot voter, in the rhetoric of the left? I think there’s a lot of people who still hold onto some semblance of liberalism in their culture, their rhetoric, their attitudes, even after they become a part of the left. I think there’s probably also a significant proportion of actual liberals which, being controlled opposition, seeks exclusively to widen that divide and sort of, function as the pepsi to the coke, even as that strategy actively drives us towards more and more extremism and destroys the country.
Because I support policies that would help everyone, even "your rural conservative idiot voter" (your words), no matter how much disdain I have for their willingness to hurt everyone not like them. And that brings me to the point.
I could give a shit about them being rural. You won't find me ever attacking them in a way that includes that facet of who they are. They support the party that is visibly, publicly, actively, destroying everything they claim to hold dear, AND they support the party who is ready and willing to do harm, big and small, to anyone outside a very specific demographic. In many cases, they are the people doing the harm, not just supporters of the people doing harm.
I can understand them just fine, from over here, where I will continue to keep myself and those who are dear to me out of their destructive path as best I can.
You're not really who I'm talking about in my post, then. I agree with most of what you say. I was mostly talking about liberals who explicitly mock them, I was talking about "FAFO" shit, I dunno if you've seen it or not, but it's become a prevalent reaction. Just the same as, say, when you see people online mocking the idea of a starbucks boycott because palestinians didn't vote, right. Posing with their starbucks cups. Most of these people weren't ever committed to a boycott, which, sure, fine. But it sees that sort of a politics as explicitly transactional, rather than being founded on just doing what's right and good. That's the sort of thing that I'm getting at, rather than people just, I dunno. Not going out of their way to talk to conservatives at all about their ideologies or try to convince them. I think people should do that still, sure, but I'm not going to personally fault people for not going out of their way to do that, or being like, explicitly focused more on the people immediately around them, and their safety.
You’re not really who I’m talking about in my post, then.
Ah good. It did feel lke we were talking past each other a bit.
I was talking about “FAFO” shit, I dunno if you’ve seen it or not
I have zero FAFO towards people who took a principled stand on Gaza with their vote. I really, really wish they hadn't, but I understand why, and IIRC if they hadnt it wouldn't have swung the election anyway.
OTOH, I do think the "Trump will be worse for Gaza" argument is proving true.
I have plenty of FAFO for your general bigoted shitstains who have proven (and continue to prove) that their commitment to the "values" they preached about for decades is entirely hollow. They are going down in this flaming wreckage with all the rest of us, and when they realize Trump isn't just going to hurt the people they wanted hurt, it will do nothing but salve my own pain over seeing what they have done to our country.
That huge walll of text to try to say that those republicans are not all stupid. Have you met them? Do you have to work with them? Shop next to them? I call them the stupid 30% and they are stupid.
I live in the Midwest and I have not met a Republican that wasn't a moron.
Sure there obviously are Republicans that aren't morons. But they still voted with the MAGAts.
Republicans = moron or bigot
Either way you shouldn't trust them.