Yes, I think this nails it.
I do think you miss one small element - which can be oversimplified to “…except for those people that I know and like.” The transformation from radical to mainstream of, e.g. gay identity is because too many people knew someone really well (often in their own family) who was gay, and that can’t help but change your opinion*. At which point, they started to comprehend the notion that, you know, other gay people that they don’t know personally might not be evil. This may not lead to a transformation in their wholesale world view, but hey, it’s a start.
*yes, I know that some people would react by becoming even more extreme, but that does seem to be a minority.
Of course, those of us on the other side of this particular tribal split have the same sort of naive view that people are essentially good. Which perhaps makes us even more susceptible to eloquent sociopaths because we tend to believe them!
John Robb of Global Guerrillas doesn’t think much of Clay Shirky’s analysis:
"Analysis like this is what happens when you do your thinking in a social media echo chamber. John Robb added,
Clay (((Shirky))) @cshirky
He is the voice of people who hear ‘hard-working’ as a synonym for ‘white.’ He is the voice of people who think black lives matter less.
“This isn’t about relative decline re; minorities. It’s about absolute decline over forty years.”
Robb has a point. The middle class has been hollowed out, on purpose, over the last 30 or 40 years. The economic pain of the non-1% is foundational in this election and the national politics of the USA in the early 21st century.
Walking through Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA today, I saw a young man with a t-shirt reading “Latino American” with the “Latino” crossed out. He was also wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat and what I interpreted as a self-satisfied smile on his face.
Privilege is invisible by nature to the privileged.
We can learn to see it, but it’s far from a comfortable awakening. If I were committed to racism or supremacy I’d reject any insight into other people’s experience outright.
Who wants to be that uncomfortable?!
(Note that I’m not saying my awareness of my own privilege is complete or special, just that I’m better than I was, and remain committed to seeing as clearly as possible through that mirror)
Sometimes, you really have to look towards the best probable result, rather than the best possible. If there’s not enough people pulling in the same direction against the worst, well…
(though, obviously, that’s not an excuse for not continuing the push for something even better…)
I would be interested to know what others here think of this statement. It seems absurd to me. If liberalism is about the common person, how/why would it be that most people are against the common person when, in most cases, this empowers themselves? There are a vanishingly small population who benefit from conservative corporatism at everybody else’s expense. I would agree that things aren’t great now, but it seems more like a fluke to me than some permanent axiomatic truth.
Are US liberals a minority? Sure, I can accept that they might be at times. But being a permanent minority seems defeatist and improbable.
Understood. It’s that inherent lack of self-reflection that makes the privileged feel like any change to their status quo is an injustice. Hence, their visceral attraction to a savior/warrior archetype.Their increasing powerlessness to control the world around them is literally making them crazy. The blaming of the “other” for this predicament is right on cue. If Avin Toffler had been required in every high school for the last thirty years everyone would be a lot less surprised at the dislocating impact of technology for the unprepared. Strap in…we’re just getting started on this mind trip.
Well, I gave it a shot, and within 24 hours of “Operation Ask Questions”, I got a tearful message from my mother asking me to stop being so political since I might hurt my relative’s feelings.
Hah! I got kicked off the family email lists during the 2004 election cycle (I converted to a liberal right after 9/11, so I missed the 2000 election).
It was a sight bigger than any general election turnout recently. Sadly, it was mainly everyone’s racist nan, but that’s the generation that votes the most everywhere…
I would rather say “That there are millions of people planning to vote for him is the problem.” Because describing approximately half of the electorate as “the problem” is the funhouse mirror image of Romney’s “47 percent” comment.
The comment quoted above, and indeed the original article fall into a sort of “demographic determinism.” Looking at demographics is important, but seeing the election ONLY in demographic terms leaves an electorate deeply divided and polarized. In a sense, it is the death of democracy and its replacement with a sort of tribal majoritorieism. That is the path to something like Erdogon’s Turkey.
Yes you should never assume that everybody is like you and your friends That can lead to the sort of complacency that the article complains about. But we should also not assume that those who disagree with us are some sort of implacable, irredeemable “other,” too stupid to be convinced or have their opinion changed. Just like the song says, everybody is a little bit racist. But almost nobody sees themselves as racist. When you accuse people of being racist, not just to their faces, but even just as a group, say “The South is dominated by white racists,” they get defensive and stop listening. And at a fundamental level, we have too much shouting, and not enough listening.
But then you run into a major difficulty: the Confederate states are dominated by white racism, and have been since their founding [1].
You can’t deal with a problem by pretending that it doesn’t exist. Demanding respect for the hyper-sensitivity of racist white people is a classic silencing/derailing tactic. It may at times be tactically useful in order to avoid provoking racist retaliation, but it doesn’t do a damned thing to solve the underlying issues.
This is the problem with the “we are all one America, division and partisanship is the problem” Third Way rhetoric of Obama and the Clintons. It plays into a false equivalency that sacrifices the rights of the oppressed for the sake of maintaining business-as-usual.
When the conflict is the Klan vs innocent victims, you can’t make progress by trying to find a “reasonable” middle-ground compromise. “A little bit lynched” is not an acceptable solution.
As Obama’s Presidency demonstrated, the problem was not “partisanship”. The problem is that the GOP has transformed itself into a nihilistic white nationalist party completely divorced from ethics and reality.
There are situations in which one side of a political dispute is absolutely in the wrong.
[1] Which, of course, does not imply that other parts of the USA aren’t also substantially shaped by racism.
