It’s true, and I get what you’re saying, but it’s also not the thing I find most frustrating about this whole topic.
It’s this false notion that “the left” is writing off huge swaths of the country, or denigrating them. When in fact, we’re fighting for affordable education, healthcare, and worker’s rights for all of us.
But people arguing the thing that even started this thread seem willing, nay eager, to equate a tweet from Whoopi Goldberg with a fucking executive order by TFG.
Sure, some people on the left think and post about how idiotic right-wing policies are. But no one making the kinds of arguments that will (hopefully) get shunted here ever bring the receipts showing how actual politicians in power on the left are doing any such thing.
It’s as if they’re listening to the mean girls telling them “everyone is laughing at you,” and they just believe it. You know?
And of course, ridiculing the policy isn’t ridiculing the person, either. Unless the policy is so wrapped up in the person’s identity that they take it as an insult to their person.
I’ve said and done stupid shit. So has everyone else. It’s the human condition. I worry about anyone who takes personal offense to criticism of saying or doing something stupid.
People can only seriously believe this, if they watch Fox News, and embrace right wing culture war ideas.
Which, in itself assumes that there is a literal physical divide between belief systems. There are countless progressive people living in predominantly regressive areas that have jobs they can’t give up, are too young to leave, are caring for family, love their culture, but not all that it entails, are trying to “fix” things from within, have deeper interests that they can’t leave, etc. When these issues of social justice come up, say the overturning of Roe, we aren’t outraged on behalf of the liberal people in New York and Washington, we are concerned about the people who, for numerous reasons, are having decisions made for them that impact their lives negatively and can only scream into the void.
This is why the Civil War was fought; it’s not that secession posed a significant threat to the North; it was fought on behalf of all of the citizens of the US, both enslaved and free, who were having their rights stripped away for the benefit of wealthy landowners and the impoverished useful idiots who were the ones actually dying. Even if 95% of a local populace is in agreement (which is never really the case), that 5% is well worth defending. If regressives get butthurt over that, I can’t find much empathy in my heart for them. And if one finds the term “useful idiots” offensive… well then don’t fight for idiotic ideals. 
I’m not sure how I stumbled onto her on Twitter a few years ago, but ever since I cannot read the phrase “family farm” without instinctively reacting to it as a talking point.
One that’s designed to invoke images of a little old couple working on the family 40 acres struggling to make a living. When in reality, most polcies targeting family farms are taken advantage of by what most of us would think of as large businesses. Along with the other alternative of vanity farms, taking advantage of the policies even though they’re not working farms at all. Neither of which is that idealic picture they’re tyring to make us think of.
While at the same time, excuding other types of farming, like co-ops, by lumping them into what we think of as larger businesses, even when they are small.
Because the majority of such folks have made up their mind. Let me give you a personal example. A week or so ago a friend of mine from Second Life gave me a link to a video on Rumble, a red flag among many, to someone that styled themselves as a “doctor” that claimed that COVID-19 was from a lab leak in China where they were trying to weaponize corona viruses. So I did my own search to see who this person was. First, they weren’t a medical doctor, they used the term doctor from their doctorate in financial analyst as credential spoofing. I pointed this out to my friend but she pushed back saying “well is he wrong?” I answered yes after listing the citations this so-called doctor tried to use to make his case which amusingly most of them didn’t prove his thesis. In fact, the citations he used were the exact opposite of what he thought they meant so either he’s ignorant of how to read scientific literature or was intentionally leaving out context of said citations to make people buy his story. Well, the conversation with my friend just was too much and I had to block and unfriend them on Second Life because she clearly wanted someone to validate her beliefs and feelings that some how COVID-19 was done by the CCP to some how harm the US and world economy which makes zero sense since bioweapons are indiscriminate. It’s like setting a building on fire which both you and your victims are trapped. So much for logic because it’s that kind of person you’re dealing with. They want YOU to believe their nonsense, not the other way round. And all you do is tire yourself out when debating such folks. It does no one any good to argue with true believer types.
Would this be a good time to mention that “Somebody Somewhere” is an excellent series (2 seasons done, but a promise that there will be a 3rd season)?
Set in rural Kansas, lots of what you describe. Also funny, and well written/acted. Lots of singing, too.
It would and I was actually thinking of that show, partially. However, it hits waaaay too close to home, literally and figuratively, so I only made it through a few episodes. I wish I knew that many cool people in my hometown, though.
This might be straying too far off topic, let me know @gracchus if we should move it elsewhere, but recent conversations have me ruminating and it seems related to this thread.
I’ve spent years if not decades politely talking to more right-wing members of my social group, including blood relatives, trying to understand them, relate to them, and find common ground. It’s only more recently I realized that I’ve never seen this reciprocated. I can’t imagine I’m an outlier here.
I know it’s ‘anecdata’ but it does lend credence to us calling bs on the whole, “if only the left would try to understand more narrative.
The Left in America wants to be one side of a functional democracy
The Right wants to win, and to rule, and that’s it
Oh, I understand that. What I’m trying to get at with my previous post is, has anyone here ever had the right-wing members of their social group try to ‘understand where they’re coming from’?
I sure haven’t.
Seems all the effort is coming from one side, and it’s the side constantly berated for not trying to relate enough.
The best I’ve gotten is that the right-winger is polite and avoids a lot of topics.
But if you think about it, the idea that someone has an opinion based on knowledge and experience, and thus the opinion takes time to develop and can be changed with new information is a concept that is culturally foreign to them. Why would they ask about that process? It’s not how they come to their conclusions.
I came here looking for more tips on how to be a left in a world where everything assumes you’re right-handed. You disappointed me, Boing Boing!
Kidding aside, I think the point here is that we belong to a tribe that when we lose, when we come in second, our instinct is to look to our own performance. To better ourselves. To accept what happened and work to win the next one.
The authoritarians lack this introspection, if they lose they immediately assume it’s because the other side cheated, not because they were better in any way. Often they simply refuse to even concede that they lost, that they are digging themselves into a hole.
What we often fail to accept is that the authoritarians do cheat, and cheat as much as they can because they feel they ought to win, and if they can’t win playing by the rules then the rules don’t apply to them, only to everyone else. And what makes it so hard to fight is that the cheaters have little to no compassion, will happily hurt others, even their own supporters, if it gives them some personal benefit.
Nope. Ever since the rise of Faux News, even the more traditional conservatives have been somewhat resistant to trying to understand where I’m coming from as a New Deal liberal (which isn’t exactly waving the red flag of revolution). Murdoch has completely poisoned the field with them, so I certainly wouldn’t consider engaging someone in the Know Nothing 27%.
This has been my experience as well. Effectively an informal and sometimes unspoken detente, which isn’t great.
No.
Any conversation even remotely close to that was a) then fishing for common cause (ie. throwing out a racist, sexist, anti-BLM statement to seek out reciprocation), b) an attempt at conversion or c) a supposed “mike drop” moment meant to shut me up, which was easily dismantled (eg. my dad saying Obama isn’t an American, then reminding him that he was raised by his white family in Kansas, literally just over the border).
Never, not even once, have I been asked by conservative friends, family or acquaintances what I believe or how I came by those beliefs. Not once.
Oh, but I’ve been TOLD what I believe many times. They’re always wrong! But Fox News told them so, so it must be true.
I do love the double-takes I get when I point out that I’m legitimately a ‘conservative’ person. I mean that in the dictionary definition way, not the authoritarian-reactionary-nazi way. You can see the confusion behind their eyes until they settle on ‘she doesn’t know what she’s saying’ or ‘she’s lying, of course’…different people, different levels of justification.
But never, NEVER have I been asked “what do you mean?”
I have one friend who genuinely listens open-mindedly. He even asks me questions, since he doesn’t keep up with current events or politics, and he knows I do.
My only frustration is that he “falls back” between conversations, and I have to ratchet him back up before we can make progress.
But I was able to provide him with valid information about COVID vaccines which he and his family actually put to use. He has a public-facing job and really, really needed to be vaccinated. His partner was pressuring him not to because of that bullshit line that the vaccine was tested on aborted fetuses. So I gave him the information that the J&J vaccine was produced using a placental stem cell line, so that might be one he and his partner could avoid if that was a problem, but that the Moderna and Bio-N-Tech didn’t involve any production or testing involvement with reproductive cell lines. So they got mRNA vaccines. 
Later, he asked about the “genetic reprogramming” boogeyman, so I explained how the mRNA vaccines work and how there is no permanent change to genetic code from them. That eased his mind.
You did a good thing for your friend and his family.
Now repeat that, millions of times!
