You Have a Right to My Opinion

One of my right-wing Christian acquaintances posted this meme today.  I've noticed that a lot of right-wingers (which includes a lot of liberal Democrats, unfortunately) express this attitude, and it needs to be slapped down harshly.  (In fact, a liberal Dem FB friend also put a Like on this meme.)

The assumption seems to be that if they get pushback for posting viciously bigoted crap, as they love to do, it's because their critics don't "like" them.  Very often the pushback comes from family members who actually love them, but disagree with their opinions.  As Christians, they should be able to understand the difference -- "Hate the sin, love the sinner" is another of their cliches -- but they prefer to make it all about them.  It's an easy way of denying responsibility for their actions.

"Like" her?  I barely know her.  This woman went to the same high school I did, fifty-plus years ago.  All I know about her now is what she posts on Facebook.  If you post stuff urging your fellow Christians to lock yourselves indoors and pray so that God will spare you from COVID (hah!), while all the unbelievers outside get sick and die, of course I'm going to call you out on it.  If your grandkids call you out on it, of course I'll back them up.  Get used to it.  Bigotry and lies do an enormous amount of harm, and you and your buddies have gotten away with it for far too long.

I don't mind when others disagree with me, even forcefully.  Really, I don't.  That's another story.  Well-meaning liberal friends have told me that I shouldn't be surprised if people get angry when I disagree with them.  I'm not surprised at all.  The surprise seems to be all on the part of people who've never had to face disagreement from people they know.  They just throw tantrums and cast themselves as victims of Cancel Culture (or whatever it's called this week).  It's common to speak of Trumpies as if they were totally distinct from the rest of the population, but they aren't.  They're our neighbors, our coworkers, our parents and grandparents, they're people we went to school with.  Of course, if they are nasty enough, we may decide not to "like" them after all.  But that's a result, not a cause of the disagreement.

Another Facebook friend from the same school and of the same vintage replied to my remarks: "I am glad I read your explanation because as a recovering people pleaser I may have interpreted this differently until I read on."  I'm glad she replied, because I'd overlooked that aspect of the meme.  Many older women have expressed similar sentiments.  But the original poster and I have frequently clashed over the content of some of her posts, especially since the rise of Donald Trump.  Now older right-wing women have claimed the freedom and power to be bigoted scum - though in reality they always found ladylike ways to do it before.

But that's oversimple: as I indicated, the person who posted the meme loves to post stuff that's hostile to everyone outside her bubble -- for example, at the peak of the pandemic she was posting memes about Christians locking themselves in and praying while everyone outside died. (In the real world, it was just the opposite: those who locked themselves into their churches got sick and many died.  Maybe that's why I haven't seen those memes lately.) Like many right-wingers of both sexes, she alternates between kissyface-huggybear memes about God's Love for All and hateful memes about those who do not love God and America Donald Trump. 

Men learn to submit to more powerful men while dumping on those they think are safely below them.  Heterosexual women are on the same hierarchical scale, below their fathers and husbands and above their children and anyone else they can look down on.  Trump's women supporters are standing under the protection of his leathery wings, feeling free to bash all the subordinates they couldn't make to suffer enough before 2016.

The deeper problem is that most people have no idea what to do when someone disagrees with them. At best they think that debate means that I state my opinion and you state your opinion and it stops there, because Everybody Has a Right to Their Own Opinion. (In fact that's where debate begins.) At worst they think debate means the shouting matches they see on CNN or Fox News, which isn't debate either.
A lot of people say there's no point in debate because you'll never change the other person's mind, and they'll never change yours. That's usually true, but I'm not trying to change my opponent's mind. I hope that people watching/reading the exchange will see what the arguments are and judge for themselves. Most of the time most people don't even know that there is another side to a question.  The function of the corporate media is to limit acceptable alternatives in order to exclude any others.

For example, this news clip about an anti-Biden flag flown by a Phoenix homeowner begins with one of the anchors asking rhetorically, "Is it vulgarity or political free speech?"  This is the kind of false antithesis centrists love.  "Fuck Biden" is both "vulgarity" and "political free speech."  (In my day, "fuck" was an obscenity, not a vulgarity.  And it turns out that the flag in question doesn't spell out the obscenity anyway, though I gather other versions being flown around the country do.)  The comments under the clip are educational too, with Trump fans exulting that they've shown how much smarter they are than "libtards" who say "Fuck Trump" by ... adopting their tactics.

But that's an old story, and in many ways I'm grateful to the Right, who make acceptable subjects and discourse that the media would prefer to censor quietly.  Does anyone else remember Anita Bryant? Her antigay crusade in the late 1970s enabled the mainstream media to cover subjects they were too cowardly to cover before. Bryant said that the Bible forbids fellatio because semen "is the most concentrated form of blood." No radical gay activist could (or would) have said that on national TV, but a reactionary Christian woman could. Thanks to Bryant for opening the floodgates to Queer as Folk!

Triumph of the Trump

I'm traveling again, and staying in a motel, so I'm seeing more TV news than usual.  The Donald Trump campaign has been getting a lot of attention.  Even the Chinese restaurant in my home town had their TVs tuned to Fox News, featuring Trump at the border, trying to look like a regular guy in a baseball cap.

I liked what Amanda Marcotte had to say about the whole depressing spectacle.

At this point, there is no doubt that the ongoing love for Donald Trump on display by the Republican base really says something about said base. Certainly, it makes it that much harder to buy the generous argument that the conservative base is a bunch of white people who have been manipulated through genius trickery into voting against their own economic interests, and makes it clear that we’re looking at bullies who would rather burn the country to the ground than share it with people they hate for utterly irrational reasons.

This gave me something to think about, however:

[Trump] is saying “forbidden” things that the “liberal elite” hates. Indeed, that structure pushes their buttons so hard that the actual content of the “forbidden” things hardly matters. All that matter is the “liberal elite” hates them and that other Republicans—deemed cowards—speak out against him. He could be screeching incoherent nonsense and as long as it seemed hateful and the “liberal elite” hates it, the base will love him.

It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that if the "liberal elite" really wanted to frustrate Trump, let alone to counter him, the sensible thing would be not to react to him as they do.  Oh, how can you say such awful things!?  is a perfectly stupid way for liberals, or anyone, to respond to right-wing provocations.  In the first place, it's just the reaction that Trump, Coulter, O'Reilly, and their ilk hope to inspire; why give them what they want?  If liberals are as much smarter than right-wingers as they love to believe they are, why not come up with clever retorts that will frustrate them, instead of gratifying them?  (There is, of course, a whole line of posts in the liberal blogosphere that tout someone giving some dumb Republican his comeuppance -- Person X Shreds / Destroys / Disembowels Conservative Y With One Well-Chosen Word -- but the ones I've seen don't amount to much.  But even if they were better, my point is that that's how liberals should always respond.)

In the second place, I think that liberals like reacting as they do.  It lets them feel morally superior to the awful, awful, conservatives.  And then there's the satisfying, soul-cleansing rush of the ragegasm, an addiction of many all over the political spectrum.  I don't mean to rule out emotion altogether, but throwing a tantrum -- especially a tantrum that delights your opponents because it's what they hoped to produce, as proof that they're right -- is not a constructive, let alone intelligent or rational, way to deal with conflict.

In the third place, I suspect that one reason for the emotional reaction is that many liberals, deep down inside, are attracted by people like Trump and Reagan and Bush and Goldwater. It was instructive, right after Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, to see how many liberals used him as a human shield, moving toward the right and saying that it was okay because they weren't as bad as Reagan, but you had to admit that some of what he said made sense. Which it didn't, of course.  There was some of the same self-congratulatory pleasure in (believing that they were) going against the grain, boldly defying the (supposedly) conventional wisdom about war, poverty, race, feminism, reproductive rights, gay people, and so on.  Which is why, when Bill Clinton became president in 1992, he could implement Reaganite policies as a Democrat.  Obama is another example of the syndrome.

About 90% of what I see about Trump from my liberal and progressive friends on Facebook is in that vein: He's so awful! He's so stupid!  His hair is stupid! Though they aren't quite sure why he's awful and stupid.  Wouldn't it be nice if there was a Democratic candidate equivalent to Trump -- and I don't mean the cautious and moderate Bernie Sanders -- who could perform the same service for liberals?  Is there a significant segment of the Democratic base that would go wild for a clown who called for stringing up capitalists and priests from every lamppost?  And would the corporate media give as much attention to such a person as they give to Donald Trump?

A Difficult Concept for Many to Grasp

... I guess it's rocket science. But this guy summed it up neatly. (Thanks to PunkAssBlog for the image and the link.)

Lisa Kansas at PunkAssBlog also shared this bit of good news:

Operation Rescue says it’s broke, may shut down

Scott Roeder, 51, of Kansas City, Mo., faces charges of murder and aggravated assault in the slaying of Tiller as the Wichita abortion provider ushered at a Sunday morning church service.

Tiller’s killing has also been a public relations nightmare for the group — despite its public condemnation of the slaying — since the name and phone number of the group’s senior policy adviser was found in Roeder’s car when he was arrested. A television crew zoomed in on the scrawled note inside the car in images that made their way to the Internet.

This was a couple of weeks ago, but I hadn't been paying attention. I'll have to check out PAB more often.

Avedon at the Sideshow complained that nobody linked to her analysis of the New York Times poll on health care, so there's the link. Her podcast interview/conversation is worth a listen, too. (Someone mentioned that until they listened to it, they weren't sure how to pronounce her name, which is one reason I decided to listen to it; I'm gratified to find that I've been pronouncing it correctly in my head all along.)