Guest post: The gender mess is the gateway
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Always wrong.
I’m quite amazed that Trump’s rhetoric appears to be working with many people. But then again, I can kind of understand why it’s striking a chord.
For example, I had a long conversation with a MAGA guy last night. A former liberal, so he says, and I believe him, this being solidly left Toronto. But now he’s on the right and he’s buying it all: war will go away if Trump gets elected, the culture war “craziness” will die down, and — this is what surprised me the most — Trump will thwart the billionaire global elites’ sinister plot to… do something or other… something something immigrants.
And then, with a shift in his tone, as if testing me, he asked me point blank what I thought about “trans in sports.” And I told him. Suddenly we were on the same page, and he could trust me and open up to me.
But as I really listened to him, I came to see that his real anxieties are that he feels deeply distrustful of the legacy media after having discovered that so many things he was told were lies, and he’s resentful at his liberal friends for attacking him whenever he revealed even the slightest disagreement with the liberal message of the day. He talked of being scolded and unfriended on Facebook… and he talked of seeing outright lies in the headlines, to the point that he abandoned the legacy media altogether. I sense his extreme views reflect a reaction against the left and the media, but taken to extremes, to match the extreme sting of anger he feels at the betrayal — a retaliation mindset, as Adam Gopnik put it in the New Yorker:
We are frightened and we are angry; we look to expert intervention for the fears, and to comic but effective-seeming figures for retaliation against the experts who disappoint us.
Comic but effective-seeming figures, like his cinematic hero (as he told me), the Joker.
From the sound of it, now he gets all his news from alt-bro podcasters, and much of it is way more conspiracy-fringe-extreme than I had even imagined was going on over in Rogan-world.
It’s telling that he started opening up to me only after he asked me about trans in sports. Ah-ha. Just as I’ve increasingly suspected: the gender mess is the gateway to the far right. It offers unambiguous proof that the legacy media are liars and that the alt-bros are trustworthy. From there, it’s a short walk to “Trump will save us” and then “Ukraine must be given to Russia.” It always leads to Putin in the end, because, as the Department of Justice has revealed, Putin is the one financing the alt-right bro mediasphere.
And then, with a shift in my tone, I made it clear that I think Putin is a monster, a thief, a thug, and a murderer. The spell was broken, and the conversation cooled and died off.
The far right hooked him with trans, and he’s theirs now. I don’t think we’re getting him back.
Kamala Harris Said She Owns a Gun for a Very Strategic Reason
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/28/opinion/kamala-harris-gun-vice-signalling.html
While this is a fair assessment of many in power in the party, it is an even better assessment of the Republicans. The only way in which Republicans can manage not to be seen as elite is to act dumb, to shout about guns, god, and abortion, and to pretend tax cuts for the rich help the poor. Being politically incorrect is their version of vice signaling.
In my experience, most of my liberal friends are out of touch with the average American (if such a thing exists). They have great ideas in many cases (except their damn fidelity to trans and occasional flirting with alternative medicine and the idea that all ideas are equal). The problem is, they talk about these ideas to each other. They don’t move into the small towns that surround their cities, sit down in cafes, and show the people there that they are actually much like them. They don’t eat fast food, they don’t drink beer unless it is imported, and they don’t have a lot of clues about what it’s like to live outside their bubble.
The Republicans are worse, but they manage to sound like they get it. Shouting about abortion and immigrants works…for them. It cannot (and should not) work for the Democrats. The problem is, as long as the Democrats continue to work for rights for women and immigrants, they will piss off and alienate large segments of voters. Too many people think the solution is to stop working on those ‘identity’ politics and be more…for lack of a better word…Republican.
This is a bad idea. Throwing women and people of color under the bus may earn them a few voters, but not enough for the ones they’ll lose. Also, it’s just wrong.
What the Dems need to do is convince the public that their policies are more worthwhile, more human, and better for the country. This, unfortunately, means discussing the policies in words an eighth grader can understand, and leaving the big ideas for once they’re elected. They need to show the country why it’s good to have policies to help the poor, the women, the BIPOC. Right now, I suspect this is impossible. It can’t be done with a campaign slogan or a sign.
But I sort of disagree that yard signs are a bad thing. If a yard sign for Kamal is a turn off telling people don’t talk to me unless you agree (and I am not that way; I talk to a lot of people about a lot of things), then why isn’t a Trump flag an identical signal, only to the other side?
I must say, I get DAMNED sick of being told we need to understand their point of view. Fuck that. If they’re not willing to understand the other point of view, I do not feel obligated. The problem is, I DO understand their point of view; I’ve been swimming in it for 60 years. I lived among it, I taught among it, I shopped among it, I took my recreation among it. I feel like I need brain bleach whenever I’m in contact with one of these people we need to ‘vice signal’ for.
It seems most unlikely to me that Harris will gain any votes for owning a gun. She isn’t going to win votes by vice signaling, because the view of educated women is set in most people’s minds, and it isn’t a pretty one. That’s what she has to overcome. Misogyny. Racism. Misogyny + Racism.
If I were to make a list of the worst ideas ever, the idea that “any enemy of my enemy is my friend” would rank very close to the top. If the death of movement atheism should have taught us any lessons, it’s that a shared lack of belief in, or opposition to, something is a very weak foundation for a movement. Sooner or later you will have to confront what your “allies” are in favor of, what they do believe etc.
Still, it is only too easy to conclude that any tribe is better than none. As I keep saying, if you manage to make people sufficiently pissed off, they might eventually decide that “I don’t care who wins, or what else is included in the deal, or who else gets hurt as a result, as long as these assholes lose!” And having decided to make a common cause with the enemy of your enemy, you once again have a stake in defending your choice (“If they were as awful as you say, a decent person like myself wouldn’t be supporting them!”). The justification spiral does the rest, and soon what began as a reasonable reaction to the excesses of wokism has lead to a total re-evaluation of everything from climate change to how to deal with COVID 19 to the legitimacy of the Russian invasion of Ukraine to who actually won the 2020 election.
In the end, of course, all it does is hand free ammunition to TRAs and giving legitimacy to their claim that those who oppose male rapists in women’s prisons and medical experimentation on children are the same people who defend pussygrabbing, corruption, authoritarianism, and overturning elections (I nearly put “bullying” and “post-truth politics” on the list out of old habit, but of course the wokesters are all in favor of that!)
https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Maximally_Effective_Mercenaries
29. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more. No less.
Religions, political ideologies etc. tend to accumulate doctrines that have no logical connection to one another. The people who insist that members affirm all the doctrines force out the intellectually honest.