My take is the rightness/wrongness of tactics are generally *more *important than the rightness/wrongness of the goal they’re applied to. Clearly you think the opposite: tactics are *less *important than goals.
Which, considering the big picture we’re talking about, is perfectly fine. It takes all kinds to make a democracy.
The reason I think as I do is that tactics form the arena in which ideas contend. If the tactics are lopsided enough they prevent ideas from contending. That’s not to say that all tactics are equally good or bad at helping ideas contend. At the limit some ideas are so bad that even bad tactics are appropriate to counter it. At the other limit, some tactics are so bad as to utterly outweigh the use of them in the service of the best possible cause.
As I see it, the real problem is that people are exquisitely sensitive to tactics. If you use a tactic you must be 100% willing to have it used against you because your using it is an affirmative license for the others to respond in kind. The morally just way to disincentivize other’s use of a tactic is to refrain yourself.
It is doubly important to be circumspect when considering using a tactic that naturally fits the other side’s mindset better than it does your own. Using such a tactic is essentially handing them a stick to beat you with; a stick they’re more skilled at wielding. Better if both sides leave it lying there unused.
Coming down from theory to practice and the issue in these recent posts: Crowdsourced denunciations are a totalitarian tactic. Conservatives more naturally wield that weapon than do liberals. Liberals using it in service of liberal causes contains an inherent contradiction that’s IMO worth avoiding.
On a separate note, I’m done interacting pro or con with the noisier parts of this thread.
Thanks for the thoughtful response! I’ll respond, and try not be “noisy”.
One of the reasons I feel the way I do is that I feel that this tactic is inevitable and unpreventable in a free and open society. Thus, the “bad guys” will always be able to use this tactic, no matter what the good guys do, as long as speech and the economy are free. I don’t believe pro-bigotry forces are susceptible to shame in any sense except as it affects their livelihoods, and thus that liberals/bigot-opponents might stop using the tactic would have no effect on bigots using it.
Secondly, I’m not convinced that bigots are more skilled at using this tactic than those opposed to bigotry – perhaps they have more history doing so, but I think that’s just because bigotry was the norm for most of human history. With greater knowledge and understanding, bigotry has become less acceptable, and I think the tactic becomes more and more useful and effective against bigotry than for it.
None of this says that it’s always appropriate – IMO, it’s entirely reasonable to criticize public figures who advocate for discrimination, and ask for others to join you in criticizing them. It’s entirely reasonable to publicly say “I will no longer shop at company X as long as they are paying money to Mr. Bigot”. But for non-public figures, like some sad, uninformed jackass with no prominence saying something dumb, I think it’s using a hammer to swat a fly, and likely to cause more damage than it would be deterring. Not that I’m against challenging and criticizing bigotry when it comes from a “little guy”, but I would oppose calls to find out where this person worked, protest their employer, etc.
I detect a certain amount of “false equivalence” here. Who believes that a person who pushes an old lady from in front of a moving bus is no different from someone who pushes an old lady in front of a moving bus? After all, they both push old ladies around.
Or that the difference between a cannibal and a vegetarian is simply a mater of taste?
I think it would be interesting to see any posts of yours from 2013 regarding the Dixie Chicks.
You might have come down on the side of the angels, but it would be interesting to see your remarks.
As to the hijack of this thread:
No one has actually been fired by an authority within their own company simply for holding unpopular views. Several persons have been “encouraged”* to resign their positions because their loudly expressed public opinions resulted in a backlash that caused the company for which they worked to (potentially or actually) lose money. That is rather different than being told to clean out one’s desk because one told a co-worker at lunch or over the water cooler that one considered Marxism to be a legitimate philosophical expression. The comparison offered is lacking in substance.
Further, regarding ** phreak9**'s thesis, Ward Churchill was certainly never fired for being too conservative. Similarly, Steven Salaita hardly held excessively conservative positions that caused his conditional offer of employment to be withdrawn. (In other words, lots of people suffer job loss for holding views with which their employers or potential employers disagree, but there is no one way street in which it is only conservatives who suffer.)
*(I am aware that such encouragement can come in the form of coercive measures, but they do not rise to the level of having one’s boss step into the room and declaring “you’re fired.”)
Dixie Chicks? Isn’t that the asshole musical group who attacked, and belittled, their own fans, and then complained that those same fans were no longer buying Dixie Chicks music and concert tickets? How dare ex-Dixie Chicks fans spend their own money as they see fit.
My question is - Which side of the issue is considered to be “the side of the angels”?
No, the Dixie Chicks were the ones who made a statement against the impending Iraq war and said they were ashamed that President Bush was a Texan.
Someone would have to be either really confused or just completely full of shit to describe that as “attacking and belittling their own fans,” so you must be thinking of a different asshole musical group.
But of those 5 principles conservatives have, in-group and purity seem to be really important to the modern conservative movement. Us vs them, removing impure ideas and people’s from teh nation, etc. The anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-liberal, etc. attitudes all seem to come down to this and as long as Trump is seen as pushing these ideas, I think his base will be happy. They feel their culture has been infested with impurities and outsiders (people and ideas) that need to be removed or suppressed and put into a box. That seems to be the overriding principle for the modern right.
Us vs them is huge, no question. A lot of Republican voters view everything in terms of (to use Lenin’s to raze) “Who? Whom?” That is, a big chunk of Republican voters have no fixed principles, but tailor their opinions to who’s in power. Ergo, if your guy is in power, you support whatever he says, even if it’s contrary to your stated principles and you OUGHT to be angry.
Hypocritical? Definitely. Foolish? Sure. But unique to the right? Hell no.
Said another way, if you extend that graph to the right so the point on the x-axis now labeled “conservative” becomes the middle ground, you get the populist segment of the modern right.
Each of those 5 neat lines are really a probability distribution. It’s unclear to me whether we’re now seeing a genuine change in attitudes or we’re seeing a different group being empowered, nay encouraged, to speak and act on their attitudes.
All of this of course is subject to echo chambers and feedback loops.
ETA: Or, as **astorian **said while I was typing, folks love to wear the team T-shirt and chant the team chant. Some folks love doing that more than they care about whatever they personally stand for.
In the context of this discussion, it would be the position that Velocity currently holds, regardless of whatever position was held in 2003. If the two positions are identical, then (from the perspective of Velocity), statements made in 2003 would be on the side of the angels.
(And your comments on the Dixie Chicks are just historically inaccurate.)
IMHO this is highly dependent on whether you judge that these middle class white people have any legitimate grievances with the way government has treated them. If you think they don’t, you naturally come to think of them as “a seething, angry, bigoted, violent mob”. If you think they do, then you don’t.
Current left and right wingers tend to vehemently disagree about these issues, and this leads to sharply variant views of the nature of RW support. Question is what future historians will think. Time will tell.
To put it another way, were there some principled liberals who hated what Bill Clinton did in the Nineties? Sure. But not many. Most Democrats looooved Bill Clinton, because he was their guy. And if he did things that liberals SHOULDN’T applaud (like welfare reform, like bombing Serbia, etc.)? Well, most Democrats overlooked that.
Principled conservatives SHOULD have opposed much of what Dubya did.And some did (I certainly did). But we were often a minority.
Principled liberals SHOULD have been horrified by some things Obama did, and some WERE! But most loved him too much to criticize him.
MOST of us have a circle-the-wagons instinct when the leader of our side is under attack. even if that leader is a piss poor representative of the values we claim to support.
You mean the menshevik,blue-dead-brokedick dog, Republican Lite, turd way, “centrism” of the Clintonistas? A number of my ilk (got ilk?) roundly and loudly criticized Horndog Bill and Hillary, including your correspondent from the conservative wing of the extreme left.
BillnHillary’s premise was that, given the ghastly surge of reactionary politics of their time, their realignment was a necessary defensive move to keep what little Democrat power remained, and to preserve the core for a recovery. They had a case to make and any number of strong points to support it. I am not sure they were wrong, but I think so. Still do, and have said so many times in these pages, as have many others.
I have faced a number of difficult decisions in my time of walking to and fro upon the world. Hillary or Trump was not one of them. Sugar on my porridge or ground glass shards would have been tougher.
