I feel as though we’re at this point, metaphorically speaking. So many people in this country support an autocrat in the highest office, cheering whenever he flouts the law, custom, and hurts their fellow citizens. What is MAGA if not a direct message telling us we’re done talking?
This I understand. There are at least 70-80 million of them and they’re not going anywhere. The best I can hope for is the leaders being discredited after the movement collapses and former MAGA supporters doing all they can to avoid admitting the loved Trump.
People argue and correct you online like you just butchered their family in front of them. You can concede and they still need their pound of flesh and applause from the peanut gallery. It’s tiresome and only encourages more groupthink, echo chambers and abstention from discussion entirely.
It might help to consider what you want to get out of those conversations. Focus on what’s in it for you as the real “victory condition” rather than what the resolution to the debate is.
For example, if your goal is to gain insight into how the “other side” thinks or to fill gaps in your knowledge, then as the conversation is winding down, ask yourself if you achieved this. Decide if you got something out of the conversation. Let the other person decide if they got something.
This is all about inaccuracies induced by brevity, sometimes used on purpose to shut down differences of opinion, sometimes caused by laziness and sometimes the result of a superficial analysis that nonetheless has satisfied the intellect of the speaker. There are two responses that can be used to clear up any issue of this nature, and they are: “What do you mean?” and “What’s your point?” If these prompts do not elicit frank elucidation then bad faith engagement must be assumed, which terminates any obligation for reciprocation of cordial discourse.
I believe it may be impossible to not argue over definitions unless everyone agreed to do so, and that just isn’t human nature.
The individual you are interacting with might understand the basic facts, but have an honest disagreement with you about whether a word should be applied.
But it’s a slippery slope to agree with them that you should temporarily, for argumentation’s sake, assume that the word has an additional meaning. Because the next person to use the argument won’t be as liberal, and will declare that their definition is the only correct meaning, and thus try to erase the usefulness of the word in turn.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter too much. However, regardless of how important, the two meanings will subconsciously be linked in peoples minds, leading to connotations between them. And I think that the people who want to expand definitions know on some level that words have connotations. A lot of them want to actively change language in other instances because of the connotations of objectionable phrases. So the argument that their new and expanded terms are simply neutral, and in fact have always been the only acceptable terms, whose meaning has always been objectively set in stone falls flat.
Another reason people’s definitions vary so widely is because people genuinely have different lived experiences of the same term.
Using “political correctness” as an example: A whole lot of people on the left say PC is just being polite, avoiding slurs like the N-word, being respectful, etc. And in their lived experience, that’s what they see it as. Who could be against PC?
But a whole lot of people on the right see PC as “suppressing unpleasant truth, or going out of one’s way to be offended over absurd things, like saying Oreo cookies are racist because they are black layers sandwiching white in between.” And they can point to an unlimited number of outrage-anecdotes online of people indeed being unreasonable and call that PC.
So now you have two sides who cannot possibly agree on what “PC” means because their lived experiences, and what their eyes are looking for and looking at, are so different for that term.
I think this is an issue defining the scope of the topic. Both sides understand what PC means, but there is a disagreement on whether (a) it is necessary and (b) the extent it should be applied. For a conversation like this, it is more fruitful to first identify where the sides agree, cross those off, and then move on to the rest. But the real gold in the conversation is actually understanding why one side resents PC terms and why the other embraces it.
To me the “left” example is attempting to have a conversation based on the general/original/academic definition of PC, and the “right” example is totally incoherent, something based off of vagueness and then weaponized into a debate point. Nobody thinks that Hydrox or Oreos themselves are racist. Referring to a person as an “Oreo” definitely sounds racist, or at least objectifying and demeaning. If someone is arguing that it’s not, then I question if they are in good faith.
That is one group I disagree with but I am very sympathetic with their point of view. My wife would defend abortion rights but said she would never have considered for herself.
But the typical MAGAT, well I think they are almost all racists and there is no point in arguing with them. If not racists they are stupid for believing that Trump has their interests in heart. I ghosted an erstwhile friend immediately when he told me had voted for Trump. And this guy had a PhD in math.
I think a lot of the opposition to PC on the Right is that it just seems fundamentally silly to them. Being so invested and wound up in whether it’s “crippled”, “handicapped”, “disabled”, “differently abled” and so forth, and being willing to lecture each other about it is just ridiculous to them. It doesn’t change the nature of what they’re trying to describe, and a lot of the terms are pretty silly ways to avoid saying the previous one. And when the term of choice isn’t unified (see “African American” vs. “Black”, for example), this is just proof to them that it’s soft headed nonsense, and a way for one person to club another for something silly.
The bigger problem is that they don’t understand what PC actually means, and if you actually explain it as something like “Call people what they want to be called.”, they usually agree and feel like that’s an eminently reasonable and polite thing to do. But they lump everything tangential to identification, tolerance, and the like together, and take the most ridiculous and absurd examples from liberal academia and worse, undergraduates from those institutions, and use those as examples of how the whole concept is flawed.
So then, who is being intellectually honest, and who is approaching with a closed mind? I have been trying to think about this problem for a while. There are many sub-groups involved.
There are people who have been legitimately marginalized and oppressed, in material ways and in the form of social pressure. Taking disability as an example, physically disabled people are constantly fighting a battle for accessibility, and (more so historically, but it still happens) there is hurtful language used to make fun of them or dismiss their requests for accessibility. Likewise for mental health, and any number of issues.
You have people “on the left” who advocate for them. Allies, relatives and friends of people who are marginalized.
Then you have people (usually people who just entered “the left”) who performatively parrot these issues, and possibly mangle their language while doing so. They aren’t doing people any favors, and they are coming from an inherently selfish point of view.
Then you have people in the center/right who might be sympathetic to these issues, but aren’t going out of their way to engage with marginalized people. They are passively consuming political media. They might listen to disabled people and genuine advocates, but they cannot easily distinguish between genuine advocates and performative showboaters, and they usually end up listening to the latter because the showboaters are louder and pander more to selfish personal sensibilities.
Then you have bad faith actors on the right who amplify the showboaters and the “cringe” messages made by advocates. They are trying to muddy the water and make “the other side” look bad.
When you combine the power of the bad faith actors with the performative showboaters, they end up drowning out the marginalized and their advocates. This is exacerbated by the sensationalist news media and social media algorithms that are designed to rile people up for engagement.
I am not really sure how to get out of this mess at the institutional level. I can get through to an individual but I can’t break through the Fox News/Meta/X propaganda machines.