It matters a lot whether your perception of reality is right or wrong. If your perception of reality is wrong then you will face difficulties in your interactions with reality. You make choices and take actions which you are confident will succeed based on your perception. And those choices and actions will fail if there’s a significant difference between your perceived reality and actual reality.
A lot of people perceive the reality that vaccinations are unnecessary and dangerous. So they don’t get their children vaccinated. Then actual reality steps in and gives their children measles. Their perception wasn’t the reality.
I’ve sort of reluctantly been pushed into the ‘liberal’ camp just due to…facts. I think there are a lot of misapprehensions and sandholing by self-proclaimed liberals about reality and especially among the progressives, particularly when it comes to public finanance and how effective government bureaucracy actually works, but at least they are not generally just making up shit from whole cloth as the self-described, Fox-News-hailing conservatives have done, nor are they wholly exclusionary to anyone who doesn’t fit some narrow set of social, political, and religioous beliefs and ideologies, and they aren’t led about on a noose by a succession of flagrantly lying hypocrites from Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump.
I find it risible that Barack Obama was derided from the right as some kind of hyper-liberal and Elizabeth Warren for being a ‘socialist’ for pursuing pragmatic public policy simply to reduce conflicts, address economic crises, and protect the public from exploitation by powerful corporate interests. Both of them and many others, would have been firmly in the Eisenhower camp of Republicans on a policy basis sixty years ago, and now the simple notion of curtailing adverse profiteering or negotiating with nascent nuclear powers to reduce proliferation are some kind of radical left-wing conspiracy to undermine the US government in the minds of people who keep repeating patently untrue claims.
If there is anyone who feels “rejected by society” it is the staunch conservatives denying everything from advances in medical science related to gene therapies, the insistance that women should not be allowed to make medical decisions about their own bodies, and the wealth of scientific data about topics ranging from evolution and the neuroscience of gender fluidity to global climate change and the inarugably benefits of immigration. These are the people who feel as if any change to society—which has always been in flux, and is indisputably better than it was fifty years ago for nearly everyone at every socioeconomic class—is some kind of menace that should be denied and any advocates of should be persecuted.
I think that this whole “rejection from society” business is based on a distorted notion of how empathy works. It seems to presume that in order to care whether other people are being punched in the face, you have to have been punched in the face personally and have personal experience in how getting face-punched feels.
Now, it is indeed the case that you cannot truly know what it’s like to experience X if you haven’t experienced X. However where the OP fails is that it presumes it’s impossible to care at all about X if you haven’t experienced X. The OP presumes that if you haven’t personally been shot then it logically follows that you cannot possibly think that people getting shot is bad.
Actually, now that I think about it, this actually goes beyond misunderstanding empathy: even if I have no sense whatsoever how how it feels to be shot, I still can oppose people being shot on a purely intellectual assessment of their reactions, and I can also oppose people being shot on a cold clinical assessment of the societal outcomes of what happens to societies where people are getting shot.
The OP doesn’t account for any of that - it merely defines complete selfish sociopathy as the norm and declares that anybody who differs from that norm is some sort of reject. That position is fundamentally erroneous both because it’s obviously stupid and also because it ignores tons of selfish reasons why a complete selfish sociopath might want to live in a world without race riots.
It’s always hilarious to hear American conservatives trying to define liberalism. By their reasoning, a nation that allowed abortion, lacked the death penalty and put restrictions on guns would be a big Marxist concentration camp instead of, y’know, Canada.
This is me. I’ve already discussed why I reject Republicans and Conservatism in general. Having said that, I am not particularly concerned by empathy for the poor and the marginalized. I only vaguely care about the suffering of others.
Rather, I am primarily motivated by a utilitarian appreciation of the benefits of social welfare and the redistribution of wealth. It benefits me to live in a place with less gun violence. It benefits me to have a government that doesn’t control my marriage or my wife’s uterus. It benefits me to live in a city without homeless cripples and beggars wandering the streets like the cast of Les Mis. It benefits me to have employees who are well-educated, and not distracted by things like hunger, child care, or chronic health problems.
And that’s where I fundamentally just don’t understand Conservatism. Even setting aside the moral considerations, from a purely utilitarian perspective even the most selfish Scrooge should be able to comprehend how they benefit - both directly and indirectly - from liberal policies.
I am also incredibly selfish and self serving because I want a healthy, well educated, and diverse community where everyone feels accepted and prosperous. That makes my life easier.
I find it interesting that I am often the only pickup truck owner when I go to “liberal” events with some of my liberal relatives or friends
Micheal Moore even admitted that liberals are great for many things like standing around holding signs. But your conservative redneck brother in law is the person to go to to help you move or to get something fixed.
I think a lot of the time it’s that they’ve already benefited, so to speak. That’s why white liberals tend to skew toward both educated and more wealthy.
Based on what I can tell, if you’re white, male, and you have a well paying, secure job and a good education, you’re not as likely to be feeling like you have to scrap vs. “other” groups to get your piece of the pie, and are more likely to be friendly toward programs that help others even if it’s not directly beneficial, or even mildly detrimental toward their own group.
But if you go and find a white guy who’s struggling with the employment market and his economic position, that guy is very likely to be a lot less tolerant toward policies that he perceives as enriching others at his expense, or that give others a leg up that he doesn’t get. Or for that matter that set someone else’s kids up ahead of his own.
So… almost the opposite of what you postulate. It’s not the rejection from society that forces white men into liberalism, but rather the reaping of the benefits that enables them to be liberal.
To people making this comparison, or saying the modern tea party feels persecuted, I don’t feel it is the same thing.
Nazis, or the tea party feel persecuted because they want to go back to a day when people like them were firmly in charge. They feel that those they consider to be inferior outsiders are taking over their society.
So yeah, the tea party feels victimized. But they feel victimized because non-whites, feminists, foreigners, gays, non-christians, etc. keep growing in number and influence. They want to go back to a day when people with their demographics were privileged. Meanwhile some people who benefit from those same demographics want to tear down the social hierarchy that privileges them.
Which again, comes back to my OP. I haven’t read all the replies yet. But again I’m assuming self interest is one factor in why people pick the politics they do.
White men are actually slightly under-represented compared to the electorate. The tea party is about 52% white men, the electorate is about 34% white men, solid liberals are about 30% white men. 30% is also the share of the general public, but whites are over represented in politics.
Anyway, I agree with others that looking at the insanity and stupidity of the modern conservative movement is also a major motivator to lean leftward.
Yes but as far as point 2, what separates those who are demographically privledged who fight to keep an unequal system vs those who fight to tear it down?
I can understand point 1. I can understand why non-christians are more leftist than christians. Non-whites more than whites. Women more than men. LGBT more than heteros. etc.
Hetero white men are over-represented among those who want to maintain an unequal social system. As one would expect. 30% of Americans are white men, 52% of the tea party are white men.
But why does one person who demographically benefits from inequality support an unequal system while someone else opposes that same unequal system?
I understand the arguments that a rising tide lifts all boats. I believe in human capital. Society works best when everyone who has talent is allowed to use that talent. Selfishly, I want women in science because a lot of talented scientists wouldn’t get a chance to contribute in a patriarchal culture. The cure for a disease that I or someone I love may suffer from could come from a female scientist who would be relegated to being a housewife in a different era, or from a muslim scientist who wouldn’t be allowed into the country and had to live in poverty in their home nation under different policies.
So from a selfish reason, maybe part of the issue is that some people just realize everyone’s lives get better in an egalitarian society where everyone is allowed to contribute. After all, the Nazis kicking the jews out of Germany is why the US got the atomic bomb first, because all the jewish scientists who were deemed inferior by the nazis ended up working on the project for the allies.
It comes down to how you define “rejected from society”.
I personally define it as “physically exiled - marched to the border and forced to cross it”, so I have a hard time guessing what you mean by it. If you mean to be literally marginalized by society, many liberal white men have never been literally marginalized. If you mean feeling marginalized, then virtually every Trump supporter qualifies, aside from the extremely wealthy ones who instead support him because they’re sociopaths and know Trump and his ilk will allow them free reign.
Everything anyone ever does is always done entirely based on their own interests. It’s just that some people are interested in being good, kind, generous, or non-nazi people, and thus selfish self interest drives them to act in ways that will allow them to retain a positive image of themselves, by their own definition of positive.
If you define “self interest” as “always doing the thing that screws other people over the most”, or whatever, then the number of non-conservatives who hew to it in their decision-making will decrease radically.
A lot of it comes down to whether they’re capable of empathy or whether they’re a sociopath.
But some of it comes down to education and awareness of how the world works. Persons capable of empathy but who mistakenly think that churches can take care of all the poor people can argue that social programs should be cut and churches and neighborhood charity will pick up the slack, while others look outside and note that we already have churches and neighborhoods and yet the poor remain, and deduce that if we want the poor gone we’re gonna have to get organized about it, government-style.
(The sociopaths, meanwhile, look out the door and think, “Hmm, slaves/scapegoats/lunch!”)
