This is a pretty open ended question so I am going to paint with a wide brush…you have been warned (and I don’t want to hear any shit about it)…
I have always considered the conservative side of America to be full of scared and angry people who are constantly looking for someone to call an enemy (ex. Nazis) so they can be hateful and angry in what they consider to be a constructive way. When these people can’t find an enemy they look for the nearest group of people who are not like them (minorities, gays, Muslims, etc.) and they make them the enemy so that they can be hateful and angry in what they consider to be a constructive way.
I have always considered the liberal side (and the minority side) of America to be too passive and scared to confront the conservative side. IMHO, the fear and passivity of liberals has allowed the current batch of conservative “thought” to go unchallenged for far too long and the result has been a resurgence of that good old fashioned American bigotry that the US should be ashamed of.
I think the election of Trump was a massive wake up call to the liberal side of the country. It let us know beyond any shadow of a doubt that if we don’t get mad and stand up to fight conservative “thought” in all of it’s stupidity then we are at risk of returning to the bad old days.
Has that mindset ever not existed in society? It seems like we always have to have a scapegoat to blame our problems on. Immigrants have always been a favorite to blame when we can’t think of anyone else to blame. Others who have been blamed similarly: Witches, Communists, Sexual “Deviants” (whatever definition that carried at the time), Catholics, Muslims, or a favorite scapegoat of ours here in Maine, “Massholes.”
If we lacked convenient scapegoats to blame our problems on, it’s almost like we might have to look inward, and that’s just too scary, as we might find out that we are the cause of our own problems, and thus have to take responsibility for solving them. And that’s just too much like work; we can’t have that.
So a person who had a homosexual orientation in previous years should simply avoid politics and make a change to their lifestyle to be happier?
A black or Latino person (or Asian or American Indian in portions of the country) who is hassled by police should simply make a change to their lifestyle so that they can be a different ethnicity to be happier?
A person who is witnessing direct climate change affecting their ability to make a living or to survive in a specific location should simply avoid politics and make a change to their lifestyle to be happier?
A person who firmly believes in the Biblical Creation myth and finds their children being taught evolutionary science should simply avoid politics and make a change to their lifestyle to be happier?
I do not have a lot of sympathy for the positions of the last example, but your solution is not simply realistic (or fair) to any of them.
If a person’s mere existence is a political issue, then simply existing fails to avoid politics. I do not think that people simply existing, or suppressing fundamental parts of their identity (when that’s even possible) actually produces a positive result in the majority of cases.
If you come to WillFarnaby for advice I would suggest the following:
Yes they should move to an area where the society is accepting. They will have near zero impact getting involved with politics in an area where they are experiencing problems from the state.
If you like your local area, move to a suburb where the likelihood of your being harassed decreases. This is not too expensive considering the alternative, which is to be harassed by police and protest while making near zero impact.
Move to a place there the climate is more conducive to your thriving. Not expensive considering the alternative, which is to be a victim of climate while protesting and having near zero impact on policy and zero impact on climate.
Homeschool or find alternative methods of educating your children. Very easy stuff people have been doing since the beginning of mankind.
Life isn’t fair. You can be an angry victim or a joyous survivor. You tell people to join your pet causes because you want more numbers on your side. It’s simply not in their interest and it is not a rational means to get they actually want, which is to be free from state predation. If they want the thrill of screaming protest slogans and getting victimized in a barely veiled imitation of Christ Jesus, it is of course a rational approach to achieve that.
“The State” isn’t some nebulous force that acts without thinking. It’s a group of people, elected by a second group of people, and victimizing a third group of people to please the second group.
The answer, fueled by my vitriol, is to fuck the people who run “The State”, and fuck the people who put them there, because they are shitty human beings who think that victimizing people is something they should feel free to do.
The answer is NOT to have the victims shut up and change their lifestyle to play nice with the bigots who want to make them victims.
Exist where you won’t be harassed. Of course you will likely not escape taxation, but some of the other state violence is avoidable with lifestyle changes.
Yes you can indignantly stamp your foot. I’d rather see more human flourishing than live out some morality play damning the evils of society. Of course your impulse to “fuck” your fellow humans is totally in line with human history. There have been all sorts of persecutions and pogroms to eliminate the evil ones.
It seems immature and ultimately counterproductive to hate people over a difference in opinion. It smacks of a ridiculous amount of self righteous entitlement. Consider for a moment that people may have perfectly valid reasons for looking at a set of facts and using their own moral compass to come to a different conclusion. It’s funny, in a sad sort of way, the threads where people are encouraged to enact violence upon others because of choice of dress or who they voted for.
So feeling vitriol towards a large contingent of fellow citizens? Not me. I think many believe and act very destructively but I think most of that is from ignorance and not malice. Now, the politicians who should know better I dislike.
I am a straight white guy who, once upon a time, threatened to really succeed at college in Red State America. It was about 20 years ago that I was subjected to what I consider a hate crime assault there… for being a “liberal.”
Yup, my Bible beater company was getting worked up into a drunken froth one day and began spitefully accusing me of being a liberal. What really pissed them off was my asking them, “What does that mean? What specifically are you accusing me of that gets me this label?” Apparently questions like this are considered a liberal thing to do by the lumpenyokel, as that was what actually got me sent to the clinic AFAICT.
I think it was absolutely a case of Rush Limbaugh in particular getting people who simply do not know what they are talking about worked up into a hateful froth about “liberals” as the root of all their problems. To me it seems like a cultural mass delusion- when pressed, they can’t even tell you what a fucking liberal is, but I don’t really think it is something new to the Trump era. It goes way back. I was there.
Maybe Hillary set them off and got them to vote? Maybe the rise of Fox has amplified it? Maybe a black president plus gay marriage made them realize that people were really going to use their freedoms as they saw fit, without running it past their local Bible beaters first? I don’t know exactly what was new in 2016, but the Trump era is mostly an extension of an older trend.
Alternately, protesting and advocacy and resistance can actually result in changes to state policy – for example, the Civil Rights movement, the end of slavery, advances in women’s and LGBTQ rights, etc. Advocating for changes to state policy can be effective and positive in some instances.
I do notice that while both liberals and conservatives have significant components that demonize the other side, and both liberals and conservatives have significant components that get angry about the other side of demonizing them. Conservatives don’t seem to have a significant component that thinks that Conservatives need to step back from the hate and try to reach a common ground with liberals the same way that Liberals feel that they need to step back from the hate and reach a common ground with Conservatives.
You don’t see conservative columnists suggesting that Republicans from rural states need to spend some time looking into addressing the needs of the Urban voter, or wondering how to alleviate the socioeconomic hardships led to the alienation of the angry black female voter to vote Democrat.
So while I agree that the there is too much vitriol on both sides, and that it would be nice if we could get back to relative sanity, its not clear that both sides are as interested in finding a solution.
I have some sympathy for the anti statist view but substituting a tyranny of the mob for the tyranny of the state is immoral/unjust from the point of view of intrinsic human rights as commonly understood in western classical liberal thought.
Yes when it is clear that your ideas are approaching near-majority, it doesn’t hurt to stick your neck out a bit. This may not translate well since I believe you are some type of leftist, but conservatives and others on the right understand that politics lags way behind society.
That’s easy for a member of a majority to say. My advice is to minorities (of any kind, please see beyond race) who don’t have a hope when the vast majority is set against them.
There are many many think-tank conservatives who do just that. Bill Kristol, Max Boot, David Brooks, etc. basically the warmongering conservatives who abase themselves so liberals will be open to their warmongering.
Even when that opinion is “you should left to die” as expressed in bills that protect medical professionals who decline to treat people, “someone should be allowed to kill you when they discover who you are” as expressed in the gay/trans panic doctrines which are still active in many states today, or “we should take you, work you until we’re tired of you and sell you south while raping your wife, and sell her and the kids somewhere else” expressed by the Confederate flag?
Calling death threats a ‘difference of opinion’ is not really honest. Treating them as some minor issue is not healthy either.
Not everyone who has a point of view or wears a particular symbol does so precisely how you interpret that point of view. In a democracy, I don’t care if a nutty minority wear a Nazi, Communist, Confederate, etc. attire. A couple hundred nuts or however many Southern Pride people exist aren’t that dire a threat to a nation of 300+ million that it is necessary to compromise on the concept of individual liberty. If the only point of view one is allowed to express is the point of view that the violent majority allows then one has no freedom at all.
We can talk all day about what is moral and just. In the meantime, if people are being subjected to unacceptable state predation, they should remove themselves from that situation. There is a desire amongst the evangelical left to make martyrs out of everyone instead of actually helping them out in a practical way.
One reason is because the examples you listed are people who would never vote Republican. Angry black women, or urban voters, are unlikely to ever flip red. Conservative columnists don’t focus on them because there’s not much point.
By contrast, after 2016, there were many editorials about what the Democratic Party had to do to win the “flyover America Trump voter” vote - but those were focused on Trump voters who could easily be wooed back to the blue side - i.e, union members, Rust Belt voters, soccer moms or the unemployed white working class or farmers or former Obama voters. Nobody was writing “What does the Democratic Party have to do to win the vote of Baptist evangelical fundamentalists?”, because those were far out of reach.
But I won’t digress further, since this is GD and not Elections and I don’t want to hijack the OP’s thread direction.
So instead of all that needless protesting against institutional racism and segregation in the south, black folks should have just packed their bags and moved north?