The (constructive, effective) disagreement thread

Politics & Elections
61

I was able to get past a lot of things but I think I’ve reached my breaking point when it seems like Trump is actively trying to destroy my right to vote, and not a peep from my so - called friends in my defense. I actually think I’m less tolerant of Trump supporters because I have so many decent Republican evangelical Christian friends who can’t stand the guy. If they can stand up for what’s right, why can’t anyone else? I have a Presbyterian minister friend (libertarian) whose church lost major donors because he refused to rubber-stamp Trump. I’ve seen good conservatives face real consequences for repudiating Trump.

I have zero problems befriending people with different attitudes toward economic policy. I have a harder time with social policy issues, because I am very socially liberal and I consider these human rights issues. But I still have some relationships where we don’t see eye to eye on things. The aforementioned libertarian minister is pro-life and we’ll say, not the most evolved on LGBTQ issues. We bond a lot over movies, TV shows, table top RPGs, and in-depth conversations about politics, religion and history. Probably one of my closest friends.

If he voted for Trump I don’t think I would let that friendship go, but if he voted for Trump he would be an entirely different person.

I am a Democrat who is still trying to figure out how far left I am these days. Some of the “burn it all down” lefties scare the crap out of me, so I’m… not that… But I also found Biden wholly uninspiring due to his centrism, so I’m not that either. It’s also worth mentioning my job is inherently political. The work I do is explicitly pro feminist, anti-racist, inclusive of LGBTQ folks, etc. Social conservatism is 100% at odds with my chosen career. Given how deeply enmeshed I am with progressive culture, I think I’m pretty damned reasonable.

That said, Trump transcends politics for me. He really does. When half the electorate voted for him in 2016 it felt like trauma from my personal life was happening all over again. When Kavanaugh was confirmed I was so distraught I almost left my job as an advocate. And I don’t have a lot in common with people who don’t care about that - who show with their vote that they don’t care about me. Where can you really go forward from there?

I don’t know. I think you’re asking a hugely important question, but I don’t know how much of myself I can set aside in a relationship before the relationship loses its authenticity.

62

When I wrote it, I was thinking his post was a bit like “OK, if nobody contradicts me, then what I say is true…anybody? Bueller? Bueller?”

But yes wherever possible that makes a lot of sense. I don’t know, for example, whether nephew felt that the wall was a big deal to him or not. I know they don’t live high on the hog, so financials are not so much. I’ll have to think about it.

It brings back to me that the more you know someone, the more likely you are to impact them. He’s not waiting for my pearls of wisdom. I like how the person replied to him above, like “I know you and I was going to let it go but…”

63

Sounds interesting. Can you give us more insight into who you work for and your work as an advocate? I think you touch on a good point in that politics can have a major role in ones career and we often vote with that. for example if you work in education you would want to support pro-education candidates.

Years ago I was on a board that dealt with the Kansas democrats. You remind me of one poster who worked for the Kansas National Organization for Women (NOW) and she would always post things from a strong feminist viewpoint.

64

Another thing, the president is just one of MANY politicians and political figures that impact our lives.

What about state, county, city, and school board officials? At the local level is where most decisions that affect our day to day lives are made. Issues like raising local sales taxes, whether or not to open or close a school, rezoning issues, sewer assessments, etc… those issues go beyond Trump vs Biden or republican vs democrat and have the greatest chance of getting people to work together OR split them apart.

Heck I’m going out on a limb here but from my experience school issues become THE biggest issues where people can have knock down fights worse than any democrat vs republican ones. Examples: 1. Possible rezoning of school boundaries which would allow kids from poorer neighborhoods to attend “better” schools. 2. Small town voting to raise taxes and keep a local school or closing it and consolidating with another district. 3. Voting on getting rid of a corrupt school board and superintendent.

65

I work for a nonprofit domestic violence and sexual assault services organization. I am the Grants Coordinator. We do everything from shelter and legal advocacy to prevention education in schools. We provide services to any survivor no matter the gender, but the people who come to us for help are overwhelmingly women.

Sorry hit the reply too soon. More to come.

66

I remember reading something about a continuum – maybe think of it as an ever-widening series of concentric circles.

Around each of us.

It defines a continuum of people about whom we care.

For some people, the circle extends only to the four walls of their house. They care about their immediate family. To the wolves with pretty much everybody else.

Others’ circles include their church, their neighborhood, their part of town, the company for which they work.

For some, the circles are larger. For some, “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

Some people feel as connected to a total stranger all the way across the country as they do to their spouse.

Some people feel as connected to a total stranger in Papua New Guinea as they do to a couple in Cleveland.

For some, it’s more than enough to live in some shangri-la of a gated community within a stygian world of misery and suffering.

For others, they’d rather see the bottom raised … even at the expense of seeing the top attenuated.

And they view this regionally, nationally, or globally.

It’s another perspective on the concepts of negative sum, zero sum, and positive sum game. It ties into perceptions of scarcity or abundance. It ties into selfishness and selflessness.

67

David,
This goes into my point about school issues.

Here in my community there was a big fight when they sought to redraw school boundaries because one high school was perceived as better than another and switching boundaries threatened some people who felt their house value would go down. School board meetings were LOUD with much shouting and threats of lawsuits.

Also similar was how many elementary schools have active PTA’s which raise lots of money for kids, but only THEIR kids. Not the school 4 blocks away. So THEIR kids had all this money for field trips and such but they see the kids at the next school over as someone elses problem.

And similar in some small towns where most of the residents are elderly and on fixed incomes who’s kids have long moved away and they care little about the local school district and they vote against any tax levy increase.

And then communities have the whole NIMBY thing if someone wants to build a homeless shelter or low cost housing.

68

And so if you had to sort these people out into two piles: left and right. Which pile would do you think you’d be more likely to put those who oppose school redistricting, oppose increase in school funding and taxes, oppose affordable housing?

69

Points very well made. I also appreciate you making the point (vis-a-vis redrawing boundaries) that these circles are movable and fluid.

We really do have to draw lines as individuals. Wants are unlimited. Resources are limited.

But the reason I brought up the concentric circles is that – to a great many people – Trump’s view of a solid economy creates a scorched earth (“the spreadsheet belies the humanity”).

There’s a well-established tendency for the US to be a very generous nation when things are going well at home. Makes sense, right ?

But Trump’s breed of a solid economy seems to lean heavily on trickle-down economics and the “affluent white guy” economy.

And other presidents have proved to us that it really isn’t a zero sum game. Minorities … members of vulnerable populations … can receive equal protection under the law and heightened visibility and respect in our society and the DJIA can rise.

Bush 43 created the greatest rate of home ownership among minorities in US history … by acceding to the demands of the financial markets and allowing them to throw money at people who never should have qualified … at the great expense of so many minority homeowners (and the taxpayers), and inuring to the staggering benefit of the very, very few.

[NB: Bush 43 was clearly neither the first nor the only]

Trump manages to a metric – quite likely a single metric. Wise and effective managers know that managing to a metric can often be successful as far as that isolated metric is concerned, but that you can easily kill a viable business in the process.

I don’t remember the last time our nation seemed to care deeply enough about the Common Good. Funding for public education is a classic example.

But so are health, safety, crime, punishment, clean air, clean water, public libraries, and a whole host of other things.

But the narrowness of our focus … the diminutive nature of our circles … the zero-sum-game nature of our thinking … the sort of selfishness that’s fostered and celebrated in our country … IMHO … keeps us from ever ‘lifting all boats.’

Your town doesn’t have to expand its bake sale to subsidize the next town over, but … working collaboratively … maybe the next school over can be improved, helping to stabilize the housing prices in the area that was recently chosen for neglect.

Quick anecdote.

Our former next-door neighbor (neighbor #1) complained a lot. His neighbor (neighbor #2 – on the other side) deferred maintenance on the house, most noticeably the yard. The lawn looked awful.

When neighbor #1 decided to sell his house, I got an hour-long earful about neighbor #2’s lawn – how it was going to make it extremely difficult to sell house #1, and the hit that neighbor #1 would inevitably take to the sale price.

I asked neighbor #1 if it wouldn’t be smart to offer to pay to have neighbor #2’s landscaping cleaned up for him.

Neighbor #1 did exactly that. IIRC, it cost him about $3,500 to finance the landscaping work at neighbor #2’s house, but it facilitated a sale price that was $15,000 higher than originally planned.

We’re such “rugged individuals” that collaboration seemingly never occurs to us … even when it truly does expand the size of the pie … for all of us.

We don’t think win-win.

70

Cont’d for @urbanredneck2

There is definitely a shared sense of political identity at my organization, and it keeps us going through the difficult times and secondary trauma and all that. When your staff meetings include watching surveillance videos of women being strangled to the point of unconsciousness, it’s difficult not to be affected on a visceral level, and you develop a warrior mentality. My org doesn’t just shelter women, it works within the criminal justice system and at the policy level to address these issues. While we’re not able to endorse or reject any particular candidate, it’s pretty clear which candidates support our agenda and which ones do not.

The prevailing belief among DV and sexual assault advocates is that such violence disproportionately affects women. I believe this to a point, though I would argue that men are victimized more than we realize. At any rate, sexual assault is bad and to have someone in the highest office in our country expressing enthusiasm for sexual assault - no matter how long ago - is also bad. I don’t think character is the only thing we should look for in a candidate, but it matters. Trump supporters overwhelmingly downplayed his comments in the same way that society always downplays sexual assault. It’s the same old playbook. It was this downplaying, this minimizing, this “boys will be boys” attitude from half the country, that hurt the worst. As for the allegations against Trump, Kavanaugh, and even Biden, for me it’s not about the veracity of any one claim so much as the nature of the dialogue around it. There is so much ignorance about who sexual assault survivors are, what we say, how we behave, how we respond to violence. It’s painful how clueless most people are about this subject and yet how certain they are in their judgments. They put the victim on trial rather than the alleged perpetrator.

To speak to your claim of “locker room talk,” there is a difference between objectifying someone and assaulting them. Well, in truth I think both behaviors exist on a continuum. But I do not view male sexuality as inherently threatening. It’s normal, to a degree, to describe what you find attractive in a partner, real or imagined. What Trump said went far beyond, “Let me tell you about this hot chick I banged last night.” He described kissing and groping women without their consent. I believe he does sexually assault women because he obviously views women as sex objects and because many women have accused him of sexually assaulting them.

All of which is to say, my job definitely shapes my identity and affects who I cast a vote for. I’m not part of some hive mind where I can’t critically examine these issues outside the lens of my work. But yeah, I’m a feminist and an advocate and I vote accordingly.

71

I dont want to get into that and frankly, I dont know. My point is school issues and local issues in general can get very ugly and pit neighbor against neighbor more harshly than any presidential campaign.

72

I get why you want to avoid speculation but as the common saying goes, ‘All politics is local’. What you described is a local socio-political issue and it tends to play itself out in predictable trends that line up with state and national political outcomes.

So what can we take away from this? Well, if people tend not to exhibit much empathy at a local level, I think we can extrapolate how that plays out on a larger scale, where concentric social circles tend to amplify the position. i.e. people who oppose support of school redistricting in their own small town out of self interest are probably even less likely to do so on state and federal level. Would you agree or disagree?

73

I don’t get it. If I voted for someone in good faith and they turned out to be a bad leader, I’d say my bad, I’ll vote for the other person next time. I genuinely don’t understand the impulse some people have to always double down.

74

I certainly get what you’re saying, but … ask:

  • A person who finally escaped the clutches of a cult how hard it was
  • A battered spouse who finally got out of the abusive relationship
  • A devout member of the Roman Catholic Church who had to admit that pedophiles lived among them, and that the RCC enabled them for decades
  • David Kaczynski (Unabomber’s brother) how hard it was to admit that the writings looked an awful lot like his brother’s
  • Relatives of serial killers how hard it was to come to grips with the idea that their loved one might be a monster
  • Your average married guy how hard it is for him to admit that he was wrong, and to give a heartfelt apology that demonstrates contrition and remorse.

Politics is as tribal as anything. There’s a spectrum on which most of us fall of just how tightly intertwined our very identity is with these tribal connections.

I applaud people who do have the sense of self, intellectual honesty, and courage to loudly and unabashedly admit when they were consequentially wrong.

But it isn’t very easy, and it isn’t very common.

75

I don’t get it either. I once saw a guy go on a Facebook rant about all the Trump haters and some of the vicious invective he saw, and then he said something to the effect of, “I would criticize the President myself if he didn’t get so much hate!”

That was such a bizarre idea, the notion that you shouldn’t call out your elected officials for bad behavior because they are being attacked by others.

76

I grew up Catholic. I left the church as soon as I started taking biology and physics classes and realized that the story told in the Bible just isn’t compatible with natural laws as we currently understand them, and became a deist. I leave room to reassess should we make some new discoveries.

I’m an average married guy, and I do genuinely apologize to my wife when I screw up.

The thing is that I’m not claiming to have exceptional will power or genius level intellect or nerves of steel or any other such things. That’s probably why I don’t get other people’s intransigence. I’m not Michael Jordan wondering why nobody else is as good at basketball as I am. I’m just an ordinary person who might make an occasional free throw wondering why other people don’t even aim in the general direction of the hoop when making their shot.

77

They think that the game is Curling.

78

Take a look at what 70,000,000 Americans just voted for, and then ask yourself if you have the bar in the right place :wink:

79

Considering that 80,000,000 voted the other way, average would still apply :smiley:

80

I wanted to get a couple of numbers [1] to make the following point:

At the time of the Civil War, the 23 Northern states comprised about 21,000,000 people, while the 11 Confederate states comprised about 9,000,000 people, including about 3,500,000 slaves (5,500,000 free people).

Assuming, arguendo that everybody in the North was an abolitionist, and that everybody in the South was pro-slavery:

  • 80% of free Americans were abolitionists
  • 20% of free Americans were pro-slavery

If we extrapolated to today’s US population, that would be [wait for it] about 70,000,000 Americans who were pro-slavery.

Now I am not saying that the percent of Americans who are pro-slavery today is the same as it was at the time of the Civil War, but …

Some people who hold some pretty shitty beliefs have been among us for a long time. And those beliefs tend to be handed down inter-generationally.

It’s a very durable issue that’s very hard to chip away at.

[1] Source