Bring it, then. I don’t see that you’ve brought any “facts” into this argument, at all.
You’re sounding pretty defensive on this point. Are you trying to hide something?
Absolutely. Also look at the imbalance here. Conservatives want everyone to be conformers. Christian, white, cisgender, stay married to the same person their whole life, it goes on and on.
Liberals are ok with many types of nonconformist behavior. But they don’t demand conformism with some exceptions. My gay friends don’t expect me to become gay. My minority friends don’t hate me because I’m not a minority. My divorced friends don’t expect me to join them in divorce.
Now there are some exceptions to this. Liberals do have ideas they hold as being, well, sacred even when they are potentially wrong.
If you point out that possibly the black community in high crime areas have some responsibility for their high crime rates - that it isn’t just outside oppression, that those people seem to commit more crimes - you will get tarred as an instant racist.
If you point out that the data shows that while the average woman is slightly smarter than the average man, but the distribution for men is broader and thus 1% edge of the bell curve men may be usually smarter than the 1% women - you’re obviously a sexist. Obviously the only reason why women are found less often is high achiever positions is sexism.
And so on. You will see this kind of “knee-jerk” monoculture both in online discussion forums that are liberal as well as in publications like the Huffington Post.
Really? How do you explain Nikki Haley, Condi Rice, Ben Carson, and many others? Here’s a list of black American Republicans.
Ronald Reagan was divorced. Here’s an article which shows that 4 out of 5 states with the highest divorce rates are Republican. Being divorced didn’t seem to harm McCain or Kasich or Guiliani. Schwarzenegger is still a favourite.
In short, your assertion appears to be contradicted by reality.
That is a good point in that beyond comfort or discomfort of people who follow liberal or conservative ideologies, it can become a matter of the outright welfare or distress of those who belong *and cannot stop belonging to *“out groups”. You may yourself be quite conservative in social and economic policy but if you are visibly “too different” that may not count.
To go further, politeness ***may ***be extended, to those outsiders who are the “good [outsider group here]”, “a credit to their [race/gender/religion/ethnicity]” – the ones who assimilate socioculturally at school and work, the ones who do not stand out acting different, the ones who “know their place”. You’re “all right” if you speak only standard English in public, adopt Western dress and diet, if you stay closeted or on the down low, if you become Christian or at least go for a liberal/secularistic version of your religion and keep it at home, if you don’t challenge those who have power or influence but instead thank them for their forbearance.
And ISTM that helps create the phenomenon of self-segregation and the concentration of the “misfit” demographics in a band of welcoming urban locations at the coasts and in some Big Cities elsewhere, leaving other places as “flyover”; yet, those communities in the heartland still see themselves as besieged by libs who want to destroy their values, and they keep pushing back. This in turn can become reflected in communal hostility based on ideology: a conservative who moves into Woketown may create a reaction along the lines of “What are YOU doing HERE? WE came here to get away from YOUR kind!”.
They will always make exceptions for “good” individuals, a credit to their race and all that.
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There’s a delightful term that I first heard in the movie “Thank You For Smoking”:* moral flexibility.*
If one of your politicians is divorced/unfaithful/etc., it’s a sign of your side’s corruption. If one of ours is guilty of the same sins and we accept them, it’s because we are good, open-minded, forgiving people.
I’ve walked a weird line through this dichotomy. I’m a middle-aged, white male mechanical engineer. Many mechanical engineers are politically conservative, and there are relatively few liberals in my field. Myself, I’m center-left or maybe a little to the left of that. Because I look like a stereotypical engineer, people in my field or those adjacent to mine assume that I hold conservative political and religious beliefs.
I spent the first ten years of my career in Phoenix, AZ, which is a politically conservative city. A colleague of three years once asked me, genially, which evangelical church I attended. When I explained that I didn’t believe in god myself but had no problem with those who do, this guy literally staggered backwards. He exclaimed, “b-b-but you’re a nice guy! And a family man!”
It irritated me that my colleague was so sure that atheists are, by definition, not nice people. I was more amused than irritated at the implication that atheists are, by definition, sterile. Both of us were polite and pleasant throughout the exchange, but it was both grating and alienating. I think the setting (Phoenix) amplified this guy’s certainty that I must be an evangelical Christian like him.
On the flip side, when I worked for a company in Wisconsin that makes radiation oncology treatment systems, I interacted directly with a group of medical physicists. They were generally liberal, but often worked with my conservative-engineer colleagues. When they began discussing politics without realizing I was there, one of them asked–warily–if the discussion had offended me. When I said I was liberal and agreed with what they were saying, they were visibly relieved and a little surprised.
Both liberals and conservatives tend to accept their side’s received wisdom, naturally. But as a white-guy engineer who is sometimes assumed to be “one of us,” I often hear some ugly things. During the 2005 riots in Paris, a colleague and fellow Francophile sidled up to me and explained that he had the answer to all this social unrest: kill all the Muslims.
I didn’t answer and just backed away slowly. That was the ugliest comment I’ve heard, but the more common ones are icky too. “She’s smart, but she’s a feminist and you know how they are…” and, driving through a black neighborhood, “It’s a pretty part of town, but a little dark for my taste.” (I was blindsided by the latter comment and couldn’t quite believe he was talking about the color of the residents’ skin; I had to ask for clarification a couple of times before he said “there are too many black people here.” I seriously thought he might have been talking about the local streetlights.
When I’ve been in liberal areas, I sometimes gotten doctrinaire lectures about What is Right, but they tended to verge on the nutty (e.g., “don’t use cleaners that contain chemicals,” when in fact literally everything is made of chemicals) rather than the hateful (the aforementioned “kill the muslims” and “too dark for my taste”).
So on balance, I’d much rather be a center-left liberal in a more-liberal place than in a conservative place. Yes, there are plenty of decent, thoughtful conservatives out there. If I were one of those, I might well prefer to live in a conservative place. But:
I still have a hard time saying that it’s six of one, etc., because the nuts the left puts up with are generally less harmful/hateful than the nuts tolerated by the right. (You know, IMHO).
P.S.: As a liberal, I admit that some liberals tolerate ugly things or idealize repressive regimes, so it’s not all unicorns and rainbows. Insofar as “my” side claims the mantle of tolerance, it must also avoid the paradox of tolerance.
EdelweissPirate, it sounds like we’ve had a lot of similar conversations (I’m an electrical engineer and work in the intelligence community, where the great majority describe themselves as conservative). I’m similarly divided ideologically and culturally (more about me in post 19).
IMO, I don’t think the guy you mentioned assumed that atheists are sterile. Rather, he was probably taught that atheists were all sociopaths and libertines, and that since raising a family is an altruistic act, he didn’t expect an atheist to do it.
So first of all if you don’t know why anyone on that list before the 60s (i.e. most of 'em) is meaningless to the discussion of minorities in the republican party, you lack some pretty important context on this one.
Secondly, the fact that you can point to a handful of token right-wingers is not a particularly useful argument; they remain drastically underrepresented within the party (in no small part due to the ongoing racism within the party) and are often explicitly trotted out for use in the “my black friend” argument; see also this entire paragraph. They’re “one of the good ones”.
Something something rank hypocrisy? I mean, yeah, if all you look at is actions, you’d assume that the republican party had no problem with divorce (or lying, or fraud, or clearly not being a christian to the point where the pope called it out)… And you’d be totally wrong, because the republican party has staked a great part of its identity on “family values”, values of which opposition to divorce is absolutely one. The easiest way to get very, very confused in American politics is to treat the republican party as though it actually believes any of the things it claims to believe.
Did you check the thread title? It’s about right now, not the 60s. Or perhaps you mean the 1860s, when blacks voted Republican?
Umm… token? That’s a stupid and ignorant statement. They’re on the right by their own free choice.
And people might find this article from 2016 about discrimination against right-wing academics of interest.
Moderator Note
The revival of this thread does not allow you to skip over the moderator note put in place a couple of weeks ago.
Budget Player Cadet, Quartz, and racepug: do not post in this thread again.
The rest of you: read the OP again before you decide to post, and make sure you’re responding to the question in the OP. If you’re here to talk about why Group X is bad (or to post retorts to someone else who has done the same), you’re in the wrong thread.
I’m trying to allow this thread to go on based on the OP, and I appreciate those who have made on-topic posts. I will begin issuing warnings to folks who continue to stray, however.
I want to expand on a point that several people have made in this thread, which is that liberals (and I am one) have become MUCH more angry/hostile/dismissive towards conservatives in the age of Trump.
If this question had been asked 5 or so years ago, I would have confidently stated that liberals were much more positive towards individual conservative civilians than the reverse… not necessarily due to any particular virtue, but due to their media bubble. Anne Coulter and similar influential figures outright spread the message that liberals are traitors, while Michael Moore and his ilk tended to level their attacks at conservative leaders… something like “individual conservatives are nice people who will stop and help change your tire, but their leaders are war criminals” vs “liberals are treasonous idiots”. (I’m happy to acknowledge that my own biases probably informed this view.)
But… that aiming of the bile at the leaders, not at the rank and file, has pretty much faded away since the Trump election. I like to think that I’m a thoughtful person who makes a genuine effort to understand and think the best of even those I disagree with (an effort that I’m sure fails plenty of the time), and I find it WAY harder to sympathize with and give the benefit of the doubt to someone who voted Trump and wears a MAGA hat than someone who voted McCain or Romney (or even the truly moronic GWB).
So what changed?
Frankly, and I realize that it sounds like a total abrogation of responsibility to say this… what changed is that Trump is so uniquely awful in so very many different ways. I’m glad Obama beat both Romney and McCain… but both of them were reasonable and intelligent and qualified candidates. Of course, it’s easy and convenient for me to say that, because it leaves all the blame on the right and none on the left. But… I do think that that’s a lot of the root cause.
Or put another way, previous republicans could be supported as basically decent people with maybe a handful of dismissible failings. One could plausibly argue that these failings paled as compared to the need to fight the Liberal Menace. What’s a tiny bit of hypocrisy? After all, everybody is (assumed to be) a little bit hypocritical.
Trump, on the other hand, is so openly, unabashedly, and completely reprehensible that it’s impossible to plausibly minimize his flaws. He quite literally taints by association, because nobody who’s not also scum could possibly support him. This shatters the facade of decency that was protecting the rank and file - supporting Trump and his initiatives now proves that you are flawed, not just that he is.
It does sound like You and I have had some similar experiences, FU Shakespeare…thanks for responding to my post.
I realize you’re joking a bit here, but so was I. I didn’t really think my colleague thought atheists were sterile; my sincere belief is that he couldn’t square the fact that I seemed like him with the fact that I explicitly rejected one or more of his core beliefs.
This guy was a decent person but a little parochial. At the same job, I worked with another conservative guy who wore a t-shirt in the style of the college-cliché Che Guevara shirt, but instead of the grafffiti-inflected Guevara image, the shirt showed a graffiti-inflected image of Ronald Reagan. I thought this was funny, and the guy with the Reagan shirt was never taken aback by my views or lack of degeneracy.
Honestly, I wish the divide were less along the liberal/conservative axis and more along the decent/indecent axis. Obama was a decent man; I believe both McCain and Romney would have been decent (in the same sense) and good presidents, even if I disagreed with their policies.
To follow up on this a bit… maybe, MAYBE I could sympathize with someone who was super-passionately anti-abortion, and recognized all of Trump’s flaws, but still gritted their teeth and voted for him over Hillary purely for supreme court reasons. Maybe.
But… while that person voted for Trump, they would presumably not go around wearing a MAGA hat.