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I love America. It's Americans I hate
[TheWeek] For years, my friend Jenny Boylan and I have had a recurring conversation about the purpose and value of our work. Jenny, an LGBT activist, has always been a buoyant believer in the power of language to overcome ignorance, misconception, and prejudice. She says: "It is impossible to hate anyone whose story you know." She engages with the public through public speaking, TV, and social media. I, a polemical cartoonist, would laugh in her face at her sweet naiveté. The public is a swarm of hostile morons, I told her. You don't need to make them understand you; you just need to defeat them, or wait for them die.The 2016 election gave us both occasion to second-guess our positions. Since that election, our debate has gone national. A lot of chastened liberals are telling each other that we need to really listen to the plaints of Trump voters, to try to understand them — exactly the sort of earnest effort at empathy that conservatives love to mock. Others wonder whether it isn't a misguided strategy to extend the benefit of the doubt and give fair hearing to people who have never once done the same for us. The time for civil discourse and debate is over, they say; the only course left now is resistance. A few of us are talking, after a couple drinks, about buying guns; if it comes to a fascist state or civil war, we figure, we don't want the red states to be the only ones armed. Like a lot of people, I'm still trying to figure out what policy to adopt, and what marginal role I can play, in the incoming dystopia. My official policy toward a Trump administration is straightforward enough (even if implementing it won't be): Defy, paralyze, and undermine it in any way I can. What's going to be more complicated is formulating some coherent attitude toward the 62 million of my fellow Americans who elected that administration. How to reconcile my convictions with the actual human beings — family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors — who voted for this man? What I see is that this guy and his ilk will go from attacking conservatives and Trump supporters, to attacking Trump himself. Tactically that is a bad move. Trump will survive their slings and arrows intact, but the rest won't be as understanding. They still have to deal with the supporters and conservatives. A vote cast for Trump is kind of like a murder; there may be context to consider — a disadvantaged background, extenuating circumstances, understandable motives — but the choice itself is binary and final, irrevocable. There's a case to be made that it's indefensible; that his supporters have forfeited any right to be respected or taken seriously. The conservatives of the heartland have lashed back against the coastal elites' condescending, classist prejudices by defiantly confirming them: that they're pathetically dumb and gullible, uncritical consumers of any disinformation that confirms their biases, easy dupes for any demagogue who promises to bring back the factories and keep the brown people down. Trump wasn't even my fourth choice, but I went for him because he was all there was left. My prejudices include a preference for a small government that takes less from people and which does not allow itself to be used to attack its own citizens. That may not be remedied under Trump, but a hostile government that takes more that it should would have been encased in stone. Ignorance and bigotry are actually the best possible motives for having voted for Trump — they are at least honest, if not honorable. But I don't believe all Trump voters are ignorant, or bigoted; most of them are just evil — evil being defined not as anything so glamorous as beheading journalists or gunning down grade schoolers, but simply as not much caring about other people's suffering. They're willing to consign someone else — someone Mexican, or Muslim, or trans, not anyone they know — to exile, arrest, or second-class status, in exchange for... what? A tax break? To send a message to Washington, or the mainstream media? Just out of spiteful, petulant rage? Nothing stops Mexicans from applying for emigration to the US the right, legal way, As for tax breaks, I would prefer a general reduction of revenue and spending for government, The reason is that a small government will not have the resources to use its power against its citizens. More at the link Posted by: badanov 2017-01-10 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=478077 |