RE: Were social justice warriors responsible for the election outcome?
December 22, 2016 at 11:12 am
(December 22, 2016 at 10:40 am)TaraJo Wrote: If condescending lectures like that are what progressives have to offer "white men," if we're going to talk down to them, treat them like they're already klansmen, can we be surprised they don't want to be progressives themselves? Do MTV News or Huffington Post realize that they're shooting themselves in the foot? I mean, alt-right groups are calling this a 2020 Trump campaign video and they aren't wrong; this is why "white men" voted for Trump: his side wasn't insulting them.
While I do see your point, I'm also kind of monumentally fucking frustrated that we're at this point now where if we don't couch the correct position in nice enough terms, this is somehow justification on its own for rejecting it. "Yeah I did the wrong thing! You were so mean in explaining what the right thing was!" These are the people that rail at PC culture and not being able to say disparaging shit about other groups, why exactly do they need this special treatment to be enticed to even considering a different position?
There are big communication problems with the messaging on the left, but I think the landscape that conservative political rhetoric is constructing for its side makes it increasingly difficult to effectively deal with them. Bridging this curiously prevalent double standard- where they reserve the right to start shit with us in the interests of not being politically correct, while expecting a certain degree of obeisance to even come to the table of conversation at all- is problematic for a number of reasons, chief among them being that... well, a lot of the big mouthpieces on that side are already apt to take the mere existence of other positions is an anti-them message. That's exactly why we get the war on christmas crap every year, why atheist billboards get vandalized and liberal positions get spun into conspiracy theories about false flags.
Obviously not everyone on the right is like that, in fact I hope the majority aren't, but in voting for Trump what they've told us is that at the very least that shit is not a dealbreaker to them. It does raise the question of how we should be communicating with whatever groups led to this incoming administration, and how we do it without ceding more ground to them in the process.
"YOU take the hard look in the mirror. You are everything that is wrong with this world. The only thing important to you, is you." - ronedee
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Want to see more of my writing? Check out my (safe for work!) site, Unprotected Sects!