The Uninformed, Out-Of-Date Progressive
Not all progressives are narrative-bound wokies, clinging to clearly wrong-headed policies to avoid being 'wrong'. Some are simply--newslessly clueless
I learned something interesting recently about certain progressives.
They’re not always willfully ignorant, like the diehard allies of the dudes-in-dresses set, currently rending their robes and gnashing their teeth over Trump’s much-needed rollback of The (Democratic) Patriarchy.
(Oh, the irony.)
Sometimes these progressives can’t fix what they can’t see.
The willfully clueless carefully avoids certain sources of information lest he start thinking too much, and then expressing thoughts that won’t them get invited to the good parties anymore.
Wokeness is a problem on the right too, with the rise of their accompanying snowflakes.
But not all progressives are insulating themselves, necessarily, from challenges to their belief system or are rigid dogmatics. Some avoid the news, period. Because they find it all depressing.
So, I called my old college buddy the other night
He, like myself, has always been reliably liberal. We dated, then continued to hang out together during the Reagan years, and we weren’t fans. We lived where Christian fundamentalists were constantly accosting you to get you to accept their personal Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, as your own. That’s the way they always phrased it, “Our Lord and personal Saviour, Jesus Christ.” I always thought it made Jesus sound like the ‘personal pan pizzas’ Pizza Hut was advertising at the time.
Every time they said ‘personal Saviour Jesus Christ,” I got hungry for pizza.
Sometimes we’d visit a beer dive in town dating back to the hippie days, which looked about 392 years older. We’d get drunk on cheap beer, scrutinize the ancient graffiti carved into the wooden tables, benches and walls, and bitch about Reagan, Jerry Falwell, Ed Meese, Nancy’s largely laughable Just Say No campaign, and Bill Bennett, the dumbass Christian head of the Department of Education, purporting to improve American ejimakation with Personal Pan Pizza Jesus.
Or whatever cockamamie new idea the sorta fuzzyish President championed, and whether Nancy cleared it first with her astrologer.
I could always count on Dean to be liberal, and he was when we reconnected on Da Internetz twenty years ago. Now we bitched about Bush The Sequel and his dumbass war with Saddam, long-distance. We weren’t fans.
In recent years, though, he’s pushed back a little. Not because he got more conservative, as many people do as they move into and beyond middle age, but because he seemed sort of vaguely woke. But not crazy-ass. That would be his woke fanatic friend who was my friend too until she defriended me over an article she called ‘transphobic’.
It was pretty arguably one of the least-critical arguments about transgenderism I ever made—in fact, I claimed it could be a force for good.
What’s So Terrible About Race-Changers Like Rachel Dolezal?
But you know how the indoctrinated get, MAGA or Loony Left.
In the course of our more recent conversation—and since November 5th, for Americans, it invariably centers around OMFG!—I came to realize why Dean sometimes went a little quiet on me when I espoused liberal-but-not-woke ideas.
He hasn’t been keeping up with the news. For years.
He’s not completely blind but he’s missed a lot of the culture war nonsense. To his credit, he’s spent his time much more productively than many retired people. He reads beaucoup books. Good ones too, usually on politics and history. And not pop-political everyone-is-right-wing-except-us crap. He delves into subjects like how various wars started, and biographies of people he finds interesting.
So his liberalism is, I now recognize, where mine was about 5-7 years ago before the progressive left went so undeniably wonky. When we had to address the growing cognitive dissonance we felt talking to people who expressed ideas we liked and were usually in sync with, but who now seemed a little weird and ‘off’. But we couldn’t quite put our finger on why.
Like when I first learned about transfolk but didn’t know enough about them to do anything other than accept them. I accepted gays, lesbians, bi’s, polys, and friends with weird sexual practices as long as they didn’t talk to me about them, so, if someone wants to be the opposite sex, yay for you!
It seemed weird that it turned into a thing, where, like, everyone and their brother (or was that originally his sister?) were ‘transing’, but I didn’t care until progressives insisted I go along with things I knew to be untrue, like that transwomen are the same as biological women. I sort of half-assed went along with it to be inclusive, like a good liberal; after all, the right couldn’t stand these people and some of them still hadn’t gotten over gay marriage, a law that doesn’t force them to marry gayly. I still value inclusiveness, but it was the gender identity movement that ‘woke’ me to the realization that inclusivity requires boundaries.
This, and other out-of-date beliefs Dean still held, like that only the right censors and bans books, that authoritarianism is only on their side, and What do you have against Kamala Harris anyway? Whaddaya mean you didn’t vote for her? clarified to me that Dean wasn’t woke, he just had no idea what our side had been up to for the last fifteen years.
Identifying your own dumbassery
Dean doesn’t follow the news anymore because “It’s too depressing.” I get it. I stopped following the news for awhile years ago for the same reason, especially during Trump I: You Had No Idea This Was A Prequel, Did You.
Also, Dean’s gotta live there in Fundamentalist Republican Hell, not me. He is, like most of us, just a person wanting to live his life without drama. He’s retired. He doesn’t have to deal with a soul-sucking job anymore and now he gets to do every day what he loves, reading and watching movies. He’s not watching Fox News, listening to the manosphere, and jumping on X, Outrage Central, to freak out about the latest fake or wildly exaggerated news (No, Trump never suggested feeding migrant children to alligators).
I’ve got two countries to keep track of so I don’t spend as much time on American media, but I’m not retired. Also, I’m not sure who to trust anymore because mass media has gone from superficial and biased during Trump I to being unable to tell the difference between a real news story and the Babylon Bee today. Dumping unwilling Gazans somewhere else and turning their land into Mar-A-Gaza sounds like satirical fake news.
Dean agreed to let me send him a whack of my articles specifically addressing the issues I felt he was misinformed about, and I did, expecting he wouldn’t read them, but he did admit at the end that he hadn’t researched our previous conversations before because, “I don’t know, maybe I just don’t want my beliefs challenged.”
That’s more integrity than you customarily find with most.
I didn’t handle my end of the conversation very well. I had that I’m so tired of educating people moment, and sighed kind of condescendingly sometimes. Later, I reminded myself this was exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, educate people, and it’s never effective when you put other people down or make them feel lesser than you. (Raise your hand if a DEI workshopper has ever convinced you that you’re a supremacist white devil.)
I sent him an email several days later, apologizing for my attitude and explaining more plainly, and with less superiority, what he’s been missing and how what he thinks is liberal is no longer anywhere close, and it sounds like maybe he just needs to update his information.
I’m not sure how much his friend, my ex-friend, is discussing these issues with him as I’ve lurked on her Facebook account to see how she’s doing and she doesn’t seem to be posting much about politics these days. I know she’s endured a recent deeply disturbing family tragedy.
Here’s the thing: I think people like Dean are, well, reclaimable.
He’s not an ‘activist’, married to beliefs it would be too painful to abandon if he acknowledged he was wrong. More importantly, he admitted, without my prompting or asking, that he might be afraid of the cognitive dissonance.
We’ve known each other for a very long time, and were in a relationship for a year, and we’re too old to defriend each other over this disagreement, since neither of us are fanatics.
Perhaps a better approach, when we meet people who embrace illiberal ideas or values (on either side), is to ask, “Why do you feel that way? Why do you believe that? What do you think about critics who say….”
I’m not as good as I’d like at challenging people with, erm, challenging beliefs. Like most of us, I often slap a mental label on someone based on something they say. There’s still that petty little piece of me that wants to put others down for not seeing things my way.
I have a friend who does what I should do. “Why do you feel that way?” with an open tone, inviting an information exchange rather than a challenge. Even if she doesn’t like their answer, she keeps probing to get a better understanding of why they believe whatever it is she disagrees with, without challenging them.
That’s definitely an option I don’t exercise much, and should.
There are people who are fanatics about whatever they believe—their religion, their politics, their position on abortion or guns or that transwomen are women. Others aren’t as fanatical as we assume, based on the simple fact that they believe something we don’t. We can’t open dialogues with hostility, patronization or condescension.
I know Dean is an evidence-focused guy. He and I have always asked, “Where’s the proof?” He’s an atheist. I don’t think he’s given up on the Enlightenment values that fueled the growth of classical liberalism, unlike, I’m afraid, our mutual acquaintance.
I got a response from my second email.
I think it's a pretty safe bet to say we're very divergent in our political views. I'm not likely to change your mind on anything and, while I am open to new data, my core beliefs are also not likely to change. So, it's safer if we don't discuss politics. I still love you too…
So much for being willing to challenge his beliefs.
But, maybe his mind clamped shut due to my condescension and snarkiness. That’s my continuous fault.
I still think he’s ‘one of the good ones’ on the left. His heart is in the right place. We often go many months without connecting, so his mind and heart may need more time to process what I’ve said. Maybe the next time we connect he’ll think differently. Or maybe he won’t and we’ll talk about our other fave topics, books and movies instead.
I may put a note on my knee as I recline on the couch to talk: Be kind!
When I’m not spanking my inner child for being a snot-nosed, know-it-all little brat, I help women and others reclaim their power here at Grow Some Labia.
I think this article hits the nail on the head. Regular people who are on the left don’t really know what the leaders and activists on the left are doing these days. They think they are simply fighting for equality and justice as liberals used to to do in the past few decades. They don’t realize how the left has been hijacked by woke radicals. They no longer fight for equality they now fight for special rights and special treatment for minority groups and to ignore reality in the name of some misguided sense of righteousness. This is not to say the right doesn’t have problems of its own. Oh! So many problems! Their draconian stance on abortion, opposition to birth control and LGBT rights, their propensity for book banning, their alliance with their religious cousins, pushing a free market healthcare system when we know based on the data that won’t work, urging us to abandon public education, the desire to subjugate the Palestinian people in the name of revenge, etc. But the left are no angels either. I’m a Rockefeller Republican who’s not particularly a fan of either party. But this much I can tell you the GOP warts and all, are doing quite well for themselves. The Democratic Party is a train wreck that keeps shooting itself in the foot over and over. The woke radicals mentioned above are the reason why and your average Democrat or liberal doesn’t know it. Furthermore, what the left needs to realize is you’ll never get people on your side or persuade them or get them to vote for you if you just immediately assume them to be dumb or demonize them as racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc. Nor can you achieve you’re goals when you’re out of touch with the majority of Americans, on the wrong side of common sense and science and focus on trivial stuff and non-issues while ignoring and letting slip through the cracks, real issues. Even Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian from TYT are now beginning to recognize this. These are the lessons progressives and their supporters must learn. In order to starting winning and accomplishing social change again the Democratic Party and the Social Justice Movement in the United States must find better leadership, reach out to people who disagree with them, be open-minded, and excise wokeness from their ranks. Not to mention focus on bread and butter issues that effect everyday people’s lives. Getting a good understanding of history would be a big help too. We actually as Americans across the political spectrum agree on a lot, so let’s build on that! The left also needs to declare a truce with the right on the culture war and admit there are things they’ve gotten wrong. For instance gender-affirming care for minors is bad, Trans people should not compete on the same field or court with biological women, mass immigration is not a good idea, taking down statues of the founding fathers and the Confederates is Orwellian and wrong, censorship is not how you fight bad speech but rather with good speech, colorblindness and universalism are better than identity politics and race essentialism, etc. Also, the left needs to adopt a more balanced view of American history and stop vilifying America as an evil, imperialist monster which exists purely to inflict suffering on minority groups and people around the world. They also need to stop repeating historical myths that just aren’t true. No, slavery didn’t build any part of America’s wealth. It enriched individuals, businesses and colleges but not the South or the nation as a whole. In point of fact as the great Thomas Sowell has shown, slavery slowed the South’s economic growth. The free states were richer than the slaves states. Fredrick Douglass once wrote that he met “free blacks in the North who were more prosperous, kept a better house, ate at a better table and knew more about the Constitution than 8 out of 10 slave owners in his hometown of Aberdeen, Maryland.” In the days when America was a British colony, Virginia was the wealthiest state in the union. In 1860c on eve of the Civil War, Pennsylvania had surpassed it as the wealthiest state in the union. On another note, America is not a stolen country nor did it commit genocide against its Indigenous population. While there certainly were instances of white settlers stealing individual pieces of land from Native peoples through chicanery and trickery, most of the land in this country was conquered in war or legal purchased in peaceful trade with the Native people. While the Native Americans were certainly victims of atrocities, injustices and forced displacement, there was never any large-scale genocide against them or an plan by the United States government to genocide them. The U.S. government sought to get them onto reservations, take their land and assimilate them but not to kill them. To be sure, the American Indians were treated very poorly by our government but there was never any intention to exterminate them. The same is true of the indigenous peoples of South America. Furthermore, if the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were victims of genocide, why are they all still here? Also, why are there more Native Americans alive today than ever before? If there was a genocide it didn’t workout very well. Also, we need to stop playing into the noble savage trope and acting like the Native Americans lived in a peaceful utopia and spent all day dancing until the big bad white man came along and ruined everything. Give. Me. A. Break. They had been fighting each other in bloody wars and conquering each other’s land long before the white man arrived on the continent. By the way they also practiced chattel slavery, sex slavery, torture, scalping, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and gender discrimination. That’s right, they weren’t environmentalist feminist Communists as leftists like to portray them as. They believed in private property, they had rigid gender roles and took women from other tribes and white women as sex slaves to boot, they did mass environmental destruction like controlled burns of forests and running herds of buffalo off cliffs, etc. They were just as human as the rest of us! Stop deifying the Native Americans! They could be just as savage to whites as we could be to them.
I live in a deepest-blue town in a blue state; so pretty much everyone has a knee-jerk response to identify as "very liberal" or even "progressive." But most of them don't really understand what progressives are up to these days.
The people in my town are generally older, very well educated and upper-middle-class. It's a tiny town full of quiet, well-behaved sorts of people, so we don't experience the increases in crime and lawlessness (though if you travel down the line a few miles to the next town over, which is not quite so wealthy and well-behaved, you immediately notice that all the toiletries in CVS are now behind lock and key, and that there are a lot of homeless people ranting on streetcorners, and that there's a lot of people walking around who are clearly abusing narcotics, and you'd best roll up the windows and lock the doors...).
People like to put up all the "It doesn't matter where you're from, we love you because you're our neighbor" signs (with the text repeated in Spanish and Arabic), but with the price of a modest home hovering in the $600K range, we don't get a lot of undocumented immigrants moving here. I mean, we would certainly welcome them with open arms, if only they could afford to live here...
And everyone is very accepting of trans people; because they assume that the trans folx will be just like the nice gay couple that owns a shop downtown; or the other nice gay couple that adopted four children and are pillars of the community. It is starting to get a bit disconcerting how quite a few girls at the high school suddenly decided to cut their hair short and identifying as boys, especially since we've all known them their whole lives and they always liked princesses and My Little Pony and acted like normal girls up until the moment they rather suddenly decided they were actually boys...but we just won't think about that right now because that would be transphobic and only horrible people are transphobic.
As far as everything else...well, of course everyone voted for Kamala, because people like us always vote blue no matter who - we aren't like those disgusting people who voted for Trump, who didn't go to college and have crappy jobs and put ketchup on their steak. Anything that we hear that sounds like those people might have a point about certain things is obviously misinformation, because stupid ketchup-on-steak types of people are dumb and racist and sexist and xenophobic, so they can only have incorrect opinions. There's no need to think about it any further than that!