Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

it feels like nothing works unless those people have to live and work and hang out with people of the groups about whom they are bigoted

I think I might be really far outside of whatever you're talking about. I can't think of anything I know of that qualifies as PC haranguing or hypocritical scolding or w/e, I guess outside of thinkpieces on like xojane or whatever crappy sources with low standards for content quality.

I think this is otm, fwiw.

What's described as political correctness is overwhelmingly the kind of strong, critical, educationally-focused challenge to bigotry, both hard and soft, that should be taking place, imo. It's unequivocally a good thing and, for the most part, despite an over-reliance on academic jargon at times, done in the right way. The kind of performative talk you occasionally see from (white) clickbait commentators celebrating the demise of the white man as a relevant political actor is (obviously with hindsight) wrong and could barely be more counterproductive if it tried. The idea that white working class interests and the interests of minorities are necessarily in conflict, and no amount of learning or proactive attempts at forging solidarity can change that, is poisonous and needs to be confronted with almost as much vehemence as racism itself. It has a much wider reach than the kind of useful discussions taking place in schools, offices, etc.

I think there are broader / more common issues with the way that race is discussed in liberal circles but that's probably a discussion for a different day.

i think an anti-PC backlash probably has something to do with the right-wing drift but i think it's a very very minor piece. after all the PC policing, no matter how annoying or misguided it may be, is a response to something already in the culture - the bigotry it's trying to address. it's like saying that blowing air canisters at the burning building caused the fire - at most they made the fire worse but they didn't light the match.

I've been surprised by post-election discussions with a priori "liberal" American friends, Sanders supporters, who are "I told you so"ing me that making the election a referendum on race or gender would backfire because white men people have "opinions" about those that may sound, but are not, problematic, and have not been addressed respectively enough. "Evidence": campus wars (that as a tenured humanities professor I seem to have missed), hate speech laws, people feeling bad about having weird feeling about trans people, etc. People got upset and voted Trump. Hmm.

So yeah, discussions of race and gender in liberal circles : a good topic : because "the left" contains multitudes here, and going forward we're going to need to find our ways through this.

i have a five year old and when i harangue him or raise my voice or make him feel guilty, it backfires and it makes it worse. what works is when i quietly roll my eyes and adopt a gentle tone and say the same things but express them in a more positive way and talk him down. so i think maybe sometimes the way to talk to bigoted assholes is to talk to them like the children they are.

like they deserve a tongue-lashing, but i always worry that it just makes them more angry and drives them away and into the waiting arms of breitbart and the like.

The idea that white working class interests and the interests of minorities are necessarily in conflict, and no amount of learning or proactive attempts at forging solidarity can change that, is poisonous and needs to be confronted with almost as much vehemence as racism itself. It has a much wider reach than the kind of useful discussions taking place in schools, offices, etc.

― Bubba H.O.T.A.P.E (ShariVari), Thursday, November 10, 2016 12:34 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm.

i have a five year old and when i harangue him or raise my voice or make him feel guilty, it backfires and it makes it worse. what works is when i quietly roll my eyes and adopt a gentle tone and say the same things but express them in a more positive way and talk him down. so i think maybe sometimes the way to talk to bigoted assholes is to talk to them like the children they are.

I agree with the impulse here but the basic condescension of this is exactly what ppl find insulting and dismissive! And yet, if you aren't supposed to "harangue" them (which I guess is anything that makes them feel embarrassed/persecuted/defensive??) and you're not supposed to patronize them, how the fuck are you supposed to interact with people who have said by their actions that racism and misogyny are acceptable or even desirable.

ShariVari otm there

i'm not saying it would work, btw! i think racism is such a deeply entrenched thing that certain segments of the adult population are beyond repair and beyond hope.

Also let's face it none of us has unlimited wells of emotional energy to hold these assholes' hands through this. I mean as white ppl it's our job to go out and corral our idiots and bring them into the light however we have to, but as individuals we have limits of how many times we can nod patiently at "It's not about race!" or some goddamn bullshit and be patient teachers. Personally I'm on the verge of tears 24/7 but I work with ppl who say things like "This school started to go downhill when the Black kids started coming here" and "No one helped my grandparents who spoke Italian, so why should we translate for immigrant families?" so that uses me up p much from jump.

like i sorta said in one of the other half dozen threads about this miserable week, i think in an era where people have increasing access to media that tells them what they want to hear and only presents evidence that supports their beliefs, it only gets more difficult.

i can't even look at any Facebook post which mentions the election and then i see 20 comments bc i know i'm going to read something exhausting and infuriating. i can't even talk to my cousins anymore.

I don't believe this drift in question is going to be solved by hand-holding or outreach. It is a response to major global issues, population shifts, maybe climate change effects, changing economies, etc. If someone votes for Le Pen because they want all Muslims out of France there's no amount of soft-talk you can give them to change their mind. So if you find that kind of work exhausting - and I can understand why you would - I wouldn't even bother. At best it's a drop in the bucket but more likely it's just nothingness to fill the empty space of despair in a world where our actions seem to lack any real impact.

i feel like living in los angeles my voice has zero impact, i don't talk to anyone in person who needs convincing. everyone pretty much agrees on how shitty this all is. meanwhile, somewhere else everyone is agreeing on how awesome it is. and we'll only meet online and that never ends well.

We're all caught in a tidal wave and some ppl are saying we just need to bail the water out with our little beach buckets and that'll keep us afloat. I posit a. we are at the mercy of an unfolding history that we can only observe not effect and b. that history is complex and we barely understand enough of it to even know what we're looking at. Actually I think Benjamin's thing is probably closer to what I want to express here --

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/Klee,_paul,_angelus_novus,_1920.jpg/240px-Klee,_paul,_angelus_novus,_1920.jpg

io is especially otm here but yes to everything posted in the last 30 mins. Even patient arguing feels like a privileged response

The protoypical voter who decided this election was a white, middle-class Rust Belt independent who voted for Obama in 08 and perhaps 12, then switched to Trump in 16. (Think Ken Bone.)

These are decent people and not deliberately racist. However, they often hold certain unexamined assumptions that are startlingly bigoted. Obama was able to reach them, partly through patience, partly through even-handedness, and partly by simply embodying in his person an effective counterexample to many of their worst prejudices.

Clinton, who had a more imperial, entitled tone, was not.

tbqh, although personal outreach (particularly to friends and family) is useful wherever possible, it's never going to be sufficient. The idea that universal tolerance at an individual level would mean the death of racism is one the areas where i think a lot of well-meaning liberal analysis goes off track. As things stand, i don't really see much alternative to trying to proactively forge solidarity through mutual self interest - whether that's organised labour, breaking down barriers to education, healthcare, etc. It's obviously easier said than done but that has to be where the left's attention is.

I think that's right. Approaching racism as an individual moral failing may be accurate but it doesn't address that a lot of it is driven by a zero-sum attitude towards access to dwindling resources. If your race is your one and only ticket to be part of the "in" group, the ones deserving of protection, then to attack a racist directly will in fact exacerbate that anxiety. You can't demand empathy from others unless you offer it first.

Even patient arguing feels like a privileged response

Over here in brexit land, behind the racism is usually big personal problems/money problems/mix of that the person has and I wd say you shouldn't feel like you have to be able to tackle those problems if you aren't their psychologist therefore perhaps engagement on an individual level should be swapped for something else

I should add: you are under no obligation to offer empathy to a racist

That's fine, I have no intentions in that direction anyway.

I rarely have political arguments with people I disagree with this much and there are people I know who it would take such a heroic effort to possibly convince them that you'd be throwing away your own life in the process, so I just end up barely talking to them at all. My brother has worn down my father about some things but it taken a very long time and they're always around each other.

Again, I'm not the most experienced but I'd suggest trying to appeal to people's compassion if they have any. There was a guy online I was friendly with who did this racial caricature on an art site and I asked him if he had any black friends and how they might feel about his drawing. He said that convinced him to take it down but if I called him a bigot I think he may have stubbornly kept it up. I'm not sure though.

Today I tried on another forum to get the Trump supporters to consider the non-whites who have been physically attacked by Trump supporters and they were incredibly dismissive and made a bunch of piss poor arguments, including a middle eastern guy with scary far right sympathies. It's going to be weird there because those Trump supporters are some of the most frequent posters.

I mean a crucial thing here is lots of these people believe that they are not racist (and that racism is a false charge always being leveled at them)

So they're primed to dismiss these criticisms

I don't think of arguing issues with people ad a solution so much as a question of moral honesty. I spend a lot of time, in pubs for example, with people I like and who want to talk about politics. Can't just nod and acquiesce.

i understand your point and i myself exercise that (but not most of the time). but nodding does wonders for understanding the inner functions of a person's thoughts, especially over a pint

My partner has profited from betting on Brexit and Trump now. I'm thinking of lumping on Le Pen just to jinx the fascist gravy train, or get myself out of the overdraft - not exactly win-win more like win-lose ore lose-win:(

there are people I know who it would take such a heroic effort to possibly convince them that you'd be throwing away your own life in the process, so I just end up barely talking to them at all.

"Behind every woke straight man are 25 exhausted feminists" or something like that.

in general I think you changes people's minds not through arguing points but by offering a more compelling picture of the world. the space and patience that requires are v difficult to find now that any attention space is saturated and there are so many stories out there that you can easily find an overwhelming tide of material to support any view. it's striking if you try to compare the rise of populist authoritarian politics now bears with the 20s&30s bc the people drawn to it now are living vastly more comfortable lives in much more stable polities. people are awful at realising in what respects they've got a good deal. an insomniac media doesn't help, and media/discourse/thinking in general is structurally predisposed towards alarmism and instilling a sense of crisis. this sort of politics depends on spectacle and society has become v spectacular, so it's easy to see why people's confidence in democracy has weakened

booming post

Guys - I am not thread policing at all and I'm very happy if this thread can be used to give comfort of any sort to any/all of us working out our issues but I do kinda wonder if we could move more away from the question of "how to change things" to the question of "what is going on / why are things this way" and particularly with an eye on this as a global phenomenon as opposed to a uniquely American one. Because there are specific reasons Trump won that are unique to the US, but from a long view / as part of a trend / those unique reasons don't always follow. Or maybe the question of "how do you convince people not to be racist" would make more sense in broader terms if it was "how do you convince people not to be xenophobic" which is in some ways a much scarier question that is much harder to answer?

nb that I do think the Internet and social media news has a role to play in this as well tho I wonder if its more amplifying these other things rather than being the source

xxp I'm impressed you can even read it, at least today I can blame being so jumbled on being ill

What ShariVari and ryan say resonates with me: building class solidarity is the task going forward, across communities. Then there's another way forward besides fascism and neo-liberalism.

Like I want to say is: what's going on globally is that communism remains discredited, but it's needed as an option more than ever.

in general I think you changes people's minds not through arguing points but by offering a more compelling picture of the world.

I've tried really hard to do this with some white parents at my school w/r/t their feelings about both Black Americans and our immigrant families. I've offered them the chance to be on a winning side as our programs succeed. I've tried to celebrate them pre-emptively for supporting minority groups. I've shown that this is the only tactic that will result in their OWN success as a parent organization and how robust their group could be if lots of ppl pitched in, how much of a relief it would be to share the work, and more.

I never get anything more than tepid agreement for 10 minutes until a competing opinion/factoid is ranted by another person in the office. I've decided they don't actually WANT a better future. They like this one because it makes them victims and gives them something to endlessly complain and bicker about.

xp the 'personalized feed' structure of facebook, twitter, etc. certainly enables people to create their own echo chambers which makes it harder to fight back against viral misinformation

Like I want to say is: what's going on globally is that communism remains discredited, but it's needed as an option more than ever.

OTM the protectionism/victim-ism is coming from resource scarcity in ppl's lives and that is the fault of capitalism on an individual and a global scale.

I was listening to an interesting interview with someone (possibly Alex Zaitchik) who said that a lot of the Trump supporters he spoke to saw 'political correctness' not as a tool for combating racism but as a shared language used by liberals both to mask their own racism and to exclude anyone who didn't 'get it' from polite society. It's a bad take but probably one that needs to be kept in mind.

I think this view is very widespread. I used to work in a call-centre, the staff overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly working class, mostly female, the people running the place and making decisions were remote and rarely communicated with us directly, but were palpably more middle class, and overwhelmingly male. Pretty much the defining feature of the place was that we were constantly being ordered to carry out our work duties in ways which seemed obviously counterproductive, or which seemed to have been decided by people who didn't properly understand what was going on at the customer facing end of the business. Instructions on how to do certain tasks were constantly being changed or completely reversed, usually with no explanation to us of why, people were very aware that they were not judged important enough for it to be worth explaining why a procedure had been changed, they were just told to get on with it. The general atmosphere was one of sullen acquiescence and resentment. Every year we would have this mandatory diversity training course and it was the exact same thing: being talked down to by middle class people, my co-workers often (genuinely imo) did not understand why certain things we were warned against were offensive, but there way a sullen acceptance and knowledge that arguing about it would not make any difference, awareness that they were not important enough to be given explanations why certain things were wrong beyond "because I say so", and the griping in private after it was finished. News stories about some celebrity being censured for a politically incorrect gaffe would be received in a similar way, as some remote capricious authority coming down on people for not following a set of incomprehensible and nonsensical rules. And a lot, most, of these people did have ugly hateful, racist views that needed challenging, I don't know how you go about challenging those without reinforcing this resentment.

A lot of them had positive things to say about UKIP, though I get the impression that most of them thought the party was too incompetent to vote for. I imagine that a lot of them voted for brexit, and that this idea of a remote incomprehensible bureaucracy that was dictating their lives would have resonated with them.

Alternatives to neo-liberalism, ones that are more humane and people-focused, need a rebranding. In the US words like "communism" and "socialism" carry too much baggage, especially since they carry the legacy of failed states and atrocities. I remember joining the YCL in 7th grade in the 90s during my more idealistic days, and dropped out in high school because a lot of people won't buy anything with the word "communism" or "socialism" attached to it. It's dead the in water, it was back then, and it still is today.

What I realized back then, and I still think it's true now, is that something entirely new needs to be created with new terminology. Until that happens I doubt we'll get our better alternatives.

it's striking if you try to compare the rise of populist authoritarian politics now bears with the 20s&30s bc the people drawn to it now are living vastly more comfortable lives in much more stable polities. people are awful at realising in what respects they've got a good deal.

been really fascinated by this idea for a while. how do you square the generalized anxiety in the air with the historically unprecedented levels of comfort and security? (this does not, obviously, apply to everyone but it does apply to most white people in, say, wisconsin.) the day to day experience of risk is low, and yet we are beset with overwhelming fears of catastrophic risk, system failure, encroaching dark futures. there's something about the current order that needs individuals to persist in a heightened state of alertness and anxiety in a way that i've been trying to track back to the protestant ethic but you needn't really get that academic about it. when people are pulled away from each other, when all we have is a cult of individual entrepreneurship, the result is this lonely anxious misery which inevitably finds its ready outlets. it's not just poverty imo, it's a kind of fear that and isolation that runs deeper.

Isn't this why inequality (within a given polity) is more poisonous than a notional standard of living, expressed globally?

I was talking to my therapist a bit about this last night. I experience tremendous anxiety despite living an extraordinarily comfortable life and I think some of it is that in my gut I realize how tenuous and fragile society and our stability is and so this comfort almost feels like a forgery or a mirage - it's illusory and I'm constantly waiting for the fog to lift and see that no, actually we now live in the apocalypse. I wonder how much that is true for a lot of people - that it's not /normal/ to be so safe and so it feels like it can't be real. The other big component I think is the West's cult of individuality and the general lack of sittlichtkeit that people have. It seems like so many ppl feel alienated from their families and their communities. You hear all the time about how it used to be that everyone knew their neighbors and now no one knows their neighbors, etc. That kind of loneliness I agree probably has something to do with it. I think maybe the third thing is just that we have failed to provide meaning for people - we have mostly let religion become a side project that is less and less relevant to people's day to day life and we don't have much in the way of national cohesiveness. I remember reading that Israelis have some of the highest reported rates of happiness in the world because they believe that where they are and what they are doing and what they are a part of is important and meaningful.

idk, ryan I think a lot of this overlaps with your post but some stray thoughts on the topic. I remember we discussed this question a little bit on the political philosophy thread not that long ago?

as an addendum: i don't know how afraid to be but the apocalyptic reaction on the left strikes me as possibly just feeding the same beast that's causing all this. i choose to be optimistic and see this moment as the traumatic birth of a new progressive political movement--hopefully a ferocious one. here, now, is a moment to articulate alternatives.

I was listening to an interesting interview with someone (possibly Alex Zaitchik) who said that a lot of the Trump supporters he spoke to saw 'political correctness' not as a tool for combating racism but as a shared language used by liberals both to mask their own racism and to exclude anyone who didn't 'get it' from polite society.

this is not so far out of step with how the term was originally used by leftists

that's all very well said, mordy. i lead a reasonably comfortable life too and suffer from lots of anxiety. part of my way of coping with it is to academically study the sociological roots of it. i'd like to go back to the likes of christopher lasch, auden's "age of anxiety," more weber, etc.

we need marxism without history, christianity without god, a pragmatism of compassion. not holding my breath.

we have mostly let religion become a side project that is less and less relevant to people's day to day life

Or see it primarily as a weapon used by the right.

I absolutely get the lack of community as a driver of anxiety though - I live in a university town 2,000 miles from where I grew up. Nobody I know (primarily university faculty and staff) is from here originally, and the school is just big and well-known enough that everyone always has one foot out the door thinking they could end up somewhere even bigger or more prestigious; my wife is being recruited by two places right now, both much larger and one of them is probably top three in her field prestige-wise.

So nobody has any real long term community, or never puts down roots that go too deep. I know my neighbors fairly well, but they're all in the same situation - always pondering the next move. It makes me feel constantly edgy and unsettled despite having an objectively worry-free life.