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How It's Going
There is this:
Appeasement didn't work in the 1930s and it won't work now. That doesn't mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what's under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to. If Nazis wanted to reach out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing "Jews will not replace us" and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect. It is a minority position but by granting it deference we give it, over and over, the power of a majority position.
Rebecca Solnit↱ considers our American moment, and if it's not quite that every paragraph is must-read, neither is the critique piling on. There is a point to make, and recent history has distilled it powerfully. She opens—
When Trump won the 2016 election—while losing the popular vote—the New York Times seemed obsessed with running features about what Trump voters were feeling and thinking. These pieces treated them as both an exotic species and people it was our job to understand, understand being that word that means both to comprehend and to grant some sort of indulgence to. Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election, the Los Angeles Times has given their editorial page over to letters from Trump voters, who had exactly the sort of predictable things to say we have been hearing for far more than four years, thanks to the New York Times and what came to seem like about 11,000 other news outlets hanging on the every word of every white supremacist they could convince to go on the record.
The letters editor headed this section with, "In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters." The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.
—and it's true. It was easy enough to underestimate rightist warnings that people really were upset by the prospect of civil rights for homosexuals, or human rights for women and African-Americans; after all, people weren't really so supremacist, and that wasn't how our society went. Except to the degree it was, and what Solnit describes is part of the reason why. She continues—
Paul Waldman wrote a valuable column in the Washington Post a few years ago, in which he pointed out that this discord is valuable fuel to right-wing operatives: "The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive." He notes that the sense of being disrespected "doesn't come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn't come from the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? …"
—and while it is easy enough to point to an "entire industry … devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them", it was also an easy sell. Tim Wise noted, in
2019↱, that if he wrongly accuses a casual drinker fo being an alcoholic, "they don't go binging just to 'show me'". Over the course of decades, it's easy enough to accept the priorities of an argument that requires everyone to pretend it's not really what it is. Solnit describes a "devil's bargain" in which we "flatter and, yeah, respect these white people who think this country is theirs by throwing other people under the bus—by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views"; this pandering, in turn, reinforces the supremacists' "sense that they matter more than other people", and we might beg leave to consider even centuries worth of trouble for the sake of "this sense of white people being more important than nonwhites, Christians than non-Christians, native-born than immigrant, male than female, straight than queer, cis-gender than trans".
Conservatives have served it up for so long that we hear it from the Supreme Court:
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just complained that "you can't say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Now it's considered bigotry." This is a standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress. And of course Alito is disingenuous; you can say that stuff against marriage equality (and he did). Then other people can call you a bigot, because they get to have opinions too, but in his scheme such dissent is intolerable, which is fun coming from a member of the party whose devotees wore "fuck your feelings" shirts at its rallies and popularized the term "snowflake."
Yet, still, Solnit notes, we endure "this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we're nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family"; and here she nails an important point:
This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists' "everyone's feelings are valid" applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
And this is an extraordinary iteration; I cannot stress its value enough. We can recall Sartre, how supremacists "have the right to play", and "give ridiculous reasons", because "it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly". This is a long tradition among supremacists; there is mockery in what they claim according to their disdain. The muddled cocktail of moral relativism and quack validation is an angry joke, an habitual, perhaps even reflexive, dimunition of what one disdains. A basic idea is to excuse or justify one's own behavior not according to another's, but according to one's own disdainful mockery of another. It even turned up in a
kill list↱ targeting journalists, last week. What Solnit describes, is a familiar refrain: "I've spent much of my adult life watching politicians like Bill Clinton and, at times, Barack Obama sell out their own side to placate the other, with dismal results".
It's like an old joke about Republicans and compromise: Republicans tell you what to do, and you do it; everybody has their part to play:
Among the other problems with the LA Times's editor's statement is that one side has a lot of things that do not deserve to be called facts, and their values are too often advocacy for harming many of us on the other side. Not to pick on one news outlet: Sunday, the Washington Post ran a front-page sub-head about the #millionMAGAmarch that read "On stark display in the nation's capital were two irreconcilable versions of America, each refusing to accept what the other considered to be undeniable fact." Except that one side did have actual facts, notably that Donald J. Trump lost the election, and the other had hot and steamy delusions.
This is not some new condition. Details matter. Function matters. The equivocation Solnit laments is yet another example in the absurd history of an alleged liberal media conspiracy that just can't stop appeasing conservatives.
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