Two things to get out of the way in advance... First: Some of this post is US-centric but the issues apply to much of the western world. Second: I'm a progressive. What that means to me is that we...
Two things to get out of the way in advance... First: Some of this post is US-centric but the issues apply to much of the western world. Second: I'm a progressive. What that means to me is that we should strive for tolerance, compassion and equality in culture and in our systems. We should use more of the excess production afforded by technology to take care of people than we currently do. Capitalism should be kept in check by strong state regulation. I'm not a communist, until we come up with a better economic solution which hasn't failed repeatedly in the past I believe capitalism is our best option. It just needs guardrails, some of which are socialist.
I don't mean for that to be an exhaustive description of progressivism, I just want to make it clear where I stand before I say things that, in my experience, often evoke big feelings
Big enough feelings that, somewhat often here at Tildes, I've seen posts interpreted in remarkably uncharitable ways. That's part of the motivation for my disclaimer, but not this whole post. My goal is to talk about things I believe are genuinely important if our aim is to make a better world.
As a whole, Tildes is one of the kindest and most emotionally intelligent forums I've experienced, which is why the areas where that slips are notable and speak to some of the failings of progressives at large.
One of the ideas I've seen repeated here and elsewhere which I believe is a problem:
- In reference to the far right: "Fuck them they need to meet us halfway. Or at least make some sort of good faith effort".
It turns out they don't need to do that. They just needed to vote for Trump and MAGA representatives.
They don't need to check their privilege. That's what we want. They don't really understand what we're even talking about. They don't feel lucky, they feel like their life is hard and no one is going out of their way to give them anything. They've just lived through a couple of decades of progressive social wins culminating in a widespread, ad hoc, campaign to loudly and self righteously shout down any viewpoint that doesn't conform to the new progressive gospel. That left them feeling like there wasn't a place for them in this new culture. It left them feeling marginalized.
At this point some reading this are likely having big feelings. Straight white men can't be marginalized! I don't disagree. But I didn't say they were marginalized, I said they felt marginalized. Their feelings matter. Or they should matter.
And it's not just straight white men, convenient as that would be. We know this from the last election. It's women and brown people too. Immigrants even. There were a lot of surprising demographic shifts to the right. The backlash to progressivism is real and widespread. I believe it's a big part of how we got here, with MAGA in full control of the government.
I know this isn't new information, we've been talking about it since 2016, but I'm not sure it's really sunk in yet.
Because here's the thing: In a way the people that have recently been voting for far right representation actually are marginalized. Many of them are financially insecure. A lot of them are socially insecure. That's a type of marginalization that spans demographics. And yes, groups like LGBTQ+ people, members of disfavored racial and ethnic groups and so on have it much worse. But they don't understand that because, like everyone, they're just trying to survive their own lives.
And we've been telling them, as they go bankrupt trying to keep their sick child alive in a broken medical system, that they need to recognize their privilege. We haven't tried, in any meaningful way, to have compassion and help them understand where we're coming from. We're just throwing these ideas at them, completely failing to understand they they have no context for making sense of them. Historically speaking these are pretty new ideas, they require completely reframing concepts that the western world has taken for granted for decades. That takes time.
They're struggling to pay bills and feed their families while we tell them that it's really important for people who feel like they were born into the wrong body to have support and medical care and use women's bathrooms. Step back and think about how much of a shock that is in a world that has recognized exactly two genders, determined by birth, for all of its history. It takes time for new ideas that big to digest. But, riding the aforementioned wave of progressive cultural wins, not realizing it had already peaked and was about to start receding, despite copious evidence, we just tried to ram it home. And now we lament the results and are reluctant to learn from our mistakes.
We want to create national change. Global change. But we choose niche issues and put them front and center in our messaging. And we do it without even a nod toward empathy for the majority of the population which hasn't had time to consider or digest this new information. We skipped the education step entirely. We're idiots.
I firmly include myself in that we. In 2016 I drew a line. I said, I may not have all the answers but if you can't see Trump for the bigoted, emotionally stunted, narcissist that he is then there is something wrong with your basic understanding of humanity and I have no use for you. I was an idiot.
It's not enough to be morally right, and there putting aside that morality will always be subjective. Politics is about strategy. Population level change is about strategy. Winning hearts and minds across large and varied populations requires easy to digest messaging. The right understands this. It may not be the world that we want to live in, but it's the world that exists. I saw this quote in a blog post, and then again recently on Tildes, no idea where it originally came from:
If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.
Change takes time and work and we tried to skip ahead because we were so sure that we were right. And here I want to circle back to my disclaimer: I believe we were right. That we live in a world where we have to fight for the rights of people to live however they choose to live, when they're hurting no one, is maddening. It's just fucking nuts. I wholeheartedly support the rights of marginalized people. I wish the human race wasn't inherently bigoted, that we didn't have this built in tribal impulse to draw us versus them lines, that we didn't recoil from things we don't understand.
But we can't ignore history. The human race has always been like this and it has always taken time to change things. Social change is a slow process. Just like women's rights were a slow process. Just like ending slavery was a slow process. And neither of those fights are over.
We pushed too hard, too fast, and this is the result. Brexit, Trump, Austria’s (Nazi) Freedom Party, far right gains all over Europe.
I don't mean to imply that social justice is the only reason for the rise of the far right. In fact I don't even think it's the core issue. I believe the core issue is unchecked capitalism. The ever-growing wealth gap, the capture of government by wealthy industries, the rise of multibillionaires. We focus on social justice while everyone is worried about taking care of their families and we wonder why our message doesn't resonate.
We tell people that the way they see the world, the way they were raised, is wrong but we don't first help them understand why. We don't like the political reality we're living in and we blame it on half the population rather than the systems. It's easier to be mad at people than systems.
But it's the systems we need to change. Yes we need to change people too, but first we need to take care of them. People that are just trying to survive are not attuned to nuance. They're not going to take it well when you tell them about other people's problems. If you tell them that if you're not on our side, you're against us then they're going to say "fine, I'm against you". Indeed that's exactly what they've been saying lately.
We need to own that. We did that.
In a little under two years (in the US) we're going to have the opportunity to come together and swing the pendulum back the other way. Leading up to that the focus should be on things that unite us, not things that divide us. And the biggest thing that unites us is that we're tired of our capital controlled political systems. We're tired of politicians that are in it for their donors rather than their constituents. We're tired of the top .01% siphoning off more and more of the resources. That's straightforward and easy to understand and it will absolutely resonate.
And, disclaimer once more, I'm not saying we should stop fighting for people's rights, that's a fight that should never end. But the modern far right in power is a monolithic threat to people's rights and, as such, our main focus should be on solving that problem above all others. We can do that by centering our messaging on issues that resonate with everyone and by having some grace when dealing with the people that voted the right into power rather than demonizing them. We need those people as allies. We can't afford to be stubborn or small minded no matter how stubborn and small minded we think the "others" are.