When Democrats lose major elections, the media invites them to reach out to and better understand Real Americans™. Print reporters and TV crews visit small-town cafes to ask working people having coffee and eggs about the mood out there beyond the Beltway, beyond the hustle of New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.
Strange thing is, the same happens when Democrats win big elections. “Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “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.”
Over the top, of course. Election maps indicate there are still plenty of outnumbered liberals in such places too. But the underlying assumption in these stories is more-liberal, more-diverse, urban America always has the obligation to understand and accommodate the thoughts and feelings of their more-conservative country cousins. Country cousins have no obligation to return the favor.
Solnit writes:
There’s also often a devil’s bargain buried in all this, that you 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. And you reinforce that constituency’s sense that they matter more than other people when you pander like this, and pretty much all the problems we’ve faced over the past four years, to say nothing of the last five hundred, come from 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.
This country is their birthright, by god. All others are interlopers. Those who fail to recognize and respect that do so at their political peril. Paul Waldman noted that there is an entire media industry “devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them,” and that if liberals simply showed them more respect (read: deference), hearts and minds would change, kumbaya, etc. “Fuck your feelings” and “Pinochet did nothing wrong” would turn into “Set a spell. Take your shoes off. Y’all come back now, y’hear?”
The devil’s bargain in that is, Solnit writes, as the Trump era has shown, it requires America to throw anyone not from those happier, whiter, more idyllic climes under the bus. The way we assuage the “Fuck your feelings” crowd’s insecurities about their standing in God’s natural order is “by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views.” Indeed, “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.”
Like Jesus dispensing healings to all comers, Trump (and Rush Limbaugh) promised flocks they were indeed Real Americans™. That their sins were forgiven. Indeed, they were not sins at all. The unspoken message appended to “Black Lives Matter” is “too” or “as much as yours.” That, you see, is true intolerance: lessers not knowing their places, not recognizing who God put in charge because their god is God. Because some of us need Others below us on the social ladder to feel better about ourselves, as LBJ knew and as Sean McElwee found. They want and need them the way Col. Jessep insisted we need him on that wall. Shorn of that “freedom,” what self-respect do Real Americans™ have left?
There is a “hopelessly naïve version of centrism,” Solnit explains, born perhaps of the therapist’s notion that everyone’s feeling are valid, applied to facts and principles:
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?
I think our side, if you’ll forgive my ongoing shorthand and binary logic, has something to offer everyone and we can and must win in the long run by offering it, and offering it via better stories and better means to make those stories reach everyone. We actually want to see everyone have a living wage, access to healthcare, and lives unburdened by medical, student, and housing debt. We want this to be a thriving planet when the babies born this year turn 80 in 2100. But the recommended compromise means abandoning and diluting our stories, not fortifying and improving them (and finding ways for them to actually reach the rest of America, rather than having them warped or shut out altogether). 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, and I pray that times have changed enough that Joe Biden will not do it all over again.
But why the assumption always that the onus is on the Left to do the work of “understanding” the Right when the Right feels no need to reciprocate? Compromising, as Master Trump taught them, is a sign of weakness, the Right’s cardinal sin, one only lessers commit. And lessers by their nature need not be respected or accommodated. Their voices need not be heard. Their votes need not be counted, as Master Trump taught this week. Indeed, why allow them to vote at all?
In two consecutive national elections and in three of the last six, the party most selected by neighbors that, win or lose, liberals are asked to appease has lost the popular vote. This time by 6 million votes (4%).
Solnit continues:
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.
“Why is the onus on the rest of us to explain why we’re trying to do normal? … Why we are trying to uphold the Constitution?” former RNC chair Michael Steele asked Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” [timestamp 1:10:00]. “Why are we having to explain that, and the folks who are, as the president told us he would do, deconstructing the administrative state — they don’t have to explain themselves?”
Republicans are the first to throw down the Chamberlain card, accusing Democrats of being soft on tyranny and unfit to lead. The believe instinctively that anyone willing to appease those among us treading that road, even if it is their own base, are not worthy of their support or votes. By their own code, appeasers are weak and unworthy of respect. Lessers by definition.
“If half of us believe the earth is flat,” Solnit writes, “we do not make peace by settling on it being halfway between round and flat. Those of us who know it’s round will not recruit them through compromise.”
We might, however, defeat them by out-organizing them. Defeat takes time to sink in, but repeated defeat has persuasive power of its own. Americans hate losers. Ask Donald Trump.