Happy Thanksgiving.
Our family’s annual festival of food, football, and banter begins today, around 11 am, in a Milwaukee suburb. More than fifty of us plan to attend. Both coasts will be represented, but we all grew up in fly-over country. We drive in with smiles and handshakes and hugs. We play touch football for about half an hour. We eat. We argue. We laugh.
About half of the family believes many Republican politicians and voters vacillate between sexist, racist, greedy and stupid. Many voices calling someone a liar is proof. Some may wear a mask between the car and the house.
Our right wing believes that insults from the left are projection, the Clinton family is truly evil, Democrats lie more than Republicans do and Orwellian redefinition of words like ‘fair,’ ‘lie’ or ‘racist’ is not a compelling argument.
As one of about three classically liberal family members, we have two distinct pigeon holes. Our left wing has decided that we are basically Republicans who might smoke pot. I might remind them of the third and fourth term of the Bush presidency, commonly referred to as “the Obama presidency,” when the most people in US history were incarcerated for marijuana. Reagan started the war on drugs, but the left used it as a building block for incarceration nation. Is a fiscal conservative who believes in civil liberties right wing or left wing?
We can discuss the fact that over twenty million poor young men, commonly described as “black” or “minority” have been incarcerated over the past forty years. Some will blame the public teacher unions who have kept millions of citizens illiterate. Some will blame insufficient federal education spending. Some will blame expensive private schools and suburban school districts.
I have a soap box rant about sticking individuals into categories: It’s intellectually lazy. We can do better than that. Still, we all revert to identity politics on occasion.
Perhaps when I call President Trump “Orange Bernie Sanders” it will not resonate with the family right wing. Although any criticism of Trump should intrigue the hate Trump crowd, which includes some Republicans. Any suggestion that Trump expanded government like Bernie’s wildest fever dream will rile Republican neocons who still refuse to consider Hillary and Obama more militant neocons than Shrub Bush.
Much of the debate revolves around who each of us trust. “How is Fox news materially different from MSNBC” usually boils down to amount of skew towards preferred groups. We might hear a “I don’t listen to Fox. It’s too much like CNN.”
We probably will not agree that lockdowns and federal mandates are fascist, wildly regressive and do not save lives. Can we agree that sending trillions dollars to the states subsidized lockdowns and open ended school closings? Probably not.
“By what metric is Trump conservative” or “can someone please define right/left wing?” usually earns a “you’re not helping, Will” from any who consider themselves center right. Help move towards what goal? Building a causal argument which can sway moderates? Who is currently building that sort of argument? Have insults replaced arguments? Who is selling solutions to problems we can all agree on? What problems can we all agree on?
With news services and politicians ranting only for radicalized bases, and everyone confusing opinion with fact, the most interesting aspect of interplay, is where we look for truth. Who do we still trusts and why do those figures retain trust? Where do we get our news?
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 33% of voters say they trust the political news they’re getting, down from 37% in July. Another 14% are uncertain. That’s about the same number who believe the US has a thriving extra-terrestrial population. 33% of Afghanistanis believe the Soviet Union has been bombing us for the past twenty years. The illiteracy rate in Afghanistan is almost exactly the same as the rate in US prisons: 70%. If intentionally flawed polls are slightly skewed in Biden’s favor, about 33% of the US still support Biden and think he’s competent/not senile. So, the question for this year will be “who do you trust more now than you did a year ago.”
My answers will be Peter Thiel, Rand Paul, and Glenn Greenwald. All three have delivered hard truths, facts and perspectives that do not seem to directly serve their personal or political interests. They seem to consistently believe everything they say and write. I didn’t believe them, this much, before COVID. I thought for over an hour and those were the only three people I could come up with. Cynical year. How do we transcend cynicism? How do we refrain from judging harshly with insufficient information? How do we refrain from facile categories and find commonalities? How do we pitch the fact that our opinions are almost never facts? How do we enjoy the company of people who disagree with us passionately? How do we watch this year’s Chicago Bears play a football game and not laugh or gain perspective?
Who do we trust? Who are our heroes?
Looking forward to reading. I’d like to hear your take on the tech companies monopoly and censorship of conservative views. JM