Respectfully, Sherry, what you’re doing is easy — using your eloquence to reinforce the Manichean good/bad dialectic that informs leftist outrage, and exploiting the urgency of the situation to nullify a call for introspection. I know, because it’s something I’ve been doing myself for years, but I’ve tried to tone it down recently, as I’ve realized that, beyond earning approbation from the choir and humiliating a few dickheads, it wasn’t achieving much at all.
In your previous post you said that you didn’t resent people for burying their heads in the sand. But in this subsequent framing you issue arallying cry to resist. Well, which is it? Given the stakes, are the people burying their heads, or wallowing in cognitive dissonance, inherently wrong and evil? Or is it a bit more complicated than that? For the sake of my sanity, and any shred of hope that our democracies might be salvageable, I’m believing the latter.
Take the recent parent/child separations on the Mexican border. You would think that the only possible human reaction to that news and those pictures would be horror and incandescent rage. And yet check out this article that ran on The Atlantic website yesterday:
Startegists for the monstrous new-right that has hijacked American democracy have decided that the outrage always benefits them in the long run. You could have a situation where 90% of the population believes a policy is wicked, but the outrage perpetuates the disorienting and scary atmosphere of destabilisation, and that ends up pushing people right, or at the very least pushes them to disengage from politics altogether.
Does that make a bit more sense of what I’m getting at? I’ve been honest above in admitting that I don’t know whether there is any alternative for the left. We have been caught in the alt-right’s web. But I do know that the more we kick and scream,the more trapped we become. This article was my attempt to cut a few threads.
