What’s with some leftists’ “hurt liberal’s feelings” mentality of activism?

jumpingjacktrash:

theunitofcaring:

I have a lot of thoughts about this but they’re all very speculative; be appropriately skeptical.

There are people who I really disagree with, but fundamentally respect. I understand where their understanding of the world diverges from mine, and I get what they’re trying to do, and I might hope that they never get political power but on a personal level I trust them and like them, and enjoy debating and discussing things with them, and I know that they feel the same way about me. And I want my communities to be ones in which they are welcome (and my friendships with them are not discouraged or treated as evidence against my commitment and trustworthiness).

This is sort of the Peak Liberal take on how to handle profound political disagreement, and by that I mean something more than “it’s something liberals say a lot and leftists think is really stupid”. Liberalism is a collection of social technologies which developed to try to sustain societies where people had deeply felt political, cultural and religious (mostly religious) disagreements. Lots and lots of the norms of liberalism are norms for maintaining societies in which these profound disagreements exist. “I don’t agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend your right to say it” is a core liberal norm; “we can respect each other without agreeing with each other” is liberalism; “we should treat each other compassionately and thoughtfully and lawfully even when we believe each others’ beliefs to be evil” is liberalism.

Leftists have a lot of critiques of this! Some of them are good critiques! For example: 

In practice, no community is inclusive of everyone. Communities that are aiming for ‘inclusive of everyone’ end up being inclusive of the people with the most social power, because they’re most resilient to the inclusion of people who really hate them and like to hurt them. Norms that try to make everyone get along therefore end up being norms that make things comfortable for powerful people and Not For You at vulnerable people. 

Divorcing peoples’ politics from their character like that isn’t very principled. If I think someone is a rapist, I shouldn’t ‘like them as a person but disagree with them about rape’. If I think someone supports mass murder in the form of foreign wars, I shouldn’t ‘like them as a person but disagree with them about mass murder’. Doing this requires some weird doublethink where you forget the actual consequences of peoples’ political behavior, which hurts real people, so you can relegate it to the realm where “they’re wrong about the best flavor of ice cream” and “they’re wrong about what temperature to keep their house” go. 

But the core thing here is not a specific critique. Leftists, even when the specific critiques don’t apply, are deeply suspicious of “we disagree profoundly but we can respect each other”. They recognize it as the Core Liberal Thing and they are very much opposed to the core liberal thing. So leftists, when talking with people who they disagree with politically, tend to go out of their way not to do the Core Liberal Thing. They often take pride in not having respectful, positive relationships with people who they profoundly disagree with. They are often mean to people who they disagree with. They often ridicule the idea that we should be establishing common ground or agreeing to let some disagreements lie for the sake of common interests elsewhere. 

And, yeah, they often are delighted about hurting liberals’ feelings. It’s an extension of the critique of collaborative-disagreement as a important core norm, and while I think some parts of the critique have merit, I’ve never seen anything productive come of a discussion between people who abandoned effort at kind and thoughtful disagreement in favor of trying to hurt their enemies’ feelings. And so I think you need it, at least a little bit sometimes on your own terms, even if you are opposed to it as a framework for how society should work.

oh shit, suddenly i understand why i’m seeing tumblr leftists talk about ‘liberals’ as The Enemy, when just last year ‘liberal’ was the opposite of ‘conservative’, and ‘conservative’ meant right-wing.

it’s because ‘conservative’ doesn’t actually mean right-wing, it just tends to coincide with it. conservative really means dogmatic and judgmental.

horseshoe effect is a real bitch.