Amanda Marcotte wants liberals to stop being such downers:
Progressives in the past couple of years haven't been doing ourselves many favors. The dominant discourse is so often focused on suffering and surviving, without any talk about happiness and thriving as a counterbalance.
....The recent kerfuffle over Spotify is a good example....The action feels more about performing self-sacrifice, proving liberal bona fides by showing off the small indulgences you'll give up. That garners likes and retweets, but as political action, it's likely to backfire. It will be used as confirming evidence that liberals are fun-hating scolds — which makes it easier for Rogan and his allies to recruit more young people to the right.
I'm far from the only one who has noticed. On "Pod Save America" this week, host Jon Lovett complained about the "grim and joyless aspect" of progressive politics and warns "nobody wants to become part of a sour and sanctimonious movement." It's not a popular message, but it's uncomfortably true.
Why yes! I don't necessarily agree with everything Amanda says after this, so please take up any issues you have directly with her. But her diagnosis is spot on.
Nor is it just the past two years, as she suggests. This has been going on for quite a while. Liberals are the party of:
- Don't watch the NFL. It's a racist concussion machine.
- Don't drive SUVs. They are destroying the planet.
- Nobody is "illegal." We should welcome hardworking folks from south of the border. Unless you're a racist, that is.
- Don't eat meat. It's all factory farmed and contributes to global warming.
- Suburbs are bad. We should fill them up with high rises.
- Watch your speech. You should talk the way young, college educated people do.
- The economy is terrible. Have you seen the latest news about what our heartless policies are doing to poor people?
- You aren't vaccinated? Obviously you're a selfish prick who doesn't care about your fellow human beings.
- The military? Why would anyone join the military?
- Everyone is racist. We should all gladly take diversity training courses to prove this to ourselves.
- Walmart is horrible. You shouldn't shop there because they're viciously anti-union.
- Amazon too.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Any of these things could be great if they were part of a passionate, upbeat crusade, but they aren't, really. They're mostly framed as scolding, and who the hell feels uplifted by a party of scolds?
I'm to the left of roughly 90% of all Americans, and even I get kind of tired of this stuff. There's just got to be a way for liberals to keep their principles but sell them more in an evangelistic tone and less in a hectoring one.
I agree with you Kevin but remember this: do you prefer your liberals to be moralistic scolds, or or the kind of people who argue against their own side in an debate? Seems to me the latter of the 90s and early aughts gave way to the former and it wasn't a coincidence.
If you are saying that liberals were open to to examining their own beliefs till they became appalled by what their counterparts, the movement conservatives, have become, I agree with you.
The thing is, Kevin, what you are missing is the moralism IS the point.
Terms like The Great Awokening and The Evangelical Left are not simply snide terms used by nasty right-wingers, they are well-grounded analyses of how and why this movement arose.
Wokism fills a hunger in the human psyche for telling other people what to do, for being convinced that one is better than everyone else, and for constantly finding new sins (either to pin on others, or to make oneself feel guiltier); a hunger that has been around since at least Deuteronomy.
Every culture goes through mad excesses of this sort of behavior (generically "puritanism") every so often. Nike riots, Calvinism, Stalinism, Iranian Revolution -- and Wokism. Always the same human psychology; all that varies are the details of exactly what it latches onto.
I suspect part of what drives the cycle is Peter Turchin style Elite Overproduction; at last that's what I see in most of the most recent cases. Unfortunately most of the previous ways of getting rid of excess elites seem to be gone -- but it's precisely the sort of religious madness we see in wokism, the obliviousness to evidence and absolute belief that they alone talk to and for god and good, that in the past has led to the sort of communal violence (ie war) that gets rid of elites for a generation or so.
The then sitting president orchestrated a coup to overturn the election with support from legislators of his own party, fascists and bigots on the march with encouragement from said president and his party, enquiry into said attempted coup stonewalled by members of the said party and the previous administration - I see much reason for grimness and joylessness and few for "don't worry, be happy."
Do those who are scolding people for complaining about Ilya Shapiro remember the hue and cry about 'you did not build that!'?
For every incident cited here in support of the assertion that the left is not fun it will be easy to find multiple stances of the mirror image, where the conservatives do no exactly show any desire to have a healthy debate.
( ( ( Ilya ) ) ) is looking at Ketanji Brown Jackson's & Leandra Kruger's resume & saying, "You lie!"
Shapiro is Joe Wilson's brother by another mother.
The first time I heard the term "political correctness" was late-70s UK lefties criticizing other lefties. You've not experienced annoyance-with-ones-own until you hang out in British political circles.
I often times just think that Kevin is trolling us...almost everything on his list is true...even the worse...Don't eat meat....well, this also is true.
But so what? I still eat meat and don't mind the scolding.
This is easy...they are right but I still eat meat.
Traveller
The tyranny of the righteous exists on the right and left. My experience is that the right's tyrants are mostly in the media and the people who follow them mostly just nod and listen (or repost Fox News garbage on boomerbook). The left's tyrants bring it home with righteousness interactions among individuals, but of course, also love their boomerbook posts (ohhhh those witty Bill Maher insights!).
But yeah, probably because I interact more with the left, I get irritated by their posing more. Can't quit the feeling of being superior to others, soooo gooood!
Unfortunately there are several right wingers in my extended family. Trust me they do worse than scold. Most used to be normal moderate conservatives but man are the nasty now. They tell us things like all Dems are evil knowing we have always been Democrats.
This is why the internet exists,
https://i.redd.it/r4ytu5xj27g81.gif
It's a waste of time to worry about it. Biden or even Sanders could call for all progressive and liberals to be "Happy Warriors" as Hubert Humphrey once put it and you would never see it register with anyone on the right or even independents.
You can't control every left-wing or liberal voice.
There are lots of political organizations out there scouring everywhere for left voices that will infuriate the right. Whatever it takes they will find them.
If almost every voice on the left became positive and lighthearted, they would all disappear from the narrative and the few that aren't would be foregrounded.
With so many bad actors doing all they can to paint the left as sour scolds, it may be impossible for even those on the left to tell whether this is an accurate picture.
They aren't left though. Stop calling them that. You see your problem??? Dialectical issues they have represent bourgeois decadence at their finest. It's why they mirror moral justice warriors so well.
I agree with much of this. Though the problem of course is that the situation is objectively not one of joy and jubilation. And some of the issues are hard to frame positively. How do you message about climate change with upbeat melodies?
And BTW is the conservative message any more positive? We are killing babies, getting "replaced" by undesirables, they take our guns away and the United States is going to cease being a white Christian nation. Is this any more positive or encouraging than the liberal scolding? My answer is it is worse than any of Amanda's examples. And yet it works while the liberal message does not. What does this say about human nature?
Until we can get some consistent wins, it's hard to frame issues like climate change positively. It is not a joyous issue and that should be acknowledged.
The conservative message isn't any more positive. You hit that right on its head. Conservative fear-mongering is much worse than the progressive version. The only thing is, conservatives get Fox News as its culture head talking point. There isn't anything remotely close to it on the left in terms of influence and I think it explains the imbalance.
I think the flip side of joyless progressive is angry reactionaries.
It's far easier to be a happy go-along-er if you are happy to just go along with the
status quo, whether that's eating meat without a care or driving a great big SUV you don't need or accepting the current social pecking order (assuming you are not at the bottom, which you probably aren't). Sitting as you do in the middle, the angry crazy people on Fox are no more bothersome than the shrill Puritans of the left. But it's hard to stay mindlessly in the status quo center. Time and chance happeneth to us all.
That said, probably more by the accident of my temperament, I am a pretty happy liberal guy. I drive a Prius and really like it and I'm working to eat a lot less meat (in part for my health) and struggle with watching the NFL but dang there have been some amazing games this post season. I firmly believe it is possible to be angry and upset with Trumpism and concerned about the state of the world in general and still love all the true and beautiful things around us. It helps to keep a sense of proportion alongside the capability for outrage at the deep injustices of the world, which did not start with Trump or Nixon or bloody wars of the 20th century or even the trans Atlantic slave trade, evil as it was. We humans are flawed creatures but it's better to have a lovers quarrel with the world imho.
There is along list of things that worry and disturb me but here are some reasons I am cheerful this week:
- my sister sent me a quote from Vaclav Havel about hope
- I read about Nelson Mandela taking courage from Anne Frank's diary
- listened to one of Beethoven's late piano sonatas, actually listening to some new music sent to me by my sons, actually music period.
- talking to my wife on whatsapp who is currently thousands of miles away
- being grateful for the luck I have had with friends and family .
Agreed on everything but that shitcon Havel.
Your caricature is very pat, and very dryly amusing, and completely misses what is really going on.
The only thing that we can do is to show future historians that we knew evil when we saw it.
Not really. The thing is that humans are lazy, selfish, narcissists, largely. At least, we are today since the social constraints that used to limit those tendencies have disappeared. One is often lauded for being a jerk instead of reprimanded.
So people who have standards constantly have obnoxious behavior exhibited before them. It grates. And, since the exhibitors are indeed "Deplorables", because they're being jerks for trivial reasons, it's fine to tell them they're jerks. It isn't because they "Don't know any better." or "They had a rough childhood." Nope, it's because THEY ARE JERKS!
A lot of these are just policy positions and most of them don't even have that much support even among liberals. How many of the liberals you know are vegetarians? Or even try to limit their meat consumption? Or even ever talk about it? I'm a liberal vegetarian and just about all of my liberal friends and family members eat meat and I never scold any of them about it.
How many liberals don't live in the suburbs? How many of them actually want to fill the suburbs with high rises (which in my experience, the suburbs are already full of anyway, just with feeder roads and big open parking lots instead of gridwork streets).
And as has been pointed out elsewhere, the right is hardly without scolds. Gays are going destroying America. Women who need abortions are baby killers. Boycott the NFL because it's full of woke antifa members (seriously). And what can possibly top the idea that everyone who does not believe the same set of myths you do is going to be condemned to eternal torture?
Seriously dude. This is just some weak trolling.
Leftist are anti-gay traditionally. Most of what you said is dialectical illusion. It's made to tell a story. That is when I talk to contards, that wont work on me. I tell s different story than libtards. Something that scares them.
The good news is that if you log off twitter, you won't hear most of those things.
Hey, you want some joyful progressive comments? How about:
- Holy smokes, researchers developed a vaccine in less than a year for the worst pandemic in a century! And it's already saved millions of lives.
- The Webb Space Telescope is the most complex damn mission this century, and it worked like a charm.
- We've already got the solar panels and the wind turbines and the electric cars and the heat pumps that we need to clean up carbon pollution, and guess what? They're cheaper and better than what we have now! Engineering rocks.
- If you're female or gay or a minority, you have more opportunity right now than you've ever had before. You want to go to college? Now is your time. There are actually a lot more women than men there right now. You want to be a doctor or a lawyer? Go for it. It wasn't conservatives who opened this up for you. It was people just like you, and people who believed in fairness for all. We did it, and we'll keep pushing for it. All those things listed above, things that addressed the big problems we face? They weren't done by free-marketeers and gun-toting hicks. They were done by people who thought hard and worked together to do things right, and we need everyone to do that.
+1