What I’d advise Katherine Timpf is to stop bemoaning that the University of Michigan protects people from being discriminated against for their race, gender, or sexual preference but not for their political leanings, and ask herself why it is that so many educated people of conscience no longer see her political party as a legitimate participant in the national debate.
Obviously, Ms. Timpf has a point. Michigan communications Prof. Susan J. Douglas came out and wrote an article about why it is completely understandable to “hate” Republicans. Presumably she teaches some Republicans, so how does this not create some kind of hostile environment? If she said it was just fine to hate blacks or men or Jews, we’d be outraged.
If you actually read her piece, you’ll realize that she is really lamenting the fact that the Republicans have become so filled with hate that they’ve polarized the country to the point that the left hates them right back. She isn’t saying that this is a good outcome or hoping that it continues. She’s just saying, “you started it.”
And that’s fine. We all wish there were still progressive Republicans who deal with facts and simply have different priorities than we do. But there aren’t any of those Republicans left.
Today, this is a party that is animated by religious fundamentalism, that rejects science, that is hostile to racial and ethnic minorities, that is hostile to women’s rights, that is hostile to gay rights, that tries to deny people the right to vote, that intensely dislikes intellectuals, artistic folks, secular people and religious minorities, and that aggressively promotes xenophobia.
Unless you’re a white guy who was born here and speaks English, this party hates you.
So, what happens is that the recipients of that hate stop behaving as if the GOP has a bunch of legitimate positions that ought to be politely debated. Their ideas are not seen as real enough or logical enough to be part of a proper education. “We’re debating public policy to address climate change here, buddy, and you’re denying it is even happening.” “We’re debating what would be sound policy on immigration, buddy, and you want to deport 12 million people and build alligator-filled moats along the border.” “We’re debating how best to stop the next Sandy Hook massacre, buddy, and you just introduced a bill to make it easier for mentally ill people to buy and carry semiautomatic rifles.”
So, Ms. Timpf, take a look at yourself and your movement. Take the log out of your own eye.
Your kids probably won’t get treated with respect at any respectable college.
That’s your fault, not the faculty’s.
Thanks for saying this.
Your post timed with my listening to this piece by Parker Palmer, from his book “Healing the Heart of Democracy”:
http://vimeo.com/35206922
got me thinking about the divide in this country. How do we deal with it in a way that:
a) allows us to fight the stupid and defeat it in the political realm
b) allows us to treat those on the other side with the humanity that many (most?) on their side won’t give us . . . such that people are transformed (at least enough to get along again)
without waiting for these people to die off . . .if that remotely going to truly solve it.
President Lincoln had a much more dire divide to deal with and I am intrigued by both him and Parker Palmer’s approach.
Do you have any thoughts or references to other posts/reading material that would enlighten on this conundrum?
To me it’s not the hatred but the outright dishonesty that I find contemptible about the GOP. But if you stop dealing with facts what else do you have? The antonym of “fact” is “lie”.
Sadly the comment section of Timpf’s article proves Professor Douglas’ point.
I wish there was a word for second-hand lies. Most people who repeat the lies they’re told by Fox News — and to a lesser but still important extent by the rest of corporate media — are not knowingly lying. And it’s lazy to just write all of them off as stupid and/or gullible. The oligarchy spends a huge amount of time and money to bury as many people as possible in a web of dishonesty.
No, I’m sorry, but this goes far too easy on the “victims” of Fox News. They are susceptible to those lies precisely because they are predisposed to fear and hate anyone different from them and any ideas different from those commonly accepted in their tribal milieu. I don’t see Fox News “converting” too many liberals.
They cannot be won over to rationality and decency. They could comfortably be left to stew in their own juices if only our electoral system did not systematically over-weight the votes of suburban and rural white people.
But as I said in another comment, that situation fits the interests of the 0.1% who use these people as their shock troops.
There is a term for this! Try googling “zombie lies.”
This country has one seriously flawed and self-defeating, but legitimate, small-d democratic party, and one openly fascist party with a highly effective propaganda wing. And an electoral system that’s rigged to insure that these will almost always be the only real choices in any election (and a that also causes the votes of those adhering to the deranged worldview of the fascist party to be very significantly over-weighted). And a super-rich elite that finds it convenient for its own ends to bankroll the fascist party and isn’t particularly worried about the possible consequences (the German industrialists, after all, did very well out of the Nazi regime.) We are a country in very deep trouble.
Those lamenting the good old days when religion and hate didn’t dominate the GOP and some GOP pols could be rational on social issues and the environment are simplifying once was.
Through the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, for every Lincoln/T. Roosevelt/Progressive Republican voter and politician, there was a pro-war, racist, misogynist Democrat. Political affiliation was more or less rigid being passed down from parents to children and those family traditions don’t change quickly or easily. However, it was impolite to discuss politics and religion outside one’s own tribe, and the pulpits were depoliticized after the Civil War.
Immigration, depressions/recessions, and WWI and WWII destabilized the GOP-DEM division. Republicans may have hated FDR less for his policies than for the fact that he put Democrats in control of the WH and Congress; they weren’t accustomed to being so shut out. Over time they got their act together by being identified as the better anti-communist hate merchant; filling the hearts and minds hate hole that the end of WWII left within the populace. Hate feeds on hate.
There were good things about the old GOP, but they were horrendous on economic issues — recessions/depressions, income/wealth inequality, and high poverty rates. The old DEM party was horrendous on pretty much everything else.
Don’t think that Theodore Roosevelt represented the good old days Republican if that ever existed. TR hated how Big Money had shifted the rules so they always win. He called his position the Square Deal, basically the same attraction of the Tea Party to Elizabeth Warren’s Fighting Chance. TR loved the natural beauty of our natural resources and did a lot of good but he was no progressive. He was a racist on display with his unfair dismissal of the black Brownsville soldiers conveniently just after an election. This resulted in the black people abandoning the party of Lincoln. He thought it would take thousands of years for black people to reach intellectual parity with white people. TR was also the worst kind of imperialist that set the tone for the entire country, sort of bedrock GOP. His biggest disappointment was not getting the opportunity to start a real war during his presidency so he, as he put it, could be tested in crisis. He was in the right party.
I was referring to what uniquely informed and was preserved as politically distinguishing characteristics of the old GOP and not all the elements of Lincoln/TR/Progressives. Imperialism and racism weren’t unique or limited to Republicans. They just had more opportunities to promulgate it because from 1861-1933, there were few Democratic administrations.
Lincoln gets nationalism and anti-slavery, TR gets trust busting and environment, and the progressives dominated rural areas outside the south. Of course industrialists and business were always within the fold. They held onto the “party of Lincoln” legacy all way up until 1948, lost the trust/corporate regulation reputation (which was more myth than real) with the Great Depression (Republicans always crash the economy) and New Deal legislation, and junked the GOP environmentalist meme with Reagan.
Does that mean Nixon was a progressive because of the EPA or was his action an outlier? TR’s trust busting actions were certainly an outlier, “We bought him but he wouldn’t stay bought.” The rural areas except the South were seen as progressive because of their fight against Big Money allowing TR to portray himself as for the common man, white man that is. I say it is impossible to be a racist imperialist and a progressive at the same time. We had to wait until Henry Wallace to see a true progressive emerge while the conservative answer to Henry Wallace was Harry Truman, a truly dangerous man. That’s why I have a problem referring to racist imperialist TR as a progressive. The fight against Big Money is not a left-right issue but an up-down issue same as it is today. If the Tea Party joins us in a progressive revolt, does that make them progressive? No, but it may result in breaking the stranglehold of the conservative movement on our government. I admit I have a problem with labels. I have trouble even seeing Bill Clinton as a Democrat in light of his horrible legacy of triangulation. The Clintons and the DLC are largely responsible for the perception that there is little difference between Republicans and Democrats except of course for the really crazy ones.
Amen. Conservative failures in academia – outside the little patronage business schools they like to set up – says everything about the GOP and basically nothing about academia.
Not limited to the business/econ schools that have been the breeding ground for neoliberalism. The neocons are directly out of the philosophy departments. And both are dependent on the STEM schools for the US war machine.
This: “Republicans have become so filled with hate that they’ve polarized the country to the point that the left hates them right back.”
This is so spot on. Hate doesn’t come easily to me, and I resent being put in a position where I hate an entire group of people. But movement conservatives are a persistent and insistent threat to pretty much everything I believe in, and they have been insistent, for decades now, that I – as a liberal – am a threat, the threat, to America. You just reach a point where ypu can’t take it any more.
you tell the truth
Unless you’re a white guy who was born here and speaks english, this party hates you.
You left out the word rich.
The RW is playing a dangerous game. They have alienated themselves from very huge portions of our society. Then they choose to continuously aggravate them. Maybe the RW has forgotten that history has shown this type of behavior only is allowed to occur for so long. Then those majorities unite together and in a common cause out the oppressors. In other words they are helping to light the fires of a major social revolution against themselves. The news is almost daily pointing out the social unrest against them. They will either change or go extinct.
“You started it”? Really. No way.
BWAHAHAHAHahahahahaha …