Kate wrote:I didn't even need to watch the clip to know what it was, that's unfortunate XD and I agree it is not a civil conversation, and our definitions of civility match.
But if moderates are defined not by their behavior or their center position on the left right or even authoritarian libertarian spectrum but instead specifically by, essentially, the level of fucks they give about any given issue, it makes even less sense to hold them responsible for anything. Because they don't care.
They/we do care; just not so much about the issues the left and right care about. What folks in the center tend to care about more are issues like fair play in politics, maintaining social peace and comity, preserving the legitimacy of core institutions like the media and the government, and so on. That's why we gravitate toward the center--we're more interested in trying to ensure everyone gets along than in victory by one side or the other, since helping one half of society beat the other half doesn't generally serve our interests of promoting cohesion. We'd rather work out some kind of agreement so everyone can get along again.
Is that wrong? Of course not; it just occupies our attention and can blind us to other considerations, same as any other dominant political priority. In this case, I think it's blinding us to the sheer depth of the rage that exists outside our bubble, with terrible consequences for our ability to promote those interests above. We keep thinking that what the culture warriors need to calm down is a simple instruction to do so or the social/verbal equivalent of a smart rap on the knuckles to curb future acting out, when in truth the problem is too serious to be effectively handled with such methods. Tell someone to "calm down" when they lose a minor bet and they might listen. Tell someone to "calm down" when their spouse is killed in an accident and you'll be lucky if they don't take your head off. Likewise, telling people to make like a bunch of Fonzies and chill might work after they lose a normal election to a party they consider legitimate, but will just make things worse if they think they're witnessing the rise of the fourth Reich or second USSR.
If you are saying anyone who is passionate about an issue is by definition not a moderate because they have definitive feelings about an issue, then it makes even less sense to say moderates should be responsible for making allowances for people who are uncivil. They inherently disagree that the situation merits extreme action. And I am hard-pressed to think of anyone on TCS who fits this definition of moderate or centrist. There's at least one issue of justice for everyone I know here that they feel passionately about, so who is this aimed at? Where are the moderates here?
Pretty much everyone I've read or talked politics with has at least one issue on the left-right binary that they're very concerned about, including people I'd class as "moderates" or "centrists". Likewise, most of the liberals I know hold at least one conservative belief and vice versa, and almost every extreme partisan I've encountered has shown
some concern for issues that obsess moderates like those mentioned above--nobody outside of the most radical fringe of the far left and far right appears to want to wipe their opponents off the face of the earth. I'd consider moderation/radicalism to be a spectrum just like the left-right and libertarian-authoritarian ones, with few people at the extreme edges and most clustering somewhere between them.
As such, I'd say the answer to your question about who this
thread is directed at is "pretty much everyone", albeit to varying degrees, since as far as I can tell pretty much everyone cares to some degree or another about the issues I'm talking about and is to some degree or another susceptible to the sort of behavior I'm railing at moderates for when issues they don't care about as much come up. However, to the best of my recollection the anger I described feeling at "my tribe" after the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings was largely directed at people outside TCS, including most of my favorite political commentators in the media.
I hope I have made it very clear, I absolutely condemn amd regularly speak out against pro-lifers acting terribly. But apparently, I should be joining them in harassing clinic workers at home and making excuses for Operation Rescue's antics because their actions should be immaterial compared to the issue at hand.
You can if you want, but I wouldn't agree with it. I don't think I said in my original post that people who care about civility should forget that shit and put society to the torch; what I'm advocating is learning to tolerate incivility in the sense that a firefighter tolerates the heat of a burning house. A firefighter isn't there to make
more fire and his hose (no jokes) doesn't spray napalm. But he needs the ability to tolerate the fire, to control the natural fear reaction he has to fire, so he can run to the fire and put it out at its source rather than freezing up, running away, or panicking and spraying water wildly.
Likewise, to be blunt, moderates are scared of incivility. We fear and mistrust it because it threatens the social peace and cooperation we tend to view as paramount. And since the best way to fight fear is with knowledge, we must understand incivility and its role in political change if we want to play our role well.
ETA: @Marcuse: "Good faith" might work; it's at least pretty close. As to your objections about the merits of its opposite, hopefully my response to Kate addresses that question adequately.
ETA2:
Windy wrote:AsamiSato wrote:Overall, white moderates tend to overestimate how important their irritation is and underestimate how important it is that the issue is even being raised in the first place.
The problem is if your enemies don't start sending minorities into concentration camps, all of your extremism is unjustified. Your views and incivility are only justified if your opponents are actually Nazis who are going to start rounding people into concentration camps again and make minorities sit in the back of the bus. This bias you have is why you overestimate the likelihood of the USA going back to the Jim Crow era. You don't fear the Nazis taking over the government, you want it to happen, because otherwise your entire purpose for living is a lie.
There's truth to this, but as with many applications of psychoanalysis to political disagreements, that sword cuts both ways. Could one not argue that
we simply don't want one side to be intrinsically worse than the other, because if that's the case then we've allowed tyranny to rise while we preened and wasted time with false equivalences? People are going to act on what they believe to be true, and those actions will reinforce their commitment to that belief regardless of what it is.
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn