Not all progressives are narrative-bound wokies, clinging to clearly wrong-headed policies to avoid being 'wrong'. Some are simply--newslessly clueless
I learned something interesting recently about certain progressives.
They’re not always willfully ignorant, like the diehard allies of the dudes-in-dresses set, currently rending their robes and gnashing their teeth over Trump’s much-needed rollback of The (Democratic) Patriarchy.
(Oh, the irony.)
Sometimes these progressives can’t fix what they can’t see.
The willfully clueless carefully avoids certain sources of information lest he start thinking too much, and then expressing thoughts that won’t them get invited to the good parties anymore.
Wokeness is a problem on the right too, with the rise of their accompanying snowflakes.
But not all progressives are insulating themselves, necessarily, from challenges to their belief system or are rigid dogmatics. Some avoid the news, period. Because they find it all depressing.
So, I called my old college buddy the other night
He, like myself, has always been reliably liberal. We dated, then continued to hang out together during the Reagan years, and we weren’t fans. We lived where Christian fundamentalists were constantly accosting you to get you to accept their personal Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, as your own. That’s the way they always phrased it, “Our Lord and personal Saviour, Jesus Christ.” I always thought it made Jesus sound like the ‘personal pan pizzas’ Pizza Hut was advertising at the time.
Every time they said ‘personal Saviour Jesus Christ,” I got hungry for pizza.
Sometimes we’d visit a beer dive in town dating back to the hippie days, which looked about 392 years older. We’d get drunk on cheap beer, scrutinize the ancient graffiti carved into the wooden tables, benches and walls, and bitch about Reagan, Jerry Falwell, Ed Meese, Nancy’s largely laughable Just Say No campaign, and Bill Bennett, the dumbass Christian head of the Department of Education, purporting to improve American ejimakation with Personal Pan Pizza Jesus.
Or whatever cockamamie new idea the sorta fuzzyish President championed, and whether Nancy cleared it first with her astrologer.
I could always count on Dean to be liberal, and he was when we reconnected on Da Internetz twenty years ago. Now we bitched about Bush The Sequel and his dumbass war with Saddam, long-distance. We weren’t fans.
In recent years, though, he’s pushed back a little. Not because he got more conservative, as many people do as they move into and beyond middle age, but because he seemed sort of vaguely woke. But not crazy-ass. That would be his woke fanatic friend who was my friend too until she defriended me over an article she called ‘transphobic’.
It was pretty arguably one of the least-critical arguments about transgenderism I ever made—in fact, I claimed it could be a force for good.
But you know how the indoctrinated get, MAGA or Loony Left.
In the course of our more recent conversation—and since November 5th, for Americans, it invariably centers around OMFG!—I came to realize why Dean sometimes went a little quiet on me when I espoused liberal-but-not-woke ideas.
He hasn’t been keeping up with the news. For years.
He’s not completely blind but he’s missed a lot of the culture war nonsense. To his credit, he’s spent his time much more productively than many retired people. He reads beaucoup books. Good ones too, usually on politics and history. And not pop-political everyone-is-right-wing-except-us crap. He delves into subjects like how various wars started, and biographies of people he finds interesting.
So his liberalism is, I now recognize, where mine was about 5-7 years ago before the progressive left went so undeniably wonky. When we had to address the growing cognitive dissonance we felt talking to people who expressed ideas we liked and were usually in sync with, but who now seemed a little weird and ‘off’. But we couldn’t quite put our finger on why.
Like when I first learned about transfolk but didn’t know enough about them to do anything other than accept them. I accepted gays, lesbians, bi’s, polys, and friends with weird sexual practices as long as they didn’t talk to me about them, so, if someone wants to be the opposite sex, yay for you!
It seemed weird that it turned into a thing, where, like, everyone and their brother (or was that originally his sister?) were ‘transing’, but I didn’t care until progressives insisted I go along with things I knew to be untrue, like that transwomen are the same as biological women. I sort of half-assed went along with it to be inclusive, like a good liberal; after all, the right couldn’t stand these people and some of them still hadn’t gotten over gay marriage, a law that doesn’t force them to marry gayly. I still value inclusiveness, but it was the gender identity movement that ‘woke’ me to the realization that inclusivity requires boundaries.
This, and other out-of-date beliefs Dean still held, like that only the right censors and bans books, that authoritarianism is only on their side, and What do you have against Kamala Harris anyway? Whaddaya mean you didn’t vote for her? clarified to me that Dean wasn’t woke, he just had no idea what our side had been up to for the last fifteen years.
Identifying your own dumbassery
Dean doesn’t follow the news anymore because “It’s too depressing.” I get it. I stopped following the news for awhile years ago for the same reason, especially during Trump I: You Had No Idea This Was A Prequel, Did You.
Also, Dean’s gotta live there in Fundamentalist Republican Hell, not me. He is, like most of us, just a person wanting to live his life without drama. He’s retired. He doesn’t have to deal with a soul-sucking job anymore and now he gets to do every day what he loves, reading and watching movies. He’s not watching Fox News, listening to the manosphere, and jumping on X, Outrage Central, to freak out about the latest fake or wildly exaggerated news (No, Trump never suggested feeding migrant children to alligators).
I’ve got two countries to keep track of so I don’t spend as much time on American media, but I’m not retired. Also, I’m not sure who to trust anymore because mass media has gone from superficial and biased during Trump I to being unable to tell the difference between a real news story and the Babylon Bee today. Dumping unwilling Gazans somewhere else and turning their land into Mar-A-Gaza sounds like satirical fake news.
Dean agreed to let me send him a whack of my articles specifically addressing the issues I felt he was misinformed about, and I did, expecting he wouldn’t read them, but he did admit at the end that he hadn’t researched our previous conversations before because, “I don’t know, maybe I just don’t want my beliefs challenged.”
That’s more integrity than you customarily find with most.
I didn’t handle my end of the conversation very well. I had that I’m so tired of educating people moment, and sighed kind of condescendingly sometimes. Later, I reminded myself this was exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, educate people, and it’s never effective when you put other people down or make them feel lesser than you. (Raise your hand if a DEI workshopper has ever convinced you that you’re a supremacist white devil.)
I sent him an email several days later, apologizing for my attitude and explaining more plainly, and with less superiority, what he’s been missing and how what he thinks is liberal is no longer anywhere close, and it sounds like maybe he just needs to update his information.
I’m not sure how much his friend, my ex-friend, is discussing these issues with him as I’ve lurked on her Facebook account to see how she’s doing and she doesn’t seem to be posting much about politics these days. I know she’s endured a recent deeply disturbing family tragedy.
Here’s the thing: I think people like Dean are, well, reclaimable.
He’s not an ‘activist’, married to beliefs it would be too painful to abandon if he acknowledged he was wrong. More importantly, he admitted, without my prompting or asking, that he might be afraid of the cognitive dissonance.
We’ve known each other for a very long time, and were in a relationship for a year, and we’re too old to defriend each other over this disagreement, since neither of us are fanatics.
Perhaps a better approach, when we meet people who embrace illiberal ideas or values (on either side), is to ask, “Why do you feel that way? Why do you believe that? What do you think about critics who say….”
I’m not as good as I’d like at challenging people with, erm, challenging beliefs. Like most of us, I often slap a mental label on someone based on something they say. There’s still that petty little piece of me that wants to put others down for not seeing things my way.
I have a friend who does what I should do. “Why do you feel that way?” with an open tone, inviting an information exchange rather than a challenge. Even if she doesn’t like their answer, she keeps probing to get a better understanding of why they believe whatever it is she disagrees with, without challenging them.
That’s definitely an option I don’t exercise much, and should.
There are people who are fanatics about whatever they believe—their religion, their politics, their position on abortion or guns or that transwomen are women. Others aren’t as fanatical as we assume, based on the simple fact that they believe something we don’t. We can’t open dialogues with hostility, patronization or condescension.
I know Dean is an evidence-focused guy. He and I have always asked, “Where’s the proof?” He’s an atheist. I don’t think he’s given up on the Enlightenment values that fueled the growth of classical liberalism, unlike, I’m afraid, our mutual acquaintance.
I got a response from my second email.
I think it's a pretty safe bet to say we're very divergent in our political views. I'm not likely to change your mind on anything and, while I am open to new data, my core beliefs are also not likely to change. So, it's safer if we don't discuss politics. I still love you too…
So much for being willing to challenge his beliefs.
But, maybe his mind clamped shut due to my condescension and snarkiness. That’s my continuous fault.
I still think he’s ‘one of the good ones’ on the left. His heart is in the right place. We often go many months without connecting, so his mind and heart may need more time to process what I’ve said. Maybe the next time we connect he’ll think differently. Or maybe he won’t and we’ll talk about our other fave topics, books and movies instead.
I may put a note on my knee as I recline on the couch to talk: Be kind!
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