Back in 2010 and 2011 and 2012, all of the liberal news opinion sources that I had read when I was an I AM VERY SMART New Atheist suddenly shifted on a dime, and they started repeating an intersectional line of politics that none of them had evinced back when all of us were extremely mad about Bush. It was the early rumblings of the politics of wokeness, essentially. And for several years, I found my blood pressure going up more and more every time I would read these formerly sympathetic sources. I found them painting with broader and broader brushes, and casting more and more groups that I still identified with in a worse light, and I kept wrestling with the "why bother" question... until a point finally came, in 2014, where a discontinuous break happened. And all of those voices suddenly went from being an "us" to a "them", and I was no longer a sympathetic reader of those voices.
But what I want to say is... that process of me reading, and getting more frustrated, was an essential part of the process of me shifting my perspective, and realizing a whole lot of things about politics and ideology that I had been totally in the dark about. That was, for a time, an actual answer to "why bother". It led me to a lot of much smarter, sharper reading (mostly in the form of actual, rigorous books) than I had done when I was coasting on anti-Bush vibes and Obama charisma. In retrospect, I would say, interacting with those conversations was really important, because it was interacting with it that led to the point where I could be confident that that conversation was entirely over. You could say that's sad, I guess, but I think it's just pragmatic, and possibly healthy, too. If you're blithely in a Schmidt-ian relationship with powerful forces, much better to remove the scales from your eyes, accept reality, and move on (possibly reconfiguring your life so your surface area is minimized as much as possible) than to be a gas lit cuckold, if I can haul out a fraught term.
So there's that. And unfortunately, this cycle feeds on itself - at this point, I simply can't and won't give progressives much of hearing unless they really bend over backwards to repudiate most of the last 15 years of politics and culture. And that's extremely unlikely, so I'm not particularly reachable. And that's too bad, I guess - but I already went on this rodeo before, back when I was being activisted out of my home conservative culture between 1996 and 2008. Fool me once, shame on me...
And of course, and I'm far from alone in this, I'm socially still surrounded by highly presumptuous, true-believing progressives for professional and class reasons, so at least in my case (and I think I'm far from alone in this), it's not like I no idea what evolving progressive thought looks like these days.
I believe, and I think this was once a much more common American belief, that there are much, much, much worse things in the world than different groups with different world views and different values giving each other some generous space. If we are lucky, maybe America will return to that form of organization. But it's going to be very difficult in the interim, because we have all sorts of institutions in place (the New Deal state, universities, Hollywood, multinational corporations) that assume a degree of integration that is possibly no longer supportable given how America is drifting. Or maybe other blacks swan events will conspire that restore a sense of unity - but if so, they'll almost certainly have to involve a massive amount of suffering and death, just like the Great Depression and World War 2 did.
So, to return to your original question, why bother? Well, pragmatically, it's likely that Trump and the new version of the right will overplay their hand in certain key ways. And as they do, there will likely be people who are receptive to new arguments again. You can only make those arguments if you're mixing it up in mixed communities and have gotten good at doing so rhetorically. And the old wisdom I've always seen is, far more people read than write, so if you make good arguments on a forum, even if you're downvoted, you might be reaching an audience that's invisible - that's a thankless road to hoe in the short-term, but if you time it right, and you're fortunate in picking where you participate, you could well reach people that way. I mean, even for me, there is no possible future where I'm reachable by American progressives in a positive sense... but I could be persuaded that whatever gets called the right is more or less supportable, depending on what's going on. But this is all about "what's politically effective", not "what's a fun way to spend my evenings".
p
Back in 2010 and 2011 and 2012, all of the liberal news opinion sources that I had read when I was an I AM VERY SMART New Atheist suddenly shifted on a dime, and they started repeating an intersectional line of politics that none of them had evinced back when all of us were extremely mad about Bush. It was the early rumblings of the politics of wokeness, essentially. And for several years, I found my blood pressure going up more and more every time I would read these formerly sympathetic sources. I found them painting with broader and broader brushes, and casting more and more groups that I still identified with in a worse light, and I kept wrestling with the "why bother" question... until a point finally came, in 2014, where a discontinuous break happened. And all of those voices suddenly went from being an "us" to a "them", and I was no longer a sympathetic reader of those voices.
But what I want to say is... that process of me reading, and getting more frustrated, was an essential part of the process of me shifting my perspective, and realizing a whole lot of things about politics and ideology that I had been totally in the dark about. That was, for a time, an actual answer to "why bother". It led me to a lot of much smarter, sharper reading (mostly in the form of actual, rigorous books) than I had done when I was coasting on anti-Bush vibes and Obama charisma. In retrospect, I would say, interacting with those conversations was really important, because it was interacting with it that led to the point where I could be confident that that conversation was entirely over. You could say that's sad, I guess, but I think it's just pragmatic, and possibly healthy, too. If you're blithely in a Schmidt-ian relationship with powerful forces, much better to remove the scales from your eyes, accept reality, and move on (possibly reconfiguring your life so your surface area is minimized as much as possible) than to be a gas lit cuckold, if I can haul out a fraught term.
So there's that. And unfortunately, this cycle feeds on itself - at this point, I simply can't and won't give progressives much of hearing unless they really bend over backwards to repudiate most of the last 15 years of politics and culture. And that's extremely unlikely, so I'm not particularly reachable. And that's too bad, I guess - but I already went on this rodeo before, back when I was being activisted out of my home conservative culture between 1996 and 2008. Fool me once, shame on me...
And of course, and I'm far from alone in this, I'm socially still surrounded by highly presumptuous, true-believing progressives for professional and class reasons, so at least in my case (and I think I'm far from alone in this), it's not like I no idea what evolving progressive thought looks like these days.
I believe, and I think this was once a much more common American belief, that there are much, much, much worse things in the world than different groups with different world views and different values giving each other some generous space. If we are lucky, maybe America will return to that form of organization. But it's going to be very difficult in the interim, because we have all sorts of institutions in place (the New Deal state, universities, Hollywood, multinational corporations) that assume a degree of integration that is possibly no longer supportable given how America is drifting. Or maybe other blacks swan events will conspire that restore a sense of unity - but if so, they'll almost certainly have to involve a massive amount of suffering and death, just like the Great Depression and World War 2 did.
So, to return to your original question, why bother? Well, pragmatically, it's likely that Trump and the new version of the right will overplay their hand in certain key ways. And as they do, there will likely be people who are receptive to new arguments again. You can only make those arguments if you're mixing it up in mixed communities and have gotten good at doing so rhetorically. And the old wisdom I've always seen is, far more people read than write, so if you make good arguments on a forum, even if you're downvoted, you might be reaching an audience that's invisible - that's a thankless road to hoe in the short-term, but if you time it right, and you're fortunate in picking where you participate, you could well reach people that way. I mean, even for me, there is no possible future where I'm reachable by American progressives in a positive sense... but I could be persuaded that whatever gets called the right is more or less supportable, depending on what's going on. But this is all about "what's politically effective", not "what's a fun way to spend my evenings".
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