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Why doesn't "what if the roles were reversed" ever work? I mean it works for me. I actually am convinced when people bring up that argument. But it never works when conservatives say it to progressives.
Why I'm bringing this up is that recently Abdul El-Sayed's wife appeared on stage wearing something not dissimilar to an outfit from "Handmaid's Tale".
https://x.com/FedPoasting/status/2118389760070725932
What if the roles were reversed? What if Mike Pence or Mitt Romney or J.D. Vance of Pete Hegseth showed up like this?
I have a hard time explaining why this line of reasoning just does not land at all with progressives. To me it seems like a slam dunk. What am I missing? And is there a conservative equivalent to this, i.e. a meta role reversal where conservatives are the one being hypocrites?
In this particular case I think the fact that Abdul El-Sayed is a progressive politician communicates that his wife's decision to don traditional modest Islamic dress is not a promotion of conservative Islam or social conservatism in general, the way it might be taken if a Christian Republican's wife was to dress conservatively. Rather if it signals anything it signals identification with one's minority ethnic and cultural background, and by extension a rejection of the hostility to those things exhibited by conservatives. That's my best guess as to why progressives like it.
As for why "imagine if the roles were reversed" fails to land in general, I think it's because as much as people like to say progressives have no theory of mind for conservatives, conservatives also often fail to understand the reasoning of their political opponents. They tend to take things at face value, so for example if they're told racism is wrong, they'll internalise that to mean that discriminating against anyone for their race is bad and get angry when a minority says something that could be construed as anti-white, thinking that this is a clear example of racism and something progressives should obviously condemn as well.
This isn't really how progressives think of it though. I mean, some of them may acknowledge it's unpleasant to say anti-white things or concede that some minorities are genuinely bigoted against white people, and that this is bad, but they obviously in general don't think it's anywhere near as big a deal as anti-minority racism. That's because they're not really thinking about it as some abstract principle whereby it's just wrong to judge someone for their immutable characteristics or make negative generalisations about racial groupings. From their perspective minorities are oppressed and white people are not, at least not for being white people, so being anti-white is often just rude whereas being anti-minority reinforces an existing system of oppression that causes concrete harms like over-incarceration, police brutality, discrimination in housing and so on.
To put it another way, they only really care about these things when they're perceived as punching down, and if they're punching up they usually regard them as at worst representing individual prejudice and not reinforcing systemic discrimination, and in some cases as rude but basically justifiable expressions of frustration towards an oppressive and unjust system. People who oppose progressives on the other hand usually protest that anti-discrimination should be a more abstract principle in which all forms of discrimination are equally condemned without regard to present material circumstances, viewing it in more deontological rather than consequentialist terms.
What you've described is basically just "one sin (defeat), one grace (victory)", though, and there's a reason that that saying is put in the mouths of a group called the Legions of Terror. I wouldn't say that they're never words to live by*, but the only typically-accepted reason is emergency - total war, human extinction, that sort of thing. To engage that mentality outside a true emergency is a mark of delusion or evil, and usually results in atrocity.
*I have to admit to holding that mentality with regard to stopping AI, because yeah, I believe basically anything's justified to prevent the end of the world. I'm not a terrorist, and I recommend against terrorism, purely on practical grounds (i.e. I cannot come up with any terrorist acts - at least in present conditions - that both are plausibly achievable and actually lower P(Doom)).
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